Why it took 100 years to restore the dignity of Nanny Nellie

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Why it took 100 years to restore the dignity of Nanny Nellie

By Julie Power

Her family called her Nanny Nellie. For decades, a life-size sculpture of Nellie Bungil Walker showing her topless body was displayed at the Australian Museum to illustrate outdated theories of a century ago that Aboriginal Australians were a primitive and dying race of nomadic people.

A Ngarigo woman living in La Perouse in the early 1920s, Walker’s sculpture, very likely done without her informed consent, was one of three unnamed figures designed to showcase an Aboriginal family group.

Aunty Irene Ridgeway with the newly clad version of the statue of her great grandmother Nanny Nellie, Nellie Bungil Walker, at the Australian Museum.

Aunty Irene Ridgeway with the newly clad version of the statue of her great grandmother Nanny Nellie, Nellie Bungil Walker, at the Australian Museum.Credit: Steven Siewert

On Wednesday, a more dignified statue of Walker fully dressed in clothes typical of the 1920s, was put on display after decades of research by descendants who wanted to tell the real story of her life and put a name to her face.

“They were nameless objects in a museum,” Walker’s great-granddaughter Irene Ridgeway said of Nellie and the others in the group, Uncle Jimmy Clements, and a boy, Harold Marsh. “We are rewriting that story. Giving them back a voice,” said Ridgeway.

This truth telling includes a NITV feature film about Walker’s life and times, called Her Name was Nanny Nellie.

Directed and written by Daniel King, Walker’s great, great-grandson and Ridgeway’s son, it will premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival in October.

An archival image of the Wunderlich Aboriginal Group, with Nellie in the middle, in their original state.

An archival image of the Wunderlich Aboriginal Group, with Nellie in the middle, in their original state. Credit: Australian Museum

It also seeks to connect other families to their ancestors’ statues and re-display the statues this time with their names, identities and dignity.

Ridgeway has the same profile and jawline as Walker, King said at the museum on Wednesday.

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When Ridgeway saw the newly dressed sculpture of Walker as part of a new display in the museum’s Bayala Nura gallery, she was both happy and sad. “It’s like you’re looking into yourself. I was just amazed by seeing her. Not very many Aboriginal people get to stand in front of their great-grandmother, do they?”

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Walker was rounded up by the authorities after a request from the museum which wanted to find a dark skinned, full-blooded Aboriginal man, woman and a child to depict a family unit.

They were to be used as “life-like representations of a fast disappearing race”, according to an editorial in The Australian Museum Magazine in 1925 by the Museum’s director Charles Anderson.

“The Australian is a nomad and a hunter, he does not till the fields or rare useful domestic animals,” wrote Anderson. “His ways are not our ways.”

The display and their near-naked appearance was in line with prevailing theories about Aboriginal people being a primitive and dying race, now recognised as a stereotypical interpretation.

Dr Mariko Smith, the manager of the museum’s First Nations collections, said the museum had always had “an influential platform regarding truth and authority” via its collections, programming, and exhibitions to the public.

Aunty Irene, statue of Nanny Nellie and great great grandson, Daniel King
Aunty Irene, great granddaughter of Nanny Nellie.

Aunty Irene, statue of Nanny Nellie and great great grandson, Daniel King Aunty Irene, great granddaughter of Nanny Nellie.Credit: Steven Siewert

She said the unveiling of this new display was very significant. Nanny Nellie was back on display nearly 100 years after the first time. “This time it is done in true collaboration with Aboriginal people; in contrast to portraying a so-called dying race she demonstrates ongoing family connection and thriving, continuing culture.”

Known as the Wunderlich Aboriginal Group, the trio were displayed as if they were a nomadic, prehistoric cave dwelling people.

Although Walker’s body was partly clad, the sculptures by George Rayner Hoff, one of the most important artists of the time, included details of the trio’s genitals.

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“Captain Cook’s [sculpture] wasn’t done like that,” said King.

Australia’s 1925 Census declared Aboriginal people a “dying race”. That had clearly not happened.

Ridgeway laughed. “No, we are absolutely not. Put that in there [your article]. We are not dying.”

Walker was not nomadic. A domestic living in La Perouse, she wore typical clothes of the times. And she wasn’t related to the others in the trio.

She was a mother of a child, Victoria Archibald, who had been taken from her when she got sick with tuberculosis.

Walker’s daughter Victoria Archibald wrote to the Australian Museum in 1996 saying she had been told by family that they had been overwhelmed by the dignity of the sculpture.

Yet she could not bring herself to view the sculpture because of her strong feelings.

King said when Archibald first saw the sculpture of her mother naked at a distance in the museum, she refused to view it up close. Her great-granddaughter Ridgeway did the same thing.

Asked to provide the museum with details of Walker’s life, she recalled being close to her mother as a small child. Her mother smoked a clay pipe, and they lived in a house on a reserve built by hand.

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When they moved to Sydney, Walker was sent to the Waterfall TB sanatorium, and her daughter was put in the care of the Aboriginal Protection Board, and sent to Cootamundra.

Other than spending a fortnight with her mother before she died of TB in 1932, Archibald never saw her mother again – other than at the museum in the display.

“I would say my mother was living at La Perouse when the sculpture was made,” she wrote. “I knew nothing about it for many, many years. She was not allowed to get in touch with me, and I was not allowed to get in touch with her. Our lives were destroyed.”

King and the producer of Her Name is Nellie, Ben Pederick, hope the documentary will encourage other Indigenous people to engage with institution. “For centuries, Indigenous communities have been subject to theft, misrepresentation and appropriation by museums worldwide. Now there is a positive change, led by First Nations people. Our film is one such journey.”

https://documentaryaustralia.com.au/project/her-name-is-nanny-nellie/

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