Untitled (ethnographic container)

Wooden museum boxes, burnt marks, sand, branches, wover jute-twine rope, dimensions variable.

Birrarung Gallery, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum

The displayed wooden museum boxes were created to hold significant Indigenous South- East cultural material in the museum collection across the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that had been collected by anthropologists, ethnographers, farmers, regular people and donated to the museum collection or in some cases acquired by the museum. These wooden boxes are echoes of the violent acts of colonisation that occurred across our woka (country) and wala (water) to which we as a people are still recovering and healing from today. The burnt markings across the surface of the wooden boxes have been Informed by embodied cultural knowledge of mark-making. The historical and significant cultural practice of burning is used to reposition the narrative regarding these colonial containers. Indigenous cultural practice and knowledge is centered in this work that aims to acknowledge the dark history of historical over-collecting of Indigenous cultural materials.