Ancestors, artefacts, empire : indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums / edited by Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy.

Date:
2021
  • Books

About this work

Description

Museums across Great Britain and Ireland hold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (collectively referred to as 'Indigenous') cultural heritage of exceptional value, but which is largely unknown, rarely seen, and poorly understood. Gifted, sold, exchanged, and bartered by Indigenous people, and accepted, bought, collected, and taken by travelers, colonists, explorers, missionaries, officials and others, these rare objects date from Captain Cook in 1770 to the present day. Numbering over 35,000 items, they represent all regions of Australia's vast landmass, from deserts, islands, and coasts to tropical rainforests. The book uses nearly 160 artifacts, selected from over 30 public museums, both large metropolitan and small regional, to present a multi-stranded narrative that opens up vistas on Britain's Australian history as much as Australia's British history. More than twenty Indigenous, Australian, and international experts weave together deeply-contextualized accounts of objects and object-types; of makers, communities, and regions; and of collectors, networks, and institutions, while also exploring the meanings and importance of this material in Australia, Britain and Ireland, and the world today. Distanced from their places of origin and dispersed throughout Britain and Ireland, these objects are gathered together for the first time. Out of museum stores and into this book, they are evidence of the complex, and often difficult, relationships between Indigenous Australians and British people and institutions, as well as being powerful conduits for telling that history anew and in ways that seek to challenge and rework its legacies.

Publication/Creation

London : British Museum Press, 2021.

Physical description

272 pages : illustrations (chiefly colour), colour maps ; 29 cm

Contributors

Notes

Contains an image and information on an ex-Wellcome Historical Medical Musem object, Accession number: A656082, and a photograph from the Fallaize Collection, 541193i.

Contents

Foreword / Nicholas Thomas -- Part 1: Encountering objects -- Introduction / Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy -- Assemblages: researching and interpreting dispersed Indigenous Australian objects and collections / Gaye Sculthorpe and Maria Nugent -- Part 2: Moving objects -- Reciprocity: Artefacts of Aboriginal trade and exchange / Philip Jones -- Travels with Bennelong: Collecting in early colonial Sydney / Maria Nugent -- String ecologies: Indigenous country and pastoral empires / Jilda Andrews -- Naval pathways: Tracing objects from nineteenth-century royal navy voyages / Daniel Simpson -- Excellent judgement: Bark paintings in national museums in Scotland / Howard Morphy, Antje Denner and Bree Blakeman -- Indigenous afterlives in Britain / Gaye Sculthorpe -- Part 3: Telling objects -- You are on Aboriginal land: Interpreting gifts of stone / Matt Poll -- Visitors to the rainforest: Engagements with environments and outsiders in far north Queensland / Lissant Bolton -- Life in death: Funerary and mourning objects / Julie Finlayson -- History by design in the Kimberley / Shino Konishi and Alistair Paterson -- 'Silent testimonials': Shields from Queensland frontiers / Gaye Sculthorpe -- Part 4: Unsettling objects -- Exile and punishment in Van Diemen's land / Gaye Sculthorpe -- 'Intimate relations': Objects from the Port Phillip district / Penny Edmonds -- Women lives: Women's objects in colonial South Australia / Maria Nugent and Gaye Sculthorpe -- Women lives and threads of reckoning: an afterword / Natalie Harkin -- Objects of mobility: Swan River Colony / Tiffany Shellam and Shona Coyne -- Rough justice on the Kimberley frontier / Ian Coates with Peter Yu -- Part 5: Performing objects -- Unmasking the Torres Strait: Objects and relationships / Chantal Knowles -- Slow awakenings: Institutional engagements with Indigenous art / Howard Morphy and Gaye Sculthorpe -- 'Strange and complicated feats with string' / Robyn McKenzie -- Show people: Objects of popular performance / Maria Nugent -- 'Three Boomerangs ... a shilling for each': Connecting objects and images from Moreton Bay, Queensland / Michael Aird -- Afterword / Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 264-265) and index.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    YW /ANC
    		Open shelves

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Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780714124902
  • 0714124907