Entangled knowledges: re-indigenising biocultural collections at National Museums Scotland

In 2019, Yorta Yorta artist Treahna Hamm exhibited her artwork A Yorta Yorta Person’s Bush Medicine Kit in an exhibition about First Australian Bush Medicine in Melbourne, London and Berlin (Healy 2018). The artwork, which replicated a European medicine kit, challenged the narrative put forward by European colonialists in Australia that the continent was empty of medicinal knowledge and practices. The bush medicine kit contained remedies that have been in use by First Australians for thousands of years and demonstrated the vital connection between people, Country (the term used by First Australian peoples to describe the connection between people, lands, seas and waterways, also encompassing language, law, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs and identity), and culture in Australia, a continent that is home to the oldest living biocultural knowledge on earth. From the 1700s onwards this knowledge was collected, categorised and removed from Country by European explorers, colonial officials, missionaries, anthropologists, zoologists, botanists and travellers.