 Andrew Bolt |
Racism kills our heritage
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THERE'S plenty of
New Racism -- and some of the old -- in the bid by Dja
Dja Wurrung activists to seize two Aboriginal bark
etchings on loan from British museums. |
So-called elders of the Bendigo-based "tribe" say they are the true owners of the etchings, which were collected by Loddon River landowner John Hunter Kerr in the 1850s. |
"We believe strongly that (the
artefacts) connect us to our country, our culture and ancestry," said
spokesman Gary Murray. |
This is not just a try-on. |
Murray has won an emergency declaration order under
Aboriginal heritage laws to stop the return of the etchings to their legal
owners -- the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens, which sent them here for an exhibition at the Melbourne Museum.
Some thanks they've got. The British thought
we'd be borrowing their stuff, but now find we're keeping it.
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But welcome to the New Racism, which insists
that we are always members of a tribe, and that what was done to some
never-known ancestor was done to us. |
This New Racism also declares that what was
once owned by that never-known ancestor -- even if given away -- was owned by
us, too. Even the knowledge of that never-known ancestor remains our property. |
Forget the humanist idea that we are all
individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human
race. In this New Racism, we're driven back into tribes. |
And so Gary Murray and the Dja Dja Wurrung say these
etchings are theirs, simply because ancestors 150 years ago made them. |
There's a touch of old-style racism in their
claim, of course. How does Murray
know his ancestors didn't freely give these etchings to old Kerr when he came
collecting? Or does he assume Aborigines back then were all too greedy or dumb
to give or sell such things? |
And if they did give Kerr the etchings, by
what right does now -- 150 years on -- grab them back? |
It's a good thing his ancestors -- if indeed
that's what they are -- did hand over the etchings. They are the only two left
in existence, and if Kerr hadn't collected them, and send them off for
safekeeping, there would be none left for anyone to fight over. |
That's one of the great gifts of museums;
they have been keeping artefacts that may otherwise have been lost to us. |
They have also brought knowledge of the
cultures that made them to people who would otherwise have known nothing of
tribes such as the Dja Dja
Wurrung. |
But the Dja Dja Wurrung's bid for ownership attacks the very concept of
our museums by declaring that artefacts are in the end always owned by the
tribes that made them, never the museums that bought, found or saved them. |
What a primitive and undeserving ownership
that is. |
Murray and his fellow "elders" did
not make these etchings, did not collect them, and did not preserve them. Their
only claim to them is that some tribesman they never met and could not name may
have made them before giving them away. |
If that's what ownership is today, then nothing in our museums or art galleries can stay. Our Dutch paintings must go back to the Dutch who painted them, and the skeleton of Phar Lap back to New Zealand |
NATURALLY, all Aboriginal artefacts in the Melbourne Museum must be given back to the tribes that produced them
-- just as the priceless Kow Swamp Aboriginal
skeletons, at least 9000 and possibly 20,000 years old, have already been
returned to the dead's presumed descendants in
Echuca, to be destroyed by them and lost to science forever. |
How this New Racism cuts us off from each
other, and from the knowledge which is part of our common human history. |
What a tragedy for civilisation that it grows
so strong, particularly among the educated, and is even backed now by our laws.
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