2013 Calibre Prize: Because it's your country

2013 Calibre Prize: Because it's your country

15 January 2014

Historian and award-winning writer Martin Thomas is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU). In this interview he talks to ANU history professor Tom Griffiths about the theft of human bones from Aboriginal sites in northern Australia and their repatriation from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC more than sixty years later.

The bones were taken in 1948 by Frank Setzler, Head Curator of Anthropology at the United States National Museum (now National Museum of Natural History) (NMNH), a division of the Smithsonian Institution. Setzler was one of a large party of scientists, anthropologists and photographers who comprised the American--Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, a large-scale research venture supported by the Smithsonian, the National Geographic Society and the Australian Government. (http://epress.anu.edu.au/titles/arnhe...) The stolen bones became part of the large, trans-national collection of skeletal and other human body parts held by the National Museum of Natural History. While the NMNH has long been active in repatriating Native American human remains, there is little precedent for the return of bones to a community outside US borders. The release of the Arnhem Land bones in 2009-10 followed years of lobbying by the Australian government.

Martin Thomas has been working with members of the west Arnhem Land Aboriginal community of Gunbalanya (aka Oenpelli) in documenting how the Bininj (as these people are known) regard the theft, and how they used ceremony and ritual to receive back into their country the spirits of deceased people who were 'kidnapped' when the bones were taken from mortuary sites. Thomas is the author of ʻ"Because itʼs your country": Bringing back the bones to west Arnhem Land', winner of the 2013 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, an annual award run by Australian Book Review. www.australianbookreview.com.au

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