Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties: Aboriginal Objects and Western Australian Frontiers, 1828-1914

European portrayals of Aboriginal people and their objects have long had political implications. This book explores ‘ethnographic’ objects from Western Australia now in British and Irish museums, and is the first full scholarly treatment of their part in fashioning colonial relationships and identities over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It scrutinises a body of material that once sparked extensive scholarly and popular interest, but has since been largely overlooked in schol...