Unsettling collections, revitalizing culture: The work of art in Indigenous southeastern Australia

Situated in southeastern Australia, this article examines the pivotal work of Indigenous artists in revitalizing cultural practices and knowledge that colonial violence worked to erase. Our discussion tracks the material legacy of Kaawirn Kuunawarn (c.1820–1889), an important Ancestor of the Gunditjmara Nation and the maker of two greenstone axes held in Berlin's Ethnological Museum. We reassemble Kaawirn Kuunawarn's material record—dispersed across multiple collections and a distance of over 16,000 kilometers—and chart its legacy in the work of contemporary Indigenous artists. While our analysis offers a remarkable account of Gunditjmara cultural “survivance,” it also shows how Indigenous histories were obscured, rather than preserved, by global processes of museum collecting. In light of these erasures, cultural revitalization is highlighted as transformative political work: an affective, embodied mode of presencing the past that unsettles the colonial legacies of collecting, reconstituting archival objects and images as vital conduits of Indigenous social memory and identity.