Both exhibits were very impressive collections, particularly "Trademarks" which had a vast collection of Native and South American pieces. However, the talk that accompanied this part of our tour was rather conflicting. In taking these items out of the archives the curator had decided to trace their origins, contacting the museums to find out how Leonhard Adams had got a hold of them in the first place and where they were from. It was revealed that Adams had actually traded many Aboriginal artifacts in return for the artifacts in his collection. The curator then went on to tell us that although she had found the museums where the pieces had been traded or obtained it was not her "priority" to find out who they originally belonged to. It seems quite contradictory to ascertain which museums worldwide these pieces were sourced from without wanting to find out to which tribe, culture or group they belonged. She then went on to inform us on how much the pieces were worth and the standing that they had created for the museum. That's all well and good, but surely the people to which these pieces belong to, these cultural and socially significant pieces of which they may be the only ones in existence, have the right to know where their ancestral artifacts are residing? It seemed particularly condescending that the one tribe she had managed to allocate a shield to, when they visited it and critiqued it for not being the best they had ever heard of, she then produced her texts books and history books to show the tribe to which the shield in question belonged were actually wrong in her opinion. If anything, this shows the contrast between written history and oral history. This tribe stated that they had heard of tales in their past of greater, better and more artistic works, something to which the written, colonial history cannot back up so instead it takes this condescendingly defensive stance, telling the culture they are wrong because they do not have written, identifiable proof. It seemed that for a museum that originally came across as very open and understanding is just as unreceptive towards the idea of acknowledging the true owners and potential repatriation of museum items.
Another disturbing factor was the mention of the artifacts that had been traded out of Australia. There was no mention of trying to get those back or contacting remaining members of Aboriginal tribes in order to tell them where their cultural, historical and social artifacts are. I realise that money, time and effort are big questions in relation to this, but if there are records of how the value of their items has increased over the years, surely there must be one with what pieces went where and what group they may have originally belonged to.
The "Experimental Gentlemen" exhibit was very interesting, it charted the representation of indigenous cultures through books, paintings and etchings from those first settlers in Australia. It was very interesting to note that where the early settlers had, in very detailed ways, depicted Aborigines and their culture, but by the 1880s this had stopped. The reason behind this was that this representation had become undesirable to the colonisers who wanted to draw more people to Australia. It effectively creating an invisibility that some will argue is still continuing today.
"Panoramic View of King George's Sound, part of the Colony of South River" (above- detail) by Robert Havell and Robert Dale in 1834 was one of the major pieces of the exhibit. It was interesting that the detail shown here of the amicable looking hand shake is contrasted by a descriptive booklet that came connected to the image. This booklet charted the tracking down, decapitation and transportation of the head of the indigenous leader, Yagan, back to England with Robert Dale. An image of the decapitated head was inserted as the front-piece of the pamphlet. This certainly went against the Australia Britain was trying to project in an attempt to tempt new settlers. As a result this was one of the last images presenting Aborigines.
Interestingly, Yagan's skull was repatriated to representatives of the Noongar tribe on the 31st August 1997 in Liverpool. He wasn't buried in Australia until 10th July 2010 due to disagreements over his remains. This idea of museum repatriation links back to the first exhibit "Trademarks" and whether the tribes to which those pieces belong should be contacted and whether they have the right to take their pieces out of museums should they want to. I think it's something that's going to become more debated over the next few years, especially now that the British Museum has started repatriating items under the Human Tissue Act in the UK.
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