Museums must learn from Indigenous museum models

We need to change the way we see museums in Australia and learn from the way Indigenous Australians have preserved their culture for thousands of years.
This is the central idea of a two-day international symposium hosted by the College of Arts and Social Sciences which began on Thursday.
Anthropologist Dr John Carty is an expert in Aboriginal art and has spent the last three years working with the Australian National Museum and the British Museum to look at Indigenous views on what museums are.
"It's been very revelatory for those museums to realise that Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander people around Australia have really strong pre-existing models for heritage management and curation of cultural materials."
"They want museums to come to them, to bring expertise and work together. Not constantly bringing Aboriginal people to Canberra."
Dr Carty said that while the traditional western concept of a museum brings objects together in a protected bricks-and-mortar environment, indigenous culture is different.
"The museum is the landscape, the country where sacred objects are kept."
"There are places that are protected, curated and cultivated to maintain meaning through time for thousands of years, not just keeping an object safe in a box."
"The challenge is to take the bricks and mortar approach to museums, and the distinctly Australian sense of country, and finding a common language."
Symposium convenor Dr Anna Edmundson takes issue with the way museums are presented as an exclusively western invention.
"The western-style museum is only one of many traditions which run parallel in human history."
"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had their own collecting and curating traditions, which have developed over tens of  thousands of years - so maybe it's time museums  started learning from our them.
"When we recognise the existence of alternative traditions of custodianship of cultural heritage we are making an important step in the decolonisation process, and we are broadening our own intellectual horizons," she said.
Return of the Native: Contestation, Collaboration and Co-authorship in Museum Spaces is a two-day international symposium on Indigenising museum spaces being held at the ANU.
More information is available here.