Buwugalbuwananha: stolen Kamay spears return

Ethan Floyd watches his cultural heritage return home.

For as long as so-called Australia has existed, this colony has been a crime scene and it has inflicted a genocide on my people. Not only a genocide in the conventional sense –measured in corpses and lives lost –but a cultural genocide too, evident in the erasure of our languages and of our songlines. Nowhere else in the world has the ferociousness of the commitment to strip us of everything that sustains us been so consistent.

Epitomising this pattern, which plagues the historical relationship between First Nations people and the settler-state, is the plight of the Kamay spears – forty fishing spears stolen from the Gweagal people in a brutal opening salvo to Britain’s colonisation of Australia.

Since their theft in 1770, the spears were held in Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the behest of Trinity College. Last year, the spears were brought back to Gadigal land for the first time in more than 250 years as part of an exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum. When I first reported on the spears, this signalled for the local Indigenous community, particularly members of the La Perouse Aboriginal Land Council, the possibility of repatriation – that is, the return of the Kamay spears to the Gweagal people.

However, in a move emblematic of colonial paternalism which dictates the terms of access and control over important cultural artefacts for First Nations people, the spears were returned to Cambridge University in July 2022. This affirmed to the local Indigenous community what we have always known – that every time we go to drink from the well, we are drowned.

This pattern can be traced throughout the historical relationship between First Nations people and the settler-state. In 1967 we were allowed to be counted as humans, but had laws made for us that treated us like dogs. The promise of Mabo never eventuated with land rights of effective Native Title legislation. In 2008, Kevin Rudd delivered the National Apology to the Stolen Generations while rolling out the Northern Territory Intervention. Even now, we are embroiled in debate around symbolic constitutional recognition while a humanitarian crisis is occurring in the town camps of Alice Springs. Each time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s history. Any progress we seek is unconditionally reliant on the government acting in good faith – something which they have never been capable of doing.

While the delineation of