Cool Burning
The Collection:

Museum research as  a regenerative act

Jilda Andrews

Collections and their archive:
entangled and overgrown

Working with objects in museums collections is a wonderful challenge. Yet, the inherent paradox of working with cultural collections as a First Nations Australian researcher is that I must engage with pre-established value sets even if the values they assert are no longer upheld.

Even if the objects once belonged to my ancestors.

To navigate collections and engage with objects often involves a validation or reification of notions that have gone before, some of
which include assumptions, preconceptions, ignorance and intentions generated in very different times. Much of my work involves engaging directly with the value sets that have become attached to objects on their journeys through collection processes. As much as the object itself represents something of the past, examining how it has been ushered through time through processes of collection can reveal something bigger—and something not just about ‘the other’ but about ‘us’—
as a collective.

Beyond stories of colonial relationship, reckoning and redress, might our collections have new stories to tell; stories beyond the contexts of their own historical era?

This article seeks to clear ground for new directions for collection research. In the context of my own research and lived relations with Country, I find certain objects urging me to ask new and different questions; to look in new ways at old objects—and so, by extension,
to see different values expressed in their form and materiality. The compulsion to do this is powered by a sense of urgency that responds
to a heightened social, cultural ecological crossroads posed by a rapidly changing climate. My commitment to the historical material record also carries within it another sense of urgency about the value of cultural material in collections, and how museums (I believe) still have a unique capacity to make and remake knowledges hand in hand with the populations they serve. This belief I hold in the face of loud public discourse to dismantle museums as institutions with perceived
little contemporary relevance or value.

When I engage with collections research I hold myself accountable
to a simple premise—that it is simply not enough to reproduce what
we already know about collections and ‘things’ anymore. This particular mode of research I refer to is reliant upon—or perhaps held captive by—value sets that are already in place. I understand this as ‘passive’ and self-referential. It speaks to a mode of museum practice that is anchored to the problematic legacies that are subject to contemporary critique. Moreover, passive knowledge creation does not help the lived experience of contemporary Indigenous peoples. It might generate currency for academics, but it will not improve the shocking statistics that represent lived Indigenous experience, including lower than average life expectancy, food and water insecurity, and tragic incarceration rates.¹ This may seem an overly simplistic argument to draw, perhaps, but these are the realities of many Indigenous communities today—including my own. If collections do not start working for us and our communities, we will simply lose our capacity and reason to engage
with them.

And yet another provocation looms.

The cultural histories of Indigenous peoples reach far into the deepest depths of human occupation on the Australian continent. The framing
of Indigenous knowledges, expertise and understandings to the colonial ‘moment’ and thereafter, drastically undermines this depth and the unbroken threads which draw through to the present. How do we recognise deep ‘continuities’ and how can we contextualise cultural material in a time frame that better reflects the expertise, knowledges and relationships embedded in objects?

We can acknowledge that museums are products of colonial-era knowledge-making, but the ‘things’ they contain we know speak far beyond. This is true of Indigenous objects, certainly. But for objects
of these intercultural colonial moments, the challenge to recast value
to take in deeper Indigenous knowledges and experience is
particularly intriguing.

What follows is at once a deeply personal and critical proposition
for how we might do this. What is integrated into this thinking is a rationale that also enacts our responsibilities to Country, history, and
the ecological devastation that is our shared present, by learning to see and describe objects differently. This involves valuing ‘collection’ as what I have come to think of as a time-shepherding process, inviting historical objects into the present to engage meaningfully with dramatic change.

The Hold of Historical Value

Whether you are an Indigenous researcher or not, all work in museum collections involves engagement with values which have been already established by someone, somewhere along the line. Every subsequent engagement and moment of access are supplementary in some way.
This is emphasised further with the passing of time; as each minute meanders further and further away from the object’s ‘source’ or moment of exchange, the earlier established values gain integrity. In my experience, in some of the earlier collections comprised of Australian objects, these inherited values and associated processes and practices can almost be unimpeachable. To challenge or introduce new ideas to these records of value is not easy, and yet, it is what our material ethnographic record calls for today.

For at least two decades, profoundly important work has been undertaken both within and outside museums to reveal and engage with historical institutional practices and engender truth-telling possibilities with respect to colonialism and its brutal aftermaths.² These ongoing attempts to challenge and upend colonial narratives and their associated values have been the most important shift within museums in the past century. This has led to the introduction of new regimes of value and significance. This institutional history has, in turn, shaped much of my own research relations within museums.³

Critical interventions continue and Indigenous cultural practitioners
and scholars continue to blaze trails that are sparked by their own experiences of settler colonialism and the experience of their ancestors and those who have gone before in the formative years of nation-building projects.⁴ Through this work, and in concert with significant social and historical movements such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’, museums and their collections are in an existential moment of reckoning. Indigenous voices have a platform that is presently influential and globally positioned to inform the future
of museums.

Museums as sites of Remaking Knowledge

Within the world of museum knowledge and authority, there are many collection strategies that hold historic values firmly in place. Collection databases and content management systems can even capture keystrokes today, ensuring nothing is lost or overwritten. Such is the ever-protective relationship between old collections and the data associated with them enacted by museums. I have always been a keen proponent of this kind of integrity. I have believed that the closer we are to the ‘source’, the more useful, important, significant or powerful these objects are. They possess some kind of superpower to transcend time and space and bring us closer—as if within touching distance (even
while wearing white gloves)—to their maker, user, function, and
cultural worlds.

I have spent enough time with collections to know how they work as artefacts themselves.⁵ My fieldwork as a museum ethnographer engages directly with these structures to better understand them. Over time I came to appreciate the emotional charge behind collections— how they can move us to act. In my own case I thought my duty to act in response was as advocate, translator, interpreter, custodian and fellow countryman.⁶ Such emotions are incredibly powerful; when you identify as being on one side of an unfair contest or as the underdog, these emotions can be supercharged. Given the great potential for emotion that a shifting public discourse around collections stirs up—especially ethnographic collections—it is becoming increasingly difficult to rely unquestioningly on collections’ pre-established values in order to justify their continued collection. As we reach back in to history to justify contemporary collections, we risk separating them further from our present. We risk ending up with store rooms full of objects that get
in the way of new thinking and new action.

So how to navigate our responsibilities as museum curators and researchers? The importance of collections research is not only to
reveal and uphold what it is that we know about these things. It is also
to challenge what we know—and how, for whom, and in what contexts, such knowledge matters.

When we are open to radically new readings of old objects, we can
step towards collections in museums differently. As these objects break free from their historical time/space anchor, they can become active and emergent within the present. We have seen powerful examples of this, especially material culture used in land rights cases; story, song
and ceremony used as powerful vehicles in the highest law houses in
the country.⁷ When we are creating new knowledge in this way we enliven the material we engage with; we deliberately implicate ourselves in value creation processes to transform collections to be as important for our present as they are for our past. This act in itself need not undermine the integrity of historic collections and previously inscribed values. If anything, it can bring historical values and ideas into a powerful dialogue with ongoing cultural processes, where objects
can become engaged purposefully in the making and remaking of
knowledge; that is, as regenerative.

These are the makings of a new kind of museum practice: drawing in
the edges of what is known, honouring the past while creating stronger cultural futures, and, at the same time, engaging with the challenges of our shared and collective present. This is a kind of tending to regenerative conditions to bring about new things. It is what I like to envisage as an emergent, liminal museum. It is not revisionist by any means. We have the capacity to hold multiple voices, standpoints and ideas, and we need grand and dynamic structures to do so.

A Metaphoric Cool Burn

In order to do the work this way, we are drawn to revisit those pre-established values already ascribed to objects—the assumptions, the preconceptions, all the things that we would otherwise ordinarily accept. What does it mean to question or challenge these pre-established values? Or to completely set them aside and see objects differently? How do we give ourselves permission to do this? One mechanism I have deployed is what I call, metaphorically, a ‘cool burn’. To cool burn is to clear away the tangled overgrowth and weeds; to
open up the space for light and air, to use a bit of heat to crack
open the seeds and wait see what shoots through…

My words move on this screen in the company of a breastplate featuring the name of ‘Billy Hippie—King of Minnon’. The object sits currently in the National Historical Collection, which is the official name of the primary collection of the National Museum of Australia (NMA). According to its public facing record (accessed via the NMA’s online collection database), this breastplate is part of the collection of Edmund Milne (1861-1917), an avid collector of Indigenous artefacts in the early 1880s. In the course of his work as inspector with New South Wales Railways, Milne engaged widely with tracks and pathways across country, and was brought into contact with many people, including Aboriginal people and others who had access to land, authority and power.⁸ His collection at the NMA contains many breastplates like these as well as other cultural objects. Such is the size and significance of Milne’s collection within the NMA, that the Museum’s website features details of Milne’s collecting endeavour, commenting specifically on the way that he used his position to entitle access to Aboriginal
cultural material.

In his travels and using his networks he was able to acquire artefacts of Aboriginal interest and to document some of the history of those artefacts. He kept scrapbooks and albums of photographs to supplement his collections. What started as a childhood hobby for Milne became an all-consuming passion
and in his lifetime he amassed a huge private collection of Aboriginal artefacts.⁹

Milne displayed his collection first in his home and then bequeathed
the collection to the ‘First federal museum’ to be opened in the nation’s capital. This bequest eventually saw the collection head to the Australian Institute of Anatomy (AIA) in Canberra (the site of the current National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra). It remained there until the collection was transferred to the NMA in 1985.¹⁰

Long-standing curator with the NMA and previously of the AIA,
David Kaus, writes of Milne’s collection activities in detail.¹¹ Citing
Milne’s unpublished ‘Notes on the Australian Aborigine’, Kaus points to the frustration Milne felt at what he perceived to be declining access
to ‘genuine artifacts’, revealing something of the intent and experience
that created this collection.

The shrinkage of [the South Eastern Australian] clans has been painfully, appallingly rapid, and has been accompanied by an equally surprisingly [sic] disappearance of genuine tribal relics; this hampering the student of to day [sic] in a marked degree.¹²

It seems clear that Milne attributed some value to the objects in his collection because he believed that ‘genuine tribal objects’ were under significant threat. This anthropological imperative—albeit amateur (as Kaus notes)—is firmly present in Milne’s collection, made evident through his concern for science and for students studying Aboriginal cultures. We can thus consider a kind of urgency at play within his collecting work at least in accordance with Milne’s own rationale,
and supported at the time by an Australia-wide project of
‘salvage ethnography’.¹³

With the significance of this breastplate now known, it is worth interrogating the collection record further, paying particular attention to the way that the object’s value has been ascribed and represented.
It is here that we can apply a ‘cool burn’.

Let’s look again.

This object record clearly directs value to Milne as the collector. It positions the object as deriving value from historical context in which ethnographic items were deemed significant for what they might preserve of Aboriginal culture for the scientific record. But who
was Billy Hippie?

Often, pastoral holdings and stations provide the geographical
reference on breastplates of this nature, indicating a vicinity within which the named person held authority.¹⁴ The Queensland Government’s register of Pastoral Holdings 1863-1880 does not recognise one ‘Minnon’ station, but does, however, list ‘Minnoon’, a run on the much larger pastoral holding ‘Cubbie Station’.¹⁵ This correlates with an area of land under the longstanding stewardship of Euahlayi or Yuwaalaraay people (henceforth referred to as Yuwaalaraay). Yuwaalaraay Country is located 600 kilometres directly inland from the eastern-most point of the continent. This area is situated within an important network of tributaries which deliver a significant flow of water from the north which is then distributed via the network and arterial rivers across
the expansive south-east of the continent. The significance of this site
to the Yuwaalaraay people is crucial. It is the life source of Country.

Large-scale permanent fish traps border Yuwaalaraay country on its south-western side and a large ceremonial site of the Narran Lakes lies centrally. Dharriwaa, as this ceremonial site is known, is the home to one of Australia’s significant Ramsar listed wetland systems.¹⁶ It is a breeding ground for migratory birds and one of the largest shell middens in New South Wales. The site itself hosts ‘numerous Aboriginal site complexes in the area including shell middens, shell mounds, hearth sites, significant silcrete quarries, artefact scatters and sacred trees.’¹⁷ This region is intensely well-resourced and has been for hundreds of generations. I would like to invite you, the attuner, to consider the kind of governance and social systems required to successfully manage and maintain relationships between people of this region—and with outsiders—for the extensive trading network that extend well beyond the boundaries and resources of Yuwaalaraay country. Such social organisation and activity are evident not only in the archaeological record of this place, but also
in the systems of life that continue their connections to place. What this means is that governance of resources is, and always has been, very important here.

In her 1905 ethnography ‘The Euahlayi Tribe’, K. Langloh Parker describes Yuwaalaraay country as being split into four matrimonial classes, ‘Ipai, Kumbo, Murri, and Kubbi’.¹⁸ It is possible that Billy Hippie takes his name from his ‘Ipai’ clan group. In response to the extensive NMA collection of breastplates, further research was conducted by linguist Jakelin Troy, a cataloguing project that resulted in a publication, ‘King Plates: A history of Aboriginal Gorgets.’¹⁹ This comprehensive catalogue offers further detail about individual breastplates, including Billy Hippie’s, from Troy’s investigations of historical records.

Troy cites a letter from ‘AG Sheridan’²⁰ based at the Angledool
Police Station (dated 1911), who corresponded personally with Milne, presumably seeking more information about this specific breastplate.
It seems that Sheridan sought answers from the people of the town.

[F]rom inquiries made by me from some of the Old Aboriginals about Angledool, I have ascertained that some years ago, there was a Station called Minnon situated about 40 miles from Angledool in Q’land, and owned by a Gentleman named Dugal Cameron, who left the District over 40 years ago [c1871]. At this place there was a large crowd of Aborigine’s [sic] and one of the first Kings to wear a plate known to the Aborigines around here was the chief of Minnon. His name was Hippie but known to them by the Christian name of Bernie Hippie [sic]. I have no doubt that Hippie was the original owner of the plate now in your possession, as there was only one King of Minnon. This place
is now known as Cubbie Station, and owned by the Australian Pastoral Coy.

In this correspondence, Sheridan directly draws the connection of ‘Bernie Hippie’ as the ‘King Billy Hippie of Minnon Station.’ He goes further to say:

From what I can learn King Hippie was a very big man, and a good Athlete, and died on Woolerina station about 30 years ago [c1881] after a long illness. I obtained this information from an Aboriginal about 80 years of age. Trusting that this information will make this plate more interesting.²¹

From this account, the breastplate becomes personal. The individual, whose name and likeness was etched into history, now has a presence
in the record.

Troy goes on to offer a visual analysis of the breastplate itself, providing further social context.

The gorget was a well-crafted and expensive item and the person who gave it to Billy Hippie, probably Dugald Cameron, must have intended the gorget to have considerable impact both on Billy and anyone else who saw it. The image on Billy’s gorget is a grazier’s idealised representation of an Aboriginal stockworker, well dressed, wielding a stockwhip and mounted on a fine horse. However the picture may have not been far from the truth as
it is consistent with a contemporary account from Southern Queensland. Billy Hippie may even have been carrying a whip
and his horse wearing a bridle of his own making.²²

Troy’s final analysis, including the materiality of the breastplate is especially worth noting.

This is the finest gorget in the Museum’s collection… As a final luxury the brass gorget and chain were silver plated after the manner of military gorgets.²³

By these accounts Billy Hippie was a strong, athletic and gifted stockman. He was remembered well after his passing by those in his community and engendered care, eminence and consideration in the objects and relationships exchanged with him. He was clearly a man
of authority, strength and knowledge.

The Track to Minnoon

After satisfyingly ascertaining that the ‘Minnon’ on the breastplate was on Yuwaalaraay country, it was not until much later (and by coincidence) that I was to discover much more about this place, Minnoon. It was the owner of the property, Dugald Cameron, who led me there.

Dugald Cameron (1837-1927) was born in Maitland, New South
Wales, and was a well-respected landowner who successfully owned
and operated several properties across the region from the mid-1800s well into the 1920s. Most of his time was spent in southern Queensland.
It is fair to say that Cameron and his wife bore witness to great social, cultural and ecological change in this region. The 1923 publication
‘The History of Queensland: Its People and Industries’ notes that ‘Mr. Cameron may be said to have been the pioneer of pioneers in this portion of the State.’²⁴ Fortunately, a person of Cameron’s standing generated high interest, and his activities were well recorded in newspapers of the time. It is the report in the Balonne Beacon of the Cameron’s golden wedding anniversary in 1912 that intriguingly leads
us to know more about his relationships with Aboriginal people.

A chat with either Mr. or Mrs Cameron about the country
as it was when they first saw it, when the blacks were fierce
and treacherous, and a white woman a curiosity, is both interesting and entertaining.²⁵

But it is not until one probes specifically into records reporting on Aboriginal people directly (rather than through reports on social or pastoral activities alone) where accounts of the specific relationship between Cameron and Hippie emerges. In a column named ‘Queensland Aborigines’ written by Hanley Sneed in The Queenslander newspaper dated 1 November 1873, Minnoon, Cameron and Hippie are
mentioned together.

Mr D. Cameron, of Minnoon, twenty miles from Curriwillinghi, works his station entirely with native black labor [sic], and pays liberally, and they do their work honestly and well. On Mr Cameron going to Sydney in or about May last he left his station in charge of his black boy “Barney,” and he took care of the cattle as well as Mr Cameron would have done himself. This was Mr Cameron's own statement to me. There are also others who employ blacks on their stations —Mr. T. Ferry, of Nee Nee; Mr B. Skuthorpe, of Cubbie, on the Culgoa, and others. From personal observation, I am quite convinced that if properly treated they can be made available for any station work, and can perform it quite or almost as white men. – Yours, &c.,Hanley Sneed, Brisbane, October 24.²⁶

So revealing is this account of Cameron and Hippie’s relationship, as
one of trust and endearment, that we are urged to see the breastplate
as a genuine exchange of recognition. The imagery of a confident stockman, paired with a shared notion of ‘care’ of the cattle suggests that their relationship was important and enduring.

We may wonder now about the change that Hippie himself was witnessing from multiple fronts. Only nine years after Sneed’s account above, Hippie passed away. Dugald Cameron did leave the region around 1871—as Sheridan notes in his letter—but he was to return. In 1882, the Camerons bought the station ‘Camlet’ and they remained there until Dugald’s passing in 1927.²⁷ Suggesting that the Camerons and Hippie himself bore witness to great change is a natural conclusion to draw. How these individuals were engaged with this change—and in
Cameron’s case, directing it—is another thing again.

The imagery of Hippie skilfully riding his horse over a felled tree in pursuit of cattle brings in to sharp relief a sense of ecological change
as it is occurring. While the imagery is a romanticised notion of the stockman’s work, the actions of cattle mustering on country, including the movement of cattle over freshwater country, cattle management by horse as well as a degree of land clearing, offers a realistic sense of its impact. This activity would have been one of the earlier, significant and specific ecological impacts on Yuwaalaraay country. Others to follow became systematised and government-directed.

The Western Star and Roma Advertiser dated 5 September 1903
also detailed the annual meeting of the St. George Marsupial Board.²⁸ Queensland’s Marsupial Destruction Act operated in Queensland from 1877 to 1930.²⁹ This act entitled landowners to destroy species considered ‘pests’ as they risked impacting the significant export value of cattle and sheep to the state of Queensland.³⁰ As the 1903 article initially states, by the time the act was replaced by the successive Grazing Districts Improvements Act of 1930,

[O]ver 27 million animals (mostly kangaroos, wallaroos, wallabies, pademelons (small wallabies), kangaroo rats, bandicoots, dingoes and foxes had been destroyed at a cost of £1,187,000 paid as bonuses (bounties) on their scalps.³¹

The September 1903 annual meeting of the St. George branch of the board lists ‘Dugald Cameron, Camlet’ as an ‘appointed receiver’ of funds from this program, alongside fifteen others from the region. The article reports 33,368 marsupials having been destroyed alongside an additional 940 dingoes. The meeting discussed fixing rates and bonuses for each animal destroyed, as well as the recommendation to include ‘eaglehawk claws…per pair.’³² Systematised targeting of the animals of the region represents a mode of ecological change that held devastating effects
on species across Australia. In a well-known case, such a program
in Tasmania eventually brought about extinction. By the mid-20^th century, the ecological dynamic of the region had been altered
beyond recognition. Ecological change continues to this day,
perhaps directed differently.

One may also wonder about the extent of the care and consideration afforded to Hippie by Cameron during their close relationship. Here we have Cameron clearly engaging in the systematic eradication of native animals, many of which would have held deep significance—even kin
or totemic relationships—to Bernie Hippie.

Introducing Contemporary Contexts

As noted in Sheridan’s account—and correlated with the public
record—the ‘Minnon’ (Minnoon) mentioned on the breastplate is now incorporated by the larger property, Cubbie station. Today, Cubbie Station claims the distinction of being the largest irrigated property in the southern hemisphere.³³ Its 93,000 hectares grow irrigated cotton and wheat, sorghum, sunflowers and chickpeas. The property was converted from a grazing business in 1983. To irrigate this vast expanse of land, the station has a complex infrastructure of water storage dams that harvests river flows and ground water from flood plains.³⁴ The significant ecological impact of this industrial-scale water extraction/harvesting has been much discussed in public discourse and formal studies, not least because of the changing ownership of land and water from domestic to international companies and back again.³⁵

There are multiple compelling stories of power entangled within the journey of this breastplate. At the heart of it however, and absent in the breastplate’s contemporary narrative within the museum, is Country itself, expressive and powerful. Also hidden is the authority of the people who enacted its custodianship and governance well before the dams were built and the trees were felled.

In the first instance, we may wish to reconsider how we might craft
the curatorial ‘description’ of the breastplate. In doing this, we are compelled to recognise the individual referenced in the breastplate as someone who held high authority within this place. We are also invited to consider how to express the significance of the Country as one of the most resource rich parcels of land in Australia, both historically and today. A new picture emerges.

‘Country’ is an Indigenous concept of belonging. It not only takes in
the physicality of land and life forms, but it includes all the elements
and processes within it—and unique to it. The philosophy which underpins the concept of Country is the belief that everything is connected. To ‘know’ Country, is to not only recognise that all
elements are connected, but to understand how.

Implied within the concept of Country is the self; self and Country
are inseparable. The pulsing relationships between and amongst oneself and all the other entities within the system give rise to the collective—
a vision of the whole.

The images of Cubbie Station’s vast and expansive above-ground water holdings are astonishing (and easy to find online). It is hard to consider Country as a dynamic and operational system here. The normalisation
of large-scale industrial agriculture and its ecological impact is brought into sharp relief when we combine these concepts of ‘Country’ and ‘Cubbie’. The breastplate leads us here.

Billy Hippie’s breastplate offers us a way to tell contemporary environmental stories that include a history of Indigenous environmental knowledge, stewardship and authority. Hippie brings to the fore a range of concerns that have implications for us all, not only
his Yuwaalaraay people. Ironically, I am compelled by a similar sense of urgency and loss as Milne, the breastplate’s original collector. This ecological system is under intense and dramatic pressure. This change
is not driven by Cubbie Station alone, but by the extensive and sustained operation of industrial-scale agriculture across the region and embedded settler cultural practices of privileging some species over others, with often destructive intent. Diminished and halted river flows will inevitably trigger an ecological collapse much broader than the
once richly watered floodplains of Yuwaalaraay Country.

Breastplates as new objects

Breastplates are often derided as objects of colonial domination and displacement.³⁶ More so, their impact is tightly focused on the individual Aboriginal recipient; a view literally perpetuated by the photographic archive of Aboriginal people wearing them. We have come to read objects like breastplates in a certain way, describe them in particular detail, and dislocate them not only from their historical contexts but
also from their contemporary ones.

The dominant narratives around breastplates do not allow for a broader kind of reading. Nor do they engage with our present realities, apart from stoking the smouldering embers of white guilt and amplifying black disempowerment (again). By cool burning this dominant narrative away, and returning back to the Country that sits underneath this object (and the context of this Country today), I intend to make these breastplates speak meaningfully to contemporary situations. I can also do my bit to restore dignity and authority to Billy/Bernie Hippie, one of my Countrymen who displayed a courage to lead and represent his people through complex and enormous change in a way that no government
or authority has managed to achieve since.

It is possible to see breastplates as more than just objects that
represent dispossession and colonial domination. Beyond their colonial constraints, these objects can present new associations. By allowing new readings of objects like this to make their way further on to display and exhibition, we leverage another power of museums—to communicate ideas, generate curiosity, and cross time and space boundaries to think of the experiences of others. These narratives do not need to usurp
the traditional colonial narratives, these stories can co-exist (and possibly converge).

Clearing the overgrowth: Research Practice

Developing a practice around cool burning collections has led me into trouble. I have been reprimanded by a fair share of community members (including Elders), who worry that this practice might takes the focus off the ongoing violence of colonial legacies. Moreover, in the institutions where I work and conduct research, this regenerative approach to research has triggered heated discussions with curators and stoked panic in collection staff. I think this fear is because we base much of who we are as a nation on the records and accounts of those who have gone before us. Simply put, pre-existing settler-colonial narratives are fragile in an unreconciled nation.

Unpicking these notions, even for those who have been relegated
by history’s red pen and the hands that hold them, involves a reconsideration of who we are and how we relate to one another.
I am refining my practice as a researcher and museum ethnographer, and it has started to characterise my work.³⁷

This way of working, and the green shoots it seeks to enable, engages directly with the deep emotive power in collections. There has certainly been tears, anger and exasperation, but this practice has also brought about joy and led to new insights and ideas. It has revealed actions and events not previously known, some of these disturbing, others life-affirming. This is regenerative museum practice. Beautifully, it has validated my own knowledges of Country and encouraged me to deepen these. I have evolved my practice to include working with wood, fibre, making string, knots, weaving and netting. I grow beefwood, kurrajong, wilga and lomandra (all in the cool climate of Canberra) to better understand their material dimensions, what water they need, how they cast shade. This has led me to other kinds of collections—natural history, herbarium, and ethnobotany collections. My kin are in all of these places. I incorporate walking every day, to think about tracks, and I participate in literal cool burning to regenerate Country. I put myself in positions where I translate these learnings out of specialist worlds to visitors,
in classrooms to school children, and to family.

Considering cool burning as a useful metaphor for working in museum collections did not come about purely through my own experience as an Indigenous cultural practitioner and researcher. The idea was incubated by stepping out of Australian museums and into global collections, while always directed by an intent to pursue and support strong cultural futures in Aboriginal worlds.³⁸ From the outside there is a different vantage point. From the outside, I can see the value and significance of being a member of one of the oldest, living, continuous cultures on the planet—and the impact is readily reflected back to me by colleagues outside of Australia. It has been through their interest and willingness
to know more that I felt compelled to develop my practice in this way.
It was also through a shared exasperation of our collective task.

I have cast a wellbeing framework around my practice and continue to investigate how best to language and translate it. I no longer strive for cultural safety in my work with museums, I seek out places that can offer cultural strength. Working within and bound to a framework of redress is a tiring and diminishing task and is often highly emotional. This is
hard for any workplace.

Reading the collections landscape as a fire practitioner does, we can
see the overgrowth. We are also better equipped to get a sense of the assumptions and preconceptions that are at play and perhaps directing our focus in particular directions (within the cool burning metaphor, this would be described as ‘unhealthy’ or ‘sick’ country). Cool burning these enforces a crossroad, but it does not do it lightly. The gravity of what is at stake does not only belong to the ‘other’ as it once did with these collections, but it now belongs to the ‘us’. It is not the only solution, but one I am happy to offer up as having value, as we continue this work
into the future.

Cool BurningThe Collection:

Collections and their archive: entangled and overgrown