David Gaimster, Engaging with communities of origin, Museums Association, 10 April 2025

David Gaimster, who is returning to the UK museum sector after eight years working in Australasia, reflects on repatriation, restitution and his experiences working with Indigenous communities.

I am writing this as I make final preparations to return to the UK after eight years as director of two of the largest collecting institutions in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia – the Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland War Memorial Museum), and the South Australian Museum.

Having worked in UK museums holding artefacts and ancestral remains acquired and removed from source communities around the globe, one of my motivations in moving to Australasia in 2017 was the opportunity to observe, learn and engage directly with communities of origin.

In preparation for my return, I have been reading the Museums Association’s Supporting Decolonisation in Museums guidance, which aims to empower more people to take action to address the legacy of British colonialism. This prompted me to share some observations on the decolonisation of museums in Aoteraoa and Australia while they are still fresh in my mind.

Both countries have seen significant advances in the decolonisation and even “indigenisation” of collecting institutions, enabling wider access and stronger, more authentic engagement with the First Nations communities they serve, including developing more rigorous practice in community participation, co-production, co-governance and co-management.

Only a few years ago the Māori scholar Moana Jackson revealed the low level of trust that public museums in Australasia were held in by Indigenous communities when he observed that “museums are dangerous places because they control the storytelling”.

In 2018 the Australian Museums and Galleries Association published its 10-year Indigenous Roadmap, authored by Indigenous Australian lawyer Terri Janke. This set out five key elements for change, highlighting where the sector needed to improve and how it might do so:

• Reimagining representation
• Embedding Indigenous values in museum and gallery practices
• Increasing Indigenous opportunities
• Two-way caretaking of cultural material
• Connecting with Indigenous communities

During my time in Australasia, I have seen the balance of power shifting, both in how museums are governed and how they are managed.

Since 2006, under Reconciliation Australia, the lead body for reconciliation in Australia, organisations including museums and cultural institutions have developed Reconciliation Action Plans (RAPs). These measure their progress, year by year, on meaningful action to advance reconciliation.

Given their history in colonisation and unacceptable past practices in their interactions with First Nations peoples and their cultural objects, these plans assist museums to face up to their past and embed truth-telling and reconciliation in all their operations.

I was proud to write the foreword to the South Australian Museum’s 2023-25 RAP, which prioritised the building of authentic relationships with the community, elevated the First Nations Voice across the museum and created pathways for Aboriginal employment and professional advancement.

However, I should also say there are stark regional differences in the pace of change across Aotearoa and Australia, often reflecting the cultural setting and prevailing political environment.

As in the UK, the impulse to decolonise the heritage here has experienced some headwinds. In Australia, the Indigenous Voice referendum was defeated in 2023 resulting in widespread hesitancy in advancing the First Nations First agenda, while in Aotearoa we have seen the coalition government introduce legislation to modify the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the nation’s bicultural foundation. Day-to-day, museums are obliged to operate in this political battleground.

Decolonising the historical legacy

The major regional museums of Aotearoa and the state museums of Australia are almost all British imperial foundations of the mid-19th century. They formed part of the civilising apparatus of the settler colony, which was reinforced through their neoclassical or high Gothic architectural form.

Auckland War Memorial Museum was rebuilt after the first world war in commemoration of those who gave their lives for the empire (white settlers and Māori), in a monumental mausoleum of a building in the Greek Revival style.

In contrast, the two national museums of the region – Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra – are essentially late 20th-century developments, consciously rejecting their nation’s colonial foundations and embracing a more democratic architecture. Their design is more attuned to Aotearoa and Australia in the here and now, rather than Europe of the past.

As Arapata Hakiwai, co-CEO of Te Papa has put it, the museum was designed with intent to be “for the people, by the people”. This inversion of the European museum form was “a direct response to the outdated and stifling museum orthodoxy that placed Māori on the outside looking in”.

Te Papa (our place) represents a reimagining of the modern museum for a bicultural society in which Māori now make up 20% of the population. Its building is a “site of decolonisation, committed to examining and interrogating its practices and traditions to enable a more inclusive and meaningful museum practice that empowers the communities we serve” (Hakiwai).

Established museums across Aotearoa and Australia are actively reimagining themselves for a changed bicultural and multicultural reality, investing in capital transformation that enables decolonisation, authentic engagement and cooperation with the communities whose cultures they hold.

Auckland has one of the most diverse populations in the world, with 16% of its 1.6m population originating in Polynesia and the Pacific and 13% identifying as Māori.

As CEO of Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland War Memorial Museum), in 2020 I oversaw the transformation of the museum’s Te Ao Mārama South Atrium precinct into a space that provides an authentic cultural welcome to the venue for the first time.

It embedded local Māori and Pacific peoples’ myth and art into the design in an immersive visual and acoustic experience, rebalancing the imperial legacy of the 1920s building. This was achieved through co-commissioning with community and working closely together with Māori and Pasifika art and design practitioners.

According to architectural historian Albert Refiti, the museum “has been transformed into a space for decolonisation to begin”, enabling it to win the 2021 NZ Architecture Awards.

In Perth, the historic Western Australian Museum recently underwent a wholesale building transformation and a new identity. Its new dual name, Boola Bardip, means “many stories” in the local Noongar language.

While the majority of museums in Aotearoa have dual language identities, it is the first state museum in Australia to have taken this decisive step.

The Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, NZ is undergoing similar wholesale transformation, having been badly damaged during the 2011 earthquake. As one of the most traditional Eurocentric museums in NZ in terms of its historic gothic architecture and long-established ethnographic displays, this is likely to be one of the most significant decolonising projects of all, physically, culturally and programmatically. It will reopen in 2029.

Decolonising galleries and collections

Museums in the settler colonies were mission-driven to record and collect the native fauna, flora and culture, resulting in the accumulation of millions of cultural artefacts and remains. Although generally well preserved, these are largely still inaccessible to First Nations peoples.

Furthermore, Eurocentric anthropological displays and even online catalogues have prevailed until recently, excluding source communities from their own cultural heritage. Access can only be enabled by breaking down these barriers and inviting communities into the museum to share knowledge and ways of knowing about these cultural collections and about the natural environment in which they were made and used.

The strict single-disciplinary separation of cultural and natural heritage on the museum floor remains a barrier to decolonisation of the colonial museum. A legacy of the European Enlightenment in their design and narrative, these institutions do not engage with the intricately connected world of culture and environment as First Nations peoples see it.

At the South Australian Museum, the earliest recorded boomerang in Australia is presented typologically, entirely divorced from the wetland ecosystems for which it was first designed. Nick Thomas, an anthropologist and the director of the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, has described future postcolonial museums as “contact zones” for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues.

Several museums have recently taken steps to enable entirely First Nations First exhibitions and galleries, which, in their activist stance on cultural care and “lore” for the environment, are challenging our inherited colonial museology that continues to separate science from culture in the visitor experience.

At Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland War Memorial Museum), the installation of Haumanu, a 9.3-metre tree sculpture by artists Will Ngakuru and Nicole Charles, was created using the same woodworking techniques that have been used to build waka (canoes) for generations, inviting audiences to engage with ecology, biodiversity, human culture and craft and conservation questions through the eyes of its indigenous creators.

Haumanu’s full title includes a question: “Will you breathe for me?” The tree is starting a conversation, reminding us that humans are just one small part of the network of life.

In the storerooms

But perhaps some of the most groundbreaking decolonising practice is taking place away from the public galleries, in the storerooms. By virtue of its extensive collections of Pacific cultures collections and having the largest community of Pacific peoples in the world, Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland War Memorial Museum) undertook a multi-year project to document and conserve these collections in partnership with community knowledge-holders from 13 diaspora groups from across the city.

Their deep cultural knowledge, incorporating the use of Pacific languages and indigenous terms for objects, techniques and materials has transformed the online collections resource and will enable a future remix of the previously stereotypical single disciplinary anthropological displays.

The Pacific Collection Access Project provides a template for the future indigenising of Australasian cultural collections, with its key principles of authentic community engagement and participation in content creation. The museum’s recent establishment of a textile and fibre knowledge centre for Māori and Pasifika communities (Te Aho Mutunga Kore) aims to nurture creativity, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation by “decentering” the museum and handing agency back to Māori and Pacific peoples.

Repatriating ancestors

One of the most visible and public signs of decolonisation and acknowledgement of the past injustices that Indigenous people have suffered as a result of inappropriate museum practices is the investment in the repatriation of ancestral remains and increasingly also in the restitution of cultural property.

Historically, alongside universities, medical schools, hospitals and asylums, museums were instrumental in the collection and trade in ancestral human remains – locally, nationally and internationally.

Today, in Aotearoa and Australia, Māori and Aboriginal human remains are no longer recorded or held as part of the museum collection, but are cared for separately in a designated keeping place with a view to their return to communities of origin.

Since 2003, Te Papa has been mandated by government to lead on the repatriation of Māori ancestral remains from international institutions and cooperates with other major regional museums on return initiatives. This work is now mainstreamed in most of the larger institutions, which, as in Auckland, have established dedicated repatriation teams.

In 2022 I participated in the largest multi-institutional repatriation of ancestral remains and cultural objects to a single iwi or Māori tribe, in this case to Rēkohu, who are indigenous to the Chatham Islands.

A ceremony hosted by Te Papa saw the return of almost 200 ancestors from Otago University, Otago Museum, Canterbury Museum, Whanganui Regional Museum, the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Natural History Museum in London.

Despite being a leader in the repatriation of ancestors, today the South Australian Museum in Adelaide still has the remains of over 4,000 individuals in its care. With the assistance of the Federal Government’s Indigenous Repatriation Programme, it has accelerated this reconciliation work, which demands genuine partnership with community over research and the reburial process.

One success has been the delivery of three mass reburial events at a dedicated burial ground in northern Adelaide named Wangayarta, which was created specifically to rebury local Kaurna ancestral remains being returned from museums and universities.

Another major investment by the museum is its collaboration with Warlpiri community in the Northern Territory to repatriate and reconnect Warlpiri people with their cultural heritage that has been displaced across museums, institutions and personal collections around the world. Although now embedded in policy and practice, repatriation and restitution require significant resources and trained staff and this core work is still heavily reliant on soft funding.

Decolonising or ‘indigenising’ the workforce

All these initiatives, however, rely on having sufficient levels of Indigenous knowledge and staffing capability in the organisation. The increasing demand for repatriation and restitution from source communities, together with the pressures to support greater participation and co-production, reveals a serious weakness in the museum ecosystem of the region.

Building the necessary critical mass in the capability of museums to support indigenous community aspirations remains a long-term aspiration, particularly in Australia. Many institutions struggle to achieve the 3% target for Australian Aboriginal employment in line with the national population.

Few vocational training opportunities and the failure of the higher education system to create a pipeline of First Nations cultural workers help to explain the stubbornly low levels of First Nations people in the museum workforce, particularly in the collections teams.

Despite holding the most extensive collection of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture in Australia, the South Australian Museum has not been able to sustain the employment of an “identified” Aboriginal staff member to care for those assets.

The cultural risks of this ongoing capability vacuum in colonial museums have been captured by Māori curator Puawai Cairns in her regular Te Papa blog, where she explains that First Nations culture should be cared for by First Nations people as only they can “recognise the unique kinship bonds that exist between objects, people and First Nations histories and the obligations that come with this recognition”.

Here we can see perhaps most starkly the difference in aspiration between decolonising and indigenising the colonial museum. Cairns observes that in decolonisation the colonisers stay in control of the process. For her, indigenisation “can only be successful when there is an equitable distribution of power and resource”.

To achieve this requires ensuring the First Nations workforce is more representative of its size in the population as a whole.

More generally, the issue of workforce representation is a systemic one nationally and, as identified in the Indigenous Roadmap for Australian museums, will require a longer-term strategy and greater investment of capacity and capability building, involving new partnerships with indigenous training providers and with the community.

Investing in a culturally more inclusive workforce is an aspiration for the sector, but what museums also need are structures that better support those staff professionally and culturally. So far, Aotearoa has shown the lead in developing and retaining its Indigenous workforce.

Te Papa and Auckland, followed more recently by the Australian Museum in Sydney and the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, have evolved dedicated divisions of First Nations cultural and professional development staff complementing the core collections divisions. These cohorts provide a culturally safe and nurturing working environment for indigenous staff and support cultural competency and learning for the organisation as a whole.

In line with the principle that key business decisions should not be made without indigenous participation, leadership of those divisions is at the executive team table.

Logically, these structural initiatives should in time produce the first cohort of First Nations CEOs in the region’s museums (currently, with the exception of Arapata Hakiwai, co-CEO of Te Papa, membership of the 24-seat Council of Australasian Museum Directors is entirely white).

Decolonising decision-making

Holding colonial museums to account on decolonisation are the museum indigenous advisory or partnership boards, which now hold a critical position in the bicultural co-governance infrastructure of collecting institutions across the region. Made up of First Nations community representatives and Elders, they are responsible for advocating, promoting, monitoring and connecting with their communities.

As co-governors, their advice on First Nations protocols, custodianship and indigenous workforce development is mainly intended for the museum board, ensuring First Nations priorities stay at the top of its agenda. In Australia they advise on the development and monitor the implementation of the museums’ RAPs.

Increasingly, these Indigenous boards are formulating independent strategic priorities, which are informed by community aspiration and intended to maintain the museum’s focus on improved outcomes for First Nations peoples, irrespective of competing strategies.

From a CEO perspective, these structures certainly add complexity but I truly appreciated the benefits of the co-governance system as it manages the risk that non-Indigenous leaders can be exposed to in the legislated bicultural operating environment.

Though sometimes challenging and confronting, these advisory board meetings were some of the most enriching I have experienced in my career, adding considerably to my own learning and professional development.

Perhaps museums in Britain might learn from this advisory board model of community partnership and consider establishing similar structures as part of their own governance framework? Rather than mere consultation, it would give a community voice at the decision-making table and would accelerate museums in their decolonising journeys.

In the end, these are about de-centering the authority of the museum and shifting the power balance in favour of those whose heritage they hold. Museums in Aotearoa and Australia work at the coalface of decolonisation. They have been on a long journey and, given their histories, they will be on it for a considerable time to come. But they have experience and learntxings that we in Europe would do well to note.

David Gaimster has worked for over 30 years in senior leadership, curatorial, policy and research roles for museums, heritage organisations, universities and central government, 20 years of these as a CEO. Over the past eight years Gaimster has been CEO of two of the largest cultural and natural heritage assets in Asia Pacific, the Tāmaki Paenga Hira (Auckland War Memorial Museum), Auckland, Aotearoa NZ (2017-23), and the South Australian Museum, Adelaide, South Australia (2023-24). He is returning permanently to the UK in May to pursue new ventures in consultancy to museums and the wider cultural heritage.