The Australian Museum's Unsettled exhibition

Yaama gurra (hello with respect).

In 2018, I was approached to curate the Australian Museum’s Indigenous-led exhibition about Captain James Cook, as a response to the 250th anniversary in 2020 of the HMB Endeavour’s East Coast voyage during 1770. I knew this would be a challenging task. Cook is often celebrated as the founding father of Australia, with hero-like status to non-Indigenous Australians. But he represents the opposite to First Nations peoples: a symbol of destruction and death, pain and suffering. Curating a show about why these differences exist that meets the needs of both these audiences would not be straightforward, especially in Australia’s oldest museum.

To undertake this exhibition in a culturally appropriate way and ensure we accurately represented the views of First Nations peoples on the Cook anniversary, community consultation was undertaken to define what themes and topics would be covered. Most significantly, the consultations illustrated that First Nations peoples did not want another show about Cook; he was but a small footnote in a more expansive history. Instead, we were asked to take the opportunity for long overdue truth-telling about our shared past.

The consultation had three highest-ranking categories for possible exhibition topics: (1) colonisation and its effects; (2) Australia’s origins and foundation; and (3) addressing the false, constructed history that is pervasively shared in society. The most common specific responses were: truth, truth-telling, invasions, wars, massacres, genocide, assimilation, dispossession, resistance, resilience, and survival.

We had our content set by communities, but we needed to name this important exhibition. The First Nations staff, in partnership with independent media, consultancy, and training organisation IndigenousX, spent time brainstorming a title that could capture the importance, meaning and content being covered. We decided on the name “Unsettled”. This term has many connotations and in the context of this exhibition they are everywhere: Australia was not peacefully settled; our history is unresolved; relationships between First Nations peoples and Australians are uneasy; and after 250 years, newcomers still have a turbulent and unbalanced relationship with the natural environment in which they now live.

Truth-telling about Australia’s past is an incredibly important process for understanding who we are now and how we came to be as a nation. Truth-telling can be confronting, but the process can be powerful: grief can make way for healing, and healing unites people who were once divided. It is time we stop pretending that meaningful change can happen in a system that is grounded in denial. Until historic inequities are addressed, the gap between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Australians will only continue to widen.

Museums and other cultural institutions have the opportunity to be at the centre of this process given they are publicly trusted sources of information and knowledge. This requires a spirit of inclusiveness and a commitment to build strong relationships between First Nations peoples and collecting institutions which promote principles of Indigenous agency and self-determination. I applaud the leadership shown by the Australian Museum’s executive leadership team and Trustees for providing First Nations peoples with a platform to be heard and rebalance the narrative.

As sites of public influence and authority, it is important that First Nations peoples control how our cultures, experiences and world views are interpreted in museums. We worked with over 130 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to interpret the topics set out by the consultation data. Every one of these First Nations community members understood the enormity of our task and we have been thanked many times for sharing the stories of individuals or their Ancestors. They had been waiting a long time for this story to be told. I would like to thank every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person who contributed to the exhibition, guided us, and supported us. I hope we have made your Ancestors, families, communities, and you, proud.

It has been an absolute honour and privilege to develop, curate, and now present Unsettled to the public. It has been my most challenging, yet most rewarding professional project. I thank the visitors to the exhibition and readers of the catalogue for embarking on this journey with us. This is how we will build a better shared future – together.

I thank the Australian Museum’s Unsettled team for the hard work, perseverance, and patience on the development of the exhibition. I would also like to thank our First Nations colleagues who assisted us and gave valuable feedback and critical insight.

Lastly, I acknowledge the hard work and dedication of my Yuin colleague and assistant curator, Dr Mariko Smith, maarubaa bawaa (thank you sister).

Unsettled features over 190 objects and images throughout eight thematic sections: Introduction, Signal Fires, Recognising Invasions, Fighting Wars, Remembering Massacres, Surviving Genocide, Continued Resistance, and Healing Nations. These objects and images include Australian Museum collection items, commissions, acquisitions, and loans.

Many of the 53 objects from the Australian Museum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural collection have never been seen by the public. There is a 30,000-year-old Wailwan grindstone fragment from Cuddie Springs which demonstrates the longevity of food preparation by Aboriginal people, and Yam Island print-maker Glen Mackie’s Storyboat installation which shares a personal cross-cultural family history from the Torres Strait.

90-plus digital acquisitions have been made, including the Dark Days photographic series by photographer Brendan Beirne that feature massacre sites as they look today, and important artworks that illustrate First Nations lived experiences by First Nations artists Nyree Reynolds and Charlotte Allingham (Coffin Birth).

We are proud to welcome over 30 new object acquisitions to the Australian Museum, including works by Aboriginal artists Tony Albert, Karla Dickens, and Aunty Fay Moseley – including Aunty Fay’s One Way Ticket To Hell which took her eight years to complete due to the deeply personal and painful childhood memory of being removed from her parents. She decided to allow the Museum to purchase this work because of its important work in truth-telling.

Significant historical documents attributed to Governor Lachlan Macquarie and others have been loaned from the NSW State Archives and Records, and the State Library of New South Wales. Significant cultural objects have also been loaned from First Nations communities and peoples, such as a killer boomerang made by Kabi Kabi Goori Elder Uncle Dennis Embrey and lent to the Museum for Unsettled by his grandson Uncle Alex Bond.