For many decades, Sunshine Harvester Works was a significant landmark in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s industrial west. Museum curator Leah Bartsch explores research into the stories and objects of Sunshine.

Dr Murray Garde considers the Wubarr ceremony performed in 1948 and examines the tangled cross-cultural politics of non-Aboriginal involvement in secret Aboriginal religious ceremonies in Western Arnhem Land.

Dr Louise Hamby examines the dispersed collection of fibre objects collected by the 1948 Expedition – the objects and the process and politics of their collection.

Closing remarks from the Barks, Birds and Billabongs symposium.

Dr Ian S McIntosh examines how Yolngu people negotiated disclosure and concealment in relation to Bayini bark paintings. What did they tell Charles Mountford about it and why? What did they tell other anthropologists and how is that issue significant?

Professor Jon Altman describes transformations in the customary economy of Aboriginal people in western Arnhem Land over 60 years – a comparative analysis made possible because of research undertaken by Frederick McCarthy and Margaret McArthur in 1948.

Robyn McKenzie examines Fred McCarthy’s celebrated collection of Yirrkala string figures as artefacts of cross-cultural exchange, looking at problems of definition, description, interpretation and analysis.

Whereas the 1948 Expedition presented vast collections of plant and animal life classified according to Linnaean taxonomy, Emeritus Professor Dr Ad Borsboom explores how the Yolngu organise and present knowledge through mythological Dreaming stories.

Dr Adrienne Kaeppler, Curator of Oceanic Ethnology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, provides an overview of the museum’s Australian collections, focusing on the Arnhem Land collection which comprises more than 400 artefacts.

Josh Harris describes the rediscovery in the archives of The National Geographic Society of 12,000 feet of film shot by Howell Walker during the 1948 Expedition and the in-depth steps that were taken to preserve and bring the footage back to life.