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Yorta Yorta remains on the way home

12 May 2005 - The ancestral remains of four Aboriginal people held by a Sydney University museum for 50 years are headed back to their traditional lands.

The boxes containing the bones of two men and two women, found on properties in southern NSW, were returned to Yorta Yorta elders late last month, draped in an Aboriginal flag.

The handover was accompanied by a traditional smoking ceremony on the grounds of the university.

Accepting the remains, Yorta Yorta elder Henry Atkinson described them as examples of the first stolen people - a term used for Aboriginals removed from their families by police and welfare agencies between 1910 and 1970.

Mr Atkinson said that while the remains had been disturbed through development, it was common past practice for people to actively dig up and steal remains.

The remains of 10,000 Aboriginal people were being kept in the United Kingdom alone, he said.

“My people have been shipped overseas and dissected in museums worldwide,” Mr Atkinson said.

“These things that used to happen in the past must never ever be allowed to happen again.”

The remains were previously held in the university’s Shellshear Museum, which holds samples from Australia, Melanesia, Oceania and the Middle East, including the remains of about 130 Aboriginals.

Most of these are expected to eventually be returned as a single group.

Melbourne University held the remains of up to 1,400 Indigenous people, Mr Atkinson said, but the records for many had been lost.

The remains of the four individuals handed back were found in the NSW Murray River towns of Tocumwal, Moama and Finley.

Two of the individuals probably lived more than 100 years ago and the other two are believed to date back to before European settlement.

One of them had been buried upright in the traditional method.

Mr Atkinson said the remains would return to their traditional lands, around the NSW-Victoria border, where they would be laid to rest in safe, protected places and never disturbed again.

The ceremony was part of a repatriation project which has resulted in human remains being returned to communities across Australia.

Deputy Vice Chancellor John Hearne said the university was committed to returning all the Indigenous remains it holds.

Mr Atkinson accepted the remains a year after returning from the United States, bringing with him other ancestral Yorta Yorta remains.

He said the US remains had been further humiliated by an attempted sale on internet auction site eBay. – AAP

Source: National Indigenous Times

related links : Yorta Yorta Native Title

• Yorta Yorta win historic deal
• Why it's (almost) not worth lodging a native title claim
  2 January 2003 - Native title has been called many names, but High Court Justice Ian Callinan has found the perfect metaphor for it: the badly treated, culturally misunderstood, 'foster child'.
• A failed Yorta Yorta claim is not the end
  16 December 2002 - The Age: EDITORIAL - The High Court ruling against the Yorta Yorta people's long-running land claim in Victoria really came as no surprise. Yet there is a danger that some will read into this judicial resolution the suggestion that the whole of the mechanisms for settling Aboriginal land claims will now collapse. The ruling does not mean this.
• Native title system means legal dispossession of Indigenous people
  12 December 2002 - Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) - The High Court decision on the Yorta Yorta appeal proves once again that the native title system set up by the 10 Point Plan has been a complete failure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
• Yorta Yorta Decision: Terra Nullius by Attrition
  12 December 2002 - The Australian Democrats' Indigenous Affairs spokesperson, Senator Aden Ridgeway, today expressed his disappointment in the High Court's decision in the Yorta Yorta case, branding it terra nullius by attrition.
• Aborigine rights damaged by mining verdict
  August 9, 2002 - The Guardian (UK) - The Australian high court dealt a severe blow to the Aboriginal land rights movement yesterday when it rejected claims by the Miriuwung-Gajerrong people to a 3,050sq mile area of land in the country's remote north-west.
• How the PM's 'national interest' hijacked native title
  June 4, 2002 - Just as many people thought the 1967 referendum and the citizenship rights it conferred on Aborigines would transform our life experience and deliver equality, so too many people placed great hope in the ability of the Mabo decision 10 years ago to right the wrongs of the past and belatedly deliver social justice to the land's original owners. by Aden Ridgeway.
• Australia defends 'racist' land law
  March 13, 1999 - BBC - Australia has begun its defence at the United Nations against charges of racially discriminating against Aborigines. The Committee to End Racial Discrimination, in Geneva, wants Australia to explain changes to laws on Aboriginal land rights.
• Australia's debate over Aboriginal land rights
  December 1, 1997 - BBC - This week marks a new stage in the most politically divisive issue Australians have faced for many years. A bill introduced into the Senate - the upper house of the Australian parliament - is intended to settle the question of who owns Australia - who owns the land that people use for farming and mining. Is it the Aborigines, or descendants of the white settlers who arrived two hundred years ago? Red Harrison in Sydney says the debate is dividing Australians bitterly.
• Native Title case history by Rod Hagen
  The Rights of Indigenous Australians; Mabo; Wik; The Native Title Act; The Ten Point Plan and Harradine Amendments
• National Native Title Tribunal

Further information: native title issues page - includes news index and external links

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