‘A deeply colonial backward step’: why are donors, staff and politicians up in arms about the South Australian Museum?

A planned radical restructure of the South Australian Museum has seriously undermined relations between the institution and Indigenous staff and stakeholders. Photograph: Kelly Barnes AllStar Photos/The Guardian

For the past seven years the South Australian Museum has undergone a thawing of its long-strained relations with Indigenous peoples, thousands of whose ancestral human remains and cultural objects the institution has hoarded since the 1850s.

The museum has apologised to Indigenous Australians for the kleptocratic, inhuman practices by which it amassed a “collection’’ of Indigenous ancestral remains of about 4,600 people, patiently built previously nonexistent trust with South Australia’s Kaurna people, reburied hundreds of ancestors in Adelaide and repatriated remains to communities across Australia.