SA Museum

Many artefacts in the SA museums like this bark painting had an inscription reading how it was collected. 

The bark painting read

Collected in 1960 during South Australian Museum expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

This got me thinking about the ethics behind collecting artefacts from native people around the world. The first question I think of is who owned these items before they were collected. Secondly how did the museum staff come about to owning these items. Were they simply taken, or bought, or found abandoned. If they were abandoned you could say fair enough no one really owned them. If the they were just taken how can that be ethical at all. If they were bought it starts to get into a grey area, was the communisation right and how can you judge what these items are really worth. 

But you could also make an argument that even if these items were collected in an  unethical way, does the fact that these items help preserve a history of a culture and educate the masses. Can that override the bad taste of how these items were collected?