The Papuan Official Collection : the biography of a collection at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra

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?