British Museum doesn’t shy from its ownership of many controversial artefacts in this wonderful exploration of Indigenous Australian tragedy and triumphPreservation or plunder? The battle over the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian showWhat is civilisation? Westerners tend to think it has something to do with Greek statues and classical music. No wonder they failed to recognise it when they saw it in the great southern continent that James Cook claimed as a British possession in 1770. The expressions of civilisation that could be clearly seen all over Australia were so different and so unfamiliar that Aboriginal culture was denied to even exist. No people has been quite so consistently disparaged by Europeans as Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, whose tragic story is movingly told in this thought-provoking exhibition. It is savagely ironic that every bit of the continent Cook took for an un-owned wilderness was mapped by dreamings Continue reading...
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