Tahnee Innes: The Archive and the Cassowary

Tahnee  is an anthropologist and Yawuru-nation descendant from Broome, Western Australia. Her research interests include Indigenous curatorship, art and ethnography, and socio-political landscapes. Currently, she works in native title with the people of Cape York. In this short and thought-provoking paper, Tahnee uses the analogy, drawn from a conversation with an Elder of the Dyirbal people of the north Queensland rainforests, of a body of repatriated artifacts and information as being like a cassowary nest. When we gather eggs in this nest, she was told, they can hatch “like ideas” – but the cassowary watching over the eggs may not allow us to access them.