There is something both familiar and unfamiliar about the temporary building erected within the exhibition Wild at Manchester Museum. It is a re-imagining of a mia-mia, a form of round hut used by some Indigenous Australian peoples, including Noongar people within what is now south-western Australia.
The Noongar people build their mia-mia with vegetation from the bush, and the team at Manchester Museum have similarly used local plant-based materials, chosen in collaboration with Noongar partners. Hazel hurdles and hessian strips forge allusions to English vernacular architectural and agricultural traditions, as well as to problematic histories of trade, transportation and colonialism-induced poverty both globally and within displaced Indigenous communities in Australia. The mia-mia then, chronicles eco-cultural ties and responsibilities across vast geographical distances and asks visitors to reassess what and where they understand the ‘wild’ to be.
The re-imagined mia-mia is used to present the story of Nowanup, a meeting, learning and healing space for Noongar people situated on reclaimed farmland in Noongar boodja (country). After colonisation in the 1800s, and particularly following bush clearing for sheep farming in the 1950s and 1960s, this land had become desertified and barren, earning the nickname ‘Death Valley’. However, in 2004, a programme of ecological restoration and rewilding began through a collaboration between the National Trust of Western Australia, the Gondwana Link programme, Greening Australia and the Noongar people.
Alison Browne of the University of Manchester, who has roots in the Noongar boodja area, explains that the impetus to include this narrative in the Wild exhibition began with a conversation she had with Uncle Eugene Eades, a Menang and Goreng Noongar Elder who has led the Nowanup restoration project. “I talked to him about the work that is being done within the geography programme at University of Manchester and within Manchester Museum to think about how we decolonise institutions and curricula. And in response he invited me to think about my responsibilities to place, and to start thinking about how I could bring the connections and the experience I’ve had in the UK back to work for country and people. It’s important to recognise that this journey of work came from an invitation.”
In inviting Manchester Museum into the process of telling the story of Nowanup, Eades echoes his own sense of being invited both by the land itself and by various organising bodies and landowners to help the land to heal. In a video interview shown in the museum installation, he recalls being told by the project’s partners, “This is Noongar boodja. The gate’s open. Do the things you need to do that will make a difference for your people.”
Eades’ first step was to bring in Elders from the Noongar community, some of whom had memories of Nowanup before it was razed for farmland. “The Elders said, we need to pull down the fences,” he explains in the video. “If we pull down the fences, we can let the land breathe freely.” This was the catalyst for a process of re-seeding, mulching and planting, which has resulted in 350ha of previously barren land being covered in vegetation.
Cultural revegetation
This ecological renewal is inextricably tied to the restor-ation of Noongar ancestral practices, knowledge and relationships, for example by collecting Elders’ experiences of medicinal plants. Another essential element is the outdoor ‘bush university’, in which diverse visitors gather for camps, youth groups and cultural programmes where young people can learn how to care for and manage the landscape. This process is called ‘cultural revegetation’, emphasising the urgent cross-disciplinary work that needs to be done ‘on Country’, as well as acknowledging the fundamental interconnection between people and place at the heart of many Indigenous worldviews.
This project is linked with Manchester Museum’s attempts to decolonise the institution, alongside adopting a policy of unconditional repatriation of objects to communities. Alexandra P. Alberda, who is mixed race and Jemez Pueblo, is the Curator of Indigenous Perspectives and works on the Indigenising Manchester Museum programme, which attempts to foreground Indigenous perspectives, acquire funding for repatriation and Indigenous projects, and challenge the ways in which colonialism is embedded within the institution’s structures and collections. “We’ve been working on moving away from a transactional or ‘saviourist’ approach to a relational approach,’ she says. “We’re trying to listen and be open to calls to action, rather than dictating how and where the museum should get involved with projects.”
One of the particular challenges has been in encouraging funders to be more flexible with how they view actions and outcomes, as most funding models are not designed to apply to open-ended, reciprocal work in which goals are not fixed from the outset by the museum but established in collaboration with environmental partners, community groups or Indigenous peoples. However, Manchester Museum has found funders who have responded positively to support this shift in thinking. They are using a grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to begin a wide-ranging research project into the museum’s botanical archives relating to south-western Australia.
“We’ve been working to think about what information the botanical collections have which can support understanding at different stages in the Nowanup restoration project,” explains Alberda. The archives are being utilised to help understand what plant material might have been growing in the Noongar boodja area before the accidental and deliberate introduction of non-native species during colonisation.
It is ironic and emotionally complex that this information is held in western museum institutions born from rapacious colonial plant hunting and collecting, making it particularly important that it is now used in processes of reparation. Alberda explains, “This is the museum’s work, because this data is messy and complex, and it can sometimes have racist things in it. Our role is to use our skills, resources and expertise to navigate and clean that data.
“We’re making cross-connections, doing provenance work, and building stories in order to hand them back to communities. And that’s where we’re shifting towards being led, and towards thinking about how what we do can contribute towards healing or not get in the way of healing processes that have already started.”
For the team at Manchester Museum, it was important that the exhibition should call visitors to consider a way of thinking that they may not have encountered before. As Browne puts it, the exhibition offers “an invitation to ask: what does ‘wild’ mean? And how do we understand Indigenous knowledges, in which Nature is not a distant entity, but something fundamentally interconnected with ourselves?
“Moreover, how do we reckon with colonial histories which have clearly wreaked devastation on one of the most biodiverse zones on the planet?”
For Uncle Eugene Eades and the Nowanup project, the answer lies in a two-way healing that involves trusting in open-ended reciprocity: “If we can heal the land, the land will heal us… You can put the seed in the land, but you don’t know how it’s going to grow. Only the land knows.”
Wild is at Manchester Museum until 1 June 2025. www.museum.manchester.ac.uk
