This is a good news story.

In current times, when so much seems lost, forgotten or burnt to ashes, the return of ancestral remains has a special appeal. Last week the Guardian reported the handback of artefacts stolen from Indigenous Australians at a ceremony in Manchester; this week in Leipzig another significant event took place – the return of 45 ancestral human remains to their rightful custodians, the Gunaikurnai from Victoria, the Menang in Western Australia and the Ngarrindjeri of South Australia.

At the Grassi Museum of Ethnology, the scent of Australian smoke infiltrated the halls and display rooms. Leaves and wood brought from Australia were burnt in two cleansing ceremonies conducted by those responsible for the human remains and their return to communities of origin. Witnesses were reminded of another kind of smoke, another kind of history.

Ngarrindjeri elder Major Sumner (Uncle Moogy) spoke of the smoke as symbolic of release and essential in rituals of mourning and addressed the prestigious museum in the language of the present. With song and body he performed ancestral respect and a model of deep time. This contemporaneity of feeling was a revelation to the sympathetic German audience.

“I was most moved,” one witness whispered, “when I was told the dead are here, among us in this room. I’d never thought about museum exhibits in this way before.”

The Indigenous delegation instructed their European “family”: bodily traces are fully human and without the erosion of time. Even fragile hair samples – gathered in 1880 and among significant matter returned – betoken full humanity and inspire feelings of care and custodianship. According to Amanda Morley of the repatriation section of the Department of Arts, a fundamental assumption is that all human material, whether a sample of hair, a child’s skull or an entire skeleton, remains forever a vehicle of spirit. Even with body parts considered “modified”, such as a skull decorated and used as a drinking cup, Indigenous belief preserves its status as a person, not an object.

The remains were held in modest white boxes, draped in the Aboriginal flag. Arranged together, they formed the shape of a single coffin. This was a funeral of sorts, with the appropriate solemnity and ceremony.

Led by Dr Birgit Scheps-Bretschneider, whose in-depth provenance research was supported by forensic anthropology and medicine, a team was able to discover age, gender, injuries, illnesses and causes of death of human remains. Descendants were established for all of the named ancestors from whom samples originated. Scheps-Bretschneider is a formidable woman with a gentle presence. She has worked at the Grassi Museum with the Oceania collection for 41 years.

“When the wall came down and I was able finally to travel, I gathered all my funds and set off for Australia,” she said.

Repatriation of remains hinged, she said, on a principle of “rehumanisation”. Museum convention requires all acquisitions be given a number and record of provenance. When applied to human remains, this means that what is human is eradicated, disqualified or secondary to object status.

The Australian government has been committed to restitution of remains since 2009 and this is the second ceremony conducted by the state of Saxony. A third and final Australian ceremony will take place in 2020. Australia’s ambassador to Germany, Lynette Wood, was clearly moved by and committed to the principle of returning ancestors to “rest in peace”. “Repatriation”, she said forcefully, “makes us all stronger.” She added that the issue of repatriation was of enormous national significance to each country involved and that its cultural meanings should be better known and more widely discussed.

“It takes just one person talking to another,” said Megan Krakouer, a Menang woman from Western Australia. “Then everything else follows.”

The director of the Grassi, Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, joked that the museum had to switch off smoke detectors to enable the first smoking ceremony – “a very unmuseum-like behaviour!” There’s a sense in Leipzig of groundbreaking and radical action. Meijer-van Mensch is devoted to a model of museum activism that considers the repressed history of colonial violence and racism that accompanied the trade in body parts and artefacts. She believes that the role of the Leipzig “racial school of thought” of 19th-century anthropology laid the foundations for the state’s antisemitic laws of 1935. In this she is at the forefront of museum directors for whom the principle of return and disestablishment of certain collections has been crucial to the redefinition of their cultural role.

John Mulvaney, a pioneer in Australian archaeology, warned in 1990 that the return of remains would “replace white violence and repression with black intellectual totalitarianism”. He was mistaken. The sincerity and humility of German and Australian participants in the handing back ceremony – each standing in the same cleansing smoke and aura of tender solidarity – was evidence enough of a shift in cultural understanding of remains.

Bianca Baxter, a Gunaikurnai woman, said: “Everyone has a longing to be home, and it is no different for our ancestors.”

• Gail Jones is an Australian novelist and academic. She was shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin award and won the prime minister’s prize for fiction