Our Global Neighbours: Story-tellers from Indonesia

We are very lucky to have Ita - Putu Ayu Yunita Yastini and Novita Wenda working in Anthropology for three weeks. Bright and vivacious, with a great sense of humour, they animate our collections, adding to the academic and curatorial layers of knowledge other – human component, out of communal modern experience and open minded self-reflection about their culture in a contemporary world.

We watch them dipping into collections and coming out with comments and yarns. We talk and laugh, learn and marvel, share food and coffee. Also we are eager to capture their work and knowledge by camera and pen, and to draft the stories that make our collection meaningful.

From completely different cultural traditions, Ita from Bali and Novita from Papua, they illustrate Indonesia’s enormous cultural diversity and also some delight that these cultures are represented in our collection.

Their humour and open manner has made their visit a fruitful one for us at the Australian Museum and hopefully they too benefit from being here and working among the wonderful collections of objects we are fortunate enough to have in our care.

See also Young Visitors from Indonesia