Maria Nugent, Research Fellow, Australian National University
Objects on display in the Indigenous Australia exhibition at the British Museum, London
There is a corner (literally) in the BP exhibition Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation that features the famous British navigator Captain James Cook. It occurs at a pivotal point, where the exhibition’s narrative moves from the hard-to-fathom timescales of the Dreaming (the complex system of beliefs and stories that explain the meaningful creation of the world, and how humans reproduce that system through ceremony, art, storytelling and other meaningful action, which one anthropologist described as an ‘everywhen’) and the 40,000 plus years of human occupation of the continent, to the much shorter and more immediate timespan of the last 245 years since British encounters with Indigenous people there began. While Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese voyagers had visited since the early 1600s, Cook was the first British navigator to explore the region…
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First Night History 
Our colonial excursions leave us with a lot to answer for. This exhibition serves to highlight the loss of a rich cultural heritage, in favour of land-grabbing and world dominance.
Best wishes, Pete.
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We do, and this is so rarely acknowledged.
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