Repatriation of aboriginal sacred objects: prospects for the return of the poorly provenanced

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the challenges of repatriating poorly documented Aboriginal sacred religious objects from Central Australia. The authors present an overview of historical endeavours to repatriate these objects from Australian domestic museums and the progress of recent returns from international collections. Detailed documentation, including reference to an object’s specific relationship to places, people or ancestral stories is critical to ensuring that rightful contemporary Central Australian Aboriginal people can assume care and responsibility for any repatriated objects. The absence of provenance data and any other related collection documentation can therefore greatly inhibit the return of these objects to present-day custodians. Exploring the prospect of returning large numbers of poorly provenanced sacred objects back to Australia, this paper argues that aside from the potential logistical or infrastructure requirements of repatriating these items, the development of Indigenous cultural frameworks and innovations will be critical to any meaningful repatriation outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Repatriation
• religious items
• Aboriginal heritage
• museum ethnography
• Indigenous cultural heritage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, the authors use tywerrenge to describe the specific sacred items following Henderson and Dobson (2020, 334); other spellings are only used when pertinent to the discussion. These items are typically sacred stones and boards inscribed with motifs associated with particular Dreaming Beings and localities and are a key element in the ritual paraphernalia of Central Australia. The term also encompasses ritual designs and dances (Strehlow 1997,14–18, 84).

2 This section has been informed further via pers. comm with Ross Chadwick at the Western Australian Museum and Indigenous consultant Peter White, both on October 1st 2021.

3 Research of women’s restricted material was not undertaken by the male authors of this paper but by women at AIATSIS.

4 Peter White, pers. comm. October 1st 2021.

5 Ross Chadwick, pers. Comm. October 1st 2021.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Grant Number DE220100206].

Notes on contributors

Jason Gibson

Dr Jason M. Gibson is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in cultural heritage and museum studies at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has worked extensively with Aboriginal custodians throughout Australia on history, museum, and heritage-related projects and has conducted collaborative ethnographic fieldwork in Central Australia for the past two decades. His books include Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection (SUNY Press, 2020) and Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Experiences of Return in Central Australia (Routledge 2024).

Iain G. Johnston

Dr Iain G. Johnston is a Senior Researcher in the Return of Cultural Heritage (RoCH) Programme at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies (AIATSIS), Canberra, Australia. For more than ten years, he has worked extensively with Aboriginal communities in northern Australia on collaborative projects to explore rock art, iconography, material culture and oral histories. Since 2019, he has partnered with communities across Australia to repatriate significant cultural material from overseas collecting institutions to their keeping places on Country, first with the Return of Cultural Heritage scoping project (2018-2020) and now the RoCH Program (2020-2024).

Michael Cawthorn

Michael Cawthorn is an Associate Research Fellow with Deakin University in Melbourne. He has worked with central Australian Aboriginal men over the past twenty years on the repatriation of cultural heritage materials. Michael was previously Deputy Director with the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) where he managed the museum’s Indigenous Repatriation Program. From 2012 he worked as a consultant anthropologist in the areas of repatriation of cultural material and Ancestral remains, native title, cultural mapping, and site protection.