Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation

The Keeping Place

Robert Hudson, Shannon Woodcock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367641795
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000595116
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation explores Indigenous practices of curation, object repatriation, and cross-cultural community engagement in a dynamic Koori museum.

Grounded in the fact that Gunai Kurnai people have never ceded sovereignty, the text reorients dominant temporal and colonial approaches of museum studies to document and theorise Gunai Kurnai self-presentation and community engagement in the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place. Researched and co-authored by the Cultural Manager of the Keeping Place, Gunai Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man Robert Hudson, and white Historian Shannon Woodcock, the book traces the temporal, social, and cultural considerations of the Elders who curated the permanent exhibition in the early 1990s. Discussing community management of a collection growing through the ongoing repatriation of tools, art, and Ancestor remains, the text also explores how Robert Hudson engages with visitors to the Keeping Place and local colonial history museums, and theorises the power of Gunai Kurnai work with individuals and institutions in the small museum context. Finally, Hudson and Woodcock demonstrate that the Keeping Place articulates sophisticated Gunai Kurnai-grounded methodologies of museum practice in relation to international critical Indigenous studies scholarship.

Self-Determined First Nations Museums and Colonial Contestation provides a vital case study of an Indigenous museum space written from an inside perspective. As such, the book will be essential reading for scholars and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, Indigenous peoples, decolonisation, race, anthropology, culture, and history.

1 A tour of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place Rob Hudson – Cultural Manager

DOI: 10.4324/9781003122449-2

I want to explain why this Keeping Place is here, and a bit about the heartache we went through to get it going.

Monday to Friday, 9–5 (settler time)

People visit the Keeping Place, and I feel where they’re at. The groups arrive with their outside voices, bustling all kinds of worlds into the foyer. The teacher or tour leader finds me and asks if they should pay for their entrance now or later. They tell me how many people are with them, and I start to write a receipt for the group. Turning my eyes to the paperwork lets the guests quieten back to their individual selves. People fall out of conversations, look around, maybe noticing the bathrooms against one wall, or my office door, or the shelf of items for sale. People who visit alone or in couples are already all eyes and ears when they walk through the first doors. They read the small sign with directions on the wall, write their names in the visitor book on its stand, hand over their $6 entry fee, and take my receipt with smiles and thanks.

I feel where they’re at, and once a group calms I move through them to the exhibition entrance. The fireproof door is heavy, and its hinges sing open; whistling up to the highest pitch, relaxing down the scale again. The visitors follow me, so I move to the closest corner of the room. People need to hold the weight of the door themselves to step inside. The frail lean their bodies into the door and someone strong often holds the door open for others. Shuffling feet, people look up, around, adjusting their eyes to the softer light. They orient themselves in the space between the carved poles and free-standing displays. Those close to me see the canoes out of water. The walls are not white, they’re warm colours, earthy pink and ochre. Elders look down from portraits above our heads, and the Ancestors are in the room with us. I feel their reactions to the guests, as well.

I look over to Dingo, there on the far side of the room, muscles one tension away from flight. Or attack. The visitors slow down while they look around. I call out, ‘Keep coming, come over this way!’ The door falls closed, sing-sighing, steady scrape, clunk – back in frame. Inside is silence; we can’t hear the outside now. I wait to feel where they’re at so that I will speak in the right way for them to hear. My place here is part of this. Speaking with, welcoming.

Welcome to the Keeping Place everybody, my name is Rob. I’m a Gunai Kurnai Monero Ngarigo man. My grandfather was Ngarigo, and my grandmother was a Gunai Kurnai woman, so we travelled a lot. Our family travelled all up and down the coast because the old fellas used to work in the bean paddocks. Eventually our family made our permanent home here so we could all go to school, basically. As you can see, the Keeping Place is a very spiritual place to our people and the exhibition tells the true history of this area. I want to explain why the Keeping Place is here and a bit about the heartache we went through to get it going. It does tell the truth of what happened here, and a lot of people don’t know about that – or don’t want to know about that.

Let’s stop a minute on this one word

heartache.

Is heartache a word you use in your everyday life?

What kind of events would you call heartache?

Run this word across your tongue. Do you try to stop it from hooking into the painful memories you hold elsewhere, deeper, as heartache?

Things we know about heartache:

Heartache continues through seasons and days.

Nights.

Heartache makes everyday tasks into insults and mysteries: how can I stand here and wash the dishes when …

We cannot know when heartache might end. It could kill us or leave us untethered to the world around us.

Are we ever sure that heartache has stopped?

Practical questions for museum workers:

How do you tell someone else about your heartache?

Do you bring it up often? Or lightly? Or at work?

What would you like from the person with whom you share your heartache?

My Elders got this Keeping Place going. From the early 1970s they fought for medical care and housing for our community, then they even had to fight for the government to sell them this land for the Keeping Place to be built on. I grew up listening to the Aunties and Uncles discussing what to include in the Keeping Place to keep us strong. They included everyone and made sure that no one told anyone else’s story. They made the Keeping Place to educate the Aboriginal kids and the non-Aboriginal kids, and to be a place where the old people and their belongings could come to be cared for. The Elders chose the objects, wrote the words, and decided on this way of presenting the exhibition. They curated this exhibition to fulfil its purpose into the future, and they took the time this needed. They didn’t rush to meet a deadline, and they weren’t paid to do it. We opened the Keeping Place in 1994, and no one has changed the structure of the exhibition. We add the Ancestors’ belongings that come back, but the exhibition doesn’t need to be changed; it shows that our Elders knew what happened. They knew that we will always be here, teaching our kids and the non-Aboriginal community the truth, on our Country.¹ This Keeping Place is just one way we do that, a very specific way.

In this chapter, I walk you through the exhibition in words. I describe the Keeping Place, but this is not a ‘history’ because we are not only talking about the past. When I talk about the objects that have come back here, this includes the heartache of how they were taken away. The heartache of the stories we share in this space is always with us. When I say ‘us’, I don’t mean just the Aboriginal community in Gunai Kurnai Country, but everyone here, including non-Aboriginal people.

The Keeping Place tells the truth about what has happened.² I can only speak about my family and what I know is true. I talk about that in relation to what the Elders chose to be displayed here. You will understand what I say in your own way; you are responsible for listening and thinking about this. As Philip Pepper says on the first page of his history book The Kurnai of Gippsland, (white) historians have written a lot about what happened here, but they have misrepresented the parts about how European people behaved towards Country and towards Aboriginal people. This exhibition tells the truth. As I say to people when they visit in person – a lot of people don’t want to know.³

To use the Elders’ way of sharing the past does not make the exhibition limited or out of date.⁴ The opposite is true – significantly changing it would weaken its purpose. The Elders envisaged many children, students, and adults visiting this place, speaking with someone in this role of Cultural Manager, and leaving with a better understanding of our culture, of caring for Country. Our Elders put so much time into making this exhibition because they knew it was for people with different levels of knowledge, different attitudes, and capacities to listen. They knew that everyone comes with their own life experiences that influence how they learn here. The Elders learnt their knowledge in the same way they taught me; they were raised with it as a part of life, part of Country. The experiences of generations before us are still part of living now. Sharing knowledge in this way, in the family, while making a living on Country, means that we learn the relevance of the past within our relationships with Community and our ancestors in our places. We use the stories I will tell you here in our everyday life.⁵ I teach and learn in my work at the Keeping Place, in this role that my Elders and Community entrust me with.

In this chapter, and in this book, we follow the Elders’ direction in telling what happened here. My role as the Cultural Manager of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place includes showing visitors through the exhibition, and I’m happy to answer any questions people have. You have seen how I use the foyer/entrance space and my sense of visitors’ feelings to work with guests arriving to see the exhibition. The building enables me to work with people, and the content of the permanent exhibition shapes how I share my personal experiences with you.

Although the Keeping Place takes the basic structure of colonial museums, in that it is a room containing objects and written interpretations, it is not a museum. These are all our community’s belongings here on our Country, where they’re meant to be. Many visitors come here knowing that their ideas about Aboriginal people are limited. Some come here feeling a little bit afraid. Some have lived here all their lives and know the stories of what their own families did in the past. They have no reason to be afraid of us, but I suppose they are afraid because they know Gunai Kurnai people are still here on our Country; we have never ceded sovereignty.

The heartache to get this place going began when white men invaded Gunai Kurnai Country from the late 1830s. We are all still experiencing this colonialism today. You will see that we don’t clearly separate events and periods in history the way that European museums often do.⁶ Europeans took our land, the lives of our family members, and our languages as well. Another way that heartache travels through time and continues today is due to Europeans taking our tools, weapons, and even the bodies of our Old People to make their museums. Europeans took our belongings and made their museums. They were convinced they could make our culture and bodies disappear by controlling our every move in their laws. Making museums for themselves from our belongings was to make it seem like the people who owned the spears and shields they displayed no longer existed. They made our culture history in their policies and museums. We are still trying to bring home the bodies of our families, and to have vital cultural items given back to us by the Pitt Rivers Museum. We need these items for ceremony, through which we can bring our knowledge back to Country.

The Elders who made this permanent exhibition in the Keeping Place knew what is in the colonial archives. We know what happened on our Country before and since white people arrived, and we have seen what the colonists wrote about what they did here. We know that the writings in the archives record just a tiny percentage of what European colonists did. Most people don’t write down the crimes they commit, and only a small percentage of what they did write down was saved.⁷ Our knowledge of what has happened is not from European records, but from our community experiences of fighting invasion first hand.⁸ We incorporate what the Europeans recorded into what we know. It is illogical and racist when Europeans assume that we have less knowledge about their colonialism than they do. Gunai Kurnai people and Country developed and shared scientific, diplomatic, cultural, and legal knowledge for more than 60,000 years. It is a complex and whole system, not divided into separate parts. Our law and culture and science is of this Country. We keep and share knowledge about colonisation, especially of how Europeans perpetrate massacres and cultural genocide.

The Elders built the Keeping Place exhibition on the scaffolding of our community heartache. The exhibition doesn’t tell us about the lives of our Ancestors just according to the laws and ideologies that the colonists forced onto them, even though it does explain those laws. For the white people who don’t believe Gunai Kurnai knowledge, we display European ‘proof’ as well. In this textual version of the tour we include footnotes where you can look for more written in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A tour of the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place: Rob Hudson – Cultural Manager
• 2 Community futures and embodied sovereignty
• 3 Receiving and working with Ancestor objects
• 4 Settler museums, white supremacy, and the Keeping Place
• Conclusion
• Index