In early 2020, the academic, artist and artistic director Brook Andrew travelled to the small town of Collarenebri in north-west New South Wales to show the local Kamilaroi community some shocking footage he’d found that he wanted to feature as part of the 2020 Sydney Biennale.
Shot in 1949, it showed wealthy Adelaide collector and businessman Harry Balfour supervising a team of timber workers as they felled dozens of trees.
The trees – some possibly as old as 800 years – were covered in detailed carvings and sacred to the Kamilaroi First Nations people. Using circular saws to separate the large carved sections from the trunks, they were loaded on to trucks, transported by rail and stacked on to ships for distribution around the globe.
The carved trees of the Banarway Bora had played a central role in Aboriginal knowledge systems for centuries yet only a handful remained on country in Collarenebri, 75km north-east of Walgett. More than 50 had been removed in the 1940s and are now housed in public museums and private collections around the world.
Most of the town’s 650 residents gathered to watch the footage.
“People were crying, others were shocked. Only a few people knew about the existence of these trees,” Andrew recalls. “There were a lot of people who were pretty upset.”
Now, in a bid to bring the trees home, students at Collarenebri Central School have become global advocates, presenting a short but moving documentary called Gaaguuwiya Dhawunga (Bring Back Home), which premiered at an international conference at the Ethnography Museum of Geneva late last month and has since been posted on YouTube.
Somewhat paradoxically, two of the carved trees have been traced to the collection of the Geneva museum.
Another tree has been located in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, while the Melbourne Museum was already known to be in possession of two. The community wants them back.
Andrew, a descendent of the Wiradjuri people of central NSW, uncovered the 1949 footage in 2019 while conducting research with fellow Monash University academic Brian Martin into artefacts made from south-eastern Australian trees.
The project has so far uncovered tens of thousands of artefacts spread across more than 200 Australian and overseas museums, with more than 30,000 objects tracked down in British institutions alone.
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