ABSTRACT
Museums in Australia have been actively involved in reconciliation since the late 1970s, long before its recognition as a formal political movement. In 1978 the UNESCO regional seminar, Preserving Indigenous Cultures: A New Role for Museums, was the first time museums and Indigenous people1 sat down together as equals to talk about obligations and processes: the obligations of museums to respect Indigenous people’s rights to their cultural heritage and addressing this within the practices of museums at the time.2 Since then there have been immense changes in how museums have dealt with these issues, resulting in new relationships forged between Australian museums and Indigenous peoples in response to both internal and external political and cultural forces. This has produced a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), where ‘collective learning results in practices that reflect both the pursuit of enterprises and attendant social relations. These practices are thus the property of a kind of community created over time by the sustained pursuit of shared enterprise’ (Wenger 1998: 45). Museums in Australia and the Indigenous communities that they work with have formed a community of practice: a learning community sharing common goals and developing sets of practices within a social relationship built over time, a community that continues to grow and shape its future.
