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LONDON - Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough has welcomed a British museum's decision to return Aboriginal remains.
The Natural History Museum will return the remains of 18 Aborigines to Australia, but will delay the repatriation of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines while it conducts scientific tests on them.
The skull of an 18th person, stolen from Australia in 1913, will be returned immediately. Brough welcomed the decision to return the remains but said: "It would be my preference that all the remains be returned immediately."
The museum defended the decision to conduct the tests, saying many of the remains represented people from a time when Tasmania was isolated from the rest of the world, so they were genetically different from other human populations.
- AAP
