2019: South Australian Museum starts the return of its 4,500 Aboriginal remains to their communities
The smoking ceremony at the handover of South Australian Aboriginal remains by the Natural History Museum in London in 2019.
Image courtesy Australian High Commission, London
The return of South Australia Aboriginal ancestral remains to their communities continued in 2019. In a London ceremony, 37 sets of remains were handed over by the Natural History Museum.
One set of remains was returned to the Narungga people of Yorke Peninsula, while others will be repatriated to the Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna, Far West Coast and Flinders Ranges communities. Representing the Narungga people were elder Doug Milera and Professor Peter Buskin, the dean: Aboriginal engagement and strategic projects at the University of South Australia.
The Indigenous Repatriation Program has so far led to the return of more than 1,480 ancestral remains from overseas, with more than 1,200 coming from the UK.
The London ceremony followed the South Australian Museum announcement that it would begin to repatriate the remains of more than 4,500 people from its collection. The museum has been one of the last in Australia to return ancestral remains to Aboriginal people.
Ngarrindjeri elder Major Sumner, who has 1,200 of his ancestors in the South Australian Museum collection, worked with the museum on the repatriation policy. The museum’s head of humanities Professor John Carty told ABC News that it was “major shift in the ethics in this museum … from viewing Aboriginal people and Aboriginal ancestral remains as scientific specimens to seeing them as humans".
Kaurna elder Jeffrey Newchurch said he had seen his parents and grandparents fight to have their 800 ancestors — the people of the Adelaide Plains — returned and for years he has lobbied the museum to change its policy. Lynette Crocker said more than 1,500 of her Kaurna ancestors had been removed from their burial sites along the River Torrens.
The return of the ancestors will be a long process involving finding where each person came from and where they should be reburied. Another problem will be finding new burial sites that won’t be disturbed.
