Museum to return sacred stone to Australia
Updated
The Seattle Art Museum is giving back a small, but sacred stone which was once used in ceremonies by central Australian Aboriginal men.
Historians in Australia are hoping more museums follow Seattle's example.
Presenter: Ashley Hall
Speakers: Dr Michael Pickering, Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum of Australia; Pam McClusky, curator of African and Oceanic Art at the National Museum of Australia
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HALL: The stone in question is so sacred, that custom demands it shouldn't be seen by uninitiated men, women or children.
Even describing it is a delicate operation.
PICKERING: It's called a churinga, that's the name which is in common public use, so it's not an offence to say it. It has a very smooth surface but has particular designs on it that are sacred and that combination of sacred design and the sacredness of the stone itself, make it highly significant.
HALL: Dr Michael Pickering is the Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program at the National Museum of Australia.
PICKERING: These particular sorts of sacred objects were very attractive to collectors but they look for all the world like an excellent piece of art work and carved stone. We can't be sure of exactly how many are out there. There are certainly several thousand held in Australian museum collections and there's no reason not to expect that there'd been thousands, perhaps tens of thousands held in overseas collections.
HALL: So how did an item of such cultural significance end up in the Seattle Art Museum in the first place?
Pam McClusky is the museum's curator of African and Oceanic Art.
MCCLUSKY: It was purchased by the museum's director in 1971.
HALL: So purchased; from whom? What was the nature of that transaction?
MCCLUSKY: It was purchased by Dr Fuller, this director from a dealer in Melbourne who sent it with basically a kind of generic title of 'stone from Australia' and no provenance or documentation as to where it had come from.
HALL: It sat, largely forgotten, in a store room until recently, when some visiting Australians pointed out the stone's significance.
MCCLUSKY: I think almost all Australian museums have these off view and have gone through you know, cleaning of their conscious to recognise that many of them were collected under the worst of circumstances.
HALL: US law requires museums to re-assess the provenance of culturally important artefacts, but the decision to repatriate this item still generated debate.
MCCLUSKY: Because some people do not subscribe to taking this kind of action and feel that museums should just hold onto things forever more. And others are willing to concede that at times collecting is a mistake and there are enough artists out there who desperately want to get into museums that to hold onto something that obviously has not been well received in a museum setting is something that we're trying to be more sensitive to.
