ABSTRACT
Over the past several years there have been major developments in international repatriation debates and activities regarding indigenous human remains. As a result, many museums, Australian and British in particular, but also mainland European and American, large and small, now find themselves either implicitly or explicitly, voluntarily or compulsorily, involved in complex domestic and international repatriation exercises. However, because of the delicate professional, cultural, national and international ‘politics’ of the repatriation debate, and a prevailing popular belief that repatriation is being forced on institutions, there is still a tendency for many institutions, their departments, and the staff not directly involved in the activity, to disassociate themselves from the issues, and from those active in the area. As a result, repatriation activity is often treated as an isolated event to be contained and marginalised – even spoken about in hushed voices. It is deemed to occupy isolated individuals who are left to get on with their work of collection destruction in private. Other professionals, both those within, and those outside, the institution, criticise participants or, at best, turn a blind eye to the activity thanking the heavens that their collections are safe. Indeed, Rudyard Kipling’s (n.d.) ‘Smuggler’s Song’ comes to mind:
If You wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet, Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street, Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie. Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!
