Why one of our greatest scientific discoveries is in a UK gift shop

Billions of years ago, well before the origin of Earth, a rock was floating through space.

It once formed part of a living planet.

At some nebulous point in time, that planet died.

It's hard to say how or why that happened, but in its afterlife, the rock was given a new name: asteroid.

It likely would have continued travelling undisturbed through the furthest reaches of the universe.

Except it was hit by something.

Suddenly, the asteroid started burning up as it hurtled towards our planet's atmosphere.

Its fate forever altered.

Travelling at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour, it's common for asteroids to disintegrate on this journey.

Those that do make it to Earth typically range between the size of a pebble and a fist.

This one defied the odds.

It struck the Earth in 13 pieces. The largest of those meteorites, which came down about an hour outside of modern-day Melbourne, weighed a record-breaking 3.5 tonnes.

Its journey may have begun billions of years ago, but this was still only the start of the story.

The fight to claim a 3.5-tonne space rock didn't just kickstart a publicity battle that divided an empire — it also left a gaping hole in culture. Centuries on, the question remains: Who owned it?

Thousands of years after the rock fragments of this planet hit Earth, a piece of one of them appeared in an unlikely place, and in an even more curious form.

It was October, 1854.

The grand glass Exhibition Hall had just opened its doors for the inaugural Melbourne Exhibition in Victoria, a celebration of the fledgling state's agricultural and industrial feats.

Colonists dressed in their finery were treated to a showcase that included specimens of artificial teeth in a mahogany pedestal spinning by clockwork.

There was also a pair of boots with revolving heels.

At first glance, the unassuming horseshoe contributed to the display by local farrier James A Scott surely looked less exciting.

The short description accompanying it offered only the barest hint the metal used to forge it was not of this world: "A specimen of iron from Western Port."

Mr Scott had unwittingly submitted the first written colonial record of any of the 13 meteorites.

Today, the story behind that horseshoe is legend among blacksmiths like David Wood.

"What I know about it is, a farmer found what he thought was a tree stump in his paddock, which was a big sort of blob, but then he worked out it was iron," Wood tells Stuff the British Stole.

"It had a protrusion coming from it, sort of a longish shape. And he cut that off and started making horseshoes out of it."

Colonists first assumed the rock that had been used to make this horseshoe was part of a seam of iron underground, which they hoped to use to build railroads and other infrastructure a new city like Melbourne desperately needed.

"[Finding that] on your property would've been almost like finding gold," Wood explains.

They identified several similar rocks over the coming years in and around Cranbourne.

There was, of course, no mineral seam to be found when they dug into the depths below.

That's when colonists realised the rocks they'd stumbled on had come from space. The one Mr Scott had cut a piece off was the biggest of its kind in the world at the time.

And that's how this collection of rocks were dubbed the Cranbourne Meteorites.

If a meteorite were to land in your backyard today, it wouldn't necessarily be yours to do with as you see fit.

In parts of Australia, they belong to the state. In others, meteorites are owned by the Crown and managed by the relevant museum. In others still, the "finders keepers" principle applies.

When a man by the name of James Bruce learned of an iron mass lying on the property next door to him in the late 1850s, he didn't concern himself with questions of whether rocks from space could be owned, or whether they should be bought or sold.

He simply paid his neighbour one pound for the record-breaking 3.5 tonne piece, known as Cranbourne No 1.

"[He had] these noble intentions to send it to the British Museum," explains Rebecca Carland, a senior curator at Museums Victoria.

"He believes that everything is bigger, brighter and better back in the homeland."

But not everyone felt this way — and the state of our national identity at the time goes some way to explain why.

When colonists first encountered the Cranbourne Meteorites, Australia wasn't yet recognised as a country.

It was only a few years earlier that Victoria had received permission to separate from the colonial government of New South Wales.

With Melbourne having started out as an illegal settlement by sheep farmers looking for more lush pasture to graze, there was a sense this fledgling colony had much to prove.

Within weeks of separation, gold was found in Victoria.

"And then we not only have the power to govern ourselves, now we have money," Carland continues.

"[A few years later], we had our own state library. We had The Age newspaper, we had the botanic gardens, the university, and the national museum."

Scientists from the Royal Society of Victoria saw the possibilities of housing the then-largest known meteorite in the world in their city.

But there was a problem with that idea: Bruce had bought Cranbourne No 1 on the condition it would be sent to England.

A fight ensued — granted, in the pages of a local paper.

But it couldn't have been more combative if the speakers had broken out in fisticuffs.

In a letter to the editor of then-newspaper The Argus on January 2, 1863, Bruce wrote:

"I think this unique specimen will be visited by more and rarer men of science if placed in the British Museum than if buried in this out-of-the-way part of the world."

Frederick McCoy, then-director of the National Museum of Victoria, replied:

"Those who contemplate the more-than-ostrich-like glutting of the British Museum, swallowing up our Victorian meteorite masses … leave us something to feast on as well."

But Bruce remained steadfast:

"By what right did the Royal Society attempt to deal with my property against my wish?"

The Cranbourne No 1 meteorite, Carland says, was "the centrepiece in this culture war".

In the end, it was Bruce who claimed victory.

He eventually handed the meteorite over for presentation to the museum in England.

In return, the British Museum gave Australia's National Museum the second-biggest meteorite, Cranbourne No 2, which it had also secured.

But, more than 160 years on, it's questionable whether Bruce actually got his wish.

If you were to travel all the way to the leafy Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to see the Cranbourne No 1 Meteorite today, you won't find it in the Natural History Museum's rocks and minerals display.

In fact, you won't find it in any of the institution's dedicated display rooms at all.

All 3.5 tonnes of what was once the biggest-known meteorite of its kind today sits in a gift shop, surrounded by merchandise and souvenirs.

It isn't even the museum's main gift shop.

An hour's drive north of that Natural History Museum, Duncan Murdock manages the Earth collection at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which also has a piece of one of the Cranbourne Meteorites.

"My colleagues in London have got their own reasons for how they arrange their displays, and I don't want to comment on exactly what those choices are," he says.

Cranbourne No 1, he continues, was "purchased and exported legally by the British Museum, [which] later became the Natural History Museum in London, from the owner in Australia".

However, the Cranbourne Meteorites had been claimed long before Bruce gave his neighbour a nominal sum for the largest piece.

We don't know when precisely, but the meteorites weren't first discovered in the 1800s by white colonists. Not even close.

They had already been claimed for generations.

Aunty Gail Kunwarra Dawson is an Elder of the Bunurong people, who have long known the Cranbourne Meteorites as Kuunhdurt Laang.

"And that is 'Kuunh' for the fire. 'Durt' is the stars. 'Laang' is a rock," she shares.

Aunty Gail sees all of Bunurong Country as sacred. And the place where this Fire Star Rock fell from the sky is a particularly important site.

"When it [landed], there was fire and there was noise and it flamed the whole way down. Everybody saw it," she says.

The Elder explains it came from Bunjil, the creator often depicted as a wedge-tailed eagle.

"He sent down a fire rock to frighten the s**t out of everyone and make them behave," she continues.

"It's there to teach the young people, especially the young men, how to keep secrets, how to walk softly on the Country, how to look after things — everything about their life."

To the Bunurong people, Kuunhdurt Laang isn't just a meteorite, or a great scientific discovery, but a sacred and crucial meeting place.

It also forms part of a Songline that stretches back through the ages.

"Our Songlines run crisscross all over the country and they're often based on sacred objects like centres of a story," Aunty Gail explains.

"Each of those pieces hold knowledge within them and around them."

She says the Bunurong people can still tell these stories, and they can still speak the songs associated with them.

But they can't sing or dance them without Kuunhdurt Laang.

"It's made that place dead, and no part of Country should be dead," she laments.

It's in those songs and dance that the messages from Bunjil truly lie. And that means the Bunurong people can't really share what was meant to be passed down to their children and grandchildren.

The fact James Bruce paid his neighbour a pound for the largest piece of Kuunhdurt Laang is of little consequence to Aunty Gail.

Her people didn't receive any money for it, so she considers it a sale of stolen goods on the black market.

"It's our heart," she says. "And it was taken."

There's more than one record that suggests colonists knew the cultural significance of Kuunhdurt Laang, but a 2001 account in a local Victorian newspaper painted a particularly detailed picture.

The granddaughter of a woman who reportedly lived on the property Cranbourne No 2 was removed from wrote into the Packenham Gazette. Jean Hermon's grandmother had told her Kuunhdurt Laang "was so special [to the Bunurong people] that they cried when they saw it being taken away".

Aunty Gail lifts a hand to her chest as she considers this.

"They could see that they were crying and they still took it," she says, full of sorrow.

"The British people know the history of Australia. They just want to tell it in a different way."

But Aunty Gail says the Bunurong people have never wanted to lay guilt or blame on anyone.

To start with, all she wants is to talk.

After declining initial requests for an interview with Stuff the British Stole, the Natural History Museum offered to speak with Aunty Gail directly.

This is yet to happen — but when it does, she's going to ask them to work with the Bunurong people to bring Western and Indigenous science knowledge together in their display of Kuunhdurt Laang.

Simply having the object there, she says, "means nothing".

"No-one's even looking at it, they're looking at the … crap that's being shown around it."

But Aunty Gail ultimately dreams of Kuunhdurt Laang's return home — and with it, the "restoration of balance".

A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum said "repatriation and decolonisation" were subjects of "important ongoing debate in the museum sector", and that it was open to discussion with community leaders and governments.

However, they also said current laws in the UK leave the museum with "very limited powers" to return objects to the communities they came from.

Aunty Gail is under no illusions about this, describing the journey ahead as "long, with a little bit of ground gained each time".

The possibility of what could be sustains her.

"We could invite everyone in Australia to come and look at it, and we'd tell them the story of Bunjil. Then it would be for everyone, and the line would be mended," she says.

"There'll be a little scar, but it'll be back together.

"It's a story of regeneration and restoration. And it also would be a place of reconciliation."

Credits:

Reporting: Yasmin Jeffery and Marc Fennell

Production: Yasmin Jeffery

Animations: Lafinka

Editing: Katherine Smyrk and Felicity Sheppard

Watch Stuff the British Stole free on ABC iview and ABC TV at 8:00pm on Tuesdays.

Posted Fri 10 Jul 2026 at 6:43am

Fri 10 Jul 2026 at 6:43am