The Ethnology Room : exhibiting Indigenous material culture at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 1885-2021
Creators: name: Gleeson, PK
Publisher: name: University of Tasmania
Year: 2023

description: This thesis returns to Australia’s colonial past through the portal of a significant yet largely overlooked Australian museum, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), located in Hobart, Tasmania. Formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmania was the second of Australia’s colonies to be established, following New South Wales and remained a significant site throughout the colonial period. The originating archive for this project is TMAG’s Pacific Collection, which has not previously received sustained scholarly attention. It forms part of TMAG’s Ethnological Collection which in its entirety numbers some 10,000 objects, over 7000 of which hail from the Pacific. I explore the formation of the Pacific Collection, and its subsequent display in the museum’s Ethnology Room from the 1880s to the present as a means through which to engage in broader, pertinent discussions relevant to the ‘new’ museum history.<br>My central research question asks how such a collection of Pacific material culture came to be housed in a small museum in what is now regional Australia? That TMAG, a modest museum at the edge of empire, was able to amass one of the most significant Pacific collections in Australia, was not an anomaly. Rather, I argue that this collection reflects the prominence and dynamism of intellectual, scientific and material networks in the Austral-Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.<br>The central argument I make in this thesis is that despite Australia’s connection to the British Empire, Australian colonial museums were not purely imitative of British museology. In Australia, British museology was transformed by the Antipodean colonial world. It was, I argue, heavily influenced by the circulation of intercolonial material culture and knowledge networks within Australia and the Pacific. I suggest that when viewing British metropolitan and Australian colonial connections as networked systems, these webs and nodes very often crosshatch across Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Pacific, rather than leading neatly back to Britain. By applying transnational and transcolonial perspectives that consider the role of social exchange in museum and anthropological networks, this thesis highlights the importance of intercolonial networks in Australian museology.<br>Another key research question I pose, therefore, is whether Australia’s relationship with the Pacific challenges the assumed centrality of Britain in Australian museum history? Although Australia’s relationship with the Pacific did not replace that with Britain, the geographical location and the imperial ambitions of the Antipodean settler colonies formed central nodes in intellectual and material networks, bringing the colonial periphery to the centre of Oceanic collection and display. This thesis expands Australian museum history to include consideration of Pacific, in addition to British, worlds. It was not London, but Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand cities that were the metropoles of the Pacific.<br>Moving beyond the increasingly exhausted post-colonial critique of collecting and museums as tools of imperial domination, chapters two to five open with a carefully selected object from TMAG’s Pacific Collection: a photograph, a lime spatula, a diorama and a painting. Figuratively speaking, I remove these objects from the museum’s storerooms, recontextualising them. I curate these objects within a trajectory of acquisition and display, exposing as I do so the dynamic relationships between the colonisers and colonised, colonial networks involving knowledge and trade, and past practices of display. These new interpretations highlight how Australia’s place in the Pacific world inflected, and continues to inflect, museum practice.<br>I also use these storied objects as lenses through which to interrogate museum objects, ethnology, and indigenous art. I do so through combining theoretical insights from the cognate fields of post-colonial studies, cultural history, and visual studies. This thesis necessarily draws on an extensive volume and range of traditional archival manuscripts and sources, while also providing innovative analysis of visual and material sources. Distilling the resulting research findings not only reanimates a series of significant objects left lying dormant in a museum store, but, importantly, provides an insightful critique of past museum practice and illuminates productive ways of moving forward.<br>TMAG’s once popular Ethnology Room is now defunct; the Pacific Collection has been off permanent display since 2011. Moving the collection from storeroom to gallery as the twenty-first century progresses would necessitate vastly different forms of interpretation and display than those employed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All key stakeholders, including museum curators, academics, school educators, and the viewing public, would demand no less. History and historians can offer museums a means through which to contend sensitively with often difficult pasts, and to forge new, more appropriate pathways for the future.