Campus Review Vol. 29 Issue 2 | February 2019 | Seite 19

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devoted to the flora and fauna of Australia
and not in a museum of Aboriginal history
and culture. They are not the flora and
fauna of Australia. In Canberra, the National
Museum suffers from a selective display
of their vibrant culture and history. Sydney
prides itself on being a global city, but its
Museum of Sydney has an insignificant
gallery devoted to the First Peoples
of Australia.
What is even more disturbing is that the
great leaders of Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander communities are hardly given
prominence in the traditional museum
displays. For example, while there may
be a mention of Pemulwuy, Australia’s
first patriot and a guerrilla fighter for his
motherland, he is not given the prominence
he deserves. He even suffered the indignity
of being shot dead and having his head
chopped off and placed in a bottle of
spirits like a biological specimen and sent
to Sir Joseph Banks, the president of the
Royal Society of London, the pre-eminent
scientific society in the world. The story of
Noongar woman Fanny Balbuk Yooreel,
a 19th century resistance fighter from Perth,
hardly gets a detailed mention. Few people
are aware of the fact that Truganini spent
20 years of her life imprisoned on Flinders
Island in her own country.
In both the National Museum in Canberra
and the Australian Museum in Sydney,
Mabo, our great freedom fighter who
overthrew the concept that Australia was
terra nullis (no man’s land), has less than a
square metre of display space devoted to
him. In fact, at the Australian Museum, a
small display space with about 100 words
tells us about his great achievement.
Unaipon, Australia’s Leonardo da Vinci,
hardly gets enough space to tell us about
his great works. We are not told that well
known artist Albert Namatjira and his wife
became one of the first Indigenous peoples
to be granted full citizenship status of their
own country. They were not citizens by
birth in their own motherland!
One wonders why the NSW government
is willing to spend over $200 million on
the expansion of the Art Gallery of NSW
without giving any consideration to building
a modest $100 million state-of-the-art
museum of the First Peoples of Australia.
Did the premier, her arts minister and the
leader of the opposition forget that there
is a group of people called Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islanders who have lived in
Australia for over 60,000 years? Are they
not deserving of a museum of their own
like the American Indians, or the African-
Americans, who, after lobbying for over a
100 years for a museum of their own, have
finally got their museum in a prime location
in Washington?
It is also time for museums in Europe
and Britain to return the artefacts they
stole from the Aboriginal people. The
British Museum holds more than 6000
artefacts that belong to the Aboriginal
peoples. Captain Cook himself entered
the Gweagal camp and stole a number of
spears. Joseph Banks wrote in his journal,
“we thought it no improper measure to
take away with us all the lances [spears]
which we could find about the houses,
amounting to 40 or 50”.
Today, young Aboriginal children and
their people are being deprived of their
culture by the white invaders. According
to Shayne Williams, a Dharawal elder, “In
a spiritual sense, it would be good to hold
them again, just the way our ancestors
held them, even in 1770 … For us they
feel like our national treasure.”
It is not acceptable in the 21st century
that the artefacts that were stolen or
taken away from the Aboriginal people
are still held in the museums in Europe
and Britain. Any self-respecting nation and
their cultural institutions should return the
artefacts to the First Peoples of Australia.
Museums are important institutions in
any civilised and cultured society. They
can no longer be considered as just
repositories of ancient artefacts. They
have to be places for social change. They
need to interpret the changes that have
taken place and are taking place in 21st
century societies, especially in societies
that were once colonised by the European
powers beginning from the 18th century.
Australia is one of those countries. The
voices of the Indigenous peoples need
to be heard, interpreted and given centre
stage in the history and culture of the
nation through their eyes. Their history has
shaped the Australia we have today. They
can no longer be relegated to second-rate
status or silenced. For them to occupy
centre stage and have their histories told,
we need a museum of the First Peoples
of Australia. Their cultural property can
no longer be displayed as appendages
in the cultural institutions of Australia.
Will the premier of NSW, her minister for
the arts and the leader of the opposition
The voices of the
Indigenous peoples need to
be heard, interpreted and
given centre stage.
acknowledge the First Peoples of Australia
by building a state-of-the-art museum of
the First Peoples of Australia in the Botanic
Gardens near the Opera House or at
Appin to remind Australia of what actually
took place at this location?
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people are Australia.  ■
Dr Ragbir Bhathal served as a UNESCO
consultant on museums and science
centres. He is a distinguished teaching
fellow at Western Sydney University, a
fellow of the Royal Society of NSW and
the Royal Astronomical Society, London,
and a visiting fellow at the Research
School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at
the Australian National University.
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