Caroline Martin: Hi, my name’s Caroline Martin. Welcome to Melbourne Museum. I’m the manager of Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre and I’m going to show you around. Let’s go.
Bunjilaka was actually developed in consultation with Victorian Aboriginal communities way before it was built. It showed that Aboriginal communities and Museum Victoria have actually had a long association.
The whole premise of Bunjilaka is that it is an Aboriginal Cultural Centre that is about the lived culture. So whilst we actually have the aesthetics that represent the traditional Aboriginal way of living, what we actually do as our core business is provide opportunities where people are engaging in our community as a lived culture. The stories that make up Aboriginal culture were told in a contemporary way.
So here we are in Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre. My name’s Caroline and I’m a descendent of the Briggs family, and Traditional Owner of Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung Country. And it absolutely gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the traditional lands of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung people.
(welcome to country)
Welcome to Bunjilaka.
Bunjilaka is made up of many galleries, gardens and performance spaces. The gallery that we’re in now is the Birrarung Gallery. It’s a space dedicated to Victorian Aboriginal artists and it’s where we have the opportunity to promote a very vibrant living Aboriginal culture.
The paintings that are behind me are actually done by the great Lin Onus, a prolific Victorian Aboriginal artist that we’re very very proud to be associated with.
This part of the gallery is where we have the opportunity for Victorian Aboriginal people to tell their story and they do this through contemporary Victorian Aboriginal art exhibitions. The art exhibition that we have on at the moment is from the Gunai / Kurnai community, and one family is represented in this exhibition, the Mullett family.
Where we are now is Kalaya. This is our performance space. The purpose of this space is where we tell stories – we have education programs in there, we have performance in there... it’s also a purpose-built space for smoking ceremonies. It provides us an opportunity to do some amazing stuff in there that engages the visitor.
So from the Birrarung Gallery and Kalaya, you walk outside and you come to the Milarri Garden.
The Milarri Garden allows us the opportunity to promote the significance of Aboriginal people’s connection to Country. It allows us to tell the stories of plants and the significance of those plants to Victorian Aboriginal people for either medicinal purposes or food purposes.
We also have eels out in the Milarri Garden that provides us the opportunity to tell the significance of eels as a prominent food source in Victorian Aboriginal communities, more so particularly down in Gunditjmara Country, Lake Condah, where we’re actually able to complement the eels and the story and the significance of eels with the historical eel trap that we have in the main space of Jumbunna, the permanent exhibition space.
And now we’re in the major gallery space. This is Jumbunna and this is where we’re actually going to tell new stories; this is where the redevelopment’s going to happen.
Jumbunna is a huge space that over the next couple of years, we want Victorian Aboriginal communities to actually engage in this. We want to know what you want, what stories you want to be told in this gallery. This is our opportunity to showcase the uniqueness of who we are in Victoria and in the Australian landscape.
So the current exhibitions were opened to the public way over a decade ago. Since then, several million people have actually experienced Aboriginal culture at the museum. Our aspiration is that everyone that comes into Bunjilaka, particularly Victorians, and that’s the mainstream community of Victoria, will engage in Bunjilaka so much so that the experience will be immersive, they will have a really strong appreciation of Aboriginal culture, they’ll see it as a part of their history. So that’s why we’re actually going about to do this community consultation, and hopefully we can encourage all the language groups to come and tell us the stories that they want told.
This is where we invite you to tell us some of the stories that you think should be told in Bunjilaka.