Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties

This book assesses how non-Aboriginal collectors understood Aboriginal objects, and what this reveals about colonial relationships, anxieties and ambitions.

Chapter 1
People, objects, identity
Part I: Navigating colonial spaces
Chapter 2
Western Australian collections in the British Isles: a history
Chapter 3
'Frontier collecting': anxieties and opportunities
Chapter 4
Tracing colonial 'careerists': travels in and across empire
Part II: Collections and power
Chapter 5
'Home' on a world stage: Western Australia at the Glasgow Exhibition of 1901
Chapter 6
Mining materials: Aboriginal and settler industry and culture
Chapter 7
Breaking and remaking the settler telegraph
Chapter 8
The Cambridge Expedition
Afterword: Tracing a legacy
Appendix 1
Selective chronology
Appendix 2
Extant objects in British and Irish institutions
Appendix 3
Extant objects in the British Museum
Appendix 4
Key material discussed in chapters
Bibliography