Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this post contains images and textual descriptions of deceased persons.

In late June 2019, Tristram Hunt—Cambridge-educated historian, British Labour’s former Shadow Secretary of State for Education, and current Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum—wrote a piece for The Guardian: ‘Should museums return their colonial artefacts?

Initially one could be forgiven for thinking Hunt might be setting up an argument for change. He references Emmanuel Macron’s recent commitment to restitution, enthusiastically recounts the “compelling” scene in the Marvel film Black Panther where Erik Killmonger relieves a British museum of a Wakandan artefact, and acknowledges: “The V&A’s collections expanded in line with the growth of the British empire, in its official and unofficial guise.”

“From the beginning of my directorship,” he continues, “I wanted to be open and transparent about that colonial past, and think carefully about how to manage its legacy today.”

But, over the final three paragraphs, Hunt’s small-c conservative perspective on the museum sector becomes clear. Noting that the National Heritage Act 1983 prevents V&A trustees from de-accessioning objects “unless they are exact replicas or damaged beyond repair,” he goes on to argue that, legislation or none, such institutions somehow create a rarefied space.

There remains something essentially valuable about the ability of museums to position objects beyond particular cultural or ethnic identities, curate them within a broader intellectual or aesthetic lineage, and situate them within a wider, richer framework of relationships while allowing free and open access, physically and digitally.

Tristram Hunt

For a comprehensive critique of Hunt’s piece I recommend Sumaya Kassim’s ‘The Museum is in the Master’s House: An Open Letter to Tristram Hunt.’ Here I want to focus specifically on museum documentation, viewed through the lens of what is perhaps Hunt’s most problematic statement: “For a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise.”

The claim is logically inconsistent with the previous sentence—the one extolling the value of positioning objects beyond their cultural or ethnic context. What is more, any examination of museum artefacts online quickly reveals that, when it comes to metadata, missing context is a significant issue, and the concept of decolonisation a valuable part of the solution.

The V&A presents itself as “the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.” The lack of artefacts from 60,000 years of continuous and diverse cultures throughout Australia/Sahul therefore indicates a culturally-specific conception of what constitutes art and design. The oldest items related to Australia’s First Nations people in the museum appear to be photographs from the 1860s, the history of these objects concentrating more on Captain Thomas Edward Green and his album than on the subjects of the portraits (though at least potential communities have been identified).

Sepia photographic portrait of two Aboriginal children, one sitting, one standing
Photograph of two Aboriginal children, possibly from the Gunai, Kulin or Yorta Yorta clans. Taken c. 1865 by an unknown photographer.

This privileging of the colonial subject is widespread.

Material collected by Alfred Cort Haddon in the Torres Strait is now at the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Despite Haddon’s reputation for acknowledging his sources, and the extensive cultural information found in the expedition’s multi-volume reports, there are many items for which the documentation only references Haddon (as collector) and local European sources like Murray Island’s John Bruce.

At the British Museum (BM), the documentation for head pads acquired in 1926 references “Mrs Daisy Bates” (as field collector), and the Empire Press Union (which donated the items), while the ‘ethnic name’ “Made by Aboriginal Australian” is so generic as to be almost useless. Given the pads are made from human hair—a material the BM acknowledges constitutes human remains—more detailed contextual information could be of great significance to living relatives from the relevant source communities (see the work of Lauren Booker, University of Technology, Sydney.)

New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has material online collected by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, including Churinga from Central Australia. I am not going to link to those items. As noted in Spencer and Gillen’s The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899):

Churinga is the name given by the Arunta natives to certain sacred objects which, on penalty of death or very severe punishment, such as blinding by means of a fire-stick, are never allowed to be seen by women or uninitiated men

More than a century later, AMNH has put images of these items online without reference (let alone deference) to this context. In a recent interview with Fran Kelly, the Chief Executive Officer of AIATSIS, Craig Ritchie, spoke of how he came across secret-sacred items on display in the galleries at AMNH too, “without any kind of commentary … anything that told the story and that stuff.” Contrary to Hunt, the free and open, digital and physical access provided to these objects is founded on decontextualisation.

It is easy to argue that museums have started to change, and that the examples highlighted here represent legacy documentation attached to relatively minor artefacts. But if that were the case, one would expect more iconic, heavily-researched items to reveal a different approach. Instead, we just find more of the same.

Take the Gweagal shield, currently held by the BM (pictured at the top of this post). No documents have been found linking the artefact to a specific collector, or to other items in the collection, nor are there any extant records in the museum regarding its acquisition or provenance. There is, however, a small nineteenth-century label on the back which has been identified as written by traveller, collector, anthropologist, and museum volunteer James Edge-Partington. It reads: “CAP.COOK.”

The evidence for Edge-Partington’s claim is not known. However, piecing together illustrations and contemporary accounts, many believe the shield to be one of those used by two Gweagal men who opposed Cook and his crew when they landed at Botany Bay on 29 April 1770. The shield was presented in this historical context in the 89th episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects, and in both the Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation exhibition at the British Museum in London (2015) and the subsequent Encounters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (2015-2016).

While some, like museum director and curator Nicholas Thomas, question the shield’s provenance, it has become a cultural touchstone, symbolising the violent dispossession of Aboriginal Australians by Europeans and highlighting the inextricable link between colonisation and collecting. In the words of Indigenous artist and curator Jonathan Jones: “We do know that Australia’s collection methodology started with Captain Cook stealing shields after shooting at someone. I’ve always used that as a bit of a benchmark for the acquisition process of this country.”

Once again the museum’s documentation privileges a European perspective:

  • Production place – Made in: New South Wales
  • Findspot – Found/Acquired: Botany Bay (?)
  • Associated names – Associated with: Sir Joseph Banks (?) / Associated with: Captain James Cook (?) / Associated with: HMS Endeavour (?)
  • Acquisition name – From: Sir Joseph Banks (?)

Deep in the Curator’s Comments, surrounded by references to colonial voyage accounts and analysis of the wood by BM scientists, we find the following:

Accounts from the early period of European settlement (from 1788) note that the southern shore of Botany Bay was known as Gwea, and therefore the people from that area called themselves the Gweagal.

Museum numbeR: Oc1978,Q.839 (British Museum)

But the ‘Ethnic name’ once again reads: “Made by Aboriginal Australian.” Only European people (and a European ship) get name authority records; only European place names appear in the fielded data. There is no mention anywhere of the Gweagal warrior Cooman, who is said to have born the shield.

Hunt is keen on context because, for institutions like the V&A (and the BM) “the history of empire is embedded in its meaning and collections.” There is no sign that the Gweagal shield is in danger of being disembedded from the history of empire—quite the contrary.

Looking beyond documentation, there are museums which have started to focus on aspects of decolonisation. In Melbourne, Museums Victoria’s First Peoples exhibit provides many voices and stories, while strategically the institution now seeks “to place First People’s living cultures and histories at the core of our practice.” Sydney’s Australian Museum too has made substantial progress in recent years developing and supporting Indigenous-led exhibitions and events.

In the National Museum of Australia’s Encounters exhibition, Mathew Trinca quotes Muran man Don Christophersen, from Coburg Peninsula, northern Australia.

I think with any story about anything you need all the angles, and for so long it’s always been the person who collected, the person who could write, the person who could construct all that information, they were the ones who told stories, and kept the information, kept the materials … You have to listen to both versions, the Indigenous version of our history and the non-Indigenous version of our history, because they’re both telling the truth, but they’re both not the same story.

don christophersen

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, this idea is embodied by the replica of a Two-Row Wampum Belt which features at the entrance to the Nation to Nation exhibition space.

Photograph of beaded belt with two dark parallel lines on a lighter background
Guswenta Two-Row Wampum Belt (replica), 2014. Anthony Gonyea (Onondaga, b. 1961). Ceramic beads, leather, sinew.

The Two-Row Wampum Belt embodies an insight of the Haudenosaunee (also called the Iroquois or Six Nations) about how neighbouring nations can coexist.

One row symbolizes an Indian canoe carrying everything Indians believe to be true. The other row is the Europeans’ ship, carrying everything they believe to be true.

wall text, national museum of the american indian, Washington, D.C.

Throughout the exhibition which follows, there is wall text which explicitly acknowledges the different perspectives of Native Nations and European Nations without attempting to reconcile or amalgamate these worldviews.

In these and many more contemporary institutions, Hunt’s reliance on the “ability of museums to position objects beyond particular cultural or ethnic identities” reads as hopelessly outdated, and his claim that decolonisation results in decontextualisation looks absurd.

Following the example set by Indigenous communities and curators, exhibition designers, and those museum managers who have embraced the need for change, those of us (like myself) interested in museum documentation, cataloguing, online collections, metadata structures, and database design need to explore and invest in more nuanced, complex, polyvocal perspectives. Capturing the resulting complexity requires a more relational approach, connecting various elements to build a complex representation of the context in which things emerge, move, and develop through time.

When it comes to museum documentation this is the real work of decolonisation—not to detach and rarefy, but to embed and reconnect; not to dismantle the history of empire, but to dismantle its privileged perspective; not to de- but to re-contextualise. Otherwise, the information we provide access to, physically and digitally, will continue to reveal only a partial, one-dimensional view of complex, entangled, multi-dimensional stories.

Many of the ideas in this post have their origins in my conference paper at the recent Australian Historical Association conference in Toowoomba. Thanks to Bethany Phillips-Peddlesden for her insightful feedback on that paper, and to Mariko Smith and Shannon Foster for their comments following my presentation.

If you want to read more about provenance in the relational museum, my recent article explores many of the concepts touched on here: Jones, Michael. ‘Collections in the Expanded Field: Relationality and the Provenance of Artefacts and Archives’. Heritage 2, no. 1 (March 2019): 884–97. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage2010059