There is a room inside the Queensland Museum Kurilpa building on the South Bank of the Brisbane River that most visitors will never see. It holds ancestral remains — the physical bodies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, collected between 1870 and 1970, who died on Country and were taken without the knowledge or consent of their families and communities. Between 1870 and 1970, the remains of many beloved and respected ancestors were collected, along with burial goods and secret and sacred objects, taken without the permission or consent of First Nations people and without regard to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander laws and customs. For generations, those remains waited in a building that stood as Queensland’s civic monument to learning and natural history, invisible to the public in galleries below but present — palpably, spiritually — to the communities who knew they were there.

The concealment caused so much stress among Indigenous communities that many traditional owners who knew what was held within the museum would not even step foot into the building. That fact — understated, devastating — is the proper starting point for any honest account of Queensland Museum’s relationship with First Nations collections. It is also the starting point from which the museum’s recent institutional transformation must be understood. Not as a public relations exercise, and not as a simple bureaucratic process of returning objects to their owners, but as something more complex and more consequential: a reckoning with what custodianship actually means, and what responsibility a state institution carries when it has benefited from dispossession.

This article sits at the centre of the museum’s First Nations story. The detailed mechanics of individual repatriation returns are explored separately within this coverage of Queensland Museum. What concerns us here is the larger framework — how the collections were assembled, what they represent, what structures now govern their care, and what genuine custodianship looks like when an institution is finally willing to confront its own history.

HOW THE COLLECTION WAS BUILT.

The Queensland Museum was founded by the Queensland Philosophical Society on 20 January 1862. From its earliest years, it participated in the collecting culture of colonial science, which treated the material world — including the bodies and sacred objects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — as raw data to be gathered, catalogued, and studied. The emergence of racial science in the mid-nineteenth century, combined with the British Empire’s expansion, drove the desire for Aboriginal artefacts. Objects were collected as anything from curiosities to scientific specimens, tendentiously used to prove European superiority.

With an interest in the “science of man”, the Queensland Museum’s curatorial staff maintained a network of collectors across the colony through relationships forged with predominantly men in remote locations. While there is no evidence of the museum being directly involved in frontier killings, the use of police, protectors, missionaries and frontier doctors as the dominant network of collectors implicates the museum as a passive beneficiary of dispossession.

The record of individual transactions is, on close examination, damning. In the 1870s, police Sub-Inspector Alexander Douglas, noted for his role in violent dispersals of Aboriginal people, sent the Queensland Museum ancestral remains and burial goods — stolen during punitive raids on Aboriginal people in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Remains were also taken from regional hospitals, at times with the approval of the Chief Protector, the government agent responsible for Aboriginal people. Rogue doctors stole others from post-mortem rooms. In many instances cultural items — mostly weapons and bags — were purchased from Aboriginal people. The museum issued its collectors with tobacco for payment, itself pointing to the power imbalance of frontier currency.

Aboriginal protectors Walter Roth and Archibald Meston between them collected over 700 objects for the Queensland Museum. Both men operated in positions of enormous coercive power over Aboriginal communities under Queensland’s protection regime. The museum did not merely receive these materials passively; it actively solicited them, maintained correspondence with remote collectors, and provided the institutional legitimacy that made the enterprise appear scientific rather than predatory.

Since 1862, Queensland Museum acquired ancestral remains, secret sacred objects and cultural material from across Australia, the Torres Strait Islands and the Pacific without consent. It is acknowledged that these past practices were not respectful of and did not recognise the significance and cultural importance of this material to First Nations peoples. The museum itself has now said as much publicly, in plain language, in its formal apology.

THE SCALE OF WHAT IS HELD.

The collections that resulted from this history are substantial. Queensland Museum is custodian to more than 22,000 objects in the Queensland Aboriginal collection, as well as more than 28,000 items from outside of Queensland and more than 12,000 historic photographs. Operating under the Queensland Museum Act 1970, the museum has custody of over 15.2 million items relating to the state’s natural and cultural heritage, including those from Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Pacific Indigenous cultures.

Within this broader collection, the most sensitive and most urgently contested material is the ancestral remains and sacred objects subject to the repatriation program. Queensland Museum cares for approximately 1,394 ancestral remains and secret sacred objects belonging to First Nations peoples from Australia and the Pacific. The most important of this material are the ancestral remains of First Nations Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, burial goods and secret and sacred objects.

These are not artefacts in any conventional museum sense. They are not specimens to be studied or exhibits to be presented to a public audience. They are the physical substance of people — individuals who had names, families, and places in Country — removed by force or coercion and held in an institution that, for most of its history, treated their presence as unremarkable. From the perspective of many First Nations people, the spirits of the dead are disturbed by being separated from their bodies. The remains are as important as land rights — a much more volatile issue, closer to the heart than even getting land back.

It was not only ancestral remains that were collected — burial goods and secret and sacred objects were also taken and were often used for scientific research or public education and display. The display of sacred objects before general audiences represented a profound violation of cultural protocol, one that the museum’s institutional framework of the time had neither the language nor the inclination to recognise.

THE APOLOGY AND WHAT IT ACKNOWLEDGES.

In recent years, Queensland Museum has issued a formal public apology to First Nations communities. The museum acknowledges that it has historically played a significant role as a collector of cultural material belonging to First Nations peoples, and that these past collecting practices are inappropriate and considered unacceptable today. The museum acknowledges that some past practices of the museum, and its staff, were not respectful of, and did not understand the significance and cultural importance of objects and human remains, and that traditional owners were not empowered to prevent the removal of their possessions. The apology closes with a direct statement: “Queensland Museum apologises for these actions.”

The museum’s formal position is that repatriation is a basic human right, and the single greatest act of reparation for past injustices available to Queensland Museum, and that the museum is committed to reconciliation and reframing its relationships with First Nations peoples to forge a path towards healing and justice.

The language of the apology matters, and so does its institutional backing. Queensland Museum describes itself as a place of research, collections and stories, and states that its journey of reconciliation will ensure that inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities forms an integral part of what it does. At the heart of this commitment is the implementation of the Customs Culture and Country: First Nations Strategy and Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan, which guide meaningful and sustained action across the organisation.

The strategy is named with deliberate purpose. Customs, culture and country are the foundational categories of First Nations sovereignty — the things the colonial collecting enterprise sought to appropriate, catalogue, and control. Naming a strategy around them is a statement about what the museum now believes its relationship to those categories should be.

THE KEEPING PLACE AND THE NEW MODEL OF CUSTODIANSHIP.

The institutional shift in how Queensland Museum relates to its First Nations holdings is most visible in the structure of the Keeping Place. This is a secure space within the museum where ancestral remains and sacred objects are held not as part of the general state collection, but under a distinct framework. Culturally sensitive and restricted material from First Nations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities is currently cared for across Queensland Museum under an ongoing care and custodianship agreement made between First Nations communities and Queensland Museum.

The role that Queensland Museum now takes is one of continuing protection and custodianship at the direct request of the First Nations Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders whose ancestors reside within the museum’s Keeping Place. The distinction is legally and philosophically significant: the museum is not asserting ownership or institutional authority over these materials. It is acting as a steward, at the request of communities, until the conditions for physical return to Country can be met.

If physical repatriation is not possible and Queensland Museum is considered by community as the safest place, the museum continues to care for ancestral remains and secret sacred objects in its dedicated Keeping Place, in agreement with and on behalf of community. Communities retain decision-making authority. A Queensland Museum spokeswoman has stated that the ancestral remains and secret and sacred material have officially been deaccessioned from the main collection and that decision-making powers rest with First Nations communities who have been identified to date.

Ancestral remains and secret sacred items held in the care of Queensland Museum are housed in secure Keeping Places at both Kurilpa and Tropics. The Keeping Place also serves a second function. The museum’s secure Keeping Place acts as a temporary holding place for ancestral remains and objects returning from overseas institutes and collections before they are returned home. It is also a place where individuals who find themselves in possession of First Nations ancestral remains and restricted objects can safely surrender those items, knowing they will be cared for and, if provenance can be established, returned to the lands from which they were originally taken.

This last function speaks to how widely dispersed the consequences of colonial collecting became. The museum’s Keeping Place operates as a point of safe return not only from international institutions but from the broader community — acknowledging that private holdings of ancestral remains and sacred objects are a legacy that touches many hands beyond formal institutions.

LEGISLATION, GOVERNANCE AND THE FRAMEWORK OF RESPONSIBILITY.

The repatriation program does not operate through goodwill alone; it sits within a legislative framework that has progressively strengthened over the past two decades. The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 and the Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Act 2003 provided the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ownership and custodianship over their ancestors and secret sacred material. The Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2003 recognises that Indigenous people are the primary guardians, keepers and knowledge holders of their cultural heritage, with recognition of Aboriginal ownership of human remains and secret and sacred material.

Queensland Museum is recognised by the Australian Government as Queensland’s peak body for repatriation. That designation carries weight. It means that when ancestral remains held overseas are repatriated to Australia, Queensland Museum often serves as the first point of arrival — the institution that receives them, cares for them in the Keeping Place, and coordinates their eventual return to Country alongside communities.

Queensland Museum is continuing its work with worldwide institutions to secure the return of Queensland ancestral remains, secret sacred objects and general artefacts, including the Natural History Museum in London, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and a number of European museums. In April 2025, a ceremony at the Natural History Museum in London saw the return of 36 First Nations ancestors, with six of those ancestors’ bodies returned to four Queensland communities — the Woppaburra, the Warrgamay, the Wuthathi and the Yadhighana. This repatriation marked the fourth return of ancestors from the Natural History Museum to Australia.

The Queensland Government has provided $4.58 million to Queensland Museum over five years from 2023–24 to 2027–28 to support the repatriation of ancestral remains and secret sacred objects belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Queensland. Directly supported through this funding, Queensland Museum has returned three ancestral remains to the peoples of Mapoon and facilitated the return of one ancestor to the Weipa Peninsula People from Victoria.

Queensland Museum has also partnered with the Queensland United Australian South Sea Islander Council to co-design a framework that will guide repatriation of their Pacific Islander ancestors. The inclusion of Pacific Islander communities reflects the breadth of what the colonial collecting enterprise took — Queensland’s museum held not only the remains of Queensland First Nations peoples but those of communities across the Pacific, caught in the same networks of extraction that operated under the rhetoric of science.

Queensland Museum maintains ongoing partnerships with First Nations communities and individuals, and through the Queensland Museum Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Committee provides cultural direction and guidance to the Board and Executive Leadership Team. Under the leadership of Dr Bianca Beetson, Director First Nations, the museum’s dedicated First Nations team has grown to eight members.

PROVENANCE, DIGITAL REPATRIATION AND THE WORK OF IDENTIFICATION.

One of the most persistent obstacles in repatriation is the question of provenance. Many objects and remains in Queensland Museum’s collection carry incomplete or inaccurate records. The Queensland Government and Queensland Museum have partnered to deliver the Private Sector Pathways Challenge — an initiative aimed at improving the digital storing, processing, analysis and digitisation of First Nations archival materials including hunting and gathering tools, traditional baskets, boomerangs and rock engravings. Queensland Museum has also completed provenance research on all holdings of Bigambul secret sacred objects and ancestors, with those identified objects and ancestors now being packed in preparation for a future return to Country.

Provenance work is slow and demanding. Colonial records were often inconsistent, deliberately obscured, or simply absent. Collectors sent items with minimal documentation. Institutional cataloguing systems applied European categories to objects that did not fit them. Unravelling this history requires not only archival research but sustained engagement with community knowledge — the oral records, the kinship structures, the cultural memory held by communities themselves.

The advancement of technologies is creating new opportunities to record and preserve objects digitally. Digital repatriation can enable communities to have access to images, recordings, archive documents, research information and reproductions — including three-dimensional scanned and printed objects — providing a valuable connection, particularly for those in remote and regional communities. Digital access does not substitute for physical return, but it allows communities to reconnect with objects and knowledge that distance or circumstance currently places beyond reach. Projects include a collaboration with the Western Yalanji people to document a centuries-old dendroglyph — an Aboriginal tree carving — at risk of decay using photogrammetry, with three-dimensional renders of the carving preserving its intricate details in perpetuity.

Current projects also include the repatriation of the Burnett River Rocks — 92 engraved boulders originally located on a significant sacred site on the Burnett River at Bundaberg. They were removed in the early 1970s and scattered across the state. Queensland Museum is partnering with the Bailai, Gooreng Gooreng, Gurang and Taribelang peoples to identify and return the Burnett River Rocks to Country, and more than 30 boulders have been repatriated to date.

This project illustrates the breadth of what repatriation encompasses. It is not only ancestral remains. It is the entire spectrum of what was taken — sacred stones, ceremonial objects, rock carvings, tools, photographs, recordings — and the recognition that the act of removal in each case severed a relationship between people and place that had existed for thousands of years.

BUILDING FIRST NATIONS CAPACITY WITHIN THE MUSEUM.

Genuine institutional responsibility is not only discharged through returning what was taken. It also requires transforming who holds knowledge and authority within the institution itself. Queensland Museum is committed to creating meaningful career pathways for First Nations peoples in the museum and cultural heritage sectors. Through the Undergraduate Student Research Program and First Nations Fellowships, the museum provides paid opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to gain hands-on museum and cultural heritage experience, develop research projects, and share First Nations knowledge and perspectives. These programs foster skills development, mentorship and cultural exchange, empowering participants to shape the future of museums while deepening connections between communities and collections.

Queensland Museum recognises Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples as Queensland’s first scientists, storytellers, traders and diplomats. Through Customs Culture and Country: First Nations Strategy and Innovate RAP, the museum is committed to embedding First Nations voices across exhibitions, public programs and events, and to creating meaningful opportunities for Aboriginal peoples.

Queensland Museum is the keeping place for the State Collection of more than 1.2 million items. That scale demands expertise — scientific, cultural, relational — that can only be built over time. The fellowship programs and the expansion of the First Nations team represent an investment in that expertise that goes beyond any individual repatriation transaction. They are building the human infrastructure that will sustain this work across generations.

Queensland Museum commits to ensuring representation and respectfully showcasing the contributions and stories of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders through its research, exhibitions and programming. The First Nations Foyer at Queensland Museum Tropics, which features a dedicated space where mural artworks by local First Nations artists can be displayed in a rotating exhibition, is one visible expression of this commitment — though the deeper work is less visible and more consequential: the restructuring of authority, the revision of access protocols, and the long project of rebuilding trust with communities who had reason to distrust the institution entirely.

PERMANENCE, RECORD, AND THE CIVIC MEANING OF WHAT REMAINS.

There is a question that sits beneath all of the operational work of repatriation and custodianship, and it is a civic question as much as a cultural or legal one: what should a permanent public record of this institution’s relationship with First Nations heritage look like? How does a state that has built its official identity partly on the erasure of Indigenous presence begin to construct a record that reflects what actually happened — and what is now being done to address it?

Queensland Museum has completed over 200 repatriations in recent years, and continues to receive ancestral remains, secret sacred objects and other cultural material from organisations and individuals in Australia and around the world, surrendered into the museum’s care to be returned to Country and their families. The museum’s program of returning and reburying ancestral remains and cultural property belonging to Indigenous Australians has been under way since the 1970s. That is more than five decades of sustained effort, across multiple governments, multiple institutional leaders, and through periods when public and political support for the work was thin.

The effort is imperfect and incomplete. The museum works closely with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to prioritise the return of ancestral remains and sacred objects — but much material collected through violent means is still held in its collection. The numbers bear this out: according to the Australian Government’s arts office, the number of First Nations ancestors returned from around the world has reached 1,775, with more than 200 coming from the Natural History Museum in London alone. The scale of what was taken means the work of return will continue for years.

Queensland’s civic identity in the twenty-first century is inseparable from this work. The museum at South Bank — the institution that the queensland.foundation project addresses through the permanent onchain namespace museum.queensland — is not simply a repository of natural specimens and colonial-era curiosities. It is the institution that holds the most contested and consequential material in the state’s possession, and the institution whose willingness to confront that history honestly will shape what Queensland means as a public project.

Queensland Museum’s Director, First Nations, Dr Bianca Beetson, has stated that repatriation remains a central objective of Customs Culture and Country: First Nations Strategy 2024–28, and that the museum welcomes engagement with communities regarding repatriation of ancestral remains and secret sacred items held in care. That framing — welcome, engagement, ongoing commitment — represents a different institutional posture from the one that built the collection. Whether it is sustained across changing political climates and institutional priorities is the test that lies ahead.

The museum’s formal apology, its legislative framework, its Keeping Place, its fellowship programs, its international negotiations, its provenance research partnerships: these are all components of what it means for an institution to take responsibility. None of them is sufficient in isolation. Together, they constitute something that deserves a name more precise than “repatriation program” — they are the architecture of a new kind of custodianship, one that is not asserted by the institution over the materials it holds, but extended to communities as a service, under their direction, toward ends they determine.

The museum has stated publicly that it recognises repatriation as a basic human right, and the single greatest act of reparation for past injustices available to it. That statement is worth holding to. It is a civic commitment, made in the name of a state institution funded by Queensland taxpayers, on behalf of a relationship that Queensland as a polity has not yet fully reckoned with.

The permanent identification of this institution in civic infrastructure matters precisely because that reckoning is ongoing. A namespace such as museum.queensland is not merely a technical address — it is a declaration that this institution, with this history and this responsibility, has a permanent and legible place in the record of what Queensland is and what it is becoming. The Keeping Place holds ancestral remains that have not yet found their way home. The museum continues to negotiate with institutions in London, Berlin and Vancouver. The fellowship programs continue to build a generation of First Nations practitioners. All of this is the living content of what custodianship means when it is taken seriously — not as a completed act but as an ongoing obligation, held permanently, like Country itself.