Ancestor whose remains sat in dental school box for decades returned to Northern Territory community

The people of Yuendemu welcome their ancestor home. Photograph: John Carty/South Australian Museum

For decades, the ancestor’s remains sat in a box labelled “Queen of the Warlbiri” at the Adelaide dental school.

In the 1960s, a pastoralist who found the remains at Pikilyi/Vaughan Springs, near Yuendumu in the central Australian desert, handed them to a missionary. That missionary then gave them to researchers from the University of Adelaide’s dental school.