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Signs of a shift over bones of contention

By Lauren Martin

9 October 2004 - Nearly 100 years after Swedish scientists raided Aboriginal burial sites and smuggled out the skeletons saying they were kangaroo bones, indigenous men fought back tears as they brought the remains back to Australia.

Now the most trenchant opponent of repatriation, the British Museum of Natural History, has indicated it is prepared to send some remains back to Australia, says the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Amanda Vanstone.

She was also advised this week that the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery would return indigenous remains as well.

A former ATSIC commissioner, Rodney Dillon, said he had been impressed by a change in attitude in the past six months at the natural history museum, which holds nearly 500 Australian indigenous remains.

"It's not a complete change, and they are only talking about some of them, but they are looking more at the importance of the spirit," Mr Dillon said.

Sweden's Museum of Ethnography initiated this return after diaries of Eric Mjoeberg's 1910 expedition were published, exposing his unethical and illegal exploits as a collector. The stories outraged many Swedes.

Other Swedish museums have also returned material to states including NSW and Victoria. These were the first returns from museums in continental Europe.

The National Museum of Australia's repatriation director, Michael Pickering, said he was unaware of the change of attitude among the museums in Britain, where a Cambridge University anthropologist, Robert Foley, has warned that repatriating their collection of human remains would be "tragic".

As more museums agreed to repatriate human remains, those against it had become more vocal and heated, Mr Pickering said.

Dr Foley has said there is "huge interest" in how modern humans came out of Africa and spread across the world. "These bones help us understand that," he said.

Joey Chatfield, who travelled from Camperdown, Victoria to Sweden to bring back the remains of one of his Gunditjmara/Kirrae Wurrong ancestors, was confused and saddened about why they had ever been taken. "Worse is that the scientific research wasn't even carried out for their own benefit."

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

Ancestral remains back on Australian soil

Presenter: Vanessa Mills - ABC Kimberley WA

7 October 2004 - Human remains smuggled out of the Kimberley almost a century ago are today back in Australia.

Last week, Kimberley aboriginal leaders travelled to Sweden for a handover ceremony and to organise the return of the remains of their ancestors, which have been held in museum vaults for almost a century.

The 12 bodies of the dead were collected during a scientific expedition to the Kimberley in 1910 and 11 to collect “artefacts from Stone Age people”. There was also one set of remains each from Queensland, NSW and Victoria.

The bodies were taken without permission and smuggled out of Australia.

Journals and diaries from the expedition were published at the time, but it was not until one of Sweden’s leading anthropologists wrote a book about it, did the public really begin to debate the ethics of holding onto such artefacts.

Last year Dr Claes Hallgren published a book called "Two travellers – two pictures of Australia" about two very different members of the 1910 expedition; the aggressive leader and the enlightened ethnographer.

The ethical issue was already prominent in Sweden, when that country’s native people tried and failed to get back human remains held in a Norwegian museum.

Dr Hallgren from the Dalarna University traced the Kimberley remains to several institutions and he was instrumental in convincing the Swedish government to organise their repatriation to Australia.

The 1910 expedition leader Eric Mjoberg has been described by historians as aggressive and arrogant, who made enemies with local aboriginal people, pastoralists and even his own scientific team.

At an emotional handover ceremony in Sweden, his grand niece Lotte Mjoberg apologised.

Ernest Nulgit is the chairman of the Mowanjum aboriginal community, near Derby. He was one of three Kimberley men to travel to Stockholm to bring the remains home, which he says was a huge honour.

Mr Nulgit says a smoking ceremony was first conducted to drive out bad spirits, and he was pleased that Swedish museum officials took part in it.

The handover is also significant because Sweden is the first foreign government to unconditionally return indigenous artefacts.

After passing through Customs & Quarantine, and more official proceedures at the National Museum in Canberra today, the bones will be returned to the Kimberley and reburied in traditional country.

Source: ABC
Aborigine Remains to Return Home

30 September 2004 - PA News -The Scotsman - The skeletal remains of 15 Aborigines will be handed over today to be returned to Australia and reburied in their ancestral homeland – nearly 90 years after they were smuggled out by a Swedish zoologist and put on display in a museum.

The 15 skulls and numerous bones will be returned by Sweden’s Museum of Ethnography to a seven-member Aboriginal delegation, museum spokesman Peter Skogh said.

The Swedish government gave its blessing to the handover last week.

The remains were smuggled out of Australia by Swedish zoologist Erik Mjoeberg during two expeditions between 1910 and 1916.

Skogh said Mjoeberg’s diaries revealed that he dug up the remains from old graves and then smuggled them out of Australia by telling customs officials they were the bones of kangaroos.

“He saw the Aborigines as some kind of remains from an earlier stage of human development,” Skogh said. “It was a a very Darwinian viewpoint.”

Last year, Swedish museum officials travelled to Australia and offered to return the remains to the government’s indigenous commission.

“Not many countries have done that before,” Skogh said. ”They’ve always had to come (to other countries) and ask to have things returned before. So we got a pretty good reception.”

In June, the University of Michigan organised the return of four sets of remains from Ann Arbor, Michigan, back to Australia. The bones were believed to be the remains of four Aborigines, one of whom lived 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Last year, Manchester museum returned four Aboriginal skulls.

Aborigine groups estimate more than 8,000 sets of remains are still held in Europe. Hundreds of remains have already been brought back to Australia, but some museums and medical colleges have refused to release their specimens.

A minority of about 400,000, Australia’s Aborigines believe they must be buried in ancestral lands before their spirits can continue the journey into the afterlife.

For almost a year, researchers have tried to determine exactly where the remains in the Swedish museum were taken from.

Museum officials said Swedish explorers found the remains in Queensland and Western Australia’s Kimberly regions. They were brought back to Sweden for studies on the Aborigine race and put on anthropological displays.

“Now we’re on the right track,” Skogh said, adding that they were taken from the Kimberly region in western Australia. It’s up to the Aborigines there to decide what to do with them now, he said.

“They’ll probably bury them again in the places where they were taken,” Skogh said.

Source: The Scotsman

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