For science, salvage & state - official collecting in colonial New Guinea

Abstract

The Papuan Official Collection is a unique colonial collection assembled between 1907 and 1938 by government officers of the Australian administration of the Territory of Papua. It represents the first instance in the world where a colonial government made ethnographic collecting a requisite duty of its field officers. This unusual turn of events came at the insistence of Papua's first and longest serving Lieutenant-Governor, J.H.P. Murray, who administered the colony for over three decades. The story of how Murray came to establish an official government collection, and its subsequent formation, interpretation, and display over several decades, provides a case study par excellence for examining the complex relationship between colonialism, collecting and anthropology, which emerged over the course of the twentieth century. This study explores the genesis and history of the Papuan Official Collection, and situates it within the wider rubric of Australian colonialism. It establishes Murray as one of the earliest colonial governors in the world to implement, and publically advocate for, anthropology as a tool for colonial administration. It charts the rise of colonial discourses that linked loss of culture to physical demise in Pacific populations, and documents its influence on Australian colonial policy. Its findings suggest that the protection, preservation and management of Indigenous cultural heritage should not be considered a sideline of Australian colonial policy in Papua, but rather one of its most defining features. Over the course of its lifespan the Papuan Official Collection has been displayed in four different museums providing an opportunity to examine how a fixed body of objects (the collection) moved across time and space, to be re-interpreted into different conceptual frameworks: as curios and antiquities; ethnographic artefacts; scientific specimens; artworks; and, finally, as historic objects. My institutional history of the POC cautions against the assumption that colonial collections were always used as uncontested propaganda, which metropolitan museums were content to display on behalf of the imperial mission. While the Murray administration in Papua was able to provide goods and information to the various museums which housed the Collection, each institution had its own competing agendas and the relationship was not always a smooth one.