Right of reply: Reconnecting community knowledge to cultural belongings

Join Rebecca Fisher, acting Digitisation Manager and Nathan “mudyi” Sentance, First Nations Digital Program Manager at the Australian Museum, as they provide an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the AM’s groundbreaking digital repatriation project.

Nathan’s Aunty Grace used to say “the museum has sticks, we have stories. Without stories, museum only have sticks.” Many museums’ collections hold cultural objects that have been removed from their traditional homelands, their context often not recorded. Because of this, their significance and the complex First Nations knowledges embedded in them is not fully communicated to audiences.

The Australian Museum is undertaking a massive reconnection project looking at how digital systems could foster First Nations communities to reinterpret their cultural belongings held in museum collections and provide a digital space to reconnect cultural belongings back to their homelands.