Innes, Tahnee (2025) Wild Artefacts at Two Australian Museums. The Australian Journal of Anthropology. (In Press)

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Abstract

Indigenous communities and Australian state museums appear to have settled into a truce that might best be described by Hennessy et al’s (2013) notion of a ‘philosophy of repatriation’. This means that, after failed repatriation arguments, distance remains at the heart of the dynamic between descendant communities and their museum-stored artefacts. In the following paper, I present two stories of North Queensland Indigenous people who visited their rainforest artefacts in state museums. I conceptualise ancestralised objects as wild artefacts, where ‘wild’ is invoked in two related senses. Primarily, artefacts are like wild country: unvisited and unstable. Moreover, they are wild as in the Aboriginal English sense of a ‘wild’: angry at an injustice and potentially dangerous. Artefacts might simply remain wild. Yet if North Queensland artefacts can be kept closer to country, in regional museums, this would assist the descendant community to achieve the contact and care that could ameliorate wild artefacts.

Item ID:	84694
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1757-6547
Copyright Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). The Australian Journal of Anthropology published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Australian Anthropological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Sensitivity Note:	Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned the following may contain images of deceased persons.
Date Deposited:	11 Aug 2025 22:44
FoR Codes:	44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4401 Anthropology > 440107 Social and cultural anthropology @ 50% 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4302 Heritage, archive and museum studies > 430202 Critical heritage, museum and archive studies @ 25% 45 INDIGENOUS STUDIES > 4501 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, language and history > 450114 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander repatriation @ 25%
SEO Codes:	21 INDIGENOUS > 2104 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture > 210407 Conserving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture @ 70% 21 INDIGENOUS > 2104 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and culture > 210401 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artefacts @ 30%
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