Tl;dr

the new director employed since 2023 wants to do a reorg and make some cuts while shuffling responsibilities to fewer junior staff.

People are unhappy because this museum has been seen as a leader in employing first nations people to manage the first nations collection.

Like a lot of people I was sceptical of the initial announcement because of concerns around the potential loss of local history. Large sections of the museum have been consistent for several generations now and it’s a place that all of us can come back to and reminiscences about as adults. I haven’t followed the project since then though, so I wasn’t aware widespread opposition existed on other grounds too. Very interesting context, thanks for sharing.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It has consequently been globally acknowledged for re-building broken relations with First Nations people, affording them increased custodianship of Indigenous collections and, not least, for bringing overdue dignity to the culturally incendiary issue of how museums treat ancestral remains.

Protests broke out in the notoriously civilised city while staff, Indigenous stakeholders, global scientific experts, politicians and wealthy donors embarked on an intense and uncharacteristic public and private lobbying effort to achieve government intervention.

Indigenous experts began to work there in greater numbers and to collaborate on how to return more remains to country and to reconnect the largest collection of Australian First Nations cultural material in the world with the communities from which they were removed.

It was this improved relationship with Indigenous communities and the ongoing repatriation work on – and reburial of – the ancestral remains that many critics feared was being potentially threatened by the proposed restructure by director David Gaimster, who took over the museum in mid-2023.

There is growing concern among Aboriginal and non-Indigenous stakeholders that having chosen a difficult path of decolonisation the proposed changes now threaten a “re-colonisation” of the museum, considered by some to be the most traditionally-conservative British-style collecting institution in Australia.

In recent correspondence to the state Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Kyam Maher, eight current museum staff wrote, “Positioning ancestral remains in the restructure as a collection to be curated, returns the Ancestors to the equal of rocks and boomerangs.

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