Audio on demand

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.

John Archer shares his experience of travelling the world recording the stories, legends, myths and rituals of cultures that revere water.

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

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.

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.

Ian 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?

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.

Robert Rush Miller was one of the youngest members of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Miller’s son, Gifford Miller, and son-in-law, Robert Cashner, provide insight into his life and work.