Indigenous leaders fight for return of relics featuring in major new exhibition

Submitted by Paul Daley on Sat, 14/02/2015 - 11:03am

Three precious examples of bark art taken from the Dja Dja Wurrung people in central Victoria in the 1850s were sold to the British Museum. Now these and other treasures could return to Australia – on loan only – as part of an exhibition

When Gary Murray contemplates the thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects held in the vaults of the British Museum in London, he strikes a simple analogy.

“All of these things that belong to our people in Australia – they don’t tell a story about the Queen of England, do they?” he asks.

It’s a positive thing that a few of my people might get to see them again for a very short period. But it taunts us spiritually. We just get to see them for a fleeting moment and they are taken back again to the British Museum where they’ll be held in the archives downstairs for another decade. It’s not right.”

My people had no idea where these items would be taken to just in the same way that skeletal remains were dug up or our people shot for the basis of taking their remains overseas to these museums. And here we have today in the 21st century the Australian government of the day making laws to continue to protect those institutions that have continued to be the beneficiaries of our culture, our knowledge and our peoples’ history. It is a real insult.”

These are searching questions at the heart of Encounters but they are searching questions for museums beyond Australian museums. These are questions for museums across the globe.”

They believed the British Museum was intransigent because returning the barks would set a precedent for other objects

He supports the dual exhibitions as a means of enhancing relations between Indigenous Australia and the British Museum

I can tell you I was incredibly pissed off with the British Museum board when I met them a few years ago to discuss the return of two ancestral skulls to the Torres Strait. They displayed enormous arrogance – they were condescending in the extreme and showed what can only be described as a colonial attitude and approach to the discussions. That said, arguments about what will be in these exhibitions is a separate conversation to that about the return of ancestral remains.”

I think they thought when they took these things that Aboriginal people would die out and they would hold these great resources in their libraries and their museums. But you know they are in the bottom of the basement at the British Museum, so they are not exactly exhibited often or held in esteem in the way we hold them – they are just like any other objects and they are held there below until they feel that they want to expose them and exhibit them and tell a story. And again all they can tell is their version of a story, but there is no real life meaning to them. We want to be able to hold them to expose the real life meaning of them.”

Police shot Jandamarra dead on 1 April 1897. They cut off his head and sent it to England as a trophy

I would like to see an arrangement whereby the items remain in Australia after the exhibition because they are a part of the story of the country and my people. But I also appreciate that we are a part of a global community and that these objects can help to educate the world about what happened to Australia’s Indigenous people after colonisation. I believe that if the items have to be returned to the British Museum than they have to be the focus of a commitment around truth-telling that is itself a central part of the healing process between Indigenous Australians and the colonisers. They should not just be tucked away in the basement.”

Now I think that Mum would be over the moon with the National Museum borrowing these things. My view is that if Cook and his crew didn’t take that shield and those spears we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We are talking about objects that were taken 200-plus years ago, and because they were preserved by the British Museum they are here today.”

Friendships did occur between Indigenous people and stockmen, farmers, convicts, explorers, soldiers and anthropologists

Look closely at the troopers who appear to have spears in the head . . . our interpretation is this bark is a territorial etched bark … and includes the killing of troopers (or native police from Qld) for trespassing or failing to get consent to hunt on another clans’ lands … but that’s the British in denial, heh?”