When we walk into a natural history museum, we’re usually encouraged to marvel at glass cases of butterflies, taxidermied animals, or fossils neatly arranged in drawers. It all looks so authoritative, as though the world has been carefully named and organized for us to understand. But as Schlunke reminds us, there is nothing “natural” about natural history. These displays reflect a long colonial project: the transformation of living Indigenous Country into “nature” that could be studied, catalogued, and controlled.

In her thought-provoking work, ‘The practices of care: extinction and de-colonization in the natural history museum’, Schlunke brings us into the back rooms of the Berlin Museum of Natural History, where she encountered specimens of the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian Tiger. Gloves and lab coats were required. Every bone, pelt, and organ was carefully handled, documented, and packed away again. It was an exercise in meticulous preservation. Yet, as Schlunke reflects, these protocols do more than protect fragile remains; they also keep them locked in a system that once contributed to their extinction.

We can consider the example of the quagga, a zebra-like animal from South Africa, wiped out by the late 19th century through colonial hunting and land grabs. One quagga specimen in Berlin was stored in a vault during World War II, safeguarded in the shadow of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. At a time when human lives were being destroyed in the millions, this extinct animal was kept safe underground. For Schlunke, the image is chilling: colonial violence had already erased the quagga from its homeland, and yet its body, mounted and stuffed, was deemed worth saving amidst the rubble and dying of Berlin.

What does this tell us? For one, museums have long been places where death is both displayed and controlled. Extinct animals are treated as “rarities,” their skins preserved as if that alone honors their memory. But this kind of care often erases the deeper stories, stories of Indigenous peoples who named and knew these animals as food sources, totems and much more and whose own histories of dispossession are entangled with the animals’ extinction.

For Indigenous peoples, the concept of Country does not merely convey an abstracted landscape but a living presence, filled with ancestors, stories, and ongoing relationships. When Europeans arrived in Australia, however, they redefined Country as nature, something external, an object of study. Once renamed, plants, animals, and even human remains became specimens in jars or mounted displays, stripped of their ties to place and people. This process of “nature-ising,” as Schlunke calls it, was part of the machinery of colonisation, a way of severing local knowledge and exerting authority over land and life.

The violence of this history is not abstract. We can consider the story of the King Parrot, named by the colonial naturalist George Caley in honor of Governor Philip Gidley King. King, who once ordered that Aboriginal people could be shot on sight, also had the head of the resistance leader Pemulwuy removed and sent to the naturalist Joseph Banks in London. The parrot, once known as guma in local language, was transformed into a colonial symbol, its Indigenous name overwritten, and its connection to Country erased. As Schlunke observes, naming and classifying were not innocent acts of science but acts of domination that continue to echo in museum collections today.

Yet, as Schlunke highlights, Indigenous artists, curators, and communities are finding ways to resist and reimagine these legacies. Quandamooka artist Megan Cope, for instance, has created living sculptures that restore oyster reefs destroyed by colonisation. Her work is not about making art objects for display but about bringing life back to Country, healing ecosystems and honoring ancestral practices. Similarly, the Australian Museum’s Burra learning space places children, and adults, inside a world where Western science and Indigenous knowledge are woven together. Visitors don’t just read labels on glass cases; they crawl through eel-shaped spaces, sculpt rivers with their hands, and learn that Country is alive, relational, and resilient.

These examples show how museums and cultural institutions can move beyond the cold neutrality of taxonomies and toward spaces of connection and responsibility. For Schlunke, the challenge is not simply to add Indigenous content into old frameworks but to fundamentally reorganize and recontextualize how we think about knowledge, history, and the natural world. It means listening to Country rather than dissecting it, honoring Indigenous naming rather than overwriting it, and understanding that ecological repair is bound up with cultural repair and atonement.

In a time of climate crisis and ongoing loss of biodiversity, this shift matters for everyone. The old colonial divisions between “nature” and “culture” have left us underserved in this era of mass extinctions. The work of Indigenous artists and curators, amplified by scholars such as Katrina Schlunke, points toward another way forward, one in which museums are not mausoleums of dead specimens or repositories of colonial bounty and curiosities but living places where people can learn to be in right relation with Country.

Schlunke pushes us to imagine a different kind of care, one that goes beyond simple isolation and preservation. Drawing on Indigenous writers and artists, she invites us to think of museums not just as warehouses of the past but as places that could reconnect these remains with persistent living cultures.

In the end, Schlunke’s research is not about closing the museum doors, but about opening them wider, to multiple histories, multiple futures, and multiple ways of knowing. This research reminds us that caring for the dead is never neutral. It always raises questions about who is remembered, who is forgotten, and who has the authority to tell the story. For the quagga, the thylacine, and so many others, perhaps true care begins when they are reconnected to the Indigenous Country that they were a part of creating.