On April 9 the Royal College of Surgeons in London returned 75 sets of Aboriginal remains from its collection to Australia. A traditional ceremony was held at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, where the remains of the ancestors were purified, and where they will remain until researchers identify the different Aboriginal groups to which they belong. It is believed that a majority of the ancestral remains belong to the Yorta Yorta peoples.
The campaign to return ancestral remains held in British museums began in the mid-1980’s, and has resulted in the return of not only skeltal remains, but also a number of ancestral artifacts, including the necklace and bracelet of the last of the Tasmanians, Truganini, from the Exeter City Museum and Art Gallery Museum in 1997. Tasmanian hair samples from Edinburgh University were also repatriated, and in 2000 so was its remaining collection of Aboriginal remains.
Despite this heartening progress, museums in the United Kingdom are still in possession of many more sets of Australian Aboriginal remains, stolen in the 19th century from graves, hospitals and morgues. Researchers say it may be very difficult to identify which Aboriginal groups the remains are from, as they were collected indiscriminately.
Australian museums are also complying with Aboriginal demands: in 1976 the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery returned the remains of several indigenous Tasmanians, and in the mid-1980’s the University of Melbourne followed with its own concerted repatriation efforts.
The lack of a clear governmental policy in the UK requiring museums and institutions to return ancestral remains to Aboriginal groups is still a major obstacle to systematic repatriation efforts. But much has been done to try to establish such guidelines. The British Parliament has directed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to examine the repatriation issue. In 2000, a select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport prepared a detailed report on “Cultural Property: Return and Illicit Tradeâ€. The report included a proposal for legislation that would “undertake a consultation exercise on the terms of legislation to permit the trustees of national museums to remove human remains from their collections.â€
In the following year, a working group was set up to examine the current legal status of human remains in the UK, to examine what legal steps should be taken to allow museums and galleries to send back the remains, and to research other aspects of repatriation of Aboriginal remains. But despite the years of campaigning and these encouraging steps, there is still no legitimate policy or legislation on the horizon.
As the process drags on, Aborigines have found some success, and hope for future efforts, in direct cooperation with British institutions. As recent developments show, some UK museums such as the Royal College’s are working together with Aborigines to ensure their ancestors are returned to their homes, to receive a proper burial. Aboriginal campaigners describe it as a painful but healing process. And they have hope that the pain of separation will soon give way entirely to healing and reunion, as more and more museums and galleries take the initiative to return the human ‘contents’ of their Aboriginal ‘collections’ to their rightful homes and descendants.
