The enduring voices of Aboriginal Australia

When Captain James Cook arrived in 1770 in what was later renamed Botany Bay, he found two Indigenous Gweagal men shouting and waving spears. His sailors fired their guns and wounded one man in the leg. They then went up to the houses and found children hiding. Joseph Banks, a naturalist accompanying Cook, reported that they left the children alone but confiscated “all the lances which we could find about the houses, amounting in number to 40 or 50,” believing them to be poisoned-tipped. Later, Banks discovered that these spears were not offensive weapons but instead used to catch fish: rather than disarming them, they were denying them the chance to feed themselves.

Such misreadings—often convenient ones for the colonisers—have been common in encounters between the first British arrivals and the Indigenous population. As explored in a new exhibition at the British Museum, Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation, when they first arrived the British thought that the million people who lived on the landmass that would come to be known as Australia had no sense of land ownership. But as the curator of the exhibition Gaye Sculthorpe told me, this was a misconception. “Ownership of the land wasn’t defined by fences,” she said. “Each of the groups broadly had an area they were responsible for. At the same time people often used, by agreement, someone else’s land.” She added that while Aboriginal people are often thought to have been isolated, in fact many were keen traders with places as distant as Indonesia. Rather than the single language the British thought they were hearing, more than 250 languages were spoken. Many of these have now died out.

The Indigenous people’s story is encapsulated in the double meaning of the exhibition’s subtitle Enduring Civilisation. One of the most significant objects here is a red mangrove Aboriginal shield (below) that the curator believes was collected by Cook in Botany Bay. Taking it back to Europe symbolised the defeat of a people; when it travels back to Australia this autumn as part of a similar exhibition at the National Museum in Canberra, it will be an emotional return. “I think that’s going to be a very special moment,” says Sculthorpe.

One of the interesting aspects of this exhibition is the way Indigenous objects are presented alongside modern artistic reinterpretations. Pituri bags, made from a plant with narcotic qualities and dyed bright colours, were used and traded round Queensland. They were often made from wool—a material brought in from sheep arrived from Europe. Judy Watson, a contemporary Aboriginal artist, feels a deep connection with those bags, which still smell strongly of the narcotic. In a work displayed here, she has transposed prints of the bags over old plans of the British Museum—in the words of Sculthorpe, “investigating where they came from and where they should be today.”

This is very much a live issue. In 2011, Indigenous people from the Torres Straight Islands requested the return from the British Museum of ancestral remains purchased in the late 19th century. The Islanders argued that the remains “are a fundamental spiritual and cultural link to our past and that appropriating …ancestral remains violates the sanctity of our dead.” The Museum turned down the request, arguing that the way the remains had been collected “did not disrupt customary mortuary practices.” The exhibition has been careful to include voices here that oppose the whole idea of keeping such objects on display in a museum.

All this is in keeping with outgoing director Neil MacGregor’s argument for the value of museums in preserving cultural knowledge rather than appropriating it. Abe Muriata works in waste management by day but in his spare time weaves intricate and colourful baskets. Although weaving was in his family, he learned the art “by going to the museum and looking at the real…the old, ancient artefact done by real master craftsmen.” As the cultural links to the past fray, the museum can be a place to pass on knowledge that otherwise might be lost.

This is a small exhibition that will only take up an hour of your time. It’s more of an introduction to the subject for a London audience than the coming Australia shows apparently will be. Yet it’s worth visiting, not only for the vivid masks, impressive boomerangs and carved poles but also for seeing how museums can navigate tricky political issues. The approach here is to allow as many Indigenous people as possible to be heard—voices once silenced, but now at the centre of the narrative.

Indigenous Austalia: Enduring Civilisation runs until 2nd August at the British Museum