The first seminar scheduled for the Collecting the West series is fast approaching! Professor Andrea Witcomb and Professor Alistair Paterson will present Collecting the West: Project Narratives.

In the last 400 years, objects from Western Australia have circulated through global, national and local collecting networks.

Indeed, some of the first objects through which Europeans understood and imagined Australia came from WA. The oldest collected items surviving in the UK are plants collected by William Dampier in 1699, whose collections went eventually

to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and to The British Museum (BM). Museums around the world host significant and overlooked collections from Western Australia, many of which were exchanged in the global exchange market between collecting institutions. Unique natural specimens and Aboriginal artefacts from Western Australia were exchanged for art and other desired specimens which in turn filled the WA Museum and Art Gallery.

The Collecting the West ARCLP set out to investigate the making of these collections and the institutional, political and social contexts of individual collectors. We have explored what images of Australia these fragments from WA present to the world; asked how these growing collections eventually inform Western Australian identity, shape its historiography, collective memory and sense of place; Equally importantly, we asked how this collecting activity shaped social relations, both during the colonial encounter and its aftermath, and between different communities? In this introduction to a seminar series exploring our answers to these questions, we lay out the project and introduce the contours of our findings, pointing to the ways in which a focus on collecting practices in a single place can reveal Australia’s role in global histories of collecting.

Find out more at www.collectingthewest.org