Ngarinyin-Gija woman Dr Vanessa Russ spent her formative years on a remote cattle station in Western Australia. She remembers swimming in the river as Elders fished and told stories, drawing in the homestead creek sand at sunset and climbing the wooden rails of the stockyard as cattle were branded for transport. As a young child, she visited the rock art paintings of the Wandjina (cloud and rain spirits) and saw the reverence in which they were held. She heard that her grandmother had spoken of never touching these paintings in case a big flood came.
Today, Dr Russ leads an endeavour to revolutionise how Aboriginal cultural material is accessed, displayed and reconnected with its origins in a groundbreaking new museum.
A new kind of museum
Due to open in 2027 at the University of Melbourne’s Parkville campus, The Place for Indigenous Art and Culture will be an Indigenous-led research and teaching facility. Designed with the needs and comfort of Aboriginal people as primary considerations, it will include collection stores, an archive, a library, event spaces, seminar rooms, an exhibition space, a ceremonial area and gardens. The Place will connect the outdoors and the indoors to ensure that cultural knowledges can be appropriately seen, used, remembered and cared for. Collections will be mapped from sunrise to sunset across Australia, allowing their care to be informed by local contexts of Country and culture.
Aboriginal Australian objects are considered to have their own memories of time, place and people. The Place will treat them as both story and storyteller, with close relationships to cultural knowledge-holders. This will allow an exchange based on a principle of care that extends beyond the convention of housing collections in dark spaces absent of light, air and life to a new standard of a healthy environment that benefits people and objects alike.
Dr Russ has observed how some Elders interact with collection stores. “They think about the objects as having feelings,” she says. “The first thing they want to do is sing to the objects. They want to bring them back to life. They want to give them some healing and reconnect to them.”
Careful consideration will be given to the depth and breadth of visitors’ different life experiences. Those experiences may on occasion include painful recollections for people such as members of the Stolen Generation, who might not want to retrace their history or relive memories of welfare cars pulling up alongside them and snatching them from the street in broad daylight.
The important work of The Place will also enable University students to learn about Aboriginal history and societal structures, giving them the tools to meaningfully understand both traditional and contemporary Aboriginal art and culture.
“We're switching around the focus, but we're still maintaining all the elements of a museum,” says Dr Russ. “The museum will have a residency space so that Elders can interact with the younger generation and live and stay and then work on the cultural knowledge and teach our students about the past, the present and the potential of the future.”
Dr Russ and her team will bring together numerous existing collections, including the Donald Thomson Collection that has been on loan to Museums Victoria since 1973 after being donated to the University by Dr Thomson’s widow. The Place will house objects from over 90 Indigenous communities from Cape York, Arnhem Land, and the Central and Gibson Deserts, also including new acquisitions that expand nationally to include the southwest, east and west coasts of Australia.
The Place will transform the access and display of these collections to reflect their original cultural locations prior to colonial interruption, with priority given to Aboriginal knowledge in all aspects of collection mapping. Dr Russ aims to deconstruct homogenous stereotypes of Aboriginal Australia to reveal places of dynamic complexity, where two objects might look the same but come from distinctive cultures on different sides of a river.
“This collection holds deep cultural knowledge and richness for diverse audiences, but most especially for Aboriginal people,” she says. “Our memories are often locked up in the dark recesses of our mind until we see something and think about its place in our world. Cultural material has a beautiful ability to animate our deepest thoughts through the telling of stories, but we must see it, feel it and live it”.
Australian native flower garden.
Exploring identity and cultural collections
Dr Russ is also involved in the difficult and disheartening work of repatriating ancestral remains from the collections back to their communities of origin. Through the Aboriginal Heritage Act (2006), these Ancestors have been transferred into the care of the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council (VAHC). With VAHC having limited resources to support repatriation work outside Victoria, the University is facilitating connections with people in communities of origin. This work will empower senior knowledge-holders to lay claim to Ancestors and enable research collaborations to ensure that they are returned to the right people and the right places.
Drawing on her academic research and years of curatorship, Dr Russ brings deep expertise and experience to this new museum project. During her undergraduate years at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Art, she began working as a teacher and lecturer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She remained focused on the gallery to study Indigenous perspectives and representations of Aboriginal art for her PhD at the University of Western Australia (UWA), which she completed in 2014. These immersive experiences inspired her to embark on a career studying Indigenous art.
In 2014, she became one of only 13 West Australians selected for a Churchill Fellowship, which she used to investigate the effects of national identity as depicted in mainstream art museums on Indigenous populations in the US, Hong Kong and Singapore.
On her return to Australia, she was appointed Associate Director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at UWA—the first Aboriginal director in the museum’s 40-year history. The Berndt Museum has a wide collection of predominantly Aboriginal Australian art and cultural material, as well as items from the Asia-Pacific region.
“I learnt all the key tricks of the trade there,” Dr Russ says. “How to care for and handle cultural material, how to work with communities, how to respond appropriately to visits to ensure that Aboriginal people have access to their collections, and the different types of collections and practices. I think that really plays out in the work I want to do for the University of Melbourne.”
During this time, Dr Russ also created the first digital catalogue of the Janet Holmes à Court Collection. At the Holmes à Court Gallery she learnt how to handle objects, how diverse collection stores operate and how private collectors think about art and artworks.
Dr Russ led the Berndt Museum for four years. The numerous exhibitions that she curated included Carrolup Revisited: A Journey Through the Southwest of Western Australia (2019), focusing on the group of children who drew extraordinary works on paper at Carrolup School during the 1940s–1950s in a style that continues to influence Aboriginal art in southwestern Australia today. Another notable exhibition was Milingimbi: A Living Culture (2017), a collaboration with senior knowledge-holders from the Milingimbi Art and Culture Centre to display the barks acquired by Ronald and Catherine Berndt during the 1950s–60s. Dr Russ’ experience of witnessing artists remake barks by accessing their own archive featuring images of old stories sparked her interest in rematriating knowledge, or restoring its connection to people and place.
Dr Russ was appointed the University of Melbourne’s inaugural Asialink Leaders First Nations Fellow in 2020. She believes that Australia’s relationship with Asia is still greatly undervalued, and will seek to strengthen ties through her work on The Place. Her experience, which includes research at Japan’s National Ainu Museum dedicated to the Indigenous people of Hokkaido, has convinced her that Aboriginal Australia has more in common with Indonesia and other countries in the Asian region than with New Zealand and Canada.
In 2021, Dr Russ accepted the roles of Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Indigenous Studies at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Her work investigated the role of Indigenous data and the Indigenous Data Network in research on alcohol and family violence.
At the beginning of 2023, she accepted her current positions as the University’s Director of Indigenous Collections and Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Heritage Oversight Committee.
Connected to Country
A picturesque waterfall in Western Australia's Kimberley region
Dr Russ continues to have a deep connection to Country. “I have spent my whole life going back to the Kimberley,” she says.
She recalls an incident in her childhood that left a lasting impression. An Elder named Billy King came to see her uncle, telling him that tourists camping in one of the gorges had painted over the Wandjina – the rock paintings that her grandmother had warned them never to destroy.
“The Wandjina were no longer there, and Billy was deeply upset. He felt heartbroken. He felt that his whole purpose for life was broken,” she said. “He didn't live for much longer after that, and it was sadly an example of the complete failure to understand how Aboriginal culture operates.”
Dr Russ hopes that the University’s new museum will create an environment that enables Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to gain a deeper appreciation of Aboriginal history, culture and art, influencing future generations to care for Country.
“Given the No result of the referendum for the Voice to Parliament,” she says, “This project is needed more than ever.”