Gaye Sculthorpe

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Breastplate, of metal, engraved ‘McIntyre King of Mannilla’, c.1860–1874. ‘King’ McIntyre (c.1814–74) . Donated by A.W. Wilkins to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 1930. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Friday essay: Indigenous afterlives in Britain

Gaye Sculthorpe, The British Museum

The Ancestral Remains of Aboriginal people still lie in British museums or in graves, marked and unmarked.
Shield, collected by Admiral John Elphinstone Erskine, c.1851. National Museums Scotland. Photo: National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh.

We identified 39,000 Indigenous Australian objects in UK museums. Repatriation is one option, but takes time to get right

Maria Nugent, Australian National University; Gaye Sculthorpe, The British Museum, and Howard Morphy, Australian National University

Stone tools, clubs, boomerangs, decorative shellwork: a survey of 45 museums in the UK has found a vast number of Indigenous Australian objects. Not all were stolen; some were gifted or traded.
This wooden dish from Broome, pre-1892, was made by Yawuru people, collected by police and later presented by the Commissioner of Police, Colonel Phillips, to the WA Museum. Courtesy of the WA museum

Friday essay: 5 museum objects that tell a story of colonialism and its legacy

Alistair Paterson, The University of Western Australia; Andrea Witcomb, Deakin University; Gaye Sculthorpe, The British Museum; Shino Konishi, The University of Western Australia, and Tiffany Shellam, Deakin University

A spear-thrower, a shell, a bowl, a vase, a bucket. Five very different items tell us much about the history of collecting, the role of Indigenous experts and the shadow of colonial violence.

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