Flipping the narrative: Historical collections as sites of cultural diplomacy

Jilda A. Andrews

This article is based on the presentation delivered by Dr Jilda Andrews for the inaugural W. Wanambi Distinguished Lecture, presented by the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in collaboration with the Phillips Collection and the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. The lecture took place on 31 March 2023 at the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

Introduction

The world’s museums feature extensive collections of cultural material made by Indigenous Australians. Today, museums face a public reckoning that questions the historical making of their collections and what it means to maintain them. Underlying the processes of making and maintaining is often the presumption that institutions operated and continue to operate without Indigenous agency, power or control. This lecture offers a different framework and an invocation to consider that museum collections contain forms of cultural diplomacy enacted by Indigenous people themselves—as expressive of their desire to extend and deepen knowledges of culture and experience across cultural worlds. If museums, their stakeholders and their publics recognise this as a legitimate form of agency, we can reframe the world’s museums, from sites of ongoing colonisation and dispossession to sites of cultural strength with the potential to shape and inform stronger, intercultural futures.

Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by acknowledging the land under which we meet and the people of that land who continue to uphold its beauty and strength. I extend this acknowledgement to other Indigenous, Native, First Nations peoples gathered here today and connecting with this moment over space and time, dialling in and watching the recording. Thank you for meeting me in this moment.

Figure 1: Djambawa Marawili AM, Americalili Marrtji (Journey to America), 2019.

Source: Natural pigments on eucalyptus bark, 270 x 100 cm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. The 2017–19 Kluge-Ruhe Madayin Commission. Museum purchase with funds provided by Geoffrey Hassall OAM and Virginia Milson, 2020 (2020.0001.001).

Thank you to Jonathan Birnstock, director of the Phillips Collection, for hosting this event, and my heartfelt and extended thanks to Margo Smith, director of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. I am fortunate to have developed a wonderful relationship with Margo over several years now, which has only deepened over the past year or so in my time on the Kluge-Ruhe Advisory Council.

A very special thank you to my newly made Yolngu friends for preparing the ground for us and the words that are to follow. Once again, Yolngu thoughts, ideas and cultural worlds bring people together on a global stage, and these spaces are ready for big ideas, intriguing provocations and questions.

The Madayin exhibition

Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala is an exhibition of our time. Produced as a partnership between the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala, Arnhem Land, this exhibition showcases a mode of cultural expression that can be considered emblematic within the canon of Australian art over a practice spanning many generations.

The intricacies of bark painting from this region reflect not only the cultural systems of the Yolngu people, but also their relationships outwards. They are highly valued as art pieces themselves, represented in collections all over the world. These objects are also much more than this. Bark paintings represent a documentation of Yolngu cultural life and customs, chronicling richly interconnected cultural worlds, spirituality and everyday life, as well as aspirations and futures. Importantly, too, they chronicle change and engagements with outside worlds such as those of Makassan traders (sailing from South Sulawesi, modern-day Indonesia) and European colonisers. The early days of this practice itself was influenced and encouraged by Methodist missionaries in the mid-1930s; early barks functioned as transient, translational and highly visual archives of Yolngu life.¹

If there is a body of work that reflects an extended, ever-dynamic present, it is this. Accompanying this exhibition is a bilingual catalogue written first in Yolngu, with its English translation following. The significance of this major work of textual translation cannot be overstated; the time and resources required to co-produce this body of work is matched by equally considered intent and determination, both driven by Yolngu and Kluge-Ruhe staff in a dynamic partnership.

An exhibition of our times, indeed; perhaps an exhibition that demonstrates what it means to reinstate and recognise the cultural integrity, purpose and agency of Indigenous people into museum and gallery spaces; perhaps an exhibition that signals the important role that gallery spaces can play as an interface where cultural worlds can value their differences and engage as peers.

Life is made richer by the generosity of spirit displayed today, and time and time again, through works like those that grace the walls of the Madayin exhibition and through the voices that bring these works to life—the voices of the past and the voices of today. Yolngu expressions are firmly cemented within the Australian vernacular and, indeed, provide the framing for my presentation today as I look to the concept of ‘cultural diplomacy’ in a real and applied sense, in moments like these, and the many moments that preceded this one and those that are anticipated to follow.

Cultural leadership

We join here at a seat of world power in Washington DC. Decisions made here have impacted and will continue to impact most people on this earth. The topic of cultural diplomacy is an important one as we continue to make and remake relationships with one another in our common interest. Essentially it is about the bridge between the local and the global and multidirectional representations of the self to the other in the mutual effort to achieve greater understanding.

I am gently guided into this concept by Mr W. Wanambi, the gentleman who has inspired this lecture. He was a master of these kinds of representations and relationships. I look to his gentleness, his commitment, integrity and spark to help me think big, and put words to ideas and ideas into action today, in this place.

There are many kinds of leadership in this world; his was of a special kind. Although I only met him a very small handful of times, he offered me something truly special, and that was his time. There are certain limits to our time with each other, as we know. To be listened to—to be heard, to have stories shared openly, to share an idea or a feeling—these are all gifts of connection, relationships and time, and ones that deepen and take on greater significance with the passing of friends and loved ones. For many of us who have faced loss, however recent or long ago, remembering and revelling within moments shared together are the things that buoy our hope and light our paths, despite the deep and often heavy emotions that accompany them.

For Mr Wanambi and for my father Richard Simpson, I take this opportunity to recognise moments of representation, exchange and connection that have shaped me, and continue to inform me and my world and those within. For it is in response to profound acts of severance and loss that connection takes on its greatest power.

Our work today

For those of us who engage with cultural material in museum collections, our work has increasingly shaped an interesting interface between museums, communities and also the public. This has been influenced by different trends over the past decades, including, recently, readings of museums and collections as vestiges of colonial legacies.

Today I am proposing to ‘flip the narrative’—to consider historical collections that sit within museums and collecting institutions as sites of Indigenous agency. This is provocative, I think, because it requires a decisive shifting of position that potentially flies in the face of popular public discourse that surrounds the way we think and feel about museums and collections of Indigenous cultural material.

To ‘flip the narrative’ also challenges a suite of assumptions and presumptions around these historical collections and the authorised narratives that accompany them: how they came to be and, indeed, what their futures might be.

Some may ask why the narrative needs to be flipped? We, as a sector and a community, have made significant headway with regards to lifting the lid on collections and deepening Indigenous engagement with these collections. This is all true, and much exciting work has come out of some truly collaborative engagement between Indigenous communities and museums. Exhibitions like Madayin here are a great testament to collaborative relationships working well, under what audiences would believe to be a shared common goal. This is obviously a good thing and something I expect and hope we continue to carry on and do well.

Perhaps I am gesturing towards a greater narrative that needs to be ‘flipped’, however, and that is the story around collections and museums more generally.

Moving beyond difficult histories

Contemporary public discourse often frames collections as sites devoid of Indigenous agency and authority, as pure products of the colonial project and wholly without Indigenous voice. This position is also supported within our academic disciplines, often where a binary is put forward. In this structure, museums are positioned as dominant and powerful colonial structures, and communities are represented as disempowered sources of things, knowledges and culture. Collections of cultural material, particularly ethnographic collections, sit extremely awkwardly in our contemporary mindsets. We use words like ‘problematic’ and ‘difficult’; our seminal texts refer to damaging colonial legacies that are still active;² and we step towards collections with the presumption that they unequivocally require, in the first instance, decolonising in order to have Indigenous agency restored.

It is these assumptions and presumptions that I wish to challenge today. My work with collections shows me in so many ways that Indigenous voices are, in fact, present in collections. They are creative, multidimensional and unwavering. They are, at times, directive and authoritative; at other times, they are quiet and almost understated. In whatever ways these voices manifest, I am inviting us to recognise, in the first instance, their presence; from that point we can then see their influence. We may even be able to recognise their power and authority both before collection and during their journeys of collection—and then beyond.³ I do not have a doubt that these voices are present in collections in a multitude of ways, and that these voices are expressions of Indigenous agency. Beyond establishing this, let us also consider what these voices are actually saying. I am hoping to recognise these expressions as of a form of cultural diplomacy—expressions that wish to both communicate across difference and communicate difference itself; and to evoke empathy, establish authority, negotiate coexistence and inaugurate power sharing in ways that speak of particular moments in time and place.

Tuning in, beyond silences

You may wish to think of me as naive here and wonder why I refuse to see the dominating imposed colonial structure enacting multiple waves of erasure. My answer to you is to suggest a naivety on your part: you overlook the fact that, in the moments of humanness that sit beneath the prevailing political, social and cultural forces we so readily cite, relationships of exchange were deep, multifaceted and complex—very rarely were they simple. I refuse to believe that Indigenous people were mute in these exchanges, and that collections were products of domination and one-way exchange only. I am simply not satisfied in this simplistic belief.⁴

These voices are indeed present within the collections and their archive, but my provocation today is that we have not been prepared to hear them. Muddying the waters by seeing Indigenous power and agency in sites like museum collections forces us to reconsider how colonisation played out on Australian soil, and how complex—and very human—it must have been. It also forces us to talk with more depth and detail about how Indigenous ideas, thoughts, influences and engagement have also shaped the Australia we live in today. I’m going to suggest that a proposition like this is as much a part of our program of truth-telling as is revealing the scale and devastation of massacres on Australian soil, or the ongoing and extensive implications occurring from the dispossession of people from their lands.

Recognising voices of cultural authority within our collections can feel like a radical act. In doing so, I wish to gesture towards a new relationship we can have with our collections as sites of continuing Indigenous authority—in whatever forms these may take. I also hope that, by recognising power and authority in sites like these, we may be empowered by the actions of our ancestors, see strength and foresight in their engagements and nurture a sense of cultural strength that will lead us to stronger cultural futures. Colonisation was destructive and damaging, but our histories are much longer and richer than the last 250 years. Our story is a much longer one to tell.

I feel I must first sketch out my rationale and I will draw from some examples that have directed me towards this way of thinking. By tuning in to Indigenous voices in collections, pushing through the blinding thresholds of ‘collectedness’, and by better contextualising moments of exchange and allowing space to recognise relationships, I can step towards collections differently. I can see a whole new archive altogether. As both a museum anthropologist and as an Indigenous cultural practitioner, I understand these approaches as radical acts.

Radical act: Sensory engagement

Twenty-six years ago I began working in museums as a marketing and communications trainee. A very interesting pathway into this sector, I know, but an entirely useful one for me at least. I didn’t have a curatorial interest, but I knew that the collections of the Australian Museum—where the traineeship was based—were broad, vast and could be potentially personal. I found this to be true when touring the collection stores for the first time with my then mentor who was based in the anthropology department and had a role of stewardship of the anthropology collections.

This was a seminal moment for me—seeing the rows and rows of wood, feathers, fibre, stone, and ochre in familiar assemblages, categorised by place. It was also a sensual moment. The air was perfectly still—because it had to be—and it held a smell of the wood, feathers, fibre, stone and ochre, like an old cupboard being flung open and the waft hitting you in the face; thick and heavy, it even had a taste. It sounded like the hum of lights, the flickering of old fluorescent tubes. The bruised white gloves, used by people in the room before us, spoke of touch—a mediated touch; the points of connection had impressions of the material marked upon them. All the senses had a measure of control about them; all the senses were mediated. I wrote about this moment for Artlink magazine in 2017, and I will recall a passage here:

Those rooms are overwhelming, confusing, profound and confronting. They are time capsules placing anyone within one degree of separation to the moments of intensity we as Australians are yet to fully grasp collectively.⁵

Later in the article I reflected upon what this meant for those of us brought into contact with these spaces and these collections. To quote again:

For Indigenous community members who visit or work with museums, these storerooms … are places where we confront the past in the present. Cultural material in museum collections [is] intensely symbolic. These collections represent cultural diversity and sophistication while simultaneously can be personified as stand-ins for the lives and memories dispossessed and the destructive impact of colonisation.⁶

Within this piece I made a direct association between the presence of material in collections and the absence of material in community. I would go so far as to say that I made a correlation between the overabundance of cultural material in collections and the scale of dispossession and dispersal of Indigenous people off their lands. I inferred that the act of institutionalising cultural heritage material was akin to the institutionalisation of people through dispossessive acts. The material was a stand-in for the people, and the ease with which this inference was accepted—even expected—spoke volumes. People could see what I was inferring and accepted my position. My voice was not alone and may have even influenced others to speak similarly.

I know this is how I felt back then. The removal of this material from Indigenous people’s lives, lifeways and psyche was part of imposed systematic acts of severance of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, upholding these collections and maintaining them today was, in some way, an acceptance that sustained the act of continued severance and severing. It was colonisation again and again, over and over. I have come to understand that much of this was a response to ‘collectedness’ or being collected.⁷ The scale of collections, both vast and contained, the visible structures objects sit within and their capacity to invoke Indigenous lives is immediate and visceral. Collectedness is a valid impression, but it can also hang like a veil, obscurant and demanding.

Radical act: Advancing beyond the surface

This sentiment stayed with me for many years and guided my own research and engagement with collections, as I continued to work with museums, teach about museums, research collections and work with audiences in narrative-driven display and exhibition projects. It drove my research, causing me to further explore the idea of objects becoming ‘stand-ins’ for people or expressions, the scale of change and disruptions to Indigenous lives, how collected objects were understood as part of a diaspora or living off-country, and so on.⁸ These interesting concepts spoke neatly into narratives around repatriation, decolonisation and indigenising collections or archives, and went part way to considering concepts of an Indigenous museology.

But, while I developed and explored these ways of relating to collections of cultural material as essentially products of enduring colonisation, I felt a restlessness. The stories I was engaging with, the individual objects, the archive that sits behind them, the data, the markings, the so-called ethnographic dirt⁹—these residues of the moments of exchange between people—called for a closer look, and better engagement. The many voices present within the stories were, I felt, demanding to be heard.

Of course, collections research reveals things that are not initially apparent—this is the beauty of it; this is what it is meant to do. When we do collections research, we never get a full story from the objects alone—but without the objects, the archive of associated data is understandably incomplete. When these are united, a picture starts to emerge and the task to refine the picture calls for deeper engagement, again with the objects and the data, seeking out other associated connective threads, and, of course, reinstating these stories within the contexts of communities themselves.

Radical act: Reconnecting collections with context

Zooming in and out and back in again

In the work I do I love to take an ecological or holistic approach and include country, climatic processes and social organisations of the time. These dimensions can spectacularly bring to life a moment in time as vividly as though we are there. It is sometimes useful to even imagine as though you actually are there—bearing witness, if you like. This can help make sense of decisions and actions made in these moments.

When we are brought into these moments, as though we are there, nuance and insights begin to emerge. I’ll give you an example.

Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell were two prominent researchers from the universities of Adelaide and Harvard, respectively. They undertook extensive ethnographic research across Australia and produced an incredibly extensive archive and collection. In reading about their expedition in 1938–39, I linger over their accounts as they encounter my father’s hometown of Walgett (only 10 years before my father was born, mind you). The journals hint at a sense of frustration that the locals were not as cooperative as was hoped. This was described as a ‘lack of enthusiasm for [their] research’,¹⁰ so the team, which also included Tindale and Birdsell’s wives, were keen to move on to the neighbouring town, Brewarrina, some 83 miles (133 km) to the west. Rain had set in though, which made the black soil road near impossible to drive on. They describe the conditions in their journals as ‘dangerous’.

I can almost see Tindale’s frustration, his irritation, at being stuck in Walgett for four days in the rain, with little hope of engagement from the less than cooperative locals. I can sense the moment he decides to drive—at the first sign of the rain easing—risking getting the car stuck in the mud or, at the least, sliding all over the place. After knowing this story for some years, something happened where I gave myself permission to relate. I think it might have been a similar time that my car tyres, caked in mud, span senselessly in the same wet soil. With relatability came empathy, but it was one I was reluctant to express outwardly, as Tindale’s legacy can be particularly stinging.

Finding traction

The greatest expression of empathy, I think, was that I could see Tindale as human within a human condition. In the end, I figured that empathy does not have to come at anything else’s expense: I can still host complicated feelings about how Tindale went to many places to collect many things, including hair samples, stone tools, biometric data, weapons and detailed measurements of living bodies of ancestors and other things.

Seeing actual people within the frame is helpful. In the case of the Tindales and the Birdsells marooned in Walgett, I can also clearly sense the frustration and irritation of the locals (as a descendant of one, I even can imagine the facial expressions and body language) at the persistence of these visiting strangers wanting to know things. Probing, relentlessly asking questions, following people around with a truck full of equipment and a clear intent in their action. To withhold in this case was an act of authority, and one resulting, for Tindale, in no data, no collections from the time he spent in this town. Perhaps, as a result, there is very little detail of our region in the uniquely colourful map of Aboriginal languages that Tindale’s research later informed.¹¹

Some 60 years earlier, in 1879, still within the same region, prominent Adelaide figures Catherine and Langloh Parker settled nearby on Bangate Station to run sheep and cattle on a property of around 200,000 acres. Catherine, or Katie as she was known, was deeply interested in the Aboriginal people on her property and undertook what is today understood as a kind of amateur ethnographic study on them.¹² Collecting many cultural stories, objects and anecdotes from her time living among them, Katie learnt the Euahlayi language and Euahlayi ways. She later published volumes of Aboriginal legends as well as an account of her ethnography. A number of Euahlayi women and girls worked as domestics in the homestead and she also wrote about her life among them. These accounts are challenging to read using a contemporary lens, especially by descendants of women who were similarly ‘employed’ to perform domestic duties for other pastoral station owners: I am one of these descendants.

Again, and for many reasons, engaging with this archive is challenging—at times jarring— and, expectantly, emotional. Over time, I think, the shock somehow dissipates, blurring into other feelings or thoughts, and gently, perhaps surprisingly, details from these encounters, once obscured, begin to emerge.

Katie Parker and Old Bootha: Multiple temporalities

Katie planted a huge rose garden in the middle of the bush, surrounding their homestead. I think of it as a possible link back to her home in Adelaide or the familiarity of stately gardens that she was often a part of. Roses, however, were not originally a part of this landscape, as you can imagine. Unfortunately for everyone at this time, this country experienced an extended period without rain and descended into severe drought. For a station running up to an incredible 138,000 sheep and 4,600 head of cattle at its height, this situation became extremely challenging. Worrying. Unstable. Scary.

The Langloh Parkers, while enduring incredibly testing times like these, also, themselves, directed ecological change on my country that transformed it. Not single-handedly, of course. But I carry these feelings when I see and hold the objects Katie collected, read her stories—even though, in both cases, these things were made by my ancestors. There is a lot that I lament. Upon reading of Katie’s desperation in the midst of drought, I see her focus draw in on her roses. She sees them wilting, she knows they are about to die.

She approaches a clever woman known as Old Bootha several times to ask her to help. This senior, authoritative Aboriginal woman with broad knowledges was believed to be able to work in mysterious and influential ways. It was believed that she could call rain. Katie’s approaches were rejected many times, and I think this perhaps cemented her resolve to pursue it. She wrote, and I quote:

Once my garden of roses looked very wilted. I asked Bootha to make rain, But just then she was very offended with Matha [this was the name Katie used to refer to her husband in the presence of Aboriginal people]—one of her dogs had been poisoned, she would make no rain on his country. However, at last she said she would make some for me. I bound her to a certain day, the day came, and a heavy storm fell just over my garden. Filling the ground tank which was almost empty. About 2 inches fell. Within half a mile on each side of the garden, the dust was barely laid.¹³

In her later life, Katie donated her collection of objects to the University of Sydney at the behest of the chair of anthropology, A. P Elkin. One of these objects was a ‘witch stick’. Elkin was so enamoured by this object that he displayed it in his office.¹⁴ The broader collection later moved to the Australian Institute of Anatomy in Canberra, which then became one of the foundations of the National Historical Collection, now under the stewardship of the National Museum of Australia.

Bootha’s witch stick is not there alongside the other objects though. I am still trying to track it down. But the point I want to make about this scenario is to highlight the relationship between Katie and this clever woman, sharing moments of intense difficulty and change, but experiencing them very differently. I also think about Katie’s turn towards the spiritual realm of the Euahlayi people, turning to the authority of Old Bootha and her magic to call rain. Old Bootha’s defiant deferment is imprinted on Katie’s collection, as is Katie’s reliance on Euahlayi people to survive in a very different place at a challenging time.

Dynamic collections

I am gesturing towards the unseen here. This requires recognising how contexts, authority and intent are bound within the stories of these collected objects but are perhaps less explicit. This, of course, relies on the notion that objects in a collection represent more than simple transactional exchanges or movement from one set of hands to another. I am also illuminating human moments, ones that you or I can see or even feel, and ones that can become obscured by any number of things—including our present-day lens. I reflect on that, again learning that empathy does not have to come at the expense of other things.

I invite you now to join me back in that vision of the storage room at the museum to see rows and rows of wood, feather, fibres, stone and ochre. How many Katies are here, how many Old Boothas? Only this week I visited collections made by Tindale and Birsdell from that very expedition I referred to earlier, the one back in June 1938, objects now housed in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. My feelings are still complicated, but I came away surprised, feeling a kind of joy as I was able to see through the feelings I am supposed to have about Tindale, to strike a tangible connection with people that have gone before, and to see powerful, sophisticated ancestral knowledges of country translated into objects of material culture. Associating feelings of empowerment, enrichment and strength with visits to museums is not the story we are used to hearing or reading about.

To shift a little now to collected objects of a more deliberate nature—those intended for collection, those imbued with outward-facing messages. These objects are very well represented in the world’s great collections, and I am sure that many of them would be familiar to you. They bear similar hallmarks; they are often moveable, decorated and involve longstanding and sometimes intergenerational relationships with anthropologists. Consequently, they are often associated with extensive archives as well as non-Indigenous advocacy. These are translational objects that offer insights into cultural worlds and are particularly intended for those who inhabit other cultural worlds. I would love to draw in the canon of Arnhem Land bark paintings as an example—moveable forms of cultural knowledge that make their way from one world to another, shepherded by relationships between knowledge holders and outsiders. They find their platform in this outside world and work their magic to cause intrigue, compelling the hearts and minds of those with whom they engage.

Often through their art world framing, which is, of course, one of their powerful translational mechanisms, we are invited into what seems like realms of whimsy or otherworldliness: the fantastical creatures, the expressive processes of country, the transfixing patterning, the codes. And then there’s the story.

Not always, but sometimes, we are helped towards these messages by story; we are very lucky if there is song, dance, ceremony, or other dimensions too. Through this matrix of messaging, we are brought to hover at the edges of our own understandings, and then we are gently met by moments of extreme humanness and empathy. The mechanisms behind these objects are a mix of persuasion and incitement and a willingness for engagement. The intent is to bridge difference and create greater understanding. And I think it is incredibly successful. Look at us all gathered here today, in Washington DC, drawn by the steady hands of Yolngu—past and present—to develop greater understandings not only of their country and histories, but also of their presences and power. Their messages are other-worldly. They are of scales of time beyond your comprehension, involving webs of connection so multidimensional that they collapse life forms into spirits and then back again. They are spellbinding because they are rooted both in the past and in the present; they reiterate knowledges that are intensely comprehensive and informed by generations of relationships and cultural practice. Time in their presence is a generous gift.

They are beautiful expressions of cultural diplomacy.

Cultural diplomacy

In the official sense, cultural diplomacy usually occurs between nation states; however, in this interesting dynamic, we are seeing cultural diplomacy operating from a local position, in which locals are selecting peers not only beyond their domestic neighbours but also well outside their cultural worlds, and establishing national and international partnerships and interests that bring a multidirectional flow of benefits. Cultural diplomacy within the bark painting tradition is particular to place, of course, but mechanisms of cultural diplomacy can be found across the country and can take many forms. The wild diversity of cultures across the Australian continent helps to explain why.

Before British contact, the management of resources and relationships across the continent understandably required high levels of cultural diplomacy and its deft deployment. We are talking about a particular and necessary skill developed and refined over long periods of time—well beyond the 250 years since British contact. It is an important tool in our toolset, and it always has been. Euahlayi people do not have a bark painting tradition, but we have a partiality for song/singing (we are also really good at peer pressure); therefore, our forms of cultural diplomacy may be more present within archives and recordings, and today even on the stage.

I might wonder what it might mean to draw more purposefully from Indigenous modes of cultural diplomacy to negotiate domestic scenarios such as land, fire or water management, or the protection of vulnerable or endangered species. It is exciting to think of cultural expressions of authority beyond being narrowly understood as performance or art. But I return again to the deft deployment of this mode of communication and recognise that Indigenous cultural diplomacy is particularly powerful when exercised outside of Australia on the global stage. It is even recruited by the Australian nation state in international relationship building. My sisters and I have sung for embassies in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, East Africa, Cyprus, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Some of you might even remember our melodic messaging expressed here in Washington DC back in 2016! I can tell you that that deft deployment here in DC must have worked, as it is one of the reasons I found myself back in the collections of the Peabody Museum last week, and here today. These expressions are potent, patient and cumulative.

Recognising the strength of Indigenous voices in our collections has sparked some incredible work and innovations in museum anthropology and museum practice more broadly. Some of the work undertaken by my colleagues—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—who are anthropologists and cultural practitioners is regenerative and fulfilling. I am stunned and excited by the new approaches that are taken and the new directions our work is going in, and I see it happening across the world. You might have picked up on my comment that global networks are perhaps more receptive to this work that is being generated on the ground in Australia, and in a sense this is true. The public discourse in Australia surrounding our historic collections, as I stated earlier, has an undertow that is yet to accept the nuance and complexities of our experience and seeks out high-level symbolic atonement. There is still an awful lot of work to do to celebrate the Indigenous voices in our collections as authoritative, but the work that needs to be done is now becoming clearer. We have sat with the difficulty of the picture for so long now that some of the shock has begun to dissipate into other things, and new views of the same archive are beginning to emerge.

Humanness, empathy, exchange, relationships, negotiation and compromise are all rising to the surface as are other dimensions too, like love, trust and respect. We don’t have to diminish our feelings, thoughts or experiences of colonisation and the intensity and force of its destruction to also recognise the very human moments within our history. These are not mutually exclusive. Empathy doesn’t have to come at the expense of other things.

Conclusion

It is possible to re-envisage our collections as sites of agency and authority, but we can’t do it if our receptive senses are mediated and tempered, or if we can’t shine a better light on the complexities of our histories and invite people towards it to see what can be revealed. In some ways, I think we might need to create better spaces for Australians to sit with the complexity long enough to move beyond grand symbolic gestures and the enormous scale of the problem to see and hear the patient and potent voices of Indigenous agency that wait to be heard. This is not just about truth-telling, but also about truth-listening, and it is heavy and complicated. But on the other side is knowledge, insight, nuance and understanding.

From the roses and rain brought together by divergent relationships to country, and the anthropologists kept away from local knowledges, our collections contain Indigenous agency enacted in Indigenous ways. The barks of Yirrkala invite us to not only step towards different cultural worlds, but also to engage with the different languages and vocabularies used to express agency and authority. The breadth and diversity of these vocabularies should excite us all as they signal our work ahead! I believe that our historical collections have something important to offer our present as we grapple with truths, voice and ensuring dynamic cultural futures.

I hope that today I have been provocative enough to engage you, and persuasive enough for you to consider what I have put forward. At the very least, take this as an invitation to look differently at our cultural expressions and material, and at our collections, for expressions of Indigenous agency and to come together to do this purposefully. This act is not to deny the scale of destruction forged by colonisation, but to actively restore and repair. For it is in response to profound acts of severance and loss that connection takes on its greatest power.

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1. 1 Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 17, 19.

2. 2 See James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219. See also Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers, eds, Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005), doi.org/10.4324/9780203987834; Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenisation of Canadian Museums (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), doi.org/10.1515/9780773587465; Bryony Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2015), 26–44, doi.org/10.4324/9781315770246.

3. 3 Gibson specifically articulates the knowledge-production processes of ethnographic research as a ‘co-production’ and a property of the relationship between researcher and subject. Jason M. Gibson, Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), 7–9.

4. 4 Termed ‘stereotypic expectation’, this position of presumed exploitation is explored by Baglo who notes explicitly its acceptance by Indigenous people in her work reframing Sami agency in ethnographic exhibitions. Cathrine Baglo, ‘Rethinking Sami Agency during Living Exhibitions: From the Age of Empire to the Postwar World’, Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences, ed. Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 137–8.

5. 5 Jilda A. Andrews, ‘Indigenous Perspectives on Museum Collections’, Artlink 37, no. 2 (2017): 88.

6. 6 Ibid., 91.

7. 7 Ibid., 91.

8. 8 Jilda A. Andrews, ‘Encountering Cultural Material in Museum Collections: An Indigenous Perspective’ (PhD thesis, The Australian National University, 2019); Jilda A. Andrews, ‘Value Creation and Museums from an Indigenous Perspective’, in Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, ed. Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie (London: Routledge, 2022), 225–39, doi.org/10.4324/9781003139324-17.

9. 9 Howard Morphy, ‘Introduction’, in Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, ed. Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie (London: Routledge, 2022), 2–3, doi.org/10.4324/9781003139324.

10. 10 Joseph B. Birdsell, ‘Transcript (1941)’, field journal, South Australian Museum Archive Collections, AA 689/1/1/1.

11. 11 David R. Horton, ‘AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1996, aiatsis.gov.au/explore/map-indigenous-australia.

12. 12 David Kaus, ‘Professionals and Amateurs’, in The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, ed. Nicolas Peterson, Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 281.

13. 13 Katie Langloh Parker and Marcie Muir, My Bush Book: K. Langloh Parker’s 1890s Story of Outback Station Life, with Background and Biography (Adelaide: Rigby, 1982), 97–100.

14. 14 Correspondence between Catherine Stow and Professor Elkin regarding the Stow collection, 1938, Department of Anthropology correspondence and research papers, A. P. Elkin Personal Papers, University of Sydney Archives, P130/41/74.