Read
One shell is painted orange, with black dots covering its surface. It is wrapped with a long, flat leaf and several rows of a tightly bound, thin string. At its top is a mop of looping brown wool; it looks like curly hair messied by sleep. Another is painted white, with two orange beads attached above a curved, black line – kind of like a smile. Beneath this perhaps-face is a dress of dried grass, formed into a pattern of delicate knots that to different eyes might look like macramé or crochet. Each one can fit in the palm of your hand. They’re all about the size of a thumb of ginger, the wonderful ambiguity of the measurement holding space for their differences.
Yet they are not just shells, but shell dolls – dadikwakwa-kwa to the Anindilyawka women that create them. They come from Four Mile Beach on Groote Eylandt, which lies off the coast of the Northern Territory of Australia. Made by mothers and grandmothers for young girls, they teach kinship systems, hold secrets safe, and look out for the girls as they grow. They’re alive, too.
They’re alive and so is the practice of making them, but for more than fifty years no dadikwakwa-kwa were created on Groote Eylandt. Here, I will not explain why this tradition faded. Instead, I’d like to look at the time during which these people and their practice were separated, and the reconciliation that followed.
For over five decades, a collection of dadikwakwa-kwa were held in Manchester Museum, the university museum of a British city more closely related to worker bees and Oasis than to Indigenous Australian cultures. Manchester Museum, as with all museums built according to a Western paradigm, prioritises the physical preservation of its items. Little human touch, stable temperatures and protective storage wonderfully maintained the appearance of the shell dolls – their bush-dyed clothing and intricate dotted patterns perfectly intact. But it was a sorry existence for their spirits. Dadikwakwa-kwa were made to be held, confided in, and played with – not to lay, untouched, in silence.
In 2022, there was a spark of hope for both dadikwakwa-kwa and their connection to their traditional custodians when Groote Eylandt hosted consultations on a collection of 174 items – including maminjirrada (hook spears), awulmarra (boomerang), and more than eighty dadikwakwa-kwa. In the shade of Angurugu Women’s Art Centre, discussions with delegates from Manchester Museum and images of dadikwakwa-kwa awoke memories within Anindilyakwa Elders: they were part of Old Lady Edith’s childhood. She explained, “I remember playing with these; my grandmother, she used to come with us and collect them – we used to collect lots.”
A crucial facilitator of these consultations and the subsequent exchange of joyful memories was the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), a government agency and independent research institution. In 2019, the organisation launched the Return of Cultural Heritage (RoCH) programme, which looked to research overseas collections of Indigenous Australian cultural heritage, and to support its return to Country. One such route of this enquiry began with a request to confirm that Manchester Museum’s collection held Anindilyakwa material, followed by two questions posed to the community: ‘Is this your material?’ and ‘Do you want it back?’
AIATSIS then funded a delegation of RoCH programme leaders and Anindilyakwa community members to visit Manchester in 2023 for a handover ceremony, which would see these 174 items returned to their custodians and restituted to their home on Groote Eylandt. Before the ceremony, senior Elder Noeleen Lalara explained to the items: “we’re here to pick you up to come back to the community. We've been sad for you and we’re missing you.”
Then she, along with Anindilyakwa delegation members Maicie Lalara and Amathea Mamarika, performed a traditional smoking ceremony, cleansing the collection by smouldering Indigenous Australian plants and coaxing the plumes of white smoke over the items. During this ceremony, Noeleen recalled that “the artefacts were touching me. As we were smoking, I heard sounds, singing, dancing and my ancestors were talking to me, thanking me.”
Consider Noeleen’s words a little while longer. To exist in the company of dadikwakwa-kwa created by the generations before her provided Noeleen a feeling of connection, community and comfort. “The artefacts were touching me,” she said. “My ancestors were talking to me, thanking me.” She speaks of these items in terms of kinship rather than of ownership. So often, narratives of repatriation are framed in possessive language: do the Parthenon Marbles belong to Britain or to Greece? Are the Benin Bronzes the property of the Nigerian state or the Oba of Benin? In the homecoming of these Anindilyakwa items, however, the emphasis lies not on the rightful return to a wronged owner. Instead, it was celebrated as the restoration of a spiritual relationship between these maminjirrada, awulmarra and dadikwakwa-kwa and the Anindlyakwa community, both past and present.
Within these overarching narratives, ‘repatriation’ returns to the physical return of an item to the country it came from. In the return of these Indigenous Australian items, as with those to other First Nations peoples, ‘repatriation’ is often displaced by the phrase ‘rematriation’, which places the physical return of material objects in a broader context of restoring cultural sovereignty to Indigenous communities and rekindling connections to traditions, ancestors and Country. As the cultural heritage sector begins to adopt this expression, it acknowledges Indigenous beliefs towards material culture and indicates promise of diversifying attitudes to the return of items. More general narratives, particularly those presented by politicians and peddled by the press, remain dominated by a terminology of loss.
It is inherently Euro-centric to perceive the return of cultural heritage as resulting in a loss. It is also incredibly naive. “I can't tell you how much it doesn't feel like that,” explains Esme Ward, Director of Manchester Museum. “We have these relationships, these collaborations, we have these insights, we do more teaching. It's such a narrow way of viewing the world [to see] just what we're losing rather than understanding.”
Indeed, the process of returning cultural heritage has created lasting collaborative relationships between Manchester Museum and the Anindilyakwa community. Now, a small patch of northern England has a Belonging Gallery which currently holds an exhibition co-curated with the traditional custodians of Groote Eylandt, sharing stories of their art and traditions in their own words, and their understanding of identity, belief and Country. To dwell on the departure of the 174 returned items is to overlook the wealth of insight into the different perspectives and cultures gained by Manchester Museum and its surrounding community. Not only does this gallery connect Manchester to an international network, but the connections between these communities provide antidote to the colonial ties that have dominated the relationship between Britain and Australia since the 19th century.
While handover ceremonies should never be considered transactional, in this instance, the Anindilyakwa community chose to thank Manchester Museum for returning their cultural heritage with its own collection of shell dolls – created by current generations of women who were reacquainted with the practice of making shell dolls following the consultations in 2022. These dadikwakwa-kwa were gifted with the clear condition that each year, they must be removed from display to be played with, talked to, and confided in, in preservation of the practice they are associated with. As the Anindilyakwa community returned to Groote Eylandt, they left, willingly and proudly, both physical items of their cultural heritage and the beliefs and practices that created them. Manchester Museum faithfully observed this condition in April 2025, when it hosted an event series titled ‘Dadikwakwa-kwa come out to play!’
This example raises a necessary question: should cultural heritage items be treated according to the attitudes of the land on which they are currently held, or according to the attitudes of their traditional custodians? In 2020, more than 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage items were being held in overseas collections. Should they be cared for as lifeless antiquities, in line with the European or ‘western’ attitudes that shaped and are perpetuated by many of these collections? Or should they be treated as the living beings and ancestral embodiments that Indigenous Australian communities perceive them as? And what of the millions of other cultural heritage items, taken from countless other peoples that are clumsily gathered in ‘world cultures’ collections in museums all over the world?
I am enraptured by this story and I have been for some months. It has propelled me to skip lunch breaks to interview people from Manchester Museum, and wake up before the sun to speak to those in Australia. But, as a white Brit, all the while I have been uneasy: is this research motivated by a desire to patch up an inherited colonial guilt? Should I be analysing and advising on these items and the way they are cared for? Rather than telling of how museum paradigms and practices should change, I would instead like to ask: how should these items be cared for? How should we return sovereignty of these cultural heritage items to Indigenous Australian and First Nations communities?
Harriet Gilbert Savage,
October 2025
Harriet Gilbert Savage is Community Executive for Walpole, the sector body for British luxury. She studied colonial legacies in Latin American art and literature before expanding her focus to an Australian context during her time living there. She is interested in changing museum policy and practices to acknowledge and apply non-Western, non-academic expertise. This article is based on a report that she wrote as part of her Young Fabians Policy Research Fellowship in the UK.
Images © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester.
Showing 1 thought
Sign in with
FacebookTwitter