Workshop Announcement: ‘Translocated Nature from Australia as Indigenous Cultural Belongings’

The ‘Berlin’s Australian Archive’ team are pleased to announce an upcoming workshop: ‘Translocated Nature from Australia as Indigenous Cultural Belongings.’ The two-day workshop will take place at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN) on 8 and 9 October 2025.

This workshop is part of the provenance research project ‘Berlin’s Australian Archive,’ and will be co-hosted together with The Center for Humanities of Nature. Based at the MfN, the Center for Humanities of Nature brings together scholars and practitioners from diverse disciplines to facilitate critical self-reflection within natural history museums and biodiversity sciences.

Over the past two years, the 'Berlin's Australian Archive' project has been engaged with the MfN's Australian collections. The project asks: how can German natural history institutions recognise the ongoing significance of translocated nature to First Peoples? How can these institutions recover the information they hold about the entanglement of German natural history with Australian colonialism, as well as Indigenous knowledge and practices? And how can such work best support First Peoples' claims to sovereignty over these natural collections as Indigenous cultural belongings?

The workshop invites museum professionals and academics from Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom to engage with these questions across a two-day program. The first day is open to the public and consists of a series of short talks by invited speakers, a project presentation by the 'Berlin's Australian Archive' team, and an open roundtable discussion. The second day is for speakers and invited participants and combines visits to collections and archives with informal conversations about appropriate ways to engage with translocated nature from Australia.

Confirmed Participants

Keynote speaker: Prof. Dr. Lynette Russell (Monash University)
Keynote speakers (pre-recorded): Laura McBride (Wailwan), with Dr. Mariko Smith (Yuin), (Australian Museum, Sydney)
Project partners: Rebecca Carland and Tim Stranks (Museums Victoria, Melbourne)
Sarah Fründt, M.A. (German Lost Art Foundation)
Dr. Alison Clark (National Museums Scotland)
Dr. Jack Ashby (Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London)
Dr. rer. nat. Louiza Bengtsson (Botanical Garden Berlin)
Dr. Yann LeGall (Technical University Berlin)
Anita Hermannstädter (MfN)
Dr. Ginevra Bellini (MfN)
Dr. Stefanie Klamm (FU Berlin)
PD Dr. Hendrik Müller (Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)