As a 16-year-old medical student in Melbourne in the 1970s, Katrina Watson remembers the moment she purchased a box of human bones.
At the time, it was considered common for Australian medical students to purchase and study with a real human skeleton.
Dr Watson recalled asking the man who sold them to her where they were from.
"He said something along the lines of: 'Some country? Could have been India, but who knows?'" she said.
"He didn't even show any curiosity, interest or thought that these bones in the box was a person once."
The skeletons used for medical study were largely sourced via an "unethical" Indian bone trade.
When Dr Watson retired from her career as a gastroenterologist decades later, she began writing a novel called The Bones, based on a young medical student who grapples with the ethical dilemma of owning human remains and goes to India to learn more about their origin.
The story of the novel's protagonist has parallels to Dr Watson's own life — she also went to India to visit Kolkata, where the world's bone trade was centred.
Between Indian independence in 1947 and when the exportation of bones was banned by their government in 1985, an estimated two-and-a-half million skeletons were sold to western countries.
In 1982, the Australian government made the sale of human remains illegal, but many medical professionals and their family members have been left with skeletons in their personal possession.
It's not illegal in Australia to still own human bones, but authorities recommend members of the public who have them to hand them to police, a coroner's court, or an institute or university which accepts donations of human material.
They say the bones needed be assessed as not being of Indigenous origin or being connected to a cold case.
But these recommendations are not consistent across the country, as some coroner's courts do not accept such remains and not all universities have the capacity to store them.
Call for 'good process' for bone sets
Dr Watson said she was dissatisfied with the current approach around dealing with these human remains, which in many cases, would see teaching bone sets sitting on a shelf in an institution after being analysed.
She published her novel last year hoping to raise awareness of the issue, and she now lives alongside the bones as she urges for a solution.
"If there was a good process for those bones, I wouldn't keep them," she said.
Dr Watson said she believed the issue had to be first discussed "widely" via a committee, with representation from various communities to ensure the process was culturally sensitive.
Indian Doctors in Australia president Surjit Tarafdar told the ABC the process had to reflect the religious diversity of the deceased.
"As the skeletons very likely would have come from people of different religious and cultural backgrounds given the diversity in India, maybe [someone] could arrange a multi-religious prayer meet for the departed — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist and Jain — and arrange for the skeletons to be either buried or cremated," Dr Tarafdar said.
Universities part of solution
Dr Watson said she would like to see universities, which she said encouraged students to purchase bones in the first place, lead the process in laying them to rest.
She suggested this could involve universities holding a short ceremony and creating a plaque and a garden in recognition of the deceased.
"The universities have been the cause of the problem… and I'd like to see the universities involved have an acknowledgement [for that]," she said.
Stephen Cordner, an emeritus professor at Monash University's forensic medicine department and the former director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, agreed with Dr Watson.
"I really think the universities and the anatomy departments need to step up a bit and work with the coroners and forensic services to work out a pathway for dealing with these remains, which ends with them being respectfully disposed of — not just hanging around."
The Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), which is one of two anatomy schools in Victoria which assesses and stores human teaching bone sets, has also expressed a desire for action around this issue.
Noel Woodford, the director of the institute, said a national approach would be "wonderful".
It's understood in the days after the ABC published a story on human teaching bones in May, VIFM received a number of enquiries from the public wanting to relinquish their bone sets.
"I don't think we have the capacity — space, infrastructure, administrative — to deal with this," Professor Woodford said.
"I think having a national approach to this would be wonderful — especially since provenance would likely be impossible to establish … and the need for a respectful process of interment is only going to increase."
Other researchers and anthropologists from Australia and the United States have also told the ABC they would like to see national guidelines.
National committee in 'very early stages'
The ABC contacted 10 medical schools across the country which were operational prior to 1982 — the year the sale of human remains was made illegal in Australia.
The University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Queensland, Flinders University, the University of Tasmania and the University of Newcastle said they were keen to be involved in discussions around the issue.
University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales, Flinders University and University of Tasmania say they accept human bone sets, while the University of Sydney only accepts them "as long as their immediate provenance can be described".
University of Queensland has previously accepted bones but now does not, and Monash University occasionally accepts them.
University of Adelaide and University of Western Australia did not respond to the ABC's enquiries.
The country's national anatomy association has confirmed it is in the "very early stages" of establishing a committee to look into this issue, which they say would involve participation from universities.
A spokesperson for the Australian and New Zealand Association of Clinical Anatomists said a national committee would also rely on the participation of academics and representatives from the Indian community.
The spokesperson said the association would soon release an expression of interest to the public.
"The goal of that committee would be to reach out to other organisations that are interlocked with this to see if we can collectively come up with a policy or a prospective policy," they said.
The spokesperson expressed confidence there would be members of the community who would be eager to participate in finding a solution.
"There's really good, broad interest at the moment and a genuine desire to do the right thing."
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