We need a national keeping place for our 'lost' Indigenous remains
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Version 0 of 1. Tony Abbott’s proposal for a national war cemetery in Canberra dramatically failed to capture the support he needed most. Indeed, the Returned and Services League national secretary, John King, promptly responded that RSL state branches had already rejected the proposal a few years ago. In a comment freighted with the importance, in death, of continued connection to one’s country, King reportedly explained: “I’m sure my kids would want me buried somewhere near my home so they can visit regularly.” Consistent with that sentiment, Abbott could, if he chose, advance the cause of Australian reconciliation immeasurably by redirecting the millions he’s apparently willing to spend on what he called “Australia’s Arlington” to a much-needed national keeping place for the remains of hundreds of Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders whose birthplaces remain unknown. At its storage warehouse in outer Canberra the National Museum of Australia holds the remains of 725 of our indigenes whose bodies became collection items in Australian, European and US medical, educational and cultural institutions between the early 1800s and the mid 20th century. An absence of records means 434 of them will not be able to be returned to their communities for reburial or ceremonial disposal. Essentially, the remains of these “lost” Indigenous Australians will remain indefinitely in cardboard boxes unless the federal government pushes ahead with a long-standing proposal to build a permanent “national keeping place” for them. Australia moved closer to establishing such a facility this week after the federal government’s Advisory Committee for Indigenous Repatriation met in Canberra to evaluate Indigenous community responses to the proposal for a national keeping place in the national capital. The committee co-chair, Ned David, said: “As sensitive as this issue is, we have done our very best to keep all of the stakeholders fully informed on the proposal to locate a national keeping place in Canberra. Our report will be finalised in coming weeks and will then be given to the government.” The committee comes under the auspices of the Arts Department, a portfolio responsibility of the attorney general, George Brandis. “This has been a very long and exhaustive process. The next step, once our report has been given to government, will be for the government to respond to our recommendations in due time,” David explained. For Indigenous Australians, the obligation of people to country manifests – culturally and spiritually – in returning the dead to where they were born. The soul can’t rest until the body is home. The museum’s holding of Indigenous remains is testimony to a long and shameful episode in anthropology, medical science and Australian history when Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander bodies were treated here and abroad as little more than native fauna specimens and antiquities to be stolen, and subject to experiment and public display. The remains in the museum’s archive include victims of frontier violence between colonial soldiers, settlers and Aborigines (some skulls bear bulletholes and the marks of blades where heads were hacked from bodies) as well as those who died in institutions such as hospitals, asylums and jails. The collection also includes dozens and dozens of bodies that were indiscriminately stolen by the truckload from sacred burial grounds by men such as Murray Black, a Victorian pastoralist who supplied the Australian Institute of Anatomy – and overseas institutions – with Aboriginal skeletons for decades up to the 1940s. Throughout the 1800s Aboriginal heads were in great demand by anatomists, anthropologists and phrenologists (adherents to the pseudoscience of phrenology) who were obsessed with racial character and believed erroneously that Australian Aborigines represented a distinct – though endangered – living link to earliest man. Some institutions in Britain and continental Europe still hold Indigenous Australian remains, even though successive federal governments have been actively repatriating them for at least 20 years. Thousands have been returned – some of them directly from institutions in London, Edinburgh and Washington – to the Aboriginal communities on the lands from which they came. In such cases the early records, based on labels or ledgers, about precisely where the dead came from were unambiguous. Where provenance is less certain, remains are returned to the national museum’s repatriation unit, which then tries to determine to which people they should be returned. That is not always easy. It requires a combination of archival detective work, an intricate knowledge of Indigenous peoples and language groups, and of the practices of those who procured, traded in and collected the dead. Senior curator David Kaus explains that some of the skeletons (including those supplied by Murray Black which formed the basis of the National Ethnographic Collection at the Institute of Anatomy and later the museum) had been broken up and were often difficult to provenance. “Some remains have all of the information written on them, while some will have a number which refers back to a list which sometimes is lost,” he says. “Sometimes that, at least, can point you to the collector and that may give you some sort of information about where they were collected, to go on with.” Mike Pickering, a senior curatorial fellow at the museum, says of the 725 sets of Aboriginal remains in the museum collection, 434 can’t be provenanced. The remaining 291 are being held at the request of communities or can’t be returned for other practical reasons. Although he estimates the repatriation unit has returned 900 sets of Indigenous remains in the past two decades, some communities do not have the infrastructure or the capacity to accept them. A Yawuru elder and national museum council member, Peter Yu, says the desecration of Aboriginal graves and the removal of bodies remains closely associated with “the ongoing trauma” of Australian frontier violence to Indigenous communities. “A national keeping place is something that has been thought about for many years – by Aboriginal people, by academics and others ... but the obvious place to have it is in Canberra ... it would allow Aboriginal people collectively to have ownership of this unprovenanced material, allow for the time and capacity to do the research to determine where it comes from. “It would also be a centre for learning and for me it would become like a beacon of conscience in the national capital where it reminds us of the importance of history and what we can do to each other, but where we can learn from what we’ve done to each other.” For his part, Abbott, perhaps more than any prime minister since Paul Keating, indicates a firm understanding of the imperative to reconciliation of acknowledging the violence against Indigenous Australians (of which the trade in Indigenous bodies was a part) at the heart of Australian sovereignty. Kevin Rudd made a carefully worded apology to the stolen generations. But Abbott – like Keating – seems to acknowledge wider, deeper wrongs. Speaking to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recognition bill last February, Abbott said: “Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions, rightly make us the envy of the earth, except for one thing: we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. “This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788 this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now. Until we have acknowledged that we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.” In August, Abbott said he wanted to be a “prime minister for Indigenous affairs”. He could make a convincing move in this direction by dropping his proposal for an unnecessary Australian Arlington-style war cemetery – and by becoming the chief proponent of a national keeping place for our lost Indigenous dead. Only when it is built will those first Australians be freed from the limbo of the collections. Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning. |