The Ancestral Remains of Aboriginal people still lie in British museums or in graves, marked and unmarked.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
The British Museum
The British Museum holds in trust for the nation and the world a collection of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures.
The British Museum was founded in 1753, the first national public museum in the world. From the beginning it granted free admission to all ‘studious and curious persons’. The Museum was based on the practical principle that the collection should be put to public use and be freely accessible. It was also grounded in the Enlightenment idea that human cultures can, despite their differences, understand one another through mutual engagement. The Museum was to be a place where this kind of humane cross-cultural investigation could happen. It still is.
Housed in one of Britain’s architectural landmarks, the collection is one of the finest in existence, spanning two million years of human history. Visitor numbers have grown from around 5,000 a year in the eighteenth century to nearly 6 million today.
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Stone tools, clubs, boomerangs, decorative shellwork: a survey of 45 museums in the UK has found a vast number of Indigenous Australian objects. Not all were stolen; some were gifted or traded.
A spear-thrower, a shell, a bowl, a vase, a bucket. Five very different items tell us much about the history of collecting, the role of Indigenous experts and the shadow of colonial violence.
Unpicking the threads of the stories told about Captain Cook’s arrival is vital to find agreement on the provenance of materials that changed hands during colonisation.
An astonishing new museum opened near Ramallah, in the West Bank, on June 1.
