If any of my ancestors remains had been found to be nationally significant and purloined by a university without my permission - I'd expect that the university and the nation would pay for their return and to be interred as per my families wishes.
There is nothing insignificant about Mungo Man or any of the other important human / cultural heritage at Mungo National Park. Diverse cultural understanding is central to our knowledge of humanity. We are all inseparable from it.
The Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyaampa people should be afforded every respect members of the oldest continuous cultures in the world and those whose knowledge of this continent far outweighs the nanosecond of post-colonial 'research' that has been conducted in the past 100 years at Mungo.
Many Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyaampa people are rangers at Mungo and conduct extremely informative public tours of the site, combining Aboriginal and Western scientific knowledge and research.
Mungo is an extraordinary place and is a far richer experience if you make the time to listen to the wisdom of the people whose country it has always been.
Depends on what side of the coin you sit. Cook did nothing other than 'discover' a land already inhabited and declared it terra nullius. He sailed somewhere, woopdy doo to some, and I would wager to a lot of the original inhabitants they would have liked it to have not happened.
All Cook did of note was to decide that the people who inhabited the land weren't people because they chose to live with the land.
That and his original task was to help chart Venus's path which then allowed astronomers to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun.
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2013 E3 Maloo, 350kw
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I think the traditional owners should be the ones whose wishes are put first in relation to Mungo Man. What do they think would be appropriate?
"let them them pay for it themselves" - you are obviously saying that you are not a part of "them" but rather a descendent of Cook rather than "them". I think that Mungo Man would be able to lay claim to being one of the first Australians. I'm proud of being an Australian and I reckon our indigenous people including Mungo Man have far more relevance to Australian history than a couple of hundred years since Cook landed. I doubt whether mungo Man thought his life was insignificant.
so what did the mungo man actually do?
Current Cars:
2013 E3 Maloo, 350kw
2008 RRS, TDV8
1995 VS Clubsport
Previous Cars:
2008 ML63, V8
2002 VY SS Ute, 300kw
2002 Disco 2, LS1 conversion
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