Artefacts from across the globe returned to southern WA

Cultural artifacts from Western Australia's southern coast have been returned home after centuries in museums worldwide. These items are now on display at the Museum of the Great Southern in an exhibition titled Kalyagul: Connections to Menang Country. Kalyagul translates to "always, ever, continuing" in the Menang language, a theme woven throughout the exhibition and its related project called Entangled Knowledges: Kaartdijin, Science and History in the Robert Neill Collection.

Robert Neill, a commissariat officer in Albany in the 1840s, painted watercolor drawings of local fish, inspired by his interactions with the Menang people sharing their kaartdijin (knowledge). Deakin University history professor Tiffany Shellam discovered the fish scales attached to the drawings in the London Natural History Museum's collections. After examining 27 boxes of fish at the National Museum of Scotland, Shellam expressed her excitement about the findings.

Menang woman Shona Coyne, the exhibition's lead curator, emphasized the rarity of such cases where colonizers claimed knowledge and sent items to museums and universities. The project not only returned the fish drawings but also uncovered additional artifacts, such as plant samples collected by Menang women Lucy Webb and Lucy Eades in the late 19th century.

These specimens, now in the National Herbarium of Victoria, mark the first and only documented instances of Aboriginal people contributing to botanical collections during that era.

The research project expanded beyond fish and plants, delving into emu feathered ornaments and fishing spears. Menang traditional owners and scientists collaborated to recreate these cultural materials, adding their own samples to the herbarium's collection upon returning to their ancestral site. This comprehensive effort highlights the importance of acknowledging and preserving Indigenous knowledge and connections to the land.