This course explores some of the key themes and capabilities of cultural competence by exploring Aboriginal experiences and narratives of Sydney. Australia was ‘claimed’ for the British Crown in 1770, by Captain James Cook, but the invasion began in earnest when the First Fleet of British arrived in 1788 and established a penal colony in Sydney. As a consequence Sydney is a city rich in diverse pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary sites of significance to Aboriginal peoples. Too often though our perceptions about Aboriginal peoples consign them to an ancient past or perpetuates stereotypical imaginations that Aboriginal peoples live in remote communities (Hinkson, 2010). At the heart of this MOOC is the theme that Sovereignty was never ceded and Sydney always was and always will be Aboriginal Land. Despite this the Aboriginal presence in the city is often invisible to non-Aboriginal eyes. This course aims to bring to light marginalised narratives of Aboriginal presence in this space. To understand hidden and marginalised narratives and experiences it is necessary to develop cultural competence capabilities. Key elements of practicing cultural competence include being able to understand and interrogate context, which in the case of Sydney includes not only learning about the peoples, places and histories of Aboriginal Sydney but to also understand issues about how knowledge is created and how dominant narratives can exclude diverse knowledges and experiences. Course learning outcomes 1. Develop knowledge about cultural competence capabilities. 2. Develop a deeper and multi-layered knowledge and understanding about Aboriginal peoples, cultures and places in Sydney. 3. Develop a greater understanding of how history, cultures and places are represented, contested and interpreted and how that relates to their own context. Acknowledgement of Country We acknowledge that this course was developed on the land of the Gadigal Peoples of the Eora nation. We pay our respect to the Traditional Owners of this land and acknowledge that the land that the University of Sydney was built on has been a place of learning for many thousands of years.
Studying and collecting Aboriginal artefacts
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Cultural Competence - Aboriginal Sydney
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Representation and visibility in Aboriginal Sydney
This week highlights how Aboriginal peoples are represented and made invisible. We will look at how museums and anthropologists collected and studied Aboriginal peoples and their artefacts. We will also look at how Aboriginal peoples engaged with the colonisers and continue to do so.
Conoce a los instructores
Gabrielle Russell-MundineAcademic Leader - Cultural Change
National Centre for Cultural Competence
[MUSIC]
In this video, Matt Poll talks about how Aboriginal artefacts were collected and
studied.
He explains some of the unethical practices that lead to items coming into
collections and
how non-Indigenous collectors relied on Aboriginal people to find them.
Matt also tells us about how universities have promoted anthropology and the impact
that this has had on the way Aboriginal peoples and cultures were represented.
He links us to the impact of evolutionary thinking and
the concept of racial hierarchy that was prevalent in anthropology.
Finally, he reminds us that because of government interventions and
the history of Aboriginal dispossession, many items in museum
collections have negative connotations for Aboriginal peoples.
>> My name's Matt Poll.
I'm the Assistant Curator of Indigenous Heritage at the Macleay Museum, and
I'm also the University of Sydney's Repatriation Project Officer.
The Macleay family came out here around 1823.
Alexander Macleay was the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales and
over around 60 years,
three generations of his family had a massive interest in natural history,
Australia at the time being so fascinating to international natural historians.
They amassed a pretty massive collection which was all housed out of
Elizabeth Bay House, before it was bequeathed to the University.
And the museum, as it is, opened in 1891.
From the Macleay bequest era, it's really interesting because a lot of Aboriginal
knowledges were incorporated into the collection of natural history specimens.
A lot of collectors were relying on Aboriginal guides and
Aboriginal people to help them find different species of animals and
different plants, different things like that.
A lot of Aboriginal people even sold and
traded items to collectors, and from around that same time period a lot of those
collectors started a side business where they were acquiring artefacts and
trading them to collectors in Australia, and increasingly internationally as well.
In that era, the ethics of collecting things were pretty all over the place.
It was a bit of a free-for-all.
If you picked it up, you could have it.
Sometimes people were very engaged in wanting to trade things and
developed very close relationships with collectors.
And then in other times, there's certainly a lot of theft and
taking of people's cultural heritage and using it and
selling it without any benefit to the people it was being taken from.
So it's a very broad spectrum of ways that these items came into museum collections,
not just our own, that's across all the First Nations' cultures around the world.
And so you do find some pretty unethical practices.
Some of the problematic things that found their way into the collections were picked
up by people who witnessed massacres, for example, and then went and
collected all the artifacts off deceased people, basically.
And luckily,
through researching collections, we sometimes find diary notes of the people
who actually did acquire these things unethically, and they're the type of items
which today are a solid part of the University's repatriation project.
The role that the University played in reconstructing a representation of
Aboriginal culture is pretty significant.
The first ever anthropology department in Australia was founded at the University of
Sydney in 1923, and for around 30 years or so, it was administered by
one of the most famous anthropologists of Australia, A P Elkin, and
he was a very interesting, problematic figure.
He was also deeply Christian, and he was also very
paternalistic to the way that he administered the anthropology department.
So after the Macleay bequest, the next big engagement as such with Aboriginal
people comes through the University of Sydney Anthropology Department.
And a lot of the students who are some of the biggest figures in the history of
anthropology in Australia were taught here and donated their collections and
research materials to the universities at the end of their degree.
Being based in Sydney, yet collecting from right around the nation,
there's a broad spectrum, which is really interesting.
We have incredible collections from some of the most remote parts of the country
at that time, yet very little from Sydney itself.
So it sort of shows the focus of the time.
Anthropology was very focused on what they thought was a pristine Aboriginal
culture and didn't focus so much on the southeastern parts of the country,
which they thought even at that time had been heavily impacted by colonisation.
In so many cases, Aboriginal people wanted to make things for sale or trade.
And they would be paid for them very unethically, you know,
traded for tobacco or different sort of things like that whereas some days when
these things come back through Sotheby's auction houses or places like that
they can be worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases.
So the idea of collecting and
trading in exchange isn't foreign to Aboriginal people at all.
In some cases, they've probably been doing it for
tens of thousands of years in very particular parts of the country.
But the European model of collecting and economic exchange that
was imposed over the history of Aboriginal trade routes pretty drastically
changed the way that it had been happening for so long before then.
In relation to the changes that happened in collecting,
it's about excluding Aboriginal people from participating, especially in the economic
aspects of trading and selling items of their culture.
So there's a real historical disadvantage into how things were acquired and
collected.
And then subsequently, the life that they've had after they have been collected
which has been very controlled by non-Indigenous people.
And it's one of the main issues for museums today is how do we give
the moral authority back Aboriginal people to control how items that
were acquired in this historical period are represented and exhibited today.
Why items were collected is really interesting,
especially after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species,
evolutionary thought comes into a lot of it.
And so people are collecting items from Aboriginal Australia to illustrate
what they thought was primitive or, you know, even stone age people use these.
Very offensive terms these days.
They would use items that were collected to publish papers about the history of all
mankind around the world at the time that they thought.
And so Aboriginal culture in a sense was used as part
of a racial hierarchy from what they considered uncivilised peoples
to the top of the racial hierarchy which was their civilized culture in Europe.
A lot of the items that were acquired don't hold up
in our modern sort of understanding of how important they are culturally,
especially to modern community members.
These practices of taking cultural materials and using them to illustrate
non-Indigenous authored representations of Aboriginal culture still resonate for
modern communities today.
So many of the items that were taken broke connections between families.
This was also happening at a time of forced
relocation of people onto missions and reserves.
It's in the period leading up to the Stolen Generation with sometimes the children of
massacre victims were taken by people who were collecting items and
different things like that.
So there was a deliberate government intervention
into the administration of Aboriginal people's lives in that period.
And I think for a lot of modern community members
these objects represent that history of dispossession.
And the fact that they're technically owned by a museum is an issue
that a lot of modern communities are grappling with and trying to understand.
And why we do so much community consultation in relation to holding or
exhibiting or publishing images in this collection and why it's so important for
the moral authority of the Aboriginal people to be brought into the equation,
when we consider how museums use them, or exhibit them.
Putting the onus on communities to make the effort to engage with us,
some of the best stuff that we've done in relation to community consultation has
been through piggy-backing on other research projects that are happening and
it's a win-win situation for both the museum and the community when we
can use that information and share it and get information back.
We don't want to be out there continuing the old practices of just collecting
things and not giving something back to the community.
So it's really important that its a two-way street and
when we use their information, they can use our information as well.
They might use that in a native title case,
or they may use it in something else.
So it's great that, you know, these dusty old things can be taken off the shelf
sometimes, and modern technologies can be applied to them.
We can actually give something back,
which can economically empower Aboriginal communities.
[MUSIC]
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