1st Edition

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

By Nicola Froggatt Copyright 2025
220 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

220 Pages 32 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

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... Read more

Chapter 1

People, objects and 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

Biography

Nicola Froggatt has a doctorate from Royal Holloway, University of London; and is a research manager at the National Trust.