The delicate watercolours made by late-18^th century British scientists and settlers in the Australian penal colony of Port Jackson (now Sydney), record so many specimens: gum plants, kangaroos, and natives. They are all objects examined by the visitors' gaze, captured for the curious back home. A new temporary display at London's Natural History Museum, strives to address the unbalanced perspective promoted by these images, collectively known as the First Fleet Collection. A selection of the watercolours is to be presented with new works by Daniel Boyd, a contemporary artist of Aboriginal decent, made in response to the collection during a three-months residency at the NHM. The artist also seized the opportunity of his stay to poke into some of the museum's most controversial exhibits — its extensive human remains collection.

"Before arriving I had a few points of entry into the NHM archive," Boyd told ARTINFO. "Personal connection to landscape was one of them, in particular Cooktown on the far north-eastern coast of Australia." The city is named after Captain Cook, who stopped in the harbour to repair HMS Endeavour after she struck a reef during his 1770 expedition to discover "Terra Australis Incognita." Also on board were naturalist Joseph Banks and artist Sydney Parkinson; Banks collected a large number of specimens during this unplanned call, several of which are still in the NHM collection, and Parkinson produced the first Western pictures of Aboriginals from direct observation. "Approximately 50 kilometres from Cooktown is where my great-great grandmother was born, somewhere in the Daintree rainforest," explains Boyd today. "This connection to the place allowed me to research material from the NHM focusing on a specific landscape."

For Boyd, Britain's colonial past is also a family affair. Born in 1982 in Cairns, Queensland, the artist traces his ancestry to several Aboriginal clans from the east coast of Australia — and one of his forebears was brought from the Pentecost Island, in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, to work as a slave in Queensland. Like the First Fleet Collection, Boyd's watercolour and oil paint series "Up in Smoke Tour" includes depictions of landscapes and the Eora people who lived on the land surrounding Port Jackson, to which the artist has added scientists such as Darwin, and sculptures from Vanuatu. But his works reject the precise lines used in the 18^th century, choosing instead mosaics of colourful dots. The images are constantly interrupted, the negative space between the dots alluding to the stories ignored in colonisers' version of history. For Boyd, these works "are an acknowledgement of this loss."

Boyd's use of dots is redolent of the world-famous Papunya Tula painting, a genre based on traditional symbols that has come to embody contemporary Aboriginal art. "One can't help it," says in-house contemporary art curator Bergit Arends, "it does look what we imagine Aboriginal painting to be like, but that's not important to him." Indeed, Boyd prefers to liken his technique to pointillism and impressionism. "The convex nature of dots allows light to move across the images to create a shimmering effect," the artist says. New and decommissioned boxes from NHM's anthropology department, some previously housing skulls, frame Boyd's physical renditions of colonialism's selective memory. "I want the wider public to question how these remains came to be in the NHM collection," he explains, "whether it be from a widow whose husband had kept it as a curio, or a 19^th century sailor who traded for it during his voyage only to later donate it to a museum."

While at the NHM, the artist looked for human specimens from his ancestors' clans. With the help of Dr Margaret Clegg, the head of the human remains unit in the museum's palaeontology department, he located a skull from a burial ground west of Brisbane, on a territory once occupied by his forefathers. Boyd describes this confrontation as the most challenging moment of his time at the museum — and he now wants the skull to be repatriated. "Ceremonial funeral rites differ across Australia, but they share a common belief that we don’t own the land, the land owns us, and we come from the earth only to return to the earth," he explains. "I feel that after having been in the presence of this individual, I have an obligation to help facilitate the return to his country."

The NHM — which, with approximately 20,000 specimens, holds about a third of human remains in British institutions — has been at the forefront of the highly charged debates on repatriation that have shaken the institutional world in the last twenty years. Like most major museums, it is today open to these claims — but this hasn't always been the case. Back in 2000, both the NHM and the British Museum turned down requests from indigenous groups, both in the name of science, and for legal reasons which forbade museums to de-access part of their collection. The situation changed radically with the 2004 Human Tissue Act that allowed a number of national museums to send human specimens back to their country of origin, "if it appears to them to be appropriate to do so." In 2006, the NHM responded favourably to a repatriation request for the first time, and transferred the remains of 17 Tasmanian Aboriginal people to Australia. The same year, curator Arends commissioned artist-academic Jane Wildgoose to write a report on the human remains in the NHM's collections. "It prised open some doors that were locked," Arends remembers, and acknowledged that remains weren't "the monopoly of scientific research."

Sociologist Dr Tiffany Jenkins has severely criticised museums' growing accommodation of repatriation requests. "Unable to think about making a future, we tend to wallow in the wrong of the past," she told ARTINFO. Her book, "Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: the crisis of cultural authority," argues that the museum's sympathetic ear for these claims is the symptom of a crisis. "Cultural institutions no longer consistently hold up the values and sense of purpose integral to their formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries," she writes: "the museum institution and the professionals within it are unable to sustain and demonstrate authority." When asked about Jenkins's concept of "crisis of cultural authority," NHM's Clegg answered: "whose culture? We have a lot more to learn from working with communities than we have in trying to build walls. To have access to the remains isn't a right, it's a privilege. And it's up to us to explain to the communities why it's important and what we can gain [from studying the remains]. But crucially, it's up to the communities to decide."

As for the aboriginal skull located by Boyd, the skull's provenance has to be fully investigated before any repatriation can be envisaged. "I can't say when we will actually get to this community because we have an agreed priority list from the Australian government and we are working through it now," says Clegg. "We will get to it, but it will take time."