ABSTRACT
Song and dance were among the principal methods of transmitting cultural knowledge in the fundamentally oral societies of Indigenous Australia. As the breadth of song traditions has greatly diminished over the past 200 years, recordings of these performances now form a significant resource of intangible cultural heritage for Australia’s Indigenous people. This chapter reflects upon the digital return of twentieth-century film and audio recordings of Anmatyerr ceremonial performance to their communities in Central Australia between 2012 and 2022 and illustrates some of the complex responses that ensued. Focusing solely on the recirculation of films and audio recordings of male ceremonial performances made by the anthropologist/linguist Theodor George Heinrich (T. G. H.) Strehlow in the mid-twentieth century, this chapter reveals how the return of these materials has produced considerable interest but also anxieties and ambivalences that have made the re-integration of these recordings into present cultural practice challenging. The collaborative interrogations and returns of the Strehlow collection after a decade have also led to what I describe as ‘new collecting’, a collaborative, Indigenous-led collecting practice made in response to the return of older collections. Understanding these complex experiences and reasons for these novel collecting practices is critically important for thinking about the future of museums as an intercultural domain.
