Over three years (2023–2025), the Berlin’s Australian Archive project addressed these questions by bringing together Knowledge Holders and experts from First Nations communities with museum and university researchers in Australia and Germany. Working collaboratively, the project critically investigated collections associated with two prominent Prussian naturalists active in nineteenth-century south-eastern Australia: Wilhelm von Blandowski and Gerard Krefft.

Guided by the members of the project’s Aboriginal Advisory Board, our interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-sector team hosted two delegation visits from Australia in 2023 and 2024. Together, we sought to:

• Reassemble this material records across the national, taxonomic and disciplinary divides that led to its dispersal across multiple collecting institutions in Australia and Germany.
• Analyse how the making, circulation and scholarship of these collections intersected with colonial frameworks of knowledge production—including their infrastructural, ideological and economic foundations—in order to develop a critical understanding of the processes and conditions that severed these materials from the Indigenous communities and lands to which they are historically and culturally connected.
• Develop sustainable and culturally appropriate forms of access to Berlin-based collections for First Nations communities for whom they are relevant.
• Engage in a dialogic exchange of knowledge that addresses the interconnected nature of Indigenous knowledge embodied in Berlin’s Australian Archive and its relationship to Indigenous histories and lived cultural worlds.
• Develop guidelines that translate the historical and cultural significance, as well as the potentially sensitive nature, of the collections into appropriate protocols for research, preservation and display in German museums.