We’re getting better at dealing with old stuff appropriately. At a solemn ceremony in Cambridge recently four spears taken by Captain Cook from Indigenous people at Botany Bay in 1770 were returned to descendants of the original owners. There is growing acceptance that, whatever their scientific or archaeological significance, skulls and skeletons deserve more fitting resting places than filing-cabinet drawers or display cases.

Anzac Day is about remembering and respecting the dead. Meanwhile, efforts continue to identify individual bodies in the mud of the Western Front – also the setting for memorial services in April. Desecration of graves is considered a step too far, even in the underworld. At a Hobart school, the discovery of human remains during building works has prompted a sensitive recovery operation on the site of an old cemetery.

The image used to promote the National Gallery of Victoria’s new Pharaoh exhibition shows a figure that is probably Thumose III.Credit: NGV

All of which makes the National Gallery of Victoria’s next blockbuster exhibition both perplexing and problematic.

The promotion has already begun. A huge picture now overlooks St Kilda Road, announcing that Pharaoh opens on June 14, the latest in a series of Melbourne Winter Masterpieces. Last year the focus was on French artist Pierre Bonnard; the year before,........

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