While awareness of First Nations cultural heritage and the need to protect it is growing, more must be done to embed First Nations rights and knowledges into legislation to ensure that protections are strong, meaningful, and community-led.
For a long time, mainstream understandings of First Nations cultural heritage in Australia – where it has been acknowledged – have been made through a largely Western lens, and dominated by archaeological science rooted in European and Anglo-American traditions. This approach to First Nations cultural heritage protection developed in Australia during the 1960s–1970s, privileging archeologists as ‘scientific experts’ while ignoring First Nations voices.
While some contemporary archaeological practices are now integrating First Nations cosmologies, the discipline was long marked by cultural bias which denoted non-white cultures as ‘primitive’, undermined the complexity of First Nations knowledge systems and treated cultural heritage as strictly material and static. This informed mainstream understandings of cultural heritage as well as legislative approaches, which have been dominated by non-Indigenous understandings, including linear approaches that prioritise physical objects and fail to recognise the living nature of First Nations culture.
Boundaries like in the sea – that’s white fella rule. When they draw boundary in the sea, we’re not interested in that because our dreaming, it goes everywhere. You can’t measure that.
Pirrawayingi, Senior Tiwi Elder
Recent progress toward more holistic understandings and protection of First Nations cultural heritage has been driven by frameworks like the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) – which emphasises consultation rights, and the interconnectedness of tangible and intangible heritage – and advocacy from groups like the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance (FNHPA), who have developed a business and investors guide for private industry to better protect First Nations cultural heritage. There is also growing acknowledgement of and legislative protections for intangible cultural heritage, as seen in Victoria.
Despite this largely First Nations-driven progress, mainstream cultural heritage policy and practice still largely prioritise profit and dismisses intangible heritage, especially where development and resource extraction projects are proposed. For example, when assessing the cultural heritage significance of an ‘activity area’, most jurisdictional measurement requirements remain dominated by whether tangible traces or artefacts are present, and how often they occur.
Traditional Owners and other First Nations community members are sometimes the last to be made aware of proposed development projects and heritage disturbance on their Country, and their concerns are often minimised or deprioritised in favour of development and mainstream economic priorities.
UNDRIP and the international human rights principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) has helped recognise the urgent need to centre First Nations peoples in decision-making, with some trickle down effect. Victoria and the ACT, for example, have implemented mechanisms such as the Registered Aboriginal Parties and Representative Aboriginal Organisations to enhance First Nations involvement in heritage protection.
Nevertheless, these developments have often amounted to little more than symbolic acknowledgement. Australian domestic law does not currently mandate that projects obtain FPIC in line with the requirements of UNDRIP, and even adherence to existing legislative consultation frameworks has proven insufficient to protect heritage sites, as demonstrated by the destruction of Juukan Gorge. Traditional Owners and First Nations representative bodies are often disregarded and ignored in decision-making, with Ministers holding ultimate power to approve projects.
At best, most current consultation with First Nations community remains a tick box exercise; at worst, it is a strategy of manipulation, creating the illusion of participation without truly respecting the concerns and wishes of First Nations peoples.
An emerging area of interest in First Nations cultural heritage is the use – and abuse – of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Some voices, like Wiradyuri Wambuul woman and scholar Jess Russ-Smith, believe AI can assist and empower First Nations peoples and preserve Country if it is First Nations-led, contextualised, and purpose-built. Others warn AI risks creating new forms of tech colonialism and cultural flattening.
The exclusion of First Nations people from AI development and regulation raises significant concerns around Copyright, Intellectual Property (IP), Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP), and the misappropriation of cultural knowledge. Where AI operates without or disregards the cultural or ethical grounding that First Nations knowledge systems require, it can commodify and strip cultural symbols of their meaning, contributing to the homogenisation of First Nations culture, misrepresentation, and racial stereotyping.
Below is an example of AI generated ‘flattened’ and inauthentic art –
Wiradjuri art
AI generated art
Nevertheless, there are signs of growing awareness around the need to protect First Nations’ cultural heritage in the context of AI. As of 2025, the government has formed a First Nations Expert Working Group on ICIP to help introduce stand-alone ICIP legislation that is expected to address issues of fake art, misrepresentation, personal hurt, emotional distress, and economic loss.
Content warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this content includes mention of deceased persons and ancestors.
Since the invasion of the continent, First Nations cultural heritage objects have been stolen from Country and community and placed in museums, universities, and private collections across Australia and overseas. Thousands of secret and sacred objects, including ancestral remains, were removed without consent and used for ‘scientific’ research into biological differences or exhibited as ‘curiosities.’
Over the past 20 years, Australian museums have become increasingly active in repatriating many of these remains and sacred objects, with governments increasingly funding this work. This comes after tireless activism from and consultation with First Nations peoples who helped establish repatriation as an ethical obligation. An early milestone was the 1989 Mungo Statement, when the Australian National University returned the ‘Mungo Lady’ to the Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngyimpaa communities. While ongoing repatriation efforts are significant, thousands of items remain unreturned, and First Nations leaders have called for greater international cooperation and a more holistic approach to repatriation.
Still, significant challenges to repatriation processes remain. These include:
As the practice of repatriation grows, it must be driven by and for First Nations people and communities, ensuring cultural sensitivity, respect for data sovereignty, and ultimately respecting the right of First Nations people to be in control of decisions about their cultural heritage.
