Cultural artefacts returned to southern Western Australia after centuries abroad

Cultural artifacts spanning centuries have returned to Western Australia's southern coast, finding a new home in the "Kalyagul: Connections to Menang Country" exhibition at the Museum of the Great Southern in Albany. The exhibition aims to share invaluable knowledge with residents and visitors alike.

The Menang word "kalyagul," meaning always, ever, continuing, is central to the exhibition and its accompanying project, "Entangled Knowledges: Kaartdijin, Science and History in the Robert Neill Collection." This initiative merges the wisdom of Menang elders with that of historians and scientists.

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What's so exciting about those fish skins is that they have on every fish they've got a label which has the Menang name, very much in bold kind of writing which really kind of dominates the label and what knowledge was contained on that label is really from the Menang people who caught the fish.

In the 1840s, Robert Neill, a commissariat officer in Albany, created watercolor drawings of local fish, building on his connections with the Menang people who shared their "kaartdijin" (knowledge). These items were later sent to the United Kingdom. Professor Tiffany Shellam of Deakin University recounted the discovery of fish scales on drawings at the London Natural History Museum, which led to an investigation at the National Museum of Scotland.

"What's so exciting about those fish skins is that they have on every fish they've got a label which has the Menang name, very much in bold kind of writing which really kind of dominates the label and what knowledge was contained on that label is really from the Menang people who caught the fish," Shellam said.

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These kind of cases are quite rare. Colonisers and other visitors to our place would often come here, extract the knowledge, claim it as their own, and send it off to museums and universities around the world. Whereas this occasion, Robert Neill actually acknowledged us and acknowledged our elders and wrote down the names of the people who speared the fishes as well, so it's been a wonderful archive for us to explore.

Shona Coyne, a senior curator and manager of repatriation and community engagement at the National Museum of Australia and lead curator of the exhibition, expressed joy at this repatriation. "These kind of cases are quite rare," she noted. "Colonisers and other visitors to our place would often come here, extract the knowledge, claim it as their own, and send it off to museums and universities around the world." Coyne highlighted that Neill's acknowledgment of Menang elders and the individuals who speared the fish makes this a "wonderful archive" for exploration.

Menang man Larry Blight, who traveled to the UK to examine the collections, described the process of deciphering ancient Menang language with the team's knowledge. "We were telling them the ones that we knew, we were giving them their local Indigenous names and the usages as we," he stated, referring to both fish and plants found in the collection.

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We were telling them the ones that we knew, we were giving them their local Indigenous names and the usages as we.