30 Indigenous artifacts – including spears kept in a British museum since 1881 – have been returned to the Larrakia community. As attitudes towards colonisation and rightful ownership continue to shift, an increasing number of UK museums are repatriating items to where they originated. [1280×720]
by Party_Judgment5780
8 Comments
More info:
[https://youtu.be/HOeCbBesK8w](https://youtu.be/HOeCbBesK8w)
[https://nit.com.au/08-09-2025/20127/cultural-treasures-returned-to-larrakia-people-from-british-museum](https://nit.com.au/08-09-2025/20127/cultural-treasures-returned-to-larrakia-people-from-british-museum)
Just chiming in to recommend the podcast “Stuff the British Stole” by Australian radio.
Best time to go to the museum is now then.
Let’s hope it stays in a museum in their location and doesn’t end up in private collections.
Seems to me “returning only” isn’t enough. A huge amount of money has been made from those artifacts through 100s of years. Yes, they have been kept safe too, but when people take others’ belongings the court doesn’t order return only. Some compensation, … come with their verdict too.
I believe this should be the case for artifacts too.
Why did they use stone-age weapons just 150 years ago?
The article is vague, were these new when they were collected? If so, I don’t think they should be returned since they’re effectively a display of modern tools rather than culturally significant historic artifacts.
If they were historic artifacts when collected I think they should be returned.
Something that troubles me about this whole “return it to the people” movement is that sometimes it is obvious that the artifact belonged to, and was taken from, “the people.”
But in other cases this is what we would call private property. The people who these spears belonged to in 1881 are very dead.
We should probably say that the British Museum gave the spears to the Larrakia Development Corporation, because the original owners are not involved. If I kill you and take your hunting rifle, then give it to the state government to do with as they will, your family are probably not going to feel like it has been “returned.”
It just feels very racist/colonial to suggest that all of these people are basically interchangeable.
“We finally returned those artifacts we stole from the Larrakia.”
“Oh, how did you track down the people they rightfully belong to?”
“Oh, we didn’t. We just gave them to some other random Larrakia. They’re all basically the same to us.”