People and Plants Workshop 2: Western Australia

The second in person workshop of the People and Plants project took place on 7th November in Edinburgh. The workshop focussed on collections from Western Australia collected by Emile Clement, and brought together speakers from the Australian Tropical Herbarium, National Museums Scotland, University of Western Australia and Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation. 

In this first of two blogs about the workshop, Kathleen Lawther discusses her experience of the day:

Kerry Churnside and Kevin Guiness in conversation with Kate Oosterhof. Photo by Ali Clark, 2022

I was able to join the first People and Plants workshop at the Powell-Cotton Museum as I was just beginning my own collections research project there. This time I was attending as a new doctoral student, having just started a PhD with the University of Leicester. My research project looks at connecting data from different museums as part of the Museum Data Service, so I approached this workshop from a collections data point of view. I have worked with more than one museum that has items collected by Clement, and so I was interested in how museums could share information relating to collections with shared provenance. From Ali Clark I learnt that the majority of Australian Aboriginal material from Western Australia in National Museums Scotland and other UK regional museums came from Clement. This means that his collecting has become a proxy for Australian Aboriginal material in many  museums. Where museums are displaying their collections as representative of the vastness of ‘Australia’, in fact most of these items came from one specific area and were mediated by the collecting of one man. 

While this aspect of the history of collections is revealing about museums, the great thing about these workshops is having the opportunity to hear directly from people with a cultural connection to the collections and the land from which they originate. My museum-centric perspective on collections information was shifted by hearing from the other speakers. 

Gerry Turpin from the Australian Tropical Herbarium described how part of his role at the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre (TIEC) is to provide assistance in recording and preserving Indigenous Biocultural Knowledge (IBK). This includes sharing information that the herbarium has about collections back to local language groups - Indigenous names for plants are of particular interest because of the loss of Indigenous languages. He also offers training around intellectual property, protocols and agreements, and legislation to help people understand and advocate for their rights. 

From a data management perspective, I was interested to hear about TIEC’s use of the Miromaa database, which has a cost for institutions to use, but is free for indigenous people to use. It is favoured over more sophisticated systems because it is easy to use and because each database is standalone. While in museums conversations are about how to connect and share data, the Aboriginal groups who work with TIEC prefer that these records are not online because of sensitivity around sharing data and consent. These concerns, which are based on the historic and ongoing exploitation of indigenous knowledge, must be considered when museums which hold collections dating from the colonial period are working on data sharing initiatives. 

In the second part of the day we heard from Kerry Churnside, Kevin Guiness and Kate Oosterhof of the Ngarluma Yindjibarndi Foundation, and had the opportunity to see some of the objects. I appreciated the gestures that NMS staff made towards acknowledging Kerry and Kevin as having ownership over the collections - for example participants were asked to seek permission from them, rather than museum staff, before photographing any objects. 

Kevin Guiness discusses Yindjibarndi spearthrowers with the group. Photo by Ali Clark, 2022.

Kerry and Kevin explained some of the cultural protocols in their communities which museums need to understand when approaching Indigenous groups to work with collections. For example Kerry explained that she and Kevin are considered senior in the community but are not elders. The long distance travel involved in this project made it difficult for elders to participate. She also explained how the Western Australian Museum had suggested training young people in the community as curators to work with the collections, but this was inappropriate because it would not have been culturally safe for a more junior or less experienced person to engage with the collections. Museums need to know this to respect cultural safety and to make it safe to engage with the collections. 

This made me reflect on several aspects of museum work. Firstly the need for large and diverse teams of people to work with collections. People with cultural knowledge (in this case people with appropriate cultural seniority, and both men and women) and people with knowledge of museum systems and history need to work together. Secondly, the way we in museums expect to be able to know and record everything about an object, or collection, and have the ambition to share this knowledge as widely as possible. We think it is our right to know everything, when in other cultures, sometimes the ones from which the collections originate, this is not the case. Of course in the sector there is an awareness of cultural protocols, and I was aware of some of these issues before the workshop, but there is a difference between reading a summary in a book or guidance document (probably written by a non-indigenous person) and having the opportunity to hear directly about people’s experiences and to discuss it in a group of people with diverse connections to the collections. Finally, I reflected on safety and museums. The language of ‘safe spaces’ has become commonplace in museums, and this was reflected in some of the sessions that I attended at the Museums Association conference, also held in Edinburgh that week, so it was a subject that was on my mind. Museums need to do more than assert that they are safe spaces. They need to listen to people when they explain what will make engaging with museums and collections safe(r) for them and follow through with the action required to change their practice accordingly.