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Fourmile, Henrietta --- "The Need for an Independent National Inquiry into State Collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage" [1992] AboriginalLawB 25; (1992) 1(56) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3


The Need for an Independent National Inquiry into State Collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage

by Henrietta Fourmile (Yidindji tribe - Cairns)

"Cultural impoverishment in the midst of a rich cultural heritage is, more than any other form of deprivation, one o f the saddest to behold."
David Baradas, Museum Director (formerly) Museum of Philippine Life[1]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples are becoming increasingly alarmed at the institutionalisation, fragmentation and alienation of our cultural heritage[2] at the hands of our colonizers. Governments and their agencies, such as museums, universities, libraries and archives, and government departments involved in the administration of various aspects of our lives, have collectively become the owners, definers and managers of our cultural heritage. Our cultural property and resources are in the possession of museums and libraries, and institutes like the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra .[3] Our land and sites of significance are poorly protected by inadequate land and heritage legislation,[4] while other components of our heritage, such as our systems of law and education, languages, ceremonies, and oral histories are allowed to languish for want of government support. What is therefore occurring is a process of cultural attrition brought about by the ethnocidal policies of governments bent on our assimilation into mainstream Australian society.

If the Federal Government is genuine about a reconciliation between the country's indigenous peoples and the Australian state then serious attention must be paid to our diverse cultural heritage so that it can be maintained in its fullness for future generations. Before any effective, comprehensive national cultural policy can be implemented at federal and state levels, there must be a national inquiry into all aspects of our cultural heritage in order to determine our needs as the basis of that policy.

The current situation regarding our heritage is a mess. Huge collections of cultural property and resources exist in a few centralised locations often thousands of kilometres from the communities of origin. These collections are owned by the Crown in right of the respective states - along with the dispossession of our land went the dispossession of our cultural heritage - with responsibility for them vested by governments in various institutional boards of trustees as statutory authorities operating under their own enabling legislation. Distance alone is an effective bar to access and enjoyment. Meanwhile hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have no representative collections of those components of their heritage, and in many cases are unaware that these often rich resources even exist.

Consequently our Elders are dying without passing on vital cultural knowledge and history to our younger generations - knowledge which could be rekindled or stimulated if they had ready access to cultural items, old photographs, genealogies, language tapes, anthropological field notes, mission records, and so on. Such information is vital for those who suffered under government policies of removal and dispersal, and such missionary strategies as the dormitory system to break down the transmission of cultural knowledge. They can become reinformed about family history, what country they belong to, tribal identity, language - all of which is the stuff of cultural recovery. Needless to say, much of this information being harboured in state institutions is crucial to establishing land claims as required by legislation in a number of states. This gross inequity in the distribution of our cultural property and resources resulting from centralisation, while benefiting the academic community, is to the absolute detriment of our people.

Our cultural heritage has also become fragmented, not only as a result of institutionalisation, but because of departmental intervention. Our land, sites of significance, artefacts, arts, customary laws, languages, our economies and educational concerns are all administered by different agencies operating under different laws within a range of government departments. All these different components of our heritage are subjected to interminable inquiries which bear little relationship to each other across the broad spectrum of our cultural concerns. What was once an integrated and holistic focus of our lives has been divided up to suit the interests of those who would control and profit from us. It has become the basis of the Aboriginal industry.

Alienation from our heritage has not only resulted from physical separation, but has also been brought about by legislative means. Our ownership rights to our cultural property and sites are not recognised by the law,[5] and our rights to manage and control our heritage are reduced to advisory status, that is, token participation. With regard, to our cultural resources which result from our interaction with outsiders, inappropriate copyright laws more often protect the rights of the researchers than they do ours.[6] As a consequence academic colonialism is rife.[7]

The result is confusion, piece-meal and ineffective policies, haphazard approaches to funding and departmental buck-passing while the viability of our cultures, our ways of life, diminishes daily. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities are not getting the benefits of the various collections of their cultural heritage to which they are entitled. The overall situation constitutes a massive breach of our human rights as detailed in a number of international instruments to which Australia is a signatory.[8]

The last independent and comprehensive national inquiry into cultural collections, which included those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander origin, in Australia's public museums, art galleries and libraries was held in 1975.[9] The Committee of Inquiry found that the general state of deterioration of the nation's collections constituted "a crisis on a massive scale."[10] A separate report by the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, which was included with the main report, noted a number of concerns expressed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in relation to the way our cultural heritage was being treated by museums.[11] Many of these concerns were subsequently addressed in a set of recommendations arising out of a regional seminar held in Adelaide in 1978, the report of which is entitled, Preserving Indigenous Cultures: A New Role for Museums.[12] This report and its recommendations constitute "the first record of the wishes of Aboriginal and Island peoples in respect of the way they wish to see museums develop."[13] The 1978 seminar and its report have been used by museum workers as the yardstick by which progress in Aboriginalmuseum relations can be gauged.[14]

While there have been many improvements in terms of museums serving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural needs, some fundamental problems and issues have not been addressed. The most fundamental problem is that museums have failed to adequately inform our communities of the full nature and extent of their holdings. The issue of ownership of our cultural property has yet to be addressed by governments in line with a recommendation put forward by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations through the UN Economic and Social Council that:

"...Governments enact legislation requiring all individuals and all museums, universities and other institutions, public and private, to return the ownership and control of all indigenous peoples' skeletal remains, burial artifacts and other items of religious and cultural significance to indigenous peoples which are in their possession to their indigenous owners...”[15]

Whenever I have spoken to them on this issue Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been appalled to learn that, even though various items may have been made by their ancestors, they or their communities now no longer own those items and that they can exercise no rights of ownership over them because they are the property of the Crown. The rights of ownership are effectively exercised by the museum boards of trustees, who, in principle, because it is within their legislative powers to do so, can loan, sell, exchange, or dispose of such items - along with any other museum property - without their knowledge or consent because it is not required in law. Apart from particularly sacred items which can be returned,[16] the best communities might expect from museums is to have items returned on a fixed term loan. A second issue yet to be tackled concerns statutory involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in all aspects of the management and control of cultural property and resources. As for library and archival collections of our cultural resources the reform process has barely begun.

With regard to the inquiry itself,[17] an interim working party comprised of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders should be set up to determine the scope and terms of reference. Personally, I feel that the Committee of Inquiry must have at least a majority indigenous membership and must investigate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage collections in museums, universities, libraries, archives, art galleries, and government departments which have responsibilities in relation to our heritage and history. Beside the Office/Department of Aboriginal (and Islander) Affairs, those concerned with land, environment and natural resource management, national parks, and tourism should all be included. The Inquiry should address such matters as the:

The Committee should be able to make recommendations on the following:

ownership by communities of origin
ownership where the communities of origin are not known
ancestral remains
return of collections;

If such an inquiry can achieve these tasks and governments take their findings and recommendations seriously in a genuine spirit of reconciliation then there is hope for our cultural survival.


[1] In Edwards, R and Stewart, J., (eds), Preserving Indigenous Cultures: A New Role for Museums, AGPS, 1980. p.199.

[2] For the purposes of this paper, the following definitions (formulated try FAIRA - Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action - with regard to work carried out in relation to cultural heritage policy research) accrue:

Cultural heritage refers to the totality of cultural practices and expressions belonging as of birthright, to a particular group of people who recognise themselves as culturally distinct, and over which they hold primary rights and responsibilities as inherent sovereign rights. Cultural heritage is, by nature, (i) continuously evolving, and (ii) comprised of both intangible and tangible aspects.

With regard to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage intangible (or non-material) aspects include the corporate knowledge of each community as expressed through its social, religious, political, ethical, educational, legal,-artistic, ceremonial, linguistic, oral and intellectual practices and may be generally regarded as the community's intellectual property. The tangible (or material) aspects include cultural objects, ancestral remains, monuments, land, waterways, sites of significance, totemic species (flora and fauna), and material records and expressions (written, audio, visual and electronic) of the intangible aspects.

Cultural property refers to those components or aspects (both intellectual and material) of a people's cultural heritage which they normally consider as belonging to the group either corporately or to its members individually. Items of cultural property remain the property of the group unless transacted to others in accordance with its laws. The term is used to refer to those items or collections of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage over which we assert ownership and wish to have this ownership recognised in Australian law.

Cultural resources refer to those components of our cultural heritage which are a product of interaction between the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of this continent and over which we require equitable rights of ownership, access, enjoyment and control, Commonly these resources involve genealogies, photographs, language recordings, written accounts of cultural practices, court removal orders, missionary records, and so on.

[3] See Fourmile, H.L., "Aborigines and Museums: A Case Study in Scientific Colonialism", Praxis M, No.17 (1987).pp.7-11; and "Who Owns The Past? - Aborigines as Captives of the Archives', Aboriginal History, Vol.13, Nos,1-2 (1989), pp.1-8.

[4] See Fourmile, H.L., "Aboriginal Heritage Legislation and Self-Determination", Australian Canadian Studies, Vol.7,Nos.1-2 (1989), pp.45-61.

[5] See Fourmile, H.L., "Possession is Nine-Tenths of the Law - and don't Aboriginal people know it!", COMA (Conference of Museum Anthropologists) Bulletin, No.23 (1990), pp.57-67.

[6] See Department of Home Affairs and Environment, Report of the Working Party on the Protection of Aboriginal Folklore (Canberra, 1981); and Banki, P.; The Protection of Aboriginal Folklore: Report of the Working Party", Australian Copyright Council Bulletin, No.44 (1983).

[7] Fourmile, H.L., op cit, 1987; and Marrie, A.P.H., "Scientific Colonialism and the Aboriginal Remains Debate", paper presented at the Australian Anthropological Society Annual Conference, Queensland University, 1990. Unpublished.

[8] Such United Nations instruments as: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Articles 22 and 27); the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Article 1); the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 1); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Articles 1 and 27); and UNESCO's Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural Co-operation all contain clauses covering various facets of human rights in relation to cultural rights. See also UNESCO, Cultural Rights as Human Rights, Paris, 1970 and Robertson, AH., "Human Rights and Culture", Cultures, Vol.5, No.1 (1978), pp.9-31.

[9] Piggot, P.H., (Chair.), Museums in Australia 1975, AGPS, 1975.

[10] Ibid., p.9.

[11] Mulvaney, D.J., (Chair.), "Report of the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia", ibid. This Committee considered "... the past neglect of ethnographic collections to be a national disgrace .... it is also an economic disaster. In monetary terms, some collections are valued at millions of dollars, yet they continue to decay rapidly .... Much more significant is the fact that this wasting asset represents the heritage of a unique people. Some of the biggest and worst cared for collections originated in regions where traditional arts and crafts are no longer practised. These objects are, therefore, irreplaceable and will be increasingly valued by future Aboriginal people and indeed by all Australians above any monetary value. Their educational value for all races is similarly beyond price..." (p.15).

[12] Edwards, R and Stewart, J., op cit.

[13] Ibid., p.8.

[14] The Conference of Museum Anthropologists' publication, COMA Bulletin, provides a record of the progress made since the 1978 Seminar.

[15] United Nations Economic and Social, Council Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Forty-second session Agenda Item 15: Discrimination against Indigenous Peoples, Draft Resolution: The ownership and control of the cultural property of indigenous peoples (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1990/L.44 27 August 1990).

[16] See, for eg., Anderson, C., "Repatriation, Custodianship and the Policies of the South Australian Museum", COMA Bulletin, No.23 (1990), pp.112-122.

[17] The call for such a national inquiry, similar in scope to that of the national inquiry into museums and national collections which culminated in the Museums in Australia 1975 report, only focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural collections, was first made at the 1989 COMA Conference in Canberra. A motion supporting the inquiry in principle made on behalf of FAIRA was defeated 12 to 2 (see COMA Bulletin, No.23, 1990, pp.182-3). Substantially the same motion, but described in more detail, was passed unanimously at the Extending Parameters Forum held at the Queensland Art Gallery in February, 1990. This motion appears in the Australia Council's publication, Stretching the Edges: Resolutions from the Extending Parameters Research Forum (1991), pp.17-18.


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