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Anthropologists Howard Morphy and John Carty, and senior curator Mike Pickering, discuss Indigenous art from the Western Desert and Arnhem Land, and how art from both regions reflects concepts of Country, family and memory.

Margo talks about the new exhibition of Aboriginal artworks sent from Catholic missions in the north and west of Australia to the Vatican that recently opened at the Vatican’s Ethnological Museum and coincided with the canonisation of St Mary MacKillop.

Artist Mandy Martin, historian Libby Robin and zoologist Chris Dickman join Guy Fitzhardinge from Desert Channels Queensland for an insightful discussion that explores partnerships, art and writings about conservation around our desert rivers.

The Canning Stock Route, combined with the concept of Walyja (family), acts as a prism through which it is possible to trace both the human and the subsequent artistic movements that characterised the far Western Desert region in the 20th century.

This forum, sponsored by Museums Australia ACT branch, outlines the multimedia used in the National Museum of Australia’s Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition as part of a broader discussion on the future of museum multimedia.

Curator Anne-Marie Conde shares her work developing an exhibit on Bendigo as part of the gold module for the Landmarks: People and Places across Australia gallery, covering in particular the development of the Chinese community from the 1850s.

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?

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.

Closing remarks from the Barks, Birds and Billabongs symposium.

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