Cultural Collection Enhancement Project

Talofa lava, Bula Vinaka, Iakwe, warmest Pacific greetings. I would like to
begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of Eora country and
Burramattagal people of Dharug country. They are the original owners and traditional custodians of the land in which the Australian Museum is
situated on. I pay my deepest respects to their elders, past, present and
emerging.
Always was and always will be Aboriginal land. My name is my Moemoana Safa'ato'a Schwenke. I am from the treasured islands of Samoa, and I am the current Miss Samoa and Miss Pacific Islands and an employee of the Australian Museum as the Pasifika Consultation Officer under the Cultural Collections Enhancement Project, which is also known as CCEP. The Australian Museum is the oldest museum in Australia and the fifth oldest natural history museum in the world.
Many museums of the world, including the Australian Museum, have a
legacy rooted in colonialism and imperialism. So fast forward to present,
the Australian Museum have reevaluated their own relationship to cultural objects and changed their view of the museum as the owner of cultural objects to custodians of these collections, with an obligation to the peoples who created the cultural objects and obligation to their stories, and an obligation to their descendants.
My role as part of CCEP was to prioritise Indigenous voices, amplify the
cultural significance of the treasures that Australian Museum is custodians of, and to make the collections more accessible to their owners, their people. The Australian Museum's Cultural Collections Enhancement Project includes work across six collections, which include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Collections, Aboriginal Archeology Collection, Pasifica Cultural Collections, World Cultures Collections, archives and library.
The CCEP Digitisation Team has the responsibility of creating high quality records of the museum's cultural collections. This covers a wide range of activities from the preparations of cultural collection, objects for documentation enhancement, community consultation and digitisation which included object handling, registrations of collection objects, barcoding, data entry and much more. The Pacific Collection at the Australian Museum, which I was blessed to work with, has over 64,000 treasures from across the Pacific Islands.
Treasures created hundreds of years ago by the hands of my Ancestors,
our Pacific Ancestors. Treasures created by the same hands that for
generations past guided and sustained us, our lands and our waters.
Treasures that have so much potential to teach us both about the beauty and sacredness of our people, but also the complexities of the Pacific and what it means to be a Pacific person today, in the past and into the future.