The ancestral remains of 37 Indigenous people will be returned to Australia from London's Natural History Museum.

Narungga community representatives from South Australia, Douglas Milera and Professor Peter Buckskin, travelled to the UK to attend the handover ceremony on Tuesday night Australian time.

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They received the remains of an ancestor who will be cared for at the South Australian Museum until the community is ready to conduct a reburial ceremony.

The South Australian Museum will also look after another seven repatriated ancestral remains.

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AAP

The remaining 29 ancestral remains will go to the National Museum of Australia until the Ngarrindjeri, Far West Coast, Kaurna and Flinders Ranges communities are ready to lay them to rest.

The Australian government has welcomed the return of the 37 set of remains.

"This return is a significant event for our country," Arts Minister Mitch Fifield said in a statement.

He said the Indigenous repatriation program had led to the return of more than 1480 ancestral remains, including more than 1200 from the UK.

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For more than 150 years Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestral remains and sacred objects were removed from their communities for various reasons and placed in museums, universities and private collections in Australia and overseas.