Paper short abstract:

Rob and Shannon will share Gunai Kurnai cultural resurgence when bringing Ancestor remains into the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place collection, and, on the other hand, the frustrations of of colonial archive elisions. Both examples relate to people who lived at Ramahyuck mission in the 1880s.

Paper long abstract:

Rev. Hagenauer established the Ramahyuck mission on Gunai Kurnai Country in 1863 (until 1908). In 1884. Ferdinand von Mueller took cuttings of the hair of residents, which were sent to create collections in Germany until their return to the Keeping Place in 2020. Rob will share the story of how he and other community members understood how the hair of the Old People needed to be brought home, and the vital role of the Keeping Place in this ongoing process.

While this specific return of the hair of people who had been forced to live at Ramahyuck nourished Community, the Community was simultaneously pained by being unable to find any Moravian records detailing the exact grave sites of ancestors in Ramahyuck’s cemetery. Moravian missionaries organised grave sites by social position and gender of the individuals rather than family group, and Ramahyuck gravesites have no headstones. This situation is a tangible example of the painful difference between Gunai Kurnai ways of knowing family and culture and a colonial way of organising and archiving people that thwarts contemporary Community knowledge. Ramahyuck, as with other missions, remains a site of ambivalence in multiple ways, having been both prison and refuge when it operated, and becoming a site that white settlers have desecrated since its closure. The Moravian burial organisation compounds Gunai Kurnai difficulties of relating to the site. Shannon will speak about the ongoing struggle to identify Ancestors’ gravesites and ways around and alongside colonial foreclosures.