The Papuan Official Collection : the biography of a collection at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra
Date
2008
Authors
Schaffarczyk, Sylvia
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Abstract
This thesis explores the history of the Papuan Official Collection (POC) from
conception, through its acquisition and travel from Papua to Australia, to its storage
in Sydney and then in Canberra. It also looks at the ties the Collection has with
collections in other institutions. In short, the thesis constructs a biography for a
museum collection with a complex history. The primary aim of this thesis is to
understand why and how the POC - an ethnographic collection consisting almost
entirely of material culture from Papua New Guinea - came to be part of the
collections of the National Museum of Australia, Canberra.
In order to achieve this aim, the thesis explores the role of objects and collecting
during the Australian colonial occupation of the Territory of Papua (now the
southern portion of Papua New Guinea) between 1907 and c.1940. It situates the
Collection within its historical context in terms of the development of collecting,
museum practices, and the establishment of the discipline of anthropology. These
three areas of study are important if we are to appreciate the ideologies of the
collectors and, in particular, the paradigms that ruled European thinking with regard
to Indigenous people which grounded Sir Hubert Murray’s administration of Papua.
The thesis is organised around the interweaving of the biographies of the objects in
the Collection and events in the life of the Collection as a whole, with those of its
primary collectors. Thus, Sir Hubert Murray, his policies and collecting are the focus
of the birth and infancy of the Collection. The government anthropologists WM
Strong, WE Armstrong and FE Williams and their formal training and informed
approaches to their work are the focus of its youth, and the individual and sometimes
idiosyncratic collecting preferences of the resident magistrates are the subjects for
the directions of its young adulthood. The Australian Museum and Australian
Institute of Anatomy form the sites of the Collection’s initiation into adulthood.
Institutions overseas and at the Australian Museum, Sydney, are the homes of sibling
collections of the POC. This thesis represents the first time that all the available archival and other
information about the POC has been brought together in one cogent story. As the
Collection has survived mostly intact to the present day, it is not dead, so this is an
unfinished biography - there is more of the story to come. The discussion in the final
chapters proposes that in directing of the rest of the story, the National Museum of
Australia has a choice: Does the story of the Collection become a meaningful feature
of the Museum’s own biography, together with that of the story of Australia and
Papua New Guinea, or does the Collection begin its senescence in the solitude of
museum storage?
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Collections
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Thesis (PhD)