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The Koorie Heritage Trust Collections and History
CULTURAL WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander users are warned that this material may contain images and voices of deceased persons, and images of places that could cause sorrow.
The Koorie Heritage Trust was established in 1985 with a commitment to protect, preserve and promote the living culture of the Indigenous people of south-east Australia.
Today the Trust boasts extensive collections of artefacts, paintings, photographs, oral history recordings and library materials.
Film - 'The Vision for a Trust - Interview with Jim Berg, founder of the Koorie Heritage Trust', Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust Inc.
Film - 'The Vision for a Trust - Interview with Jim Berg, founder of the Koorie Heritage Trust', Koorie Heritage Trust
-The first item that we ever collected wasn't actually donated to the trust. It was donated to me. Somebody walked off the street, when I was at Fitzroy, at the Aboriginal Legal Service, and brought in a little grinding stone and a green stone axe head and says "Jim-- this belongs to you and your people. I'd like to leave it here." And they'd included some other little axe heads, as well. And that was kind of the unofficial start of the Koorie Heritage Trust collection.
It was just soon after that that we handed the material over to the museum for safe custody, because we weren't an organized body at the time. And my wife, Kylie, says "Why don't you set up a trust?" So I approached very prominent Koories and non-Koories. I think we got a copy of the first meeting we ever held-- very prominent lot. And we sat down, and we incorporated the Victorian Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Trust. Whew!
This is one purchase that started the base. And prior to this one coming up, had all the other fancy boomerangs with the markings on it. And I was paying big prices for it because I liked the markings on it. And got this for a song. It was the best boomerang of the night.
It's made for your hands. Perfect. See the ripple on the muscles of the tree? This sits in your hand like that, and you just-- you can feel the balance. And you just go roll it around in your hands like that. And it's just the action-- the movement. And it just feels like it was made for my hand. Just perfect. There's no other, better club in the collection than this.
Found this building. And by that time, I said "That's it, folks." I resigned from all of my positions-- every one of them-- and retired from the trust.
And I let the next generation take over, which was important, because, during all those years was getting people in, giving them the skills-- the confidence within themselves to get up and take tours-- and the retail shop. Encourage people that if you don't make a mistake, you're never going to learn. And you'd just as well make the mistakes while I'm still around so we can sort it out. But I stand by your decision.
And we bring in people that are non-Koorie because they've got the expertise. And that's why we're successful. But most of the people up front are Koories.
So the reconciliation process never ceased to-- well, it never ceased, as far as the trust was concerned, because we're just doing that every day of the year. Very important. And we're still doing it, where we have staff-- multicultural. And we're drawing the experts. And the board of directors is very multicultural. And that's where we've succeeded, for 21 years.
But I stepped aside, because this is a new era. Fresh ideas. And I'll leave you to get on with the job. And they've done that. Yeah. And they've done it-- done it well. Done us all proud.
And I dare say we can also thank all the supporters of the trust-- the membership-- are pretty strong. Yeah. Without them, we wouldn't be here today.
I've always seen myself as a custodian of our culture. And I've handed on to the next generation.
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An interview with Jim Berg, founder of the Koorie Heritage Trust.
In 1985 Jim Berg a Gunditjmara man, CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and an Inspector under the Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act, 1972 identifies the need for an organisation to be the custodian of Koorie culture.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Protecting, Preserving and Promoting Koorie Culture and Heritage with Lee Stewart, Cultural Officer', Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust Inc.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Protecting, Preserving and Promoting Koorie Culture and Heritage with Lee Stewart, Cultural Officer', Koorie Heritage Trust
-My name's Lee Stewart. I'm a descendent of the Boonwurrung group. They're a coastal group around the Melbourne area itself. Firstly, welcome to the Koorie Heritage Trust. The Koorie Heritage Trust was formed in 1985 with the returning of aboriginal skeletal remains to their traditional resting places. In 1984, the CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and also an inspector under the Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics Act initiated legal proceedings against various different institutions in Victoria. He was helped by legal counsel, in particular Ron Merkel, to get those remains returned to their traditional resting places.
The Murray Black collection was a collection of aboriginal remains from the all around the Murray River between the 1930s and the 1960s. Those remains were being held by different institutions in Melbourne where scientific study was being performed on those. It was over 100 full skeletal remains.
Unfortunately, there were 38 remains that couldn't be returned. In November 1985, the 38 remains that were left were taken through a march through the city, which the Trust instigated, down to the Kings Domain Gardens. Those remains went through a smoking ceremony. They were then wrapped in paper bark in a traditional way and interred into the ground. There was a large two-ton boulder placed over the top of those remains and a plaque with the 38 aboriginal groups within Victoria written onto that plaque itself. This boulder can still actually be seen today in the city. It's not far from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
The Murray Black collection was a significant point in the Koorie Heritage Trust's history. It was a way of starting to give control back to the community.
After the Murray Black case and the returning of the skeletal remains, the Trust started raising funds to acquire artefacts from local collections, from overseas collections, and through auction houses themselves. The first items purchased by the Koorie Heritage Trust were a collection of 12 items from the New South Wales Aboriginal Lands Council. Since then the Koorie Heritage Trust has been continuing to collect artefacts, items that date back well over 200 years old right through to contemporary pieces.
Our artefact collection consists of over 2,500 items, which contain pre-contact shields, clubs, weavings right through to contemporary items like glasswares and ceramics. Our picture collection contains over 800 pieces consisting of paintings, drawings, collages, and various other materials. We have a photographic collection. We have thousands of photographs, historical and contemporary. Our library consists of over 6,000 items, including books, manuscripts, letters, and government reports. Our oral history area consists of 1,400 items, which records the oral histories of the aboriginal people, because we had a spoken tradition and passed down our stories through the spoken word.
In 2003, the Koorie Heritage Trust moved into their new building, located in 295 King Street in the city of Melbourne.
One of the main aims of the trust is to preserve, promote, and protect the indigenous cultures of southeastern Australia. We do this through the various programs that we run through the trust, through our art galleries, our retail shop, our exhibitions, our collections, our education programs, and our oral history and family history programs. The motto of the trust, "Gnokan Danna Murra Kor-ki," is a combination of two aboriginal languages, translated it means, give me a hand, my friend, and bridge the cultural gap.
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Lee Stewart, Cultural Officer at the Koorie Heritage Trust, describes the founding of the Trust and the work the Trust is committed to.
Film - Sophie Boord and Jackie Farkas, 'Koorie Culture is Unique with Tim Church, Collections Cadet', Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust Inc.
Film - Sophie Boord and Jackie Farkas, 'Koorie Culture is Unique with Tim Church, Collections Cadet', Koorie Heritage Trust
-My name's Tim Church. I'm a Gunditjmara man from Heywood, Portland. I work here at the Koorie Heritage Trust as a curatorial cadet.
Traditional artefacts from the southeastern Australia, such as these shields, are different from other artefacts around Australia. They're good examples of the typical Victorian shields. You can see this by the designs on the shield. It's got the concentric diamond designs. The wood is a bit darker from here than around Australia. You can tell these two are parrying shields, by how thin they are. That's how they're different from spear shields. Spear shields are a lot broader and parrying shields are used for in close battle for blocking or to strike another person with it.
Contemporary artists like to come in and have a look at what sort of designs are on the shields or objects, what are from their area. More and more contemporary artists, you can see them using the more diamond design shapes, whereas before they could have used dot work, which isn't from this area. So it gives them more of their own identity of who they are and that they are Koorie people, and it's separate from around Australia.
A good example of traditional designs being used in contemporary art today is on this possum skin cloak made by Kelly Koumalatsos, a Wergaia/Wemba Wemba woman. So the designs on the actual cloak are again the concentric diamond designs. On Kelly's cloak here, you can see that the designs have actually been screen printed onto it. Traditionally they were etched in with bone and stone artefacts. Traditionally the color was crushed up ochre mixed with animal fat to make it all stick on and stay on. This cloak today is used in our permanent exhibition for people to come in and actually handle it and put it on, whatever they feel like really. Traditionally the cloaks were sewn together by kangaroo sinew. This contemporary cloak, it's just sewn together by cotton. Traditionally when it rained, the inside of the cloak was worn on the outside. During the summertime, the fur was on the outside.
This is a pastel drawing done by an artist named Vicki Cousins. She's from the Girai Wurrung, Gunditjmara area. This design is from a possum skin cloak from Lake Condah area. It's just one pallet of it. The Lake Condah cloak is held at Museum Victoria. It's from the early 1800s. It was done by men on a Lake Condah aboriginal mission. This particular design is based on the eel fish traps down at Lake Condah area. It shows the weirs, which were dug out from lake to catch the eels. Down there they use an extensive range of different weirs and eel traps made out of volcanic lava rock.
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Tim Church, a collections cadet at the Koorie Heritage Trust, shows us how Aboriginal culture from south eastern Australia (Koorie) is in many ways distinct to other areas of Australia.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Tommy McRae: An interview with Senior Curator Nerissa Broben', Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust Inc.
Film - Sophie Boord, 'Tommy McRae: An interview with Senior Curator Nerissa Broben', Koorie Heritage Trust
Tommy McRae has a unique drawing style. He actually started the figures at the feet and worked his way up. The drawings that we have are ink on paper. And Tommy McRae is quite interesting because he incorporates traditional elements, elements of hunting and fishing, but he also incorporates some European elements. In a couple of the drawings we have here, we have the figure of William Buckley, who is an escaped convict from the Sorrento area, and in a number of McRae's drawings, he also includes figures like the Chinese miners and other European elements that obviously had significance to him during this period of time.
Through McRae's drawings we're able to see specific details of the activities that he chose to portray, whether it's someone up a tree hunting possum or the specific body decoration used during ceremony as part of a dance.
The CEO of the Koorie Heritage Trust purchased the Tommy McRae sketchbook back in 1988. We've actually separated the seven drawings in the sketchbook to the seven framed drawings that we have here today.
Tommy McRae was possibly a Kwatkwat man from the Goulburn region, which is in Northeastern Victoria. He was born around 1830, and this was at a time when many Europeans were actually moving into the region where he lived.
The earliest surviving drawings that we have from Tommy McRae date back to around the 1860s.
In the 1880s, Tommy McRae set up a camp with his family at Lake Moodemere, which is around the Murray River region. Around this time, he sold many sketchbooks, which was important to have a cash income at the time, because many of the Koorie people were actually living on rations and handouts from missions and things.
Tommy McRae was quite a resourceful man. He and his family actually sold Murray cod, raised poultry, and made possum skin rugs during this time as well.
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Nerissa Broben, Senior Curator at the Koorie Heritage Trust, talks about how the artist Tommy McRae provides a valuable Koorie perspective from the late 1800s through his drawings.
Film - 'Uncle Sandy Atkinson talks of the Old Murray Cod', Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust Inc. and Uncle Sandy Atkinson
Film - 'Uncle Sandy Atkinson talks of the Old Murray Cod', Koorie Heritage Trust
-In my generation, for instance, I can remember so clearly every year in the very hot summer times, you know, in the part of the evening when there's not a breath of air in the-- around, you know. And the sun over in the west is just sinking. And the sky is beautiful reds and pinks. And people-- it would be so hot, and the whole mission might just go down and sit on the banks of the river, you know.
And psychologically, I would suggest, you know, that's where it was nice. And maybe it was starting to cool, was starting to cool down. And usually at that time, this old man, Murray Cod, would come up. And he'd start playing up and down the river. And he must have been so big that when he swam along just a bit under the surface, he would create spout that ran up and looked like a whale blowing up water, you know. In fact, we used to call him a whale, you know.
But sometimes in the late evenings when it became dark, you'll hear him talking or singing down there with the grunts, you know, making lots of noise. Yeah, but that was him. And my dad tells a story that they were telling him that one time, probably the generation before him, some of the old men decided that they might catch him.
And so they put their nets in. And the next morning when they sailed a boat to get him, he was in the net. He was there swimming around in their net. And they pulled him up. And as they got up, nearly to get him to lift him into the boat, he went berserk. And he nearly tipped them out in the river. And he ripped their net to pieces and he got away.
And so that became a rule that nobody ever tried to catch him again, you know. And I think there was another sort of traditional type if thing, where Aboriginal people may have, you know, in a situation like that, he may have been coming as sort of the boss creature of that part of things.
So we all knew and respected him, and didn't ever want to catch him again. Because he'd done us like a dinner before and ripped our nets to pieces and so on. So I think, you know, even getting to my generation that, no, I don't know of anybody who tried to catch him.
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In the early 1980s this grindstone was donated the CEO of the Aboriginal Legal Service and an Inspector under the Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics Act (Vic) 1972.
This grindstone is the first item collected on behalf of what was to become the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Trust, known today as the Koorie Heritage Trust.
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This spear shield was part of the first collection of artefacts that the Trust ever acquired, purchased from the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Corporation in 1985.
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The word Marngrook comes from the Gunditjmara (located in the south western district of Victoria) language and means 'game ball'.
Elements of the game of Australian Rules Football (AFL) are believed to have originated from a traditional game that was played with a possum skin ball. There are various stories which relate that this game was being played in different formats across Victoria.
Weapon - William Barak, Wurundjeri (maker), 'Club made by William Barak', 18 December 1897, Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust (AH1695)
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This club (and Barak’s shield) were purchased by the Trust in 1991 from a private collector.
The collector had purchased both artefacts from a shop called ' Decoration’ in Little Collins Sreet many years prior. 'Made by King Barak Last of the Yarra Tribe 18/12/97' is inscribed on the club in cursive script in black ink.
Wood : 75 x 6.5 x 5.5 cm
Functional Object - William Barak, Wurundjeri (maker), 'Parrying Shield made by William Barak', 18th December 1897, Koorie Heritage Trust
Courtesy of Koorie Heritage Trust (AH1434)
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The weet weet was used in hunting (birds etc.) and also as a toy.
Held at the thin end, it was whirled around the head and projected with force along the ground, where it skips along the ground for a considerable distance. This particular weet weet is from the Murray/Darling River region.
Print - The Australasian Sketcher (publisher), 'Mission Station Dimboola', 22 March 1882, Koorie Heritage Trust, picture collection
Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust
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This basket, is from Coleraine in south western Victoria and was acquired by the Trust from an Auction house in 1994.
Print - 'The First Australian 11', 1868, Koorie Heritage Trust, picture collection
Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust
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The first Australian cricket team to tour Britain was an all-Aboriginal team in 1868.
In 1867, Bullocky and Cuzens became the first Aborigines to play inter-colonial cricket, representing Victoria against Tasmania and in September. Against the express wishes of the Board of Protection of Aborigines, the Aboriginal 11 was smuggled aboard a ship bound for Sydney and then Britain.
Between May and October 1868 they played 47 matches in Britain - they won 14, lost 14 and drew 19, a creditable outcome. A non-Aboriginal Australian team did not tour Britain until ten years later.
Drawing - Tommy McRae (artist), 'Buckley ran away from ship', c.1880s, Koorie Heritage Trust, picture collection
Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust
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This drawing by Tommy McRae depicts the figure of William Buckley with a group of Koorie men.
Tommy McRae is a Koorie artist from the Goulburn region in north east Victoria born around 1830. This sketch was most likely drawn by Tommy McRae in the 1880s. This sketch is one of seven sketches that were purchased by the Koorie Heritage Trust as part of a sketchbook in 1991.
Drawing - Tommy McRae (artist), 'Buckley with a group of Aborigines', c.1880s, Koorie Heritage Trust, picture collection
Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust
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Tommy McRae’s drawings are very significant as they offer insights into Koorie culture, from the late 1800s from a Koorie perspective which is quite rare.
McRae depicts traditional scenes of hunting, fishing and ceremony but he also includes depictions of Europeans, Chinese miners and the figure of William Buckley in many of his drawings.
Through his eyes we are able to see specific details of some of the activities he choose to depict, hunting possum up a tree, or the specific body decoration worn for dance.
