Boomerangs and other cultural artefacts currently housed at Aberdeen’s Marischal Museum are today being studied by experts from Australia as part of a new pilot project.
Gary Pappin and Cressida Fforde are visiting the University’s Marischal Museum on behalf on Indigenous communities in
Marischal Museum is the only Scottish museum to be included in a pilot project, called eMob, which is developing an online guide to Indigenous Australian cultural heritage housed in museums overseas. A later phase will include material from many other
The online guide aims to assist participating Indigenous nations in the Murray and Lower Darling Rivers area to locate cultural heritage housed overseas, and to help to foster direct links between the source communities and museum curators.
The University’s Australian collection includes a wide variety of Indigenous objects, including boomerangs, bags and tools, alongside objects used by European settlers.
Gary Pappin, a member of the Mutthi Mutthi nation, said: “It is a privilege and honour to view cultural material in Aberdeen on behalf of the Indigenous nations participating in eMob.”
And his colleague, Cressida Fforde, added: “These visits are an integral part of the eMob process and we are very encouraged by the support received from participating museums such as the University of Aberdeen.”
Neil Curtis, Senior Curator at Marischal Museum, said: ‘I am very pleased that items in the museum collection will now become better known in the area from which they were collected a century or more ago. I also hope that this visit will increase our understanding of the collections so that we can care for them and use them more appropriately.”
The pilot project is funded by the Murray and Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations Confederation, the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Studies and the World Archaeological Congress.