Towards relational ethics: Foundational concepts for the shifting ground of GLAM

Mike Jones

Addressing the opening of the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in March 2001, Prime Minister John Howard described the new institution as ‘unique … in some respects it is very un-museum like’. He continued:

what this museum and what its concept seeks to do, is to interpret and relate history and the experience of our country in a somewhat different way. Quite properly and inevitably there will be debate in the future about that way of interpreting our history and that way of relating those events.¹

Howard provided few specifics, but he was likely aware that debate had already started. Five months before the museum’s opening, NMA board member David Barnett—a government appointment and Howard’s authorised biographer—sent a memo to museum chair Tony Staley criticising the institution for its political correctness, alarming text panels and ‘inflammatory’ displays, including one featuring Indigenous leg irons.²

Conservative journalist and historian Keith Windschuttle was similarly inflamed. The NMA opened during Australia’s history wars that saw a backlash against the ‘black armband’ view of history, perceived as too focused on imperialism, racism, sexism and other injustices at the expense of heroic achievements and the promotion of a sense of national pride.³ In a piece for Quadrant entitled ‘How Not to Run a Museum’, Windschuttle labelled the institution a ‘profound intellectual mistake’ due to its lack of an overarching narrative and emphasis on social history, its reliance on postmodernism and its perceived devaluing of the (primarily white, male) ‘agents of history’ in favour of its ‘objects’, particularly the ‘currently fashionable interest groups of women, ethnics, and indigenes’.⁴

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these critiques of the NMA showed little awareness of, or support for, contemporary developments in museums. Social histories, multiple voices, contested perspectives, suspicion of metanarratives⁵ and references to contemporary politics were common (though to varying degrees) in many state and national museums in Australia, and internationally. Contrary to Windschuttle’s view, this was how large, contemporary museums operated. They did so through increasingly collaborative practice yet this, too, was barely referenced in the backlash against the NMA. A review of the NMA—initiated less than two years after its opening and delivered in July 2003—mentioned collaboration only in terms of working with cultural and academic institutions and other ‘stakeholders’, and the need for an institutional ‘collaboration strategy’ to support these activities. The review noted that revising themes, narratives and curatorial approaches should be based primarily on ‘rigorous scholarship’ and more incisive audience surveys.⁶ There was no acknowledgement of the potential for co-curation, community consultation processes, focus groups or participatory practice, nor any recognition that the apparent ideal of the museum as a neutral, self-contained source of authoritative knowledge was, by that stage, increasingly out of date.

More representative of the time was a two-part special issue of the journal Humanities Research, ‘Museums of the Future/The Future of Museums’, published by the Humanities Research Centre and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at The Australian National University in 2001 and 2002. Among the many notable contributors was Dawn Casey, director of the NMA at the time of its opening. She wrote of the importance of ‘people, technology, and partnerships’, the diversity of advisers and specialists from outside the museum who contributed to its development, and the need to activate and maintain ‘community participation in natural and cultural resource initiatives’.⁷ Similar language appeared throughout the two issues. Concepts like partnerships, collaborations, linkages, participation, engagement and inclusion recurred. Paul Pickering started the second part with a call for the museums of the future to ‘speak with more than one voice’,⁸ while, later in the same volume, W. Richard West explicitly adopted the idea that contemporary museums were becoming ‘forums’ rather than temples.⁹ That West, in his contribution, relied on ideas proposed by Duncan F. Cameron 30 years earlier¹⁰ is telling. As with many anthologies focused on the future, hindsight reveals the two issues to be not only of their time, but connotative of a period that, after developing over several decades, was on the verge of changing again.

In this article I explore the development of large national and state museums in recent decades in two parts. The first part introduces the period from 1971 to 2010, and the ways in which the authoritative ‘temple’ of the past developed into the sorts of institutions discussed in Humanities Research, characterised by partnerships, collaborations, community participation and engagement with multiple voices. As much of this history is already well documented elsewhere, I focus on developments that function as historical precursors to the ideas taken up in the second part, which looks at the period from 2011 to the present.

Starting a decade after the Humanities Research special issues, this recent past contains elements that suggest the emergence of a new phase of practice in the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector.¹¹ Rather than providing firm foundations and clear guidelines, these new developments look beyond stable institutional concepts like partnership and engagement, into more complex, contextual and changing forms of relationality—ones comparable to those outlined by Indigenous and feminist thinkers. The examples used to illustrate this point come primarily from museums in settler colonial states, and First Nations initiatives in particular. A striking feature of this work is the adoption of increasingly relational forms of ethics, not only visible in museum practice but also clearly articulated by archivists and archival theorists. I conclude by suggesting that, while relational ethics are far from universally practised or accepted, they provide a flexible foundation for the next phase of GLAM practice.

Changing relationships

The reliance on partnerships and collaborations emphasised in the two special issues of Humanities Research developed gradually. Until the mid-twentieth century, museums were primarily interested in collections and scholarship.¹² As outlined by museum scholar Stephen Weil, the relationship between museums and the public was hierarchical rather than reciprocal:

The museum was established to ‘raise’ the level of public understanding, to ‘elevate’ the spirits of its visitors, and to refine and ‘uplift’ the common taste. There was no ambiguity in this. Museums were created and maintained by the high for the low, by the couth for the uncouth, by the washed for the unwashed, by those who knew for those who didn’t but needed to know and who would come to learn.¹³

From the late nineteenth century, museums were also increasingly professionalised. In the UK, the Museums Association was founded in 1889. It held its first annual conference in 1890 and published the first issue of Museums Journal in 1901. In the US, the American Association of Museums was founded in 1906. It published what is believed to be the first code of ethics for museum workers in 1925, focusing on concepts like devotion, faith and honour. Opening with a call for courtesy and a commitment to service when dealing with the public, the code then discussed professional relationships between collecting institutions, directors, trustees and staff. Above all else, museum workers were accountable to the director:

They should carry out to the best of their ability the plans of the director … An employee’s attitude toward the museum director and the museum official by whom he is employed should be one of respect for authority.¹⁴

It was an approach that, in Hilde Hein’s words, ‘assumed a benevolent hierarchy’.¹⁵

It was not until the latter part of the century that these relationships were seriously questioned. The year 1971 was pivotal: it was identified by Kenneth Hudson as the moment when ‘it became obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that there would have to be fundamental changes in the philosophy and aims of museums’.¹⁶ It was the year that saw protests against elitist, establishment art museums at American Association of Museums meetings in New York.¹⁷ In 1971, at an International Council of Museums (ICOM)¹⁸ meeting at Grenoble, a delegate from Benin questioned the utility and worth of museums in contemporary life, leading to sessions the following year at which Latin American professionals, in particular, called for museums to better engage with communities.¹⁹ The theme of the Grenoble meeting was ‘The museum in the service of man [sic], today and tomorrow’. Over the course of the 1971 meeting, ICOM adopted a series of resolutions that challenged the custodial focus of institutions and called for changes to the ‘structure, statutes, rules, programmes and services of ICOM’.²⁰ The council, to that point, had been mainly comprised of institutional representatives, the majority of whom came from large, long-established institutions; however, younger attendees, in particular, were arguing for individual membership.²¹ In a shift away from past positions like the 1925 code of ethics, there was a clear sense that professionals were seeking recognition for personal, political and ethical positions as individuals distinct from their institutions.

As Duncan F. Cameron argued in the opening to ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, also from 1971: ‘There is abundant evidence of an identity crisis in some of the major institutions.’²² Faced with uncertainty about the role of museums in contemporary society, and protests and resistance against establishment institutions from artists, activists and sections of the public, Cameron suggested that a ‘forum’ was required to facilitate discussion and debate in an accessible, democratic space, thereby creating ‘an equality of cultural opportunity’.²³ By providing a space for these conversations that was distinct from the institution, the museum could accept and incorporate changing ideas about what was important while maintaining its role as a builder and preserver of collections for the future. The alternative (untenable to Cameron) was that the museum be effectively torn down from within.

Though Cameron’s terminology was widely adopted, those that followed quickly departed from the specifics of his argument. In 1991, Steven Lavine and Ivan Karp wrote: ‘now few serious museum practitioners would claim that a museum could be anything but a forum’.²⁴ W. Richard West’s contribution to Humanities Research noted approvingly that museums were becoming forums; Casey explicitly labelled the NMA as a ‘forum’ prior to its opening;²⁵ and historian Graeme Davison wrote that ‘the idea of the national museum as a meeting place, a kind of piazza or forum … is an attractive one that we Australians have also begun to follow’.²⁶ Yet Cameron was not arguing that the forum should be brought inside the museum temple or that museums themselves should become forums. He saw the need for both as distinct spaces: ‘the forum is where the battles are fought, the temple is where the victors rest. The former is process, the latter is product.’²⁷

Whether inside or outside the museum, the idea of the ‘forum’ evokes a democratic space where the views of the people must be considered. Museums and their staff were no longer seen as the elite experts charged with dispensing knowledge to improve the populace. In 1974, ICOM’s proposed reforms were adopted, creating a ‘more participatory, member-based organization’.²⁸ With these changes came a new definition of museums, the fourth since the establishment of ICOM in 1946:

A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of the society and its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment.²⁹

For the first time, there was explicit reference to ‘service to society’. According to Hudson, earlier drafts of the definition referenced service to community, but this idea was seen as problematic:

Who was to decide whether a museum is serving the community or not? What proportion of the community does it have to serve in order to justify its existence? What limits were to be set to such a vague concept as the community? On the whole, ‘society’ was felt to be a safer word than ‘community’, partly, no doubt, because it is even vaguer.³⁰

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining why the phrase ‘service to society’ has proven so resilient, appearing in all subsequent definitions up to and including the latest, adopted by ICOM in August 2022.

In 1974, in addition to adopting structural changes and a new definition, a resolution was passed to prepare a code of professional ethics. Though the initial intention was to adopt a ‘definitive text’ at the next session, the drafting and sign-off process lasted more than a decade. ICOM’s Code of Ethics for Museums was adopted at the fifteenth general assembly meeting at Buenos Aires on 4 November 1986. Especially given the context in which it was initiated, the final text is comparatively conservative. The minimum standards for museums focus on the ethical duty of the organisation towards its collections, rather than to people, communities or societies. Rather than a ‘forum’, section 2.6 states that museums ‘should offer both the general community and specific individuals and groups within it opportunities to become actively involved in the museum and to support its aims and policies’. Consultation is only referenced in relation to other museums, academic institutions, disciplinary colleagues and fieldwork (i.e. consulting the ‘proper authorities’).³¹ Despite the definition of a museum focusing on ‘service to society’, a museum worker’s ethical duty was to maintain collections and services while remaining accountable to professional partners and existing power structures. As for the definition of a museum, ethics was not explicitly included until the 2022 version.

Meanwhile, theoretical and practical developments were occurring in the museum sector that were markedly more progressive. From the 1980s, ‘new museology’ embraced shifts in the politics of representation, and explicitly recognised that knowledge and values are contextual and contingent rather than universal.³² The literature of this period is well documented. Broadly speaking, new museology focused less on the administrative processes and professional practices found in museums, and more on the place of museums in society, the contextual and historical nature of museum knowledge, and the multiplicity of social, cultural and political environments that shape our understanding of objects.³³ If objects themselves are taken as mute, then all meaning is historical and contextual rather than inherent or fixed, with multiple possible (potentially contradictory) meanings that can continue to shift and change after an object enters the museum.³⁴ Uncovering this plurality requires admitting diverse voices.³⁵ As Bernadette Lynch writes, this necessitates ‘a move away from a singular focus on collections research towards a focus on relations with people’.³⁶

For settler colonial museums with large ethnographic collections, admitting ‘diverse voices’ and plural meanings meant (and means) working with Indigenous people and communities. In 1985, the Australian Museum opened its new Aboriginal Australia Gallery. For the first time, Aboriginal people were involved in the development process,³⁷ providing information and content, and helping to create striking features like a Wandjina rock art display painted in situ by Ngarinyin senior traditional lawman David Mowaljarlai. Four years later, following lengthy consultations with Ngarrindjeri people, Ngurunderi: A Ngarrindjeri Dreaming opened at the South Australian Museum. Curator Steve Hemming later reflected on the need for state museums to ‘develop research directions jointly with Aboriginal people’ if they were to ‘continue to have a useful community role to play in the area of Aboriginal culture’.³⁸ First Nations people were becoming both the agents and the subjects of social, cultural and artistic representation—not just the unspeaking objects of research, history and institutional display.

In 1993, some of the key principles underpinning this type of work were formalised in the Museums Australia policy Previous Possessions, New Obligations. The document, which opens with a clear statement around ‘the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to self-determination in respect to cultural heritage matters’, called for involvement from First Nations peoples in all aspects of museum work related to First Nations artefacts, stories and knowledge—from exhibitions, collections management and access, to employment, training and policy formulation.³⁹

The National Museum of Australia may have drawn the ire of conservative commentators, but, by the time of its opening, such principles were firmly established. Dawn Casey described two events in 1998—a Smoking Ceremony in July at which members of several Aboriginal communities cleansed Acton Peninsula, and the ceremonial turning of the first sod by Howard in October—as emblematic of the fact that the museum ‘has a history viewable from two perspectives’.⁴⁰ Within the galleries, as Bain Attwood noted, ‘at various points in the First Australians gallery, the National Museum tells history by using the narrative forms or conventions that are often adopted by Aboriginal people’, which was ‘part and parcel of the very reason why this part of the Museum was created in the first place’.⁴¹

The NMA was just one of many new or significantly updated Indigenous and First Nations galleries that opened between 1996 and 2004. Others could be found at the Australian Museum, the Western Australian Museum, the newly opened Melbourne Museum and the South Australian Museum. Internationally, there were comparable developments at major institutions like New Zealand’s Te Papa, the Canadian Museum of History and the new National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. These and others have been widely discussed as key examples of public programming based on consultation, co-curation, and the inclusion of multiple voices and perspectives.⁴²

But these initiatives are perhaps most usefully viewed as the culmination of changes that can be traced back to that pivotal year, 1971. Despite Casey, West and others’ claims that museums were now forums, there was still a sense that consultation and participation was largely on the institution’s terms. Community members were more frequently invited to the table, but the table still belonged to the museum. The director of the Indigenous Cultures Program at Museums Victoria, palawa woman Gaye Sculthorpe, noted the new exhibitions being developed around the turn of the millennium, and concluded:

The impact of community consultation or collaboration is also hard to assess … On major developments, the parameters for development usually include tight schedules often rigidly policed by project managers that make flexibility, a requirement for effective collaboration, difficult.⁴³

Consultation and partnerships were the preferred process, but the product was still initiated, managed and shaped by the museum, with staff held accountable to internal authority structures.

Perhaps the concept of the forum still applied. Named for the place of public assembly and discussion at the heart of Ancient Rome (and therefore inherently Eurocentric), the forum was filled with religious buildings and monuments to notable (male) citizens. It was a place where citizens came to hear politicians, senators and priests speak and debate, listen to advocates and watch processions, rather than a place where they could speak and be heard themselves. And it was a site for commerce, including slaves. As Keith Bradley noted: ‘the cries of slavedealers could always be heard … The objects of their exchange, however, seem for the most part to have endured the proceedings in silence.’⁴⁴ It was a place where existing power structures remained strongly in evidence.

Sculthorpe’s observation about the difficulty of assessing the impact of these processes seems appropriate. However, there are instances where the lack of visible impact on the final product is notable. Following Ngurunderi, a new Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum was installed, opening in 2001. The development included consultation with Aboriginal communities, and was championed by content coordinator David Kerr as a ‘door to the future’.⁴⁵ But a stated determination to ‘swing the pendulum back to an object-rich exhibition’⁴⁶ and avoid the ‘voguish’ display styles of museums like the NMA and Museum Victoria⁴⁷ resulted in a conservative exhibition space—one that has been justifiably criticised for sidelining First Nations voices and attempting to reclaim the authority of the non-Indigenous anthropologist to speak about Aboriginal culture.⁴⁸

Whatever the product, museums at the turn of the millennium continued to present themselves as stable, authoritative institutions that served the whole society of which they were part. As Davison argues, they also largely retained their ‘civilising, nation-building role even if the language has changed to reflect a more corporate culture’.⁴⁹ This corporate and managerial language is clearly visible throughout the two special issues of Humanities Research (2001/2002). Caroline Turner wrote of partnerships, promoting participation and productive engagement; Iain McCalman discussed museums and heritage in the ‘new economy’; Casey referenced external advisers, and collaborations that produced ‘showpieces for our business partners’; and Amareswar Galla was interested in ‘facilitating productive relationships for collaboration, [and] cultural exchange’. An implied sense that museums provided a relatively neutral space in which these activities could occur was present throughout.

Two responses in the ‘Future Shots’ section of the 2001 issue hinted at something more. As president of Museums Australia, Carol Scott suggested museums in the future could no longer rely on their ‘transcendent authority’ and would need to ‘re-negotiate relationships with communities and stakeholders’. And Margo Neale, director of the Gallery of First Australians at the NMA, wrote of museums as sites of encounter, and the significance of accountability:

From an Indigenous perspective … I hope the museums of the future increasingly become sites of negotiation. Places where multiple histories are told by diverse voices and stories have no end. A place where contradictions are allowed to exist, hard questions are posed without qualification, answers are debated and conclusions are forever rubbery.

Though the corporate language of negotiation and stakeholders remained, relationships, accountability and multiplicity would become central concepts in the years that followed.

Relational museums, relational ethics

When Scott and Neale reflected on the future, change was already underway. James Clifford’s article ‘Museums as Contact Zones’ (1997) suggested the potential for museum work that looked beyond ‘consultation’ to more active, collaborative work in which authority was shared.⁵⁰ He borrowed the term ‘contact zone’ from Mary Louise Pratt, who saw it as a perspective that emphasised how subjects were ‘constituted in and by their relations to each other’.⁵¹ Here the museum was not the centre—neither temple nor forum—but an unstable place that was shaped and reshaped by a series of encounters between different peoples, communities and cultures.⁵² Though not referenced anywhere within the Humanities Research special issues, Clifford’s ideas would become increasingly prominent in the years to come.⁵³

Since the emergence of new museology there has also been increasing interest in the idea of relational objects and relational museums. Museology, material culture studies, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, archival theory and more have demonstrated an increasing commitment to the idea that things (including people) and their meanings are deeply interconnected, and that their identities depend on and are shaped by complex networks of relationships. Museums began exploring their role in these networks, for example through the Relational Museum Project (2002–6) at the Pitt Rivers Museum.⁵⁴ As museologist Duncan Grewcock wrote:

Recognising and working with a partial and shifting understanding of the world informs the emergence of what one can term ‘the relational museum’. The relational museum emerges through varying attempts to re-image the contemporary museum as connected, plural, distributed, multi-vocal, affective, material, embodied, experiential, political, performative and participatory.⁵⁵

This represents a conceptual shift away from the stable, corporate museum developing partnerships with stakeholders.

Concurrent with the development of new museology, theorists in other fields were also developing alternative models of ethics.⁵⁶ As with the ‘relational museum’, these looked beyond stable categories and universal codes to more connected, affective and experiential forms of reasoning. Feminist ethicist Carol Gilligan did this, in part, through an example known as ‘the Heinz Dilemma’, first proposed by Lawrence Kohlberg. In brief, Heinz’s wife is sick with a rare disease. A large drug company has created a drug that can help, but it is prohibitively expensive and Heinz cannot raise the money. The dilemma asks: should Heinz steal the drug to save his wife? The intention is for people to quickly turn from this question to abstract concepts (i.e. is a human life worth more than property; should we break the law on moral grounds) to decide from three options:

1. Heinz shouldn’t steal because it breaks the law.
2. Heinz should steal to save his wife, but should be punished by the law.
3. Heinz should steal the drug, and the law should not punish him.

Kohlberg labelled these ‘pre-conventional’, ‘conventional’ and ‘post-conventional’ moral thinking. He argued that, at the highest stage of ethical thinking (i.e. post-conventional), individuals should develop a deeply held set of moral principles that they wish to apply to all people, and should apply them even if they run contrary to the law and social practices of the time.

Gilligan challenged the assumptions behind these conclusions in her 1982 book In a Different Voice. Drawing on alternative responses that were discounted by Kohlbeg’s analysis, particularly those coming from young women, she noted that some people responded by considering Heinz’s relationship with his wife, specifically, whether spending time in jail might cause more problems in the long run; whether she might need additional medicine in the future and, thus, require a more sustainable option than theft; and whether the relationship with the drug provider could be fostered in a way that made stealing unnecessary. These participants looked at the Heinz Dilemma and saw not abstract concepts or a contest over rights, but a network of relationships that extended through time.

Whereas the dilemma is often stated as ‘should Heinz steal or not steal?’ with the stealing assumed, participants who focus on relationships do not take this for granted, instead they try to find a way to nurture relationships and open up other options. As Gilligan noted, where one person sees ‘a conflict between life and property that can be resolved by logical deduction’, another sees ‘a fracture of human relationship that must be mended with its own thread’.⁵⁷

In 1984, Nel Noddings published Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics & Moral Education, retitled A Relational Approach in later editions. In it she argued that acting in a caring way was not about following rules or fixed guidelines, but being responsive to particular situations:

Variation is to be expected if the one claiming to care really cares, for her engrossment is in the variable and never fully understood other, in the particular other, in a particular set of circumstances. Rule-bound responses in the name of caring lead us to suspect that the claimant wants most to be credited with caring.⁵⁸

Interestingly, when considering museums, Noddings noted that it was people, as individuals, who cared, not institutions, though an institution could ‘work toward establishing an environment in which caring-for [could] flourish’.⁵⁹

Within the GLAM sector these ideas were taken up most visibly by archivists. In ‘From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives’ (2016), Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor sought to move away from models based on individual legal rights to an alternative approach ‘informed by feminist ethics, that [centred] on radical empathy and obligations of care’.⁶⁰ Community members were not just users, or external stakeholders who were periodically consulted, but ‘central focal points in all aspects of the archival endeavour’. The archivist, too, was part of this ‘web of relationships’ that changed and required nurturing through time.⁶¹

Caswell and Cifor’s work influenced archival theorists and practitioners internationally. A recent special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies provides examples of how their ideas have been applied in practice in the five years since their article, including in Australia, through the development of new policies and processes at the University of Melbourne Archives in relation to child welfare records.⁶² Heritage and museums professionals have also started to explore these concepts as they relate to collections and exhibitions. For example, Temi Odumosu has examined the relationship between custody and care when working with digital reproductions of enslaved and colonised subjects; and Alexandra Bounia has examined how explicitly activist exhibitions on the refugee ‘crisis’ in Greece in 2016 model an ethics of care approach by reaching out to the communities involved and attempting to tackle injustice.

This is work that values emotional engagement with specific communities. According to Caswell and Cifor, GLAM professionals working in this way have an ‘affective responsibility’ to the various stakeholders involved. Where critics of the NMA saw some displays as inflammatory, lacking in objectivity and too concerned with fashionable interest groups, an ethics of care model sees moral decision-making as ‘deeply relational, context dependent, and emotionally resonant’.⁶³

Such an approach pushes against dominant understandings of museum ethics. In 2004, ICOM released a revised version of its Code of Ethics for Museums that included a number of updates from the 1986 version discussed in the previous section. Perhaps most significantly, whereas the 1986 code advised that museums should give communities the chance to support the institution’s aims and policies, the 2004 code included a section titled ‘Museums Work in Close Collaboration with the Communities from Which Their Collections Originate as Well as Those They Serve’, which provided the rather vague instruction to remain ‘responsive’ to the idea that collections reflect the heritage of the communities from which they originate.⁶⁴ ICOM’s code is intended as a universal framework, applicable to many thousands of museums internationally. For museum director and member of the ICOM Ethics Committee Gary Edson, this is not a problem. ‘Ethics do not change’, he wrote in 2016: ‘People, situations, expectations and interpretations may change; but ethics persist as an enduring framework for conduct.’⁶⁵ In Museum Ethics in Practice, published a year after Caswell and Cifor’s influential article, Edson mentioned emotions only once:

Ethical decision making depends on right thinking and an attitude that gives full attention to the idea of public trust. An obstacle to ethical decision making is being influenced by passion, emotion, or personal interest. The appearance or suggestions of such conflict can damage a museum’s reputation and its ability to fulfil its mission.⁶⁶

Others disagree. For example, First Nations scholar Deborah Doxtator writes about finding things in museum drawers that are connected to you personally:

They try to drill into my head that it’s good to be unbiased, that it’s good to separate my emotions and take my emotions out of my work. I can’t. To me, that is false. That’s like pretending that something that is there, isn’t.⁶⁷

Encountering perspectives like Doxtator’s reminds us that affective and relational ethics are not just feminist concepts, nor are they particularly new. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes, legal definitions of ethics that are centred on the individual are centred on Western modes of thinking: ‘In indigenous frameworks, relationships matter. Respectful, reciprocal, genuine relationships lie at the heart of community life and community development.’⁶⁸ Writing about Indigenous research methods, Shawn Wilson highlights the relational nature of reality, and the fact that objects are less important than one’s relationship to that object.⁶⁹ Rather than an ethical duty of care to collections and artefacts, the duty of care here is to one’s relations—what Wilson describes as ‘relational accountability’.⁷⁰

Indigenous and feminist concepts like relational accountability, radical empathy and the ethics of care provide useful lenses through which to understand and reframe contemporary issues. Consider the position of museum leaders like Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria & Albert, who has continued to argue against the repatriation of colonial artefacts.⁷¹ Hunt and others rely on arguments about the supposedly fixed and essential nature of museums—as world institutions, responsible for protecting and preserving collections—and defend their positions by raising the spectre of empty museums as the logical end point of acceding to repatriation requests. The ethical thinking underpinning this argument aligns with Kohlberg’s and is premised on the belief that acting ethically must involve applying a single, abstracted decision to every request. However, having analysed repatriation decisions, Pierre Losson has established that each is ‘historically situated’ rather than generalisable, with the repatriation process providing an opportunity to build and nurture relationships of trust.⁷² Relational accountability and an ethics of care provide a model for understanding these processes, and for considering how to navigate and nurture the complex and changing relationships that shape museums and the communities with which they are entangled.

Exhibitions provide evidence that forms of relational practice are starting to emerge. The Melbourne Museum and its Indigenous section, Bunjilaka, first opened in October 2000. Like the NMA, it received mixed reviews, including criticism for being too politically correct.⁷³ But the level of consultation and negotiation with local communities was unprecedented, leading to a sense of connection that led to a desire to re-engineer the space to further reflect the needs and interests of Aboriginal people.⁷⁴ Whereas the first Bunjilaka exhibitions centred the museum, including through self-reflexive displays that critiqued past museum practice, the new displays were more confident. As Andrea Witcomb noted at the time of its opening, First Peoples ‘simply operates differently and goes about embodying that difference in its exhibition practices’.⁷⁵

A newly formed group was essential to reshaping the exhibition development process for First Peoples. Self-titled Yulendj, from the Kulin word for knowledge and intelligence, and made up of elders and community representatives, the group met regularly throughout the process. Week-long workshops included smoking ceremonies, cultural practices and knowledge sessions led by elders, as well as continuing collaborative work with design and conservation staff, preparators and multimedia teams.⁷⁶ More than just consultation, this was a co-curation process that built strong and deep relationships linking the museum, its staff and community members.⁷⁷ The results were visible in the gallery space, including first person plural text on labels, community symbols and displays where the interpretive voice of First Nations people was prioritised over the findings of Western science.⁷⁸ Yulendj members talk about feelings of connection, being part of something bigger and the responsibility to bring people along with them. Carolyn Briggs describes herself as ‘made up of a whole lot of other people that have contributed to my thinking’, and Esther Kirby characterises the results as like ‘one of those patchwork quilts. Everybody’s got a different story and them patches all join together.’⁷⁹

Other significant First Nations exhibitions in the past decade—such as ningina tunapri (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), Songlines (NMA), Colony (National Gallery of Victoria), Gadi (Australian Museum) and Endeavour Voyage (NNMA)—all contain elements of community involvement and co-curation that go beyond partnerships and consultation into more relational, entangled ways of working.

Arguably, Unsettled (2021) has taken these ideas the furthest. The Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition was a First Nations–led initiative developed in response to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of Captain James Cook’s Endeavour. Clifford argues that, to avoid paternalism, museums need to do more than consult after the curatorial vision is already in place.⁸⁰ Here the First Nations curatorial team, Laura McBride and Mariko Smith, undertook a consultation process with communities to ask Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples what they thought the project should address. This happened before the exhibition planning had begun.⁸¹ Smith writes of the need to disrupt understandings of many aspects of the work:

including how we define positions like ‘curator’. For my Wailwan and Kooma colleague … Laura McBride, a curator should operate more so as a conduit; a facilitator who actively prioritises and amplifies First Nations voices so that communities can accurately and appropriately represent themselves and their cultures within the museum.⁸²

In the resulting exhibition there is a genuine sense that the primary relations to which the curators held themselves accountable were community relationships outside the museum, and that this was achieved in a way that remained professionally productive with support from senior management who were willing to make, and protect, the space required to do the work. In Nodding’s terms, the museum itself did not ‘care’, but an institutional environment was established where caring and the relational ethics that underpins it could flourish.

If relational ethics are the future, to borrow from William Gibson, then the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed. One of the largest completed redevelopments in recent history is the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. Its beautiful new exhibition spaces include references to ‘Looking Two Ways’ and First Nations perspectives are visibly present throughout, including in spaces devoted to natural history and the sciences. But when wall text in a display titled ‘Forming Ancient Landscapes’ compels the visitor to ‘tread lightly on these special places full of meaning’, the presence of a Rio Tinto Gallery in the same institution opening just six months after the Juukan Gorge incident⁸³ is jarring. The museum’s CEO, Alec Coles, has spoken about the institution consulting with 54,000 people as part of its development, including work with over 70 different Aboriginal language groups, to create a space he argues is without rancour or bias. Based on these public statements, the quantitative emphasis here feels qualitatively different to public descriptions of the Yulendj group on the Museums Victoria website; and, as a visitor, the prominent Rio Tinto Gallery feels like a troubling disconnect rather than another patch in the communal quilt.

Museums Victoria has continued to value and nurture the relationships established through the Yulendj group. In more recent years these relationships have been centred, with the museum committing to placing ‘First Peoples living cultures and histories at the core of our practice’.⁸⁴ One result of this commitment was discussed publicly in 2018 when human remains were removed from the Swedish History Museum’s exhibition Vikings: Beyond the Legend before it opened at the Melbourne Museum.

Head of First Peoples at the time Genevieve Grieves was invited onto Tom Elliott’s Drive program on radio 3AW to explain the decision. Their exchange clearly highlights the institution’s investment in relationships and the ways in which this constitutes a rupture with more established Western notions of ethics. Grieves explained that the history of ancestral remains in museums made their display distressing for some (but not all) Aboriginal people, so, after consulting with their advisory group, the decision was taken to remove them in this instance. Elliott asked whether this meant that Museums Victoria could no longer show any human remains. Grieves explained that there were still other human remains on display; it was not an absolute position—there needed to be ongoing dialogue. Elliott responded with a variation on the ‘empty museums’ trope seen in the repatriation debate: ‘if you try and worry about what everyone thinks, soon you won’t be able to exhibit anything’. Grieves replied:

Yeah, I don’t know I necessarily agree with that position, and I can only talk to our position on this, which is that our First Peoples communities are really important to us as a museum and we recognise a history that we’ve been involved in as an institution that’s done a lot of damage to a lot of people, and hasn’t actually been resolved.⁸⁵

Her response pushed back on universalist notions of ethics by referring to the specific context of the decision, holding the institution accountable to its relationships with First Peoples, and basing the decision in part on an empathetic understanding of the hurt and damage that past practices had caused.

Conclusion

The outline of Kohlberg’s Heinz Dilemma presented above referenced his pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional stages of ethical thinking, with the highest level of ethics involving a kind of detachment from social convention or the opinions of others. Carol Gilligan redefined these stages according to an ethics of care:

1. Pre-conventional stage: people are focused on the self.
2. Conventional stage: people have come to focus on their responsibilities towards others.
3. Post-conventional stage: people have learned to see themselves and others as interdependent.

It is interesting to note the broad correlation between Gilligan’s stages and the history of museums. Early institutions focused inward, on objects, collections, scholarship and research. From the 1970s there was a shift towards focusing on responsibilities to the public, culminating in the development of partnerships and participatory practice in the early 2000s. Now there are signs of a move into the ‘post-conventional’ with its acceptance of relational entanglement.⁸⁶

These developments are not without their dangers. Apart from continuing conservative attacks on political correctness, or its modern equivalent, ‘woke museums’,⁸⁷ there are structural challenges to consider. Gilligan notes how the powerful position at the top of a hierarchy becomes the edge of a web of relationships, while the centre of a relational network becomes the middle of a hierarchy: ‘each image marks as dangerous the place which the other defines as safe’.⁸⁸ When faced with the consequences of such changes some may attempt to shore up longstanding ways of working. Relational thinking and contextual ethics also produce a sense of instability that can be unsettling, along with an inability to generalise from one situation to the next. The requirement to slow down and pay attention to specific relationships⁸⁹ pushes against calls for increased efficiencies and clearly defined stakeholder outcomes.

Relational thinking and ethics provide a means for navigating this inherent instability. As Noddings argues, variation is expected and shows an ability to truly invest ourselves in the particular set of circumstances with which we are faced. There is further work to do here, including the need to better understand and learn from institutions like community-run keeping places and arts and culture centres that are more embedded in specific, local relationships than large state and national museums. Perhaps in 20 years, and with the benefit of hindsight, this moment will look more like a continuation of the move towards more collaborative practice that started in the 1970s. Periodisation aside, there are clear examples emerging from archival and museum practice that show the value of developing and nurturing relationships and spaces that allow caring, empathy and the pursuit of justice to flourish.

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1. 1 John Howard, ‘Address at the Opening of the National Museum, Canberra’, PM Transcripts, 12 March 2001, pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-11793.

2. 2 Joyce Morgan, ‘The Right Men for a Museum’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 2001, sec. News and Features; David Dean and Peter E. Rider, ‘Museums, Nation and Political History in the Australian National Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization’, Museum and Society 3, no. 1 (2005): 40, doi.org/10.29311/mas.v3i1.63.

3. 3 John Howard, ‘The 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture—The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federal Government’, PM Transcripts, 18 November 1996, pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-10171. See also Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004).

4. 4 Keith Windschuttle, ‘How Not to Run a Museum’, Quadrant 45, no. 9 (September 2001): 19, 14–16, search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.649540673484738.

5. 5 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv.

6. 6 Review of the National Museum of Australia Its Exhibitions and Public Programs: A Report to the Council of the National Museum of Australia (Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia, July 2003), 54, 69–70.

7. 7 Dawn Casey, ‘Case Study: The National Museum of Australia—Keynote Address from the Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, 26–27 July 2001, Canberra’, Humanities Research VIII, no. 1 (2001): 19, 22.

8. 8 Paul A. Pickering, ‘Editorial: Beyond East and West’, Humanities Research IX, no. 1 (2002): 3.

9. 9 W. Richard West, ‘American Museums in the 21st Century’, Humanities Research IX, no. 1 (2002): 59–60.

10. 10 Duncan F. Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, Curator: The Museum Journal 14, no. 1 (1 March 1971): 11–24, doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1971.tb00416.x.

11. 11 Though libraries and galleries are not a specific focus in this article, the term GLAM is used in the introductory and concluding sections to encompass collecting and heritage institutions more broadly, many of which feature exhibitions and public programs comparable to those discussed here.

12. 12 Kenneth Hudson, ‘The Museum Refuses to Stand Still’, Museum International 50, no. 1 (1998): 43, doi.org/10.1111/1468-0033.00135.

13. 13 Stephen E. Weil, ‘The Museum and the Public’, Museum Management and Curatorship 16, no. 3 (1 September 1997): 257, doi.org/10.1080/09647779708565852.

14. 14 American Association of Museums, Code of Ethics for Museum Workers (New York City: American Association of Museums, 1925), 8, catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001378444.

15. 15 Hilde S. Hein, The Museum in Transition: A Philosophical Perspective (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 129.

16. 16 Kenneth Hudson, Museums for the 1980s: A Survey of World Trends (London: Macmillan, 1977), 15.

17. 17 Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, 18.

18. 18 ICOM, founded in 1946, is an international non-government organisation supporting museums and museum professionals.

19. 19 Hudson, Museums for the 1980s, 7.

20. 20 ‘Resolutions Adopted by ICOM’s 10th General Assembly—Grenoble, France, 1971’, International Council of Museums, 1971, icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICOMs-Resolutions_1971_Eng.pdf.

21. 21 Bernice Murphy, ‘Charting the Ethics Landscape for Museums in a Changing World’, in Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage, ed. Bernice Murphy (London: Routledge, 2016), 24, doi.org/10.4324/9781315560151.

22. 22 Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, 11.

23. 23 Ibid., 18 (original emphasis).

24. 24 Steven Lavine and Ivan Karp, ‘Introduction: Museums and Multiculturalism’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 3.

25. 25 Dawn Casey, ‘The National Museum of Australia: Exploring the Past, Illuminating the Present and Imagining the Future’, in Negotiating Histories: National Museums: Conference Proceedings, ed. Darryl McIntyre, Kirsten Wehner and National Museum of Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001), 3.

26. 26 Graeme Davison, ‘Museums and the Burden of National Identity’, Public History Review 10 (2003): 13.

27. 27 Cameron, ‘The Museum, a Temple or the Forum’, 20–1.

28. 28 Murphy, ‘Charting the Ethics Landscape for Museums in a Changing World’, 24.

29. 29 Bruno Brulon Soares, ‘Defining the Museum: Challenges and Compromises of the 21st Century’, ICOFOM Study Series 48, no. 2 (15 December 2020): 16–32, doi.org/10.4000/iss.2325.

30. 30 Hudson, ‘The Museum Refuses to Stand Still’, 43.

31. 31 ‘International Council of Museums: Code of Professional Ethics Special Issue: Ethical Considerations and Cultural Property: Documents: A Selection of Codes of Ethics’, International Journal of Cultural Property 7, no. 1 (1998): 215–22.

32. 32 Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, ‘The Interrogative Museum’, in Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges, ed. Raymond Aaron Silverman (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 282–3.

33. 33 Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), 1–5; Deirdre C. Stam, ‘The Informed Muse: The Implications of “the New Museology” for Museum Practice’, Museum Management and Curatorship 12, no. 3 (1 September 1993): 268–71, doi.org/10.1016/0964-7775(93)90071-P.

34. 34 Peter Vergo, ‘The Reticent Object’, in The New Museology, ed. Peter Vergo (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), 41–59.

35. 35 Hein, The Museum in Transition, 2.

36. 36 Bernadette Lynch, ‘Introduction: Neither Helpful nor Unhelpful—A Clear Way Forward for the Useful Museum’, in Museums and Social Change: Challenging the Unhelpful Museum, ed. Adele Chynoweth Bernadette Lynch, Klaus Petersen and Sarah Smed (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2021), 7, doi.org/10.4324/9780429276903-1.

37. 37 Jack Golson, Jim Specht and Sharon Sullivan, ‘Obituary—Ronald John (Ron) Lampert’, Obituaries Australia, 2008, oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/lampert-ronald-john-ron-32742.

38. 38 Steve Hemming, ‘In the Tracks of Ngurunderi: The South Australian Museum’s Ngurunderi Exhibition and Cultural Tourism’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 2 (1994): 45.

39. 39 Museums Australia, Previous Possessions, New Obligations: Policies for Museums in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (Melbourne: Council of Australian Museum Associations Inc., 1993), 1.

40. 40 Casey, ‘The National Museum of Australia’, 3.

41. 41 Bain Attwood, ‘Contesting Frontiers: History, Memory and Narrative in a National Museum’, ReCollections 1, no. 2 (September 2006). As outlined in the Act that established the museum, the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia was always conceived as a distinct part of the museum, developed and maintained by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. See National Museum of Australia Act 1980, accessed 5 December 2022, www.legislation.gov.au/C2004A02316/2011-12-27/text.

42. 42 See, for example, Senka Božić-Vrbančić, ‘One Nation, Two Peoples, Many Cultures: Exhibiting Identity at Te Papa Tongarewa’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 112, no. 3 (2003): 295–313; Kirstie Ross, ‘Slice of Heaven: 20th Century Aotearoa: Biculturalism and Social History at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa’, Aboriginal Policy Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 115–27, doi.org/10.5663/aps.v2i2.19009; Dean and Rider, ‘Museums, Nation and Political History’; Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), doi.org/10.1515/9780773587465; Claire Smith, ‘Decolonising the Museum: The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC’, Antiquity, 2005; Kylie Message, New Museums and the Making of Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006); Kristine Ronan, ‘Native Empowerment, the New Museology, and the National Museum of the American Indian’, Museum & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 132–47.

43. 43 Gaye Sculthorpe, ‘Exhibiting Indigenous Histories in Australian Museums’, in Negotiating Histories: National Museums: Conference Proceedings, ed. Darryl McIntyre, Kirsten Wehner and National Museum of Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2001), 79.

44. 44 Keith Bradley, ‘“The Regular, Daily Traffic in Slaves”: Roman History and Contemporary History’, Classical Journal 87, no. 2 (1991): 137–8.

45. 45 David Kerr, ‘A Door to the Future: The Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum’, Artlink 20, no. 3 (September 2000): 22–6.

46. 46 Ibid., 25.

47. 47 Steve Hemming, ‘Objects and Specimens: Conservative Politics and the SA Museum’s Aboriginal Cultures Gallery’, Overland, no. 171 (2003): 122.

48. 48 See, for example, Hemming, ‘Objects and Specimens’; Christine Dauber, ‘Revisionism or Self‐Reflexivity at the South Australian Museum: The Museumising Imagination in the Postcolonial Era’, Journal of Australian Studies 29, no. 85 (January 2005): 113–25, doi.org/10.1080/14443050509388020.

49. 49 Davison, ‘Museums and the Burden of National Identity’, 9.

50. 50 James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 210.

51. 51 Mary Louise Pratt, quoted in ibid., 192.

52. 52 Andrea Witcomb, Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (London: Routledge, 2003), 89, doi.org/10.4324/9780203361023.

53. 53 Robin Boast provides a useful summary of this work up to 2010, in ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited’, Museum Anthropology 34, no. 1 (1 March 2011): 56–70, doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1379.2010.01107.x. Google Scholar and Google Ngram Viewer suggest that, since this time, citations of Clifford’s work have continued to increase.

54. 54 Chris Gosden, Frances Larson and Alison Petch, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199225897.001.0001.

55. 55 Duncan Grewcock, Doing Museology Differently (New York: Routledge, 2014), 5, doi.org/10.4324/9780203110515.

56. 56 In addition to those covered, fields such as oral history have also explored the potential of relational ethics and multi-vocal forms of authority. See, for example, Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, ‘Who’s Afraid of Oral History? Fifty Years of Debates and Anxiety about Ethics’, Oral History Review 43, no. 2 (1 September 2016): 338–66, doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohw071.

57. 57 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 31, doi.org/10.4159/9780674037618.

58. 58 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics & Moral Education, 2nd ed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 24, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt7zw1nb.

59. 59 Ibid., xv.

60. 60 Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, ‘From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives’, Archivaria 82 (6 May 2016): 24.

61. 61 Ibid., 41.

62. 62 Rachel Tropea and Georgina Ward, ‘Fierce Compassion and Reflexivity: Transforming Practice at the University of Melbourne Archives’, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3 (22 October 2021), journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jclis/article/view/121.

63. 63 Caswell and Cifor, ‘From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics’, 28.

64. 64 International Council of Museums, ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, 2004, icom.museum/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICOM-code-En-web.pdf.

65. 65 Gary Edson, ‘Unchanging Ethics in a Changing World’, in Museums, Ethics and Cultural Heritage, ed. Bernice Murphy (London: Routledge, 2016), 131, doi.org/10.4324/9781315560151.

66. 66 Gary Edson, Museum Ethics in Practice (London: Routledge, 2017), 108, doi.org/10.4324/9781315560137.

67. 67 Deborah Doxtator, ‘The Implications of Canadian Nationalism for Aboriginal Cultural Autonomy’, in Curatorship: Indigenous Perspectives in Post-Colonial Societies: Proceedings, ed. Canadian Museum of Civilization, University of Victoria (BC), and Commonwealth Association of Museums (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization with the Commonwealth Association of Museums and the University of Victoria, 1996), 59.

68. 68 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed (London: Zed Books, 2012), 125.

69. 69 Shawn Wilson, Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Black Point: Fernwood Pub, 2008), 73.

70. 70 Ibid., 77. See also Allison Boucher Krebs, ‘Native America’s Twenty-First-Century Right to Know’, Archival Science 12, no. 2 (1 June 2012): 173–90, doi.org/10.1007/s10502-011-9161-2; Lauren Tynan, ‘What Is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin’, Cultural Geographies 28, no. 4 (1 October 2021): 597–610, doi.org/10.1177/14744740211029287.

71. 71 Tristram Hunt, ‘Should Museums Return Their Colonial Artefacts?’, Observer, 29 June 2019, www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jun/29/should-museums-return-their-colonial-artefacts.

72. 72 Pierre Losson, ‘Opening Pandora’s Box: Will the Return of Cultural Heritage Objects to Their Country of Origin Empty Western Museums?’, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 51, no. 6 (2 November 2021): 379–92, doi.org/10.1080/10632921.2021.1941467.

73. 73 Lynette Russell, ‘Bunjilaka Brooding’, Meanjin 60, no. 4 (2001): 99–100.

74. 74 Linda Young, ‘First Peoples, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum’, Museum Worlds 2, no. 1 (2014): 214.

75. 75 Andrea Witcomb, ‘Poetics and Politics: First Peoples Exhibition Bunjilaka Gallery, Museum Victoria’, Artlink 34, no. 2 (2014): 52, search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.352117074472071.

76. 76 Amanda Reynolds, ‘First Peoples Exhibition, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum’, Museums Australia Magazine 22, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 20.

77. 77 Andrea Witcomb, ‘“Look, Listen and Feel”: The First People’s Exhibition at the Bunjilaka Gallery, Melbourne Museum’, THEMA. La Revue Des Musées de La Civilisation 1 (2014): 52.

78. 78 Young, ‘First Peoples, Bunjilaka’, 214–15.

79. 79 ‘Yulendj Group’, Museums Victoria, accessed 7 December 2022, museumsvictoria.com.au/bunjilaka/about-us/first-peoples/yulendj-group/.

80. 80 Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 207–8.

81. 81 Laura McBride and Mariko Smith, The 2020 Project: First Nations Community Consultation Report 2019 (Sydney: Australian Museum, May 2019).

82. 82 Mariko Smith, ‘Inspiring Change for First Nations Representation in Museums’, IndigenousX, 9 July 2021, indigenousx.com.au/inspiring-change-for-first-nations-representation-in-museums/.

83. 83 A cave in Juukan Gorge, with evidence of continuous occupation dating back 46,000 years, was permanently destroyed by Rio Tinto in May 2020. See Michelle Stanley and Kelly Gudgeon, ‘Pilbara Mining Blast Confirmed to Have Destroyed 46,000yo Sites of “Staggering” Significance’, ABC News, 26 May 2020, www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-26/rio-tinto-blast-destroys-area-with-ancient-aboriginal-heritage/12286652.

84. 84 This commitment is stated in the footer found at the bottom of every page of the institution’s website. See Museums Victoria, [Home], accessed 8 October 2020, museumsvictoria.com.au/.

85. 85 Tom Elliot, ‘Viking Bones Removed from Museum Due to “Potential Distress” It May Cause Indigenous Australians’, 3AW (blog), 2 May 2018, www.3aw.com.au/viking-bones-removed-from-museum-due-to-potential-distress-it-may-cause-indigenous-australians/.

86. 86 See Adele Chynoweth, Bernadette Lynch, Klaus Petersen and Sarah Smed, eds., Museums and Social Change: Challenging the Unhelpful Museum (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2021), doi.org/10.4324/9780429276903.

87. 87 Christopher Hope, ‘New “Woke” Definition of a Museum Is Orwellian Attempt to Rewrite History, MPs Warn’, Telegraph Online (UK), 3 April 2021, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/03/museums-will-pushed-rewrite-history-woke-orwellian-new-definition/.

88. 88 Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 62.

89. 89 See Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson, ‘Toward Slow Archives’, Archival Science 19, no. 2 (June 2019): 87–116, doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09307-x.