Saturday, October 13, 2007

Remains of Aboriginal Australians to Return

The Swedish Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm has been given permission from the Swedish Government to return the remains of ten Aboriginal Australians to their country. On the 22 October 2007 a delegation of representatives from various Australian Aboriginal groups will visit the museum and take possession of the remains.
The remains come from the Kimberley region of North Western Australia where in 1910-11 a Swedish expedition plundered graves. The expedition was led by Eric Georg Mjöberg (1882 - 1938), who’s relative Lotte Mjöberg followed in Eric’s footsteps in 2004 and met the people of Kimberleys in an attempt to right the wrongs of the past, as documented in this radio broadcast.
In 2004 the remains of 15 Aboriginal individuals were returned to Australia by the Ethnographic Museum with an emotional ceremony performed when they reached their home country.
Aboriginal remains from British museums are also being returned.

2 comments:

NickeH said...

Note that the said Mjöberg also wrote a book called På Giftets Vingar which is a kind of surrealist account of some of the dreams he has while suffering from tropical fever after having returned to Sweden.

James Barrett said...

The joint Australian Swedish TV documentary I saw recently called in Sweden Skelettsamlaren focused on the book Giftets Vingar, re-enacting the hallucinations of Mjöberg and suggesting his suffering becasue of what he did.