November marks the return of another collection of Indigenous remains from Britain, this time to the Dunghutti people of northern New South Wales.
The remains will be in the temporary care of the Australian Museum in Sydney before making the trip to their final resting place.
Rachael Hocking has the story.
It was a simple ceremony at the entrance to the Australian Museum.
An elder smoked gum leaves onto a box cloaked in an Aboriginal flag.
Inside the box were ancient remains that could be 2,000 years old.
They belong to an ancestor of Dunghutti elder Kenneth Dickson.
"I'm grateful to be able to express the concerns of what this means to Aboriginal people through the culture and spirituality, and I think a lot of other communities will appreciate the same when their ancestors' remains are brought home from all parts of Europe."
A smoking ceremony is intended to cleanse the remains of any evil they have carried since they were taken from their traditional country -- in this case, more than 50 years ago.
The Australian Museum's Phil Gordon says it is a process that should not have to happen.
"Because people are breaking the law by taking ancestral remains. Even in the past, there were laws that prohibited the taking of Aboriginal remains away. Doctors took them away, physical anthropologists (did) to study, people just wanted to collect remains."
Phil Gordon says it creates mixed feelings for the Aboriginal people they are taken from.
"There's usually a whole range of different emotions. First, anger, of course. I mean, 'Why were these remains taken? Why didn't we know about these remains?' And then, in most cases, gratitude that the remains are being returned."
While elders know very little about the identity of the person behind the bones, they have an idea about how the bones were discovered.
"These ones were found on Crescent Head Beach. Back in the day, it could have been through the routine mining that may have unearthed it, because Aboriginal people camped out there for many years with their families -- hunting, fishing -- and this, this is taking back for the preservation, for him to be buried in his own land."
The latest remains have travelled more than 34,000 kilometres so far, and they still have further to go before they meet their final resting place.
A research biologist originally collected them in the early 1960s.
They have sat in the Hampshire Cultural Trust, in Britain, since the 1980s.
Now, they join other Dunghutti remains in the Australian Museum that were returned from Washington earlier this year.
Together with seven more sets of remains, they will travel to Dunghutti country, near Kempsey in Northern New South Wales, to be reburied on home soil.
"For the community, it's a big thing. It's spiritual and cultural in all aspects of Aboriginal traditional life."
