I live in a beachside suburb of Adelaide. It is becoming pretty up-market these days as the old houses and shacks that once lined the esplanade are turned to rubble and replaced with two and three storey mansions. The old dunes and the lagoons on which they are sited are long gone. The original coastline, once replenished seasonally by the tides and the shifting sands, is in many places shored up by huge rock deposits designed to keep back the encroaching sea. Little remains as a reminder of the Kaurna people whose land was appropriated by British settlers from 1836 onwards, land which they had lived on and managed sustainably for some 40,000 years. 

In August 2019, at Tulukutangga, near the remnants of a natural spring which once fed into a large lagoon, and which is a central part of an Indigenous Dreaming Story, local Kaurna people gathered for a Repatriation Ceremony – the reburial of eleven Kaurna Old People, whose bones had been returned from the Natural History Museum of the UK, and from the large collection of ancestral remains held by the South Australian Museum. It was a moving ceremony, a stark reminder of the ‘spoils of conquest’ attitude of all ‘invaders’ over the centuries, the assumed right to take what was of interest from those dispossessed – in this case for ‘scientfic research’, or as curiosities, or to trade or sell. Finally, eleven Old People had been returned to Country and buried in what were once the dunes over which they had roamed in life.