On a laptop screen in a small office in Broome, Bardi Jawi men leaned in close.
Objects collected from their grandparents and great-grandparents — held for decades in a museum in Illinois — appeared one by one.
Spears, boomerangs, shields, and Bark baskets.
As well as items with restrictions, meant to be handled with cultural care.
As they looked, the men began talking about places on Country where the raw materials still grow, about cultural practices that have not disappeared, and about what has changed — and what hasn't — since the objects were taken.
It was the beginning of a return.
"You get a sense of the person's presence," senior Bardi lawman Kevin George later said, describing the moment the artefacts came home.
"And they told us to look after and to cherish these things ... everyone was joyful and respectful and loved it."
The scene, described in a new academic paper in Australian Aboriginal Studies, is used to make a broader argument: that repatriation works best when it is built as a partnership — not a transaction — and when Traditional Custodians are in control from the outset.
The paper examines the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' (AIATSIS) Return of Cultural Heritage project, which ran from 2018 to 2020, and focuses on its first completed return: significant Bardi Jawi material repatriated from the Illinois State Museum to Ardyaloon (One Arm Point), on the tip of Western Australia's Dampier Peninsula.
The authors — including AIATSIS staff, Bardi Jawi knowledge holders and museum partners — argue a "three-way partnership model" between community, collecting institution and AIATSIS was the most ethical way to complete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research within a government agency.
At the centre of their case is a practical problem which has stalled many repatriation efforts for decades: overseas museums often have rules, boards and "due diligence" requirements that can make the process slow or bureaucratic — particularly when items are sensitive, when provenance records are incomplete.
AIATSIS' approach, the paper argues, resolves this by shifting the work upstream, and doing it with the people who hold cultural authority.
Rather than beginning with a formal request drafted in Canberra, the RoCH team began on Country — and moved at the pace required by remote life.
They were told in Fitzroy Crossing to speak to Frank Davey about "One Arm Point material". Phone reception was patchy.
Roads could take three to seven hours, depending on washouts.
So the team extended their stay, switched to a four-wheel drive, and went to meet.
From there, the process followed four steps.
First, AIATSIS wrote to more than 200 overseas collecting institutions, asking what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material they held, and whether they were willing to return significant items.
Second, it identified collections which could realistically be returned under a museum's existing policy.
In this case, the Illinois State Museum responded positively, and its curatorial staff worked with AIATSIS to better understand the collection's provenance.
The Bardi Jawi objects had been collected during fieldwork by linguist Gerhardt Laves between 1929 and 1931.
Although Mr Laves didn't always record the names of the people he collected items from, his field notes — some held by AIATSIS — contained enough detail to begin triangulating cultural ownership.
Third came consultation and partnership-building.
Multiple meetings at Ardyaloon, with senior men and women examining archival records and photographs, discussing what should return, what should not, and how returned items would be cared for and reincorporated into cultural practice.
By the end of those meetings, the paper says, Bardi Jawi representatives endorsed AIATSIS to submit a formal repatriation request on their behalf.
The museum's board unanimously approved it.
One board member described it as "the most complete repatriation request I have ever encountered".
The fourth step was the return itself.
The material was brought back to Ardyaloon in October 2019, with community celebrations later held in 2020 after COVID disrupted travel and gatherings.
What the paper is really documenting, though, is what changed inside the museum because of the partnership.
In one tangible shift, the Illinois State Museum adjusted its collection management practices: assigning male staff to handle restricted men's material and treating the Bardi Jawi objects according to cultural protocols.
Those practices, the authors say, then influenced how staff cared for the museum's wider Australian Aboriginal holdings.
There were softer changes, too — the kind museums often struggle to describe in policy language.
During an official handover ceremony, Bardi men used two returned boomerangs in a cultural performance as a deliberate act of exchange: sharing culture in a setting that had historically taken it.
For the museum, the paper suggests, the return became a "turning point" — an example of repatriation not as loss, but as a form of institutional learning.
The authors situate this in a larger global shift in museum practice, often described as decolonisation: a move away from the idea that Western collecting institutions are neutral authorities, and toward models which recognise museums were built through colonial acquisition, and that cultural material has living owners, laws and obligations.
In that framing, repatriation is no longer a moral debate conducted in abstract terms.
The paper also makes a blunt point about what this model requires: resourcing.
The work was driven by an organisation able to fund travel, research, consultation and coordination across multiple institutions and jurisdictions.
But for communities, the outcome is not a neat line on an inventory list. It is the return of belonging — and a chance for old objects to become active again.
"It was like I was going back in time," Mr George said.
"Everyone felt the same way ... the children, the Bardi men and Bardi women, the Bardi aunties and uncles."
