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Dead Aborigines returned home

By Thea Williams

9 May 2003 - As the remains of 300 Ngarrindjeri people were returned to their lands yesterday, a century after they were first taken, Aboriginal community leaders believed there were “thousands” more ancestors still to be handed back from museums around the world.

During a smoking ceremony at the edge of South Australia’s Coorong, marking the nation’s biggest Aboriginal repatriation, men carried the 18 boxes storing the ancestral remains after their delivery from Canberra to a local museum.

Most of the remains were taken from grave sites between 1898 and 1906, then collected and categorised for science by South Australia’s then coroner, William Ramsay Smith, before being sent to the University of Edinburgh.

They were repatriated from Scotland in June 2000 and held at the National Musem in Canberra while their return to the Coorong was negotiated.

Community leaders hailed the repatriation ­ acknowledging the University of Edinburgh and the National Museum of Australia ­ but were critical of the state museum for delaying the process.

“There are still thousands of people who have got to come back to us, they have got to come back and be put in their resting place,” chairman of the Ngarrindjeri heritage committee, Tom Trevorrow, said yesterday.

“This is the start, it is what gives people strength. We have to speak very strongly to the (South Australian) Museum and they have to return to us our old people they have got there. There were negotiations but they had a negative effect.”

According to the South Australian Museum’s head of anthropology, Philip Clarke, the collection was packed in boxes in the early 1990s and signed out of the official state collection, waiting to be returned.

“Our museum had agreed to hand back quite a large component of the ancestral remains coming from the Ngarrindjeri . . . when the community decided where to bury them,” Dr Clarke said.

The director of the National Museum’s repatriation program, Michael Pickering, said the British Museum of Natural History in particular had strongly resisted requests to return its collection to communities in Australia.

“We are hoping the British Government can come to some agreement to facilitate the return of remains,” Dr Pickering said.
Dr Clarke said returning the remains from the South Australian Museum was complex because the community did not have enough space to store the boxes held by the state’s museum and it was yet to negotiate reburial sites.

Source: The Australian

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