‘We need to get them back home’: the fight to bury Aboriginal remains kept in museums

For some years, Yorta Yorta man Jason Tamiru’s job was to help secure “thousands of bones, hundreds of people” from museums, institutions and private collectors around the world. As a cultural heritage officer for Indigenous nations in north-west Victoria, Tamiru would organise burial ceremonies and inter the remains back on Country. “It’s a duty, mate,” says the theatre director. “A role I took on with honour.”

The bones of children and babies “hit you right in the soul and the spirit”, he says. He vividly recalls the return of perhaps the most widely known Indigenous infant: the “Jaara baby”, originally buried in the hollow of a tree in the. It wasn’t until almost a century later, in 2003, that the Melbourne Museum returned the remains to the Dja Dja Wurrung people.