Gunditjmara stone tools found in University collection sparks art exhibition and hopes of repatriation

When Vicki Couzens first laid eyes on stone tools used by her ancestors, she was in Melbourne, 250 kilometres from her Gunditjmara country, viewing items in the Leonhard Adam Collection held by the University of Melbourne at the Grimwade Centre.

"There are stone axes, there's grinding stones and other core parts and cutting implements," Dr Couzens said.

Dr Couzens is a Vice Chancellor's Indigenous Research Fellow at RMIT and senior knowledge custodian who has for decades been working to revitalise her culture, particularly related to language revival and the making of possum skin cloaks.

Contact with the Gunditjmara stone tools made her wonder about how they were used by her matriarchal ancestors.

"When we're making possum skin cloaks now, we use contemporary tools like scissors instead of traditional cutting implements, but what were they then? And did we make the tools? Or, who made them?," she said.

"We're kind of at the beginning of this story or this curiosity to understand women's roles back then, and what we're doing now and the continuation.

"I want to follow that and invite others along to think about those things."

That is what sparked the idea for an exhibition she and her sister, Lisa, curated for the Warrnambool Art Gallery, called pakayn marree weerrath (bone, stone, string) Women's Tools — and it's brought home some of the stone tools too.

"In the exhibition, we've been loaned stone tools from the Leonhard Adam collection; he collected a lot of objects in the '50s and '60s from Gunditjmara country," Dr Couzens said.

Eighty years ago, these stone tools were taken from Gunditjmara country by amateur collectors and sold to museums in Melbourne.

Leonhard Adam was known to be one of few anthropologists making an effort to preserve Indigenous Australian artefacts at that time. 

The exhibition brings together work from two local family clan groups, across three generations of women, who have responded to the artefacts, creating modern works and contemporary cultural pieces.

These works contain the idea that Gunditjmara culture is a living culture that is still here, and still evolving.

Dr Couzens created a collection of tall wooden digging sticks for the exhibition, tools she says had numerous uses for women.

"Digging sticks were very much a part of life, used for digging yams and things out of the ground, digging ants or goanna," she said. 

"They were also for fighting and dispute resolution as part of our traditional cultural law and practice.

"There was consequence for behaviours and that was dished out by whatever the elders decided."

Dr Couzens said this physical punishment maintained the balance and sense of justice, for both men and women.

The digging sticks could also be used as a weapon in warfare.

After the arrival of the British in what is now known as the Western District of Victoria, Gunditjmara people fought for their land in the decades-long Eumeralla wars and are proud of being known as the 'fighting Gunditjmara'.

"At colonisation, our women wouldn't have just run screaming from the murderers who came into camps and started killing people, they would have defended their families, we were strong and tough," Dr Couzens said.

"So those sticks were invaluable in lots of ways."

Artefacts reveal stories personal and political 

When Dr Couzens saw the stone tools in the Leonhard Adam collection, it was not the first time she had made a discovery of an object that was made by her ancestors, but had for years been preserved and hidden a long way away in a museum collection. 

In 1999 during a visit to Museum Victoria for a printmaking workshop, she was shown a rare possum skin cloak that had been taken from Tae Rak (Lake Condah), her grandmother's country, in 1872. 

She later discovered the cloak had been made by her great-grandfather and five other Gunditjmara men. 

The experience altered her path, starting her on a mission to revive the possum skin cloak story, which she has been doing for decades across Victoria. In 2016 she was awarded the Australia Council Fellowship for her work.

This time, it was through working alongside the director of the Grimwade Centre, Robyn Sloggett, that Dr Couzens was able to explore the Leonhard Adams collection, sparking her curiosity about the Gunditjmara stone tools. 

Professor Sloggett's own research shed some light upon where the stone tools were collected from, and by who. 

"From the beginning of the 20th century, there was a big, big group of amateur stone tool collectors who used to scour the countryside and pick up stone tools, and there's a number of extraordinary, enormous collections," Professor Sloggett said.

"So you can imagine what the countryside looked like before they started collecting, when you had these kind of museums on country, and then after they collected when all this stuff virtually disappeared."

Professor Sloggett says that all sorts of people were collecting Indigenous artefacts in Victoria, from Melbourne businessmen to station masters, but the main collector around Gunditjmara country was a man who lived in Portland named Carl Kurtze. 

"Carl Kurtze had a private museum of curios in Portland, inherited by his father," Professor Sloggett said.

She said, these days, it would be fair to look back on the collection of Indigenous artefacts and view it as pilfering, but it had to be understood in the context of the time.

"Well, of course now, looking back, hindsight is a wonderful thing," she said.

"And the term 'salvage archaeology' [meant] we've got to collect this stuff because people won't be there. So it's a very complicated story."

Professor Sloggett finds Leonhard Adam interesting because he was collecting with the goal of showcasing Indigenous identity.

"He collected bark paintings as well as stone tools, and was fastidious in trying to identify who painted the bark paintings, and when, and what the story was that was associated with them."

Repatriation to a 'keeping place'

Professor Sloggett says she believes it is high time for repatriation of the stone tools and that it would benefit researchers as much as it would the Indigenous custodians of the artefacts. 

"Research is about context. Just from a research perspective, yes of course you want them where you can talk to the people who know about them," she said.

"I have to say that working with Vicki Couzens has been absolutely brilliant because Vicki brings all sorts of new questions to the collection, like thinking about women's tools for example.

"It's richer if we share, you can have dialogue about things. 

"Sitting down talking to people about cultural material brings out much more opportunities for research than measuring them in a laboratory."

Now the tools are back and on display, Dr Couzens also sees there is an opportunity for the beginning of important discussions and questions about where artefacts like these should be kept in the future. 

"We're looking at having a keeping cultural place at the Warrnambool Art Gallery, so we'll have somewhere, we'd be able to get some of our own objects and look after them," Dr Couzens said.

Professor Sloggett says that the repatriation quandary that these stone tools present is a dilemma faced by museums and collectors around the world. 

"The museum world is wracking its brains about these questions at the moment, but the idea of repatriation, well it's law."

A living culture

An eye-catching piece in the Women's Tools exhibition is a possum skin stole made by 21-year-old Tarryn Love titled koontapool wayapawanh or Meeting the Whale.

It was acquired by Warrnambool Art Gallery.

Ms Love learnt the art of possum skin cloaking from the elders in her family, including her Auntie Vicki.

"We're reviving it. That practice is back, and that wouldn't be without the work that my Auntie Vic's done, the work that my grandpa Ivan did and what's been taught through our mum," she said.

Patterns burnt into the stole detail the annual arrival of whales in Warrnambool, which travel from Antarctica each year to give birth at Logans Beach near the mouth of the Hopkins River.

"When I come to Gunditjmara country and I see koontapool (whale) swim through and visit, I'm witnessing a ceremony happening, I'm part of it," Ms Love said. 

"Koontapool has visited Gunditjmara country many times before I was here, and will for many times after, so it's really about understanding my responsibility in that ceremony, in that place," she said. 

Ms Love said that she made her piece in response to a grinding stone stained with ceremonial ochre that Warrnambool Art Gallery has held in its collection for decades.

Ms Love says that her experience of 'ceremony' does not fit commonly held perception of what Indigenous ceremony should look like and her piece is a response to that.

"A lot of the time when people think of ceremony, they think of this traditional context of Aboriginal culture," she said.

"What people need to understand is it's a living culture, with living knowledge and living ceremony, so regardless of how far I am from the traditional context, everything that was in my ancestors is embedded in me," Ms Love said.

"Being brought up and learning what it means to be Gunditjmara, and understanding how our culture has been impacted by colonisation, and the ongoing daily struggles, I think it was so important for my identity to know that culture is not just colour," she said.

"Culture is living, it evolves, that's why we're still here as First Nation people because we're the most adaptive culture there is."