Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) is one of the oldest museums in Australia with its founding collections established by the Royal Society of Tasmania, this first established outside of the United Kingdom. TMAG is undeniably a colonial archive and a site of conflict and trauma for the islands Aboriginal people. Both the museum and the Royal Society were not just benefactors of objects from the colonial frontier and dispossession but also the dealers in Aboriginal ancestral remains and cultural material. For over one and a half centuries the collection and curation of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and culture was heavily informed by ideologies of ‘primivity’ and ‘extinction’, both narratives used to justify colonisation. Weighed down by decades of these false narratives TMAG have, over the past twenty years, begun to redress past wrongs and slowly build better relationships with the Aboriginal community. The 2008 exhibition ‘ningina tunapri: To Give Knowledge and Understanding’, the first to be collaboratively curated and to include Aboriginal voice and perspective, challenged the former 160 years of TMAG’s interpretation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. It also inspired several subsequent cultural projects and exhibitions that confront and reshape colonised spaces through a culmination of Aboriginal resistance, resilience, and cultural revitalisation. This paper discusses the development of these more inclusive museum practices that are underpinned by Aboriginal knowledges, anti-colonial methodologies, and self-determination that support the aspirations of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community.