British Museum and National Museum of Australia host dual indigenous exhibition National Museum of Australia adviser Henrietta Formile Marrie believes some artefacts in the British Museum collection should be returned to Australia. Picture: Brian Cassey Source: TheAustralian The Botany Bay shield has been in the British Museum's collection since 1771. Abe Muriaea spent years teaching himself a traditional art that was endangered in his community. Contemporary artworks for the British Museum exhibition. IT is 97cm long, 29cm wide and has a ragged hole near its centre. Made from the bark of the spotted mangrove tree, the "elemong" shield has few distinctive features, yet it is a rare and potent symbol of the first, tense moments of contact between Europeans and Aborigines on Australia's east coast. Thought to have been made by the Gweagal people, this defensive weapon transports us back to that fraught autumn day in 1770 when crew members from the HMB Endeavour, working under the command of James Cook, tried to land at Botany Bay but were challenged by two Aboriginal men. The Aborigines had rejected Cook's offerings of nails and beads, and the explorer resorted to violence, firing at them with his musket. He injured one of the men, who showed remarkably little fear. The expedition's botanist, Joseph Banks, took up the story in his journal: A man who attempted to oppose our Landing came down to the Beach with a shield ... this he left behind when he ran away, and we found upon taking it up that it plainly had been piercd through with a single pointed lance near the centre. This shield has been in the British Museum's collection since 1771. It carries enormous historical significance for Australians, yet it has never been exhibited here. That is likely to change, however, when the British Museum and National Museum of Australia stage a highly ambitious project: linked exhibitions in London and Canberra based on key objects from the BM's Australian indigenous collection. The Canberra exhibition will mark the first time these artefacts have been back in Australia since colonial collectors obtained them as gifts, objects of trade or - more controversially - in the aftermath of violent conflict. NMA acting director Mathew Trinca says the exhibitions are the most important project the National Museum has worked on in years. "It quickly became clear to us that this wasn't just an exhibition," he tells Review. It is an entire program of work. I think, honestly, that this is the most important work we're doing this decade. There's also a national debate that we're fostering about what this material is, what meaning it has for all Australians, as well as reconnecting indigenous people around the country to what in many cases is the earliest material, extant, that originated from their communities. For Trinca, a man unafraid of lofty rhetoric, the Cook shield alone has untold significance. "That shield we believe to be remarkable," he says during an interview in his large uncluttered Canberra office, "because it stands at the epicentre of what then follows. The misapprehension, the confusion, that first meeting between the Aboriginal people of the Botany Bay area and Cook, stands somewhat as an emblem of a whole series of encounters that take place across the continent in succeeding years. It is anticipated the shield will be exhibited at the NMA alongside four spears also acquired from Botany Bay, and on loan from the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The joint project is affording NMA staff unprecedented access to the BM's treasures, widely regarded as the world's most significant collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts from the early days of British settlement. British Museum director Neil MacGregor tells Review: "I think a London audience will be astounded by the beauty and significance of these objects and I hope they will be moved and impressed by what they learn about the deep history and contemporary vitality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands cultures. I am delighted that we will then lend many objects to the National Museum of Australia, where both indigenous Australians and others can view this material. The linked exhibitions will likely open in 2015 - one at the BM and the other at the NMA on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. By then, five years of cross-continental collaboration, research and consultation will have gone into the shows. While they will employ different curators and the final list of objects has yet to be confirmed, both will include weapons, jewellery and utensils collected as the first waves of European exploration and settlement broke across the country, from Cook's landing at Botany Bay, to bloody frontier skirmishes in north Queensland and the Kimberley, to surprisingly amicable exchanges in the embryonic West Australian colony. Aboriginal leader Peter Yu, who is on the NMA's indigenous advisory committee, agrees the Canberra exhibition will be "a milestone exhibition in the history of the nation." "I think it'll be a highly emotional one in terms of what the cultural material represents in terms of first contact and subsequent relationships," he says. It will also provide greater insight into, and a reconnection to, the circumstances and context of the materials' origins ... Overall, I think this is potentially very significant as a major reconciliation event. Yu explains while reconciliation has been happening in Australia for some time, there has never been an event that focuses on indigenous people's relations with early settlers and the British crown. Already, the project is generating the biggest consultation with indigenous communities in the NMA's history. NMA and BM curators have fanned out to 15 indigenous communities covering every state and territory, from Albany in the southwest to the far-flung Torres Strait Islands, in a bid to inform indigenous communities about objects that came from their regions. In several cases, communities were astounded to learn artefacts potentially made or owned by their ancestors were in the BM collection. And some activists are demanding those objects be repatriated to their original communities. NMA adviser Henrietta Fourmile Marrie says she was overwhelmed to discover recently the BM has jewellery collected in Cairns in the 1890s that is strikingly similar to a shell ornaments worn by her great-grandfather, Ye-i-nie, in a historic photograph. Ye-i-nie was an influential community leader and the 1905 photograph shows a slight man of regal bearing, his initiation scars visible across his torso. He holds a hefty wooden shield and wears a shell headband, hairband and pendant, as well as a large breastplate engraved with the words "Ye-i-nie/King of Cairns/1905." Marrie argues BM artefacts from the Cairns region - among them shields with distinctive rainforest designs and a message stick on which a father commemorates the death of his daughter - should be returned to the area or, failing that, put into temporary custodianship at the NMA. "Why do the British Museum want them?" she demands, her voice soft yet insistent. It has no relevance to them as a people. It has no relevance to their culture; it has more importance for us here. A Yidinji woman with empathetic brown eyes and a quietly determined manner, Marrie has worked for the UN and has been a cultural rights campaigner for several decades. She points out when Aboriginal communities were dispossessed of their land, they were also dispossessed of their cultural heritage. Moreover, the victors not only write the history, they often keep the spoils of that history. For these reasons, she argues the BM artefacts - many of which are rarely on public display - eventually should be repatriated so contemporary Aborigines "and the next generation can understand more about who they are as a people, and who they are as a nation." Dennis Ah-Khee, a traditional landowner from north Queensland, agrees "those [BM] collections should come back into this country." He says emphatically: "If the British Museum wants copies of those artefacts, we can produce them ourselves and send them [the copies] back." Ah-Khee says museums often fail to comprehend the spiritual and emotional value of indigenous objects. I know a lot of our old people, if those artefacts come back here, they will cry, right, they will cry. We regard them as living things. They're a part of our history. However, Torres Strait Islander Lui Ned David sees the issue differently. He too has sat in on an NMA consultation and he says of the linked exhibitions: "I'm all for it, in many ways. It showcases us as two indigenous races to the rest of the world, and to our country. It tells a story. More importantly, for us as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, I honestly believe there's a sense of pride. It showcases to us the good and bad [history], there's some truth about it. Something on this scale from one of the most prominent institutions on the planet - you don't ignore something like that, and you don't try and do away with it. I think you embrace it. The Tudu Islander was equally chuffed when a spectacular crocodile dance mask, made from a metal saw, feathers and turtleshell by his great-grandfather in the 1880s, was displayed prominently in the BM foyer in London two years ago. The mask, he explains, was given by his great-grandfather, Maino, to British researcher Alfred Haddon, who in turn, donated it to the museum. It was a gift; something for them to put on display so the rest of the world would know about this great warrior and chief [David's great-great-grandfather]. I'm quite proud about it. In sharp contrast, David says he recently had an "unbelievably painful" experience with the BM. A co-chairman of the federal government's advisory committee for indigenous repatriation, he had campaigned for the return of two Torres Strait Islander skulls from the BM. Although this claim was supported by the recently deposed federal Labor government, the BM rejected it late last year. "It [the decision] was downright one-sided for all the wrong reasons," says David, his voice quivering with emotion. The skulls were acquired by Haddon and donated to the BM in 1889. David argues: "These are human remains. They belong to my people and we are asking if we can please have them back so we can give them a decent burial. He says the skulls will not be publicly exhibited - museums would rarely, if ever, display human remains these days - and are of no scientific use to the BM. The BM decision resists the international trend for museums to return human remains to indigenous claimants, but the museum's deputy director, Jonathan Williams, maintains "the trustees gave very careful consideration to the claim." In rejecting it, the board argued Haddon's acquisition did not interrupt mortuary processes, as TSI skulls were traded in the 19th century. The trustees also concluded public benefit was best served by the museum retaining the skulls. While David remains a strong supporter of the forthcoming twin exhibitions, for him, there is a whiff of hypocrisy about the spurned claim. The BM, he says, has "refused our claim. On the other hand, they are after our collaboration. THE working title of the NMA show is Encounters and, in a sense, the historical stories of how the collected objects brought whites and blacks together - in friendship, commerce and battle - are as revealing as the artefacts themselves. Indeed, Ian Coates, the NMA staff member who came up with the idea for the joint project, says these objects have "the potential to change how we all understand Australian history." Coates, co-lead curator of Encounters, says the BM artefacts "demonstrate the longevity of Australia's indigenous people's history in a way that words cannot ... They show that there is no single, easy narrative that describes Australia's colonial past. The frontier was messy, at times it was violent, at times there was friendship. Certainly, the stories of how the objects were collected suggest a broader spectrum of relationships between European settlers and indigenous people than conventional narratives of white oppressors and passive black victims allow. When Scottish pioneer and surgeon Alexander Collie met young Minang leader Mokare in Western Australia in the early 19th century, few could have imagined how close the two - separated by language and cultural differences and the period's cast-iron racial prejudices - would become. Collie had sailed alongside lieutenant-governor James Stirling to help establish the Swan River Colony in 1829 and was appointed the first government resident of King George Sound (near Albany) in 1831. Mokare was Collie's interpreter and guide, and the two men became so attached that after each died prematurely, from different illnesses, they were buried side by side in a makeshift graveyard. Collie was also a collector and the artefacts he gathered, probably with Mokare's help, are in the BM collection. Among them are a spearthrower and fearsome-looking axe. Other exhibits conjure a more confrontational history: one of fierce indigenous resistance to a relentlessly advancing frontier of European occupation; of attacks on colonial settlers followed by far bloodier reprisals. Objects from the Kimberley including an iron axe and glass-headed spear can be traced back to one of the most infamous police pursuits of the colonial era: the three-year hunt for Jandamarra. Sometimes known as the Aboriginal Ned Kelly, Jandamarra led an armed uprising against European settlement and the police in the 1890s after he killed a white policeman. A hunting net and shields collected by sugar industry pioneer John Ewen Davidson speak of further Aboriginal resistance to European colonisation in north Queensland in the 1860s and 70s. In 1866, Davidson wrote in his diary about the paralysing terror of an Aboriginal child caught up in an armed police raid: "One little girl took refuge under my horse's belly and could not move." The raid was a reprisal for local Aborigines' attacks on white settlers near Cardwell. Davidson observed: "It was a strange and painful sight to see a human being running for his life and see the black police galloping after him and hear the crack of the carbines." As the conflict continued, the cane farmer's attitudes towards Aborigines rapidly hardened. Just five months after he wrote so movingly about the terrified girl, he shot at two large groups advancing on his camp. "We followed them up into the scrub firing at them as they went," he wrote on June 24, 1866. Some were wounded, but I saw some killed: there was plenty of blood on one or two shields which we picked up. As Davidson's diary shows, some objects collected and donated to the BM - and which are likely to be shown in Encounters - were acquired amid lethal violence, under circumstances that today would be considered unethical. Should such items eventually be returned to their source communities? Or does the formidable reputation and reach of the BM - in effect, a universal exhibition and research centre - override such considerations? The vexed issues of ownership and custodianship will be addressed at a conference the NMA plans to hold in tandem with the Canberra exhibition. Trinca says: "The whole reason we're doing this is to open out the possibility of having this discussion productively, for the nation." Certainly, recent legislation means there will be no repeat of a dispute that erupted in 2004, when Aboriginal activists in Victoria took out a cultural protection order to stop three touring indigenous exhibits - a ceremonial headdress owned by the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, and two bark etchings from the BM - returning to Britain. Amid warnings that seizure would put future museum loans to Australia at risk, the Federal Court overturned the protection order and the indigenous exhibits were returned to Britain. A new federal law means touring artefacts and artworks are insulated from attempts to keep them here; some believe this legislation was passed with Encounters in mind. Intriguingly, the NMA's consultations are already overturning mistaken assumptions about some artefacts held by the august London institution for more than a century. In north Queensland, amused indigenous people declared a hunting net collected by Davidson and classified as a kangaroo net was actually a brush turkey net. In the Torres Strait, islanders told visiting NMA staff that an object listed on the BM website as a charm was part of a headhunting kit, while an artefact listed as a chest pendant was a pubic shell cover. The NMA cross-checked these claims, and found the locals' observations were spot-on. The NMA's Coates made a further, stunning discovery about what many say is an under-researched collection. While on a curatorial exchange with the BM, he spotted several watercolours - one featured masked, grass-skirted men dancing around a campfire - of late 19th-century Torres Strait Islander life. The drawings were signed T. Roberts. Coates guessed these were the work of celebrated Australian painter Tom Roberts, something the British had not realised. Still palpably excited, the curator says: "Identifying the Roberts drawings was definitely something of a eureka moment - it was, 'No, it couldn't be,' followed by, 'Could it be?' - and then the excitement of realising that these were by him, and that they were a previously unknown body of work which complemented his rich published account of his time in the Torres Strait." The BM and NMA now suspect there is a Roberts oil painting of one of these scenes in private hands and are keen to hear from the owner. Gaye Sculthorpe, who is curating the London show, concedes "a lot of the collection has not been adequately researched or published." But she says the research being poured into the linked exhibitions is helping to change this. Digitisation of the collection, she says, is giving researchers, including indigenous researchers in Australia, enhanced access to it. Sculthorpe is the first indigenous Australian to win a staff job at the BM, and she says while the London exhibition will include the colonial stories that frame the exhibits, it will also focus on the objects' histories before white settlement. "These objects don't just have one story to tell, they have many stories to tell," she says. Both the Canberra and London exhibitions will include contemporary indigenous artworks, a statement about how indigenous culture, far from being snap-frozen, continues to evolve. Sculthorpe explains: "One of the important messages of the London exhibition is to emphasise that the objects held by the museum, whether they're from the early colonial period or contemporary objects, reflect a living, diverse and dynamic culture. It's not a relic of the past. Abe Muriata, a Girramay man from the Cardwell area, is living evidence of that. A painter and shield-maker with a big-brimmed Akubra and a playful sense of humour, Muriata spent years teaching himself a traditional art that was endangered in his community. It took him three years to make his first bicornual basket - an elegant, bell-bottomed affair unique to the rainforest people of Queensland - and he largely achieved this by studying historical examples in Queensland museums. Muriata argues museums help invigorate indigenous culture by conserving artefacts and records of cultural practices undermined by government policy. "Many years ago in Queensland, a lot of our people were removed [to government-run settlements], and it broke the tradition of passing down the skills needed to manufacture a lot of the artefacts," he explains. A weaver of 10 years' standing, Muriata has had his baskets exhibited in the Queensland Art Gallery and South Australian Museum, and he is passing on his skills to others. "I'm getting better all the time," he says. This is not a trade you just pick up on a whim and say, 'I'm gonna make a basket'. It took me three years to make my first basket, and even then it was not top-quality stuff. Like Muriata, Marrie has unearthed important aspects of her heritage (a recording of her grandfather speaking his traditional language, a family genealogy dating back to the 1860s) in Australian museums. But unlike the self-taught weaver, she is indignant she and her extended family would have remained ignorant of this rich history if she had not sought it out. She feels strongly that lost or broken traditions could be rekindled if indigenous communities had better access to old photographs, family histories or language tapes held by museums. The revelation the BM has shell jewellery that closely resembles that worn by her great-grandfather continues her ambivalent journey of discovery - the pleasure of recognition, followed by disappointment she didn't know about this trove of traditional treasures earlier. "We were quite overwhelmed by the amount of our cultural heritage that is in the museum," she says. Not just the artefacts, but the written information about them that is so crucial to our cultural existence and our cultural survival. Marrie has long campaigned for indigenous people to be better informed about the material museums hold about them, writing in a 1992 paper: "The current situation regarding our heritage is a mess." She tells Review things have "improved slightly" since then, and she applauds the NMA and BM consultations. "It's great they have decided that the way forward is to have consultations with the communities where these objects and cultural materials come from," she says. It's something that's been missing for many, many years. Museums have never really gone out there and consulted on the ground, so it's nice to see that shift in thinking.