Berndt Museum Rock Art: The South-West Collections

Access:

The Berndt Museum will be closed to all external requests for access to the Collection (Archives, Objects, Photos and Audio-Visual) between 1 July 2014 and 6 January 2015.  Museum staff are instituting protocols to enhance access to the Collection as part of ongoing preparations toward the opening of a new Aboriginal Cultures Museum.  We sincerely apologise to community groups, researchers and the general public. We will attend to access requests as soon as we can after the six month closure.

The Berndt Museum, with permission from the appropriate communities, holds some secret-sacred objects. Strict conditions apply to the custody of and access to these objects. Secret-sacred objects are not displayed in the public gallery of the Museum. The objects displayed there are not secret for their region of origin. The Museum will remove any object from display if a qualified Aboriginal elder asks.

Museum policy recognises the need to control image recording within the public galleries in order to safeguard claims to control over cultural property made by members of Australian Aboriginal communities, among others. Notwithstanding this, the policy observes that: • visting members of the public may take, for their own fair dealing for the purpose of research or study, criticism or review (as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968), photographs of a general view of an exhibition gallery space as a whole, while they may not focus on specific individual artistic works that may be subject to copyright and claims of cultural property by Aboriginal communities; • recordings (whether photographic, digital or video) made for any other purpose require express permission in writing from the Director, who will give approval only if the purpose and or context is directly relevant to the purpose, activities and projects of the Museum itself. The Berndt Museum respects the inherent intellectual and moral rights of all artistic creators, and makes every effort to contact the relevant copyright holders and and their communities before displaying or making artistic works available for third party reproduction. All requests for photographic images, whether of objects held by the Museum or historical images, must be made on the prescribed form, which is available for download.

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