Ancestors, artefacts, empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish Museums

Abstract

Museums across the United Kingdom and Ireland hold over 39,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artworks and artefacts. Gifted, sold, exchanged and bartered by Indigenous people, and accepted, bought, collected and taken by travellers, colonists, explorers and others, these objects date from 1770 to the present, representing all regions of the vast Australian continent ... More than twenty Indigenous, Australian and international experts weave accounts of objects, makers, communities, and regions, and collectors, networks and institutions. They present a multi-stranded narrative entwining ancestral pasts, expanding empires, colonisation and the contemporary moment, exploring the importance of this material in Australia, Britain and Ireland, and the world today. Show more