Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties

European portrayals of Aboriginal people and their objects have long had political implications. This book explores ‘ethnographic’ objects from Western Australia now in British and Irish museums, and is the first full scholarly treatment of their part in fashioning colonial relationships and identities over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It scrutinises a body of material that once sparked extensive scholarly and popular interest, but has since been largely overlooked in scholarship into the relationship between collecting and empire.

This book assesses how non-Aboriginal collectors understood Aboriginal objects, and what this reveals about colonial relationships, anxieties and ambitions. Considering objects now spread across the British Isles, it examines intersecting impulses that informed collecting: notions of the ‘frontier’, the navigation of one’s experiences across sites of empire, and the Eurocentric narrative of Aboriginal ‘extinction’, to show how colonial ideology intersected with personal experience. It scrutinises collectors’ own accounts as well as the voices of other individuals involved in collecting episodes, showing how ideas about indigenous peoples were being developed and contested.

Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties is particularly aimed at scholars of material culture, histories of collecting and empire, cultural heritage workers and other readers interested in museums, colonialism and Australian history.