The Manufacturers: Collection, Display and Aboriginality at the Queensland Museum from the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

This study uses two material collections of Aboriginal culture held at the Queensland Museum, in order to examine the participation of the Museum in the process of colonialism and othering. The collections examined were gathered by Dr Walter E. Roth and the pastoral manager Jeremiah Coghlan, from 1891-1903. Specifically, this thesis investigates how the collection of Aboriginal material culture perpetuated a myth of Aboriginal people as inherently conservative, incapable of adaptation to new circumstances, and poised on the brink of extinction. How these myths were perpetuated and, more importantly, how and why they ignored the contrary evidence of culture entanglement in the collections will be examined. This thesis deals with a broad range of multi-disciplinary approaches, synthesising the study of history with the study of material culture and museum theory. The concept of frontier entanglement of cultures has been adapted and applied to a study of objects, to demonstrate the physical evidence of this entanglement in Aboriginal culture, and what an acknowledgement of this entanglement might suggest for a reinterpretation of the frontiers, both imagined and actual.