ABSTRACT
The museum archive contains threads of Tasmanian Aboriginal narratives that hint at the histories, lives, and afterlives of Ancestors whose remains were taken, traded, and studied across the world. Our cultural objects often followed through these same handlers, routes, and institutions. Cultural detective work on Country and across archives recovers in part our stories. Creative responses act to disturb and break the pervasive mechanisms by which our Old People were objectified, and our objects rendered useless, trapped, and hidden in cabinets far from home. This chapter reflects on the challenges of working as an artist with fraught, contested history on our lands that were not ceded in the colonial wars of Van Diemen’s Land.
