Aboriginal collections from the Swan River Colony c.1830-1850: nature, methods and motivations

With Dr Gaye Sculthorpe, British Museum

Most of the earliest Aboriginal objects from the Swan River Colony are now held in collections in the United Kingdom and Ireland and are not widely known in Western Australia. These collections are particularly important as they were made decades before a formal museum was established in Western Australia and hence contain many object types not found in Western Australian collections today. As the role of Aboriginal people in assisting collectors is an important topic being dealt with in another seminar (Shellam), my paper concentrates on the methods and motivations of a small number of British and Irish collectors, particularly Samuel Nel Talbot whose collection is in the British Museum, and his contemporaries in the 1830s and 1840s. These include George Fletcher Moore whose collections went to the Royal Dublin Society and Alexander Collie whose Aboriginal collections went initially to the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital Museum in Gosport. Informed by Howard Morphy’s concept of ‘the two locals’, the paper will consider some of the factors at play in the collection of objects within Western Australia itself as well as factors in Britain that informed collecting practices. Some comparative reference will be made to collections made in other Australian colonies in the same period.

Gaye Sculthorpe is Curator & Section Head of Oceania, in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the British Museum. As well as undertaking research on early WA collections, she is currently researching early Aboriginal objects from the greater Sydney region in association with the La Perouse Community and ANU. Her co-edited volume Ancestors, artefacts, empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museum was published in September 2021 by British Museum Press.

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