Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties

Aboriginal Objects and Western Australian Frontiers, 1828-1914
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-69560-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 220 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 490 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Cultural History

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.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Froggatt, Nicola

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Australische und Pazifische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1

People, objects, identity

Part I: Navigating colonial spaces

Chapter 2

Western Australian collections in the British Isles: a history

Chapter 3

‘Frontier collecting’: anxieties and opportunities

Chapter 4

Tracing colonial ‘careerists’: travels in and across empire

Part II: Collections and power

Chapter 5

‘Home’ on a world stage: Western Australia at the Glasgow Exhibition of 1901

Chapter 6

Mining materials: Aboriginal and settler industry and culture

Chapter 7

Breaking and remaking the settler telegraph

Chapter 8

The Cambridge Expedition

Afterword: Tracing a legacy

Appendix 1

Selective chronology

Appendix 2

Extant objects in British and Irish institutions

Appendix 3

Extant objects in the British Museum

Appendix 4

Key material discussed in chapters

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Nicola Froggatt has a doctorate from Royal Holloway, University of London; and is a research manager at the National Trust.