A ceremony has been held in central Victoria for the reburial of Indigenous remains taken from their original gravesites decades ago.
Elders of the Yung Balug clan of the Dja Dja Wurrung people have laid to rest the remains of three of their ancestors in a traditional ceremony on the banks of Lake Boort, north of Bendigo.
Kerri Worthington with this report.
Three small rectangular graves lie side by side overlooking an empty, but picturesque, Lake Boort.
The air is filled with the smoke of green leaves, taken from a selection of trees and bushes native to the area.
The man leading the proceedings is Jida Gulpilil Murray, and he explains the smoke is especially important at this ceremony, because the original resting place of his ancestors was disturbed.
"It's important for us to carry out these type of smoking, cleansing ceremonies because it'll protect our spirit. We don't know if these old people have got a bad song or story in there. You know, it might still linger around. And by doing this it's just going to clear it all out and it's going to give us the right passage, see, to carry out the burial."
The three are believed to be men, aged in their 20s or 30s, who died in the mid-1800s and were buried along the Loddon River, which passes through Boort.
Their graves were disturbed in the 1970s by farmers clearing land, and the remains were taken to the Melbourne Museum.
"Today, three of our esteemed ancestors have returned to their tribal homelands -- not the exact in situ spot, but close. Information is scarce, and for what it is worth, these tribal people are simply known by Museum Victoria as HB-127, HB-128 and X-48064, as a curiosity to be exhibited, studied and stored in steel drawers in the concrete jungle of the Victorian museum. Yet they, like all of us, are human beings and would have had a wonderful life hunting, fishing and gathering across the abundance of the Loddon Valley and plains."
Master of ceremonies, Luke Murray.
Mr Murray told those attending the reburial the men would have had strong ties to the region, likely having married into other Dja Dja Wurrung clans, strengthening the language bonds and customs between the groups.
(Didgeridoo music fades out)
The cultural ceremony was attended by elders and both indigenous and non-indigenous locals.
Jida Gulpilil Murray told them the formal reburial represented a coming together of different cultures.
"You're here and we're here. We want you to walk with us to our ancestors there, where we've prepared their final resting place. Now, I ask that you treat that place just like it was your own ancestor's."
(Didgeridoo and chanting around the graves).
The Boort area is rich in indigenous history.
Farmer Paul Haw, whose land abuts the reburial site, says Lake Boort contains cooking middens and hundreds of scar trees -- where bark was cut to make the canoes the locals used for fishing.
Mr Haw says it's obviously long been home for indigenous people, and is the right spot for a reburial.
"The land they're buried on is owned by Parks Victoria in the Big Lake Reserve, as it's known by the Boort people. It's quite a big area, probably 15-hundred acres in the old language, and it's a good safe place for them to be because we know no one does wheelies (hooning in cars and motorbikes) or anything there. It's a good place for people to just pull off the road and have a look at them, and it's near my house where I can keep an eye on them. I can't think of a better place we could have planted them, becasue if you put the skeletons where they actually came from -- some came out from teh middle of paddocks, ploughed up cooking mounds -- you couldn't put them back where tractors are goign to keep running over you."
The remains had been held in the Melbourne Museum before being repatriated to traditional owners.
Museum Victoria director of collections, research and exhibitions, Dr Robin Hirst, says the museum is the official repository for indigenous remains.
"We hold remains from various parts of Victoria, in fact various parts of Australia, we hold many remains. We contact various traditional owners in various communities, or they contact us, and then we work through the process of de-accessioning them from the collection. They go through our board and then they are repatriated."
Dr Hirst says the museum is anxious to return indigenous remains to their country, and the repatriations are undertaken with utmost respect.
But Yung Balug elder Gary Murray says in the Melbourne Museum alone, there are more than a thousand sets of indigenous remains and more should be done to speed up the repatriation process.
"Keen's one thing, but getting through the bureaucratic red tape is another, apparently. And I think we've got to get over it. We've done enough of these repatriations, going right back to the 1980s, to know what we have to do, and that is find the right people in the right country, which is not hard given there's 15 years of Native Title evidence about who's who in Victoria and elsewhere. And I think the other thing of course is resourcing. We've done this one on the smell of an oily rag. At the end of the day, we need to look at how we did it today, and once we decided to do it, it was done quick."
So decades after they were taken away, three sets of indigenous remains -- three people -- have returned to their country.
(Singing/ rhythm sticks as the graves are closed)
And a report on the handback of the remains at Boort can be seen in this week's Living Black program on Sunday at 1.30 pm on SBS ONE.
