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Five sets of ancestral remains from Australia that have been held in German museum collections since the 19th century have been handed back at a ceremony that a community representative described as a sad but “very joyful” moment.
The restitution is part of efforts by German museums and authorities to return human remains and cultural artefacts that were taken during the colonial era.
In this case, three sets of remains that had been in Berlin since 1880 were handed over along with two other sets of remains held in the north-western German city of Oldenburg, Lower Saxony. Four representatives of the Ugar Island community, part of the Torres Strait Islands, off the north-eastern tip of Australia, travelled to Berlin to honour their ancestors and accompany the remains on their journey home.
“These ancestral remains were never meant to be here,” said Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s state museums.
“They’re here because, during the colonial era and beyond, Europeans presumed to make other peoples and cultures the subject, or more often object, of their research – appropriating artefacts from cultures outside Europe on a scale that is almost unimaginable today and even desecrating the burial places of those communities in the process,” he said.
Around the turn of the 20th century, he added, museums in Berlin set up a network of scientists, travellers, traders and others to bring back cultural items from around the world, and “in racing to compete with the other major European museums, they all too often disregarded the humanity and dignity of the peoples they encountered”.
The restitution of remains from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and the State Museum for Nature and Man in Oldenburg means that Australia has now recovered 162 sets of ancestral remains from Germany, and about 1,700 other sets from around the world, said Natasha Smith, the country’s ambassador to Germany. She said the returns were “an extremely high priority” for Indigenous Australians and the government.
“It’s sad, but it’s a very joyful moment,” said Rocky Stephen, an Ugar Island representative, at the ceremony on Thursday honouring the ancestors. “This is a process of healing that’s going to happen when they return back to us.”
“No matter [if] it was nearly a 40-hour journey to travel here, because it’s been 144 years they have been missed back at their home,” he said.
Parzinger said museums in Berlin aimed to do “everything we can to make the repatriation possible” of remains whose countries and communities of origin could be identified and wanted to bring them home.
Governments and museums in Europe and North America have increasingly sought to resolve ownership disputes over objects that were looted during the colonial era.
In 2022, for example, Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement paving the way for the return of hundreds of artefacts known as the Benin bronzes taken from Benin City – now in Nigeria – by a British colonial expedition more than 120 years ago.
