Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Melbourne Museum's attempts to repatriate an object that divided the recipient community. I suggest museums have replaced religious institutions as sites where the moral rectitude of the Australian state is tested and maintained, if ambiguously.

Paper long abstract:

All Australian state museums are involved in the repatriation of Aboriginal ceremonial objects, based on the essential notion that such objects were taken 'without the consent'. However, the actual process of repatriation can go far beyond such notions. Identifying the owner of an object may be impossible and where they are identified, they may prefer to leave their object in the museum. Sometimes objects are returned to a community, only to be damaged or stolen. In this paper, I wish to discuss attempts by Melbourne Museum to repatriate an object to a community that led to a highly contentious outcome that divided the community on a number of cultural and political levels. It not only raised issues concerning the project of repatriation itself, but about the general role of museums in the fraught relationship between settler Australia and its indigenous inhabitants.

In examining these events, I will suggest that with the secularisation of Australian society, museums and other public institutions have tended to replace religious institutions as sites where the moral rectitude of the Australian state is tested, delineated and maintained, if somewhat ambiguously. Here, divinely ordained laws regulating moral behaviour have been subsumed by elaborate policies, procedures and 'vision statements' meant to provide both a moral code and 'moral guidance' for museum curators engaged in projects such as repatriation. As with the attainment of moral worth in general, the preservation and adherence to these moral codes is the central issue, notwithstanding the success or failure of their application.