AWABAKAL woman Irene Ridgeway cried when she laid eyes on the life-sized, clay statue of her great grandmother for the first time. 

Irene was in the storage room of the Australian Museum – and the emotional moment was the culmination of years of Irene’s research to find her family. 

Irene’s ancestor was named Nellie Walker – and her story has become a powerful catalyst in changing the way colonial museums around the globe represent Aboriginal people in public history. 

Nellie’s statue was one of three statues of ‘full blood’ Aboriginal people commissioned by the museum in the 1920s. 

The people – a child, a man and a woman – were called the ‘Wunderlink group’ and exhibited as nameless objects…