In 2022, a collections-survey project commenced at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), to explore and contextualise the museum’s Australian First Nations collection. Although such collections are held in Aotearoa New Zealand metropolitan museums (including in Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch, and Dunedin), they have been little considered. This research project considers the potential of a comparative trans-Tasman approach to research into the collection and display of material deemed ethnographic by colonial era collectors in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Local comparisons of histories of display and collection in Australasia will be explored, as will inter-colonial networks of material and cultural exchange that draw attention to historic connections between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Significantly, this is an important initial survey to explore how the Australian First Nations collections came to Te Papa, with the aim of raising awareness of the collection and providing a basis for future community engagement.

museum, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, trans-Tasman, colonial, history, material culture, First Nations

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) has its beginnings in the Colonial Museum in 1865 (Fig. 1). The museum status changed to reflect the identity of an emerging nation, taking the name Dominion Museum in 1907 when the country moved from being a colony of Great Britain to having an autonomous government. Under the National Art Gallery and Dominion Museum Act 1930, the museum’s remit was further extended to establish a ‘National Art Gallery, a Dominion Museum, a War Memorial Carillon and Hall of Memories’.¹ In 1972, the Dominion Museum became known as the National Museum of New Zealand. Then, in the 1990s, a new conception of the museum emerged, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Act 1992 established Te Papa as a ‘forum’ for the nation and a place for all New Zealanders to stand.² A major impetus was Te Māori: Te Hokinga Mai exhibition that had opened in 1986 at the then National Museum. Following the displays at major institutions, such as the Metropolitan Art Museum, St Louis Art Museum, the M H de Young Memorial Museum and the Field Museum, the return of the cultural taonga (treasures) from overseas significantly shifted the national cultural sector (McCarthy 2011).

Figure 1. 

Colonial Museum, Wellington, circa 1880, by Burton Brothers, New Zealand. Te Papa (C.014974).

Since its inception Te Papa’s bicultural approach has been an integral part of the museum’s philosophy and work programme which recognises the authority of tangata whenua (people of the land) and communities with their taonga. This has included a focus on the repatriation of Māori human remains such as Toi Moko (mummified Māori tattooed heads) and Kōiwi Tangata (Māori and Moriori skeletal remains) (Herewini 2008; Jean 2020) in line with a key principle: mana taonga, which acknowledges the shared authority with iwi (tribes), hapū (sub-tribes) and communities (Kanawa et al. 2024). This practice is at the heart of Te Papa’s collection care and community engagement work within Aotearoa New Zealand, described as ‘the recognition that there still exists living relationships and connections between taonga and their cultures of origin’ (Schorch & Hakiwai 2014, p. 197). Curatorial practice at Te Papa recognises mana taonga as a broad and critical part of the way in which community exhibitions are considered to include non-Māori cultures (Gibson & Mallon 2010). The authors explore and contextualise the formation of Te Papa’s Australian First Nations collection in this paper to increase awareness of the collection so that the museum may expand its mana taonga approach internationally, and engage and collaborate with First Nations communities and researchers in the future.

In this exploration, where possible, we establish provenance for key objects that provide broader insight into the collection’s history. Te Papa’s Australian First Nations collection, referred to in this paper as the First Nations collection, has not been the subject of previous scholarship, and before this project began, very little was known about the approximately 400 cultural objects in the collection. From the museum catalogue, the Production Place for the collections are documented as: Western Australia (16), South Australia (15), Tasmania (1), Queensland (69), Northern Territory (17), and more generally Australia (317). Key collectors are Alexander Turnbull (1868–1918), Clement Wragge (1852–1922), Thomas Griffith Taylor (1880–1963), Hugh Hastings Romilly (1856–1892), Sali Herman (1898–1993), Sir George Ferguson Bowen (1821–1899), Sir Joseph Kinsey (1852–1936), and institutions Tairāwhiti Museum Te Whare Taonga o te Tairāwhiti and Tūhura Otago Museum. The authors follow similar collection surveys of international history collections at Te Papa, such as the South African collection survey (Powell & Akeli Amaama 2023) and the Pacific Cultures collection surveys, which examined East Polynesia (Mallon & Hutton 2013), Niue (Akeli & Pasene 2011) and the Cook Islands (Hutton et al. 2010) with the first overview written by Te Papa’s former ethnologist Janet Davidson (1991).

The presence of First Nations collections in Aotearoa New Zealand museums has been little considered in the existing literature, though Te Papa, Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, Canterbury Museum and Tūhura Otago Museum all hold collections. Te Papa’s First Nations collection therefore provided a unique case study to examine the development of the First Nations collections, and illuminate trans-Tasman colonial connections between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, which might shed light on other collections in Aotearoa New Zealand. We demonstrate how patterns of colonisation across the Australian colonies resulted in the collection of the First Nations cultural objects that made their way to Aotearoa New Zealand by analysing a potentially rare Tasmanian First Nations (known contemporarily as the palawa or pakana) model bark canoe from lutruwita (Tasmania); a striking rainforest shield from Yidinji Country in coastal North Queensland; two boomerangs supposedly collected on Gadigal Country during the founding years of British colonial settlement in Sydney, New South Wales; and a dilly bag from Quinkan Country in North Queensland.³ Surveying and examining how Australian First Nations collections such as these came to be in Aotearoa New Zealand is a first step in opening the collection to First Nations researchers and communities so they may determine its future.

The history of trans-Tasman connection between Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia is a long one. It encompasses geographies, penal colonies, labour mobility, trade and exchange, and European colonisation and settlement. Aotearoa New Zealand’s formal administrative connection to New South Wales ended with the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 (enacted in 1841), having long had an association with the New South Wales colony that had been established in 1788 (see Denoon et al. 2000; Sinclair 1987; Neumann et al. 1999). In 1900, the idea of creating a Commonwealth of the Australasian colonies was brought to the New Zealand Parliament for discussion.⁴ In 1901, the Australian colonies took on a federal status as the Commonwealth of Australia by incorporating New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, with the colony of New Zealand opting out of the Federation.

Though Te Papa’s 19^th century First Nations collections have never been exhibited at the museum, First Nations artists and communities have visited Te Papa over the years, resulting in significant acquisitions and exhibitions. In 2012, through the work of then-curator of the Māori collection, Awhina Tamarapa, a contemporary possum cloak was gifted to Te Papa by cloak makers Lee Darroch, Maree Clarke, Vicki Couzens and curator Amanda Reynolds from the Banmirra Arts Incorporation. The possum skins for the cloak had been sourced from Aotearoa New Zealand, thus “enabling the revival of the ancient tradition of possum skin cloaks to the Southeastern Aboriginal communities”.⁵

Also in 2012, Megan Tamati-Quennell (curator of Modern and Contemporary Māori and Indigenous Art) and Aboriginal Art curator Brenda L Croft (Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra) curated the Gifted: Aboriginal Art, 1971–2011 (Fig. 2) exhibition at Te Papa, drawing on the critical concepts of tikanga Māori (cultural practices), mana taonga and manaakitanga (respect) (Tamati-Quennell 2020, pp. 25–26).⁶ Through the exhibition development, it was discovered that “selected artworks had been shown previously in 1979 at the National Art Gallery” accompanied by a full catalogue (Tamati-Quennell 2020, p. 29). Significantly, however, Croft and Tamati-Quennell were able to add more information to the record about artist names and materials.

Figure 2. 

Gifted: Aboriginal Art 1971–2011 exhibition, 2013. Photo by Michael Hall. Te Papa (69726).

In 2022, this project was initiated in response to increasing enquiries from communities and researchers seeking to understand the holdings of Te Papa’s historical Australian First Nations collections. Te Papa had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2019 (Fig. 3), formalising a partnership between the two organisations and a commitment to collaboration in the field of Indigenous collections. The opportunity to further connect on the work of exchange, and in discussions on repatriation and return, provided a basis to review the First Nations collections.

Figure 3. 

Te Papa and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at the Memorandum of Understanding signing, 2019. Photo by Jack Fisher. Te Papa (139633).

As a starting point, a high-level survey of the First Nations collections within the International History Collection found about 400 cultural objects within Te Papa’s holdings. The authors consider this article to be the first phase in understanding the collections, providing a historical survey of the collection holdings to identify key primary collectors and significant historical themes and objects. The authors presented on aspects of the collection history at the 2021 AIATSIS Summit in Brisbane and the 2023 Australian Museums and Galleries Association Conference in Newcastle. The project aims to provide an overview which may form the basis for future discussions.

The objects in Te Papa’s Australian First Nations collection span more than a century of creation, collection and acquisition. The objects form part of the museum’s International History collection and are known as the Australian First Nations collection. The International History collection was formerly known as the Foreign Ethnology collection, and Powell and Akeli Amaama (2023) have outlined its history, based on the work of Livingstone (1998), who first surveyed the collection. The collection was the birthplace of most of the museum’s collections relating to human histories and cultures, including objects from Pacific Cultures as well as Taonga Māori. In the 1990s, the Pacific and Taonga Māori collections were separated into new discrete collection categories and since then the International History collection has retained only objects from cultures outside of Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific, and the Torres Strait Islands. At Te Papa and many other Aotearoa New Zealand museums, material culture from the Torres Strait is held within Pacific collections – unlike in Australia, where it is classified as First Nations. The International History collection currently comprises about 6,000 objects, including the 400 First Nations cultural objects (Fig. 4).

Figure 4. 

PowerBI generated a visual image of the Australian First Nations collection at Te Papa, 2022. Terminology is based on data held in the museum’s Collection Information System (Emu) and may be inaccurate. Further research is needed to validate the descriptions assigned to the First Nations collections, which may be a future step in the museum’s community engagement (for example, one boomerang has been reclassified as a leangle due to research for this paper (see Fig. 11)).

In the First Nations collection, many of the objects from the late 19^th century are provenanced to New South Wales and Queensland. The Northern Territory is most represented among the collections acquired from the mid-20^th century. The provenance of the collection can be characterised according to two major historical and chronological phases of acquisition. The first, which this paper examines, is the period of collecting and acquisition from the 1860s to the 1930s, under two of the Colonial Museum’s (and later the Dominion Museum’s) most prominent directors and curators: James Hector and Augustus Hamilton. The second major period of acquisition began in the 1970s after the Australian Federal Government donated to the New Zealand Government an assemblage of objects displayed at the South Pacific Festival of the Arts (1976).⁷ The South Pacific Festival of the Arts was formed after discussions at a conference of the South Pacific Commission, an international development organisation founded in 1947 by colonial powers with strategic and military interests in the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. Member governments of Pacific nations suggested the festival as a way to ensure the survival of traditional arts and develop and revitalise new art forms.

The objects that formed the donation from the Australian Government are contemporary arts and crafts from central Australia and they originate primarily from the Northern Territory.⁸ The donation was compiled for the festival by the Aboriginal Arts Board, which had been established in 1973 by the socially progressive Whitlam government.⁹ The formation of the Aboriginal Arts Board was part of a broader suite of government policies and programmes intended to encourage self-determination in Aboriginal communities and develop and promote the arts in Australia.

It was governed by an all-Aboriginal board chaired between 1975–1980 by renowned Rirratjingu artist, activist and composer Wandjuk Djuakan Marika, who attended and performed at the 1976 festival held in Rotorua, New Zealand (Geissler 2020). The Arts Board routinely commissioned works for touring exhibitions and display during public events, and made donations to cultural institutions in Australia and abroad to share and promote Aboriginal art.¹⁰

Te Papa’s Museum Archive holds documents relating to Aboriginal ethnological acquisitions in 1879, 1899, 1917 and 1925. A focus on Aboriginal art throughout the 1970s and 1980s also features heavily in museum correspondence, with correspondence in the 1990s relating particularly to bark paintings.

This paper explores the history of the Te Papa First Nations collection’s formation and significance, followed by a discussion of a selection of First Nations cultural objects held in the Te Papa collection. These cultural objects have been selected for their individual historical significance, and for their potential to illuminate the overall historical context of Te Papa’s collection. Rather than focusing solely on uniqueness or rarity, we attempted to ensure that objects from a range of First Nations communities across Australia were represented in our selection, as well as objects that were made or used by First Nations women.

We have done so by employing an ‘object social biography’ approach (Kopytoff 1986) to present the significant themes, collectors, donors and historical context of the collection in this survey. This methodology has become well established in museum and cultural heritage studies since the 1980s, and it acknowledges that objects accumulate and possess their own histories and affective qualities over time. They have ‘social biographies’ formed by interactions with human actions and the contexts of their production, consumption and exchange. Given the dearth of knowledge about the provenance and histories of the objects in the First Nations collection we are surveying, this methodology is well suited to this project. This approach provides insights into the motivation for collecting over time.

In November 1899, the pioneer meteorologist Anglo-Australian Clement Wragge wrote to James Hector, curator of the Colonial Museum in Wellington (Fig. 5), with an offer. With plans to sell his Queensland home and migrate to Aotearoa New Zealand, Wragge was looking to downsize the considerable ethnographic collection he had amassed when travelling to remote locations across South Australia and Queensland to establish meteorology stations. Hector, however, was not moved by the offer of sale. “This museum,” wrote Hector, “has a sufficiently complete collection of Queensland native implements which was presented by the late Governor Sir George Bowen, Captain Moresby and the late Commodore Goodenough.”¹¹ Hector’s seeming lack of interest in the Australian collection is mirrored in the collection’s exhibition history. In the century and a half since the museum’s establishment, it seems the 19^th and early 20^th century Australian ethnographic holdings have never been displayed (or at least not intentionally, which we will explain later in this article).

Figure 5. 

Colonial Museum, Wellington, circa 1880, by Burton Brothers, New Zealand. Te Papa (O.005257).

The aforementioned exhibition Gifted: Aboriginal Art 1971–2011, by Tamati-Quennell and Croft, featured the objects donated to Te Papa in the wake of the South Pacific Festival of the Arts in 1976. This was the first public display in the museum’s history to include First Nations material from Australia.¹² In extant correspondence and acquisition registers, the interest of both James Hector and Augustus Hamilton in ethnology is most apparent in connection with the collection and display of taonga Māori, followed by objects from across the Pacific. The Australian First Nations collection never made it out of storage.

Contemporary literature concerning First Nations material in Aotearoa New Zealand museums is also scant, which is notable in light of the strong history of exchange between Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand museums since the late 19^th century.¹³ Scholarship about both Māori and First Nations cultural objects in foreign collections has tended to focus on those in Europe and America, rather than those that made the shorter trip across the Tasman Sea.¹⁴ As sociologist Peter Beilharz has rightly noted, Antipodean scholarship has routinely looked north, but there is much to be learned from looking sideways instead (Beilharz 2015, p. 82). Both Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand museums consciously collected significant international ethnology collections (even if they were not displayed, as was the case at Te Papa). However, First Nations collections in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Māori collections in Australia, have perhaps received less attention from researchers and curators than cultural objects with potential for storytelling that strongly reflects the predominant historical and national themes, events, and interests of the collecting country. These collections then, could be considered to have fallen through the cracks – far from home.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, local, national and international ethnology collections were standard features of colonial museums, and cultural objects belonging to Indigenous peoples from abroad were highly sought after. For example, Canterbury Museum boasted a large collection of First Nations material, and in contrast to the collection at the Colonial Museum, it was exhibited in an Ethnological Room alongside material from Asian, African and European countries (Dorward 1996). This international ethnology collection was arranged according to the most up-to-date methods of display, inspired by the comparative, typological format of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (Gosden and Larson 2007). This method of arrangement was intended to communicate the notion that cultural artefacts reflected the degree of evolutionary development in what were presumed to be specific racial types. This is exemplified by the Canterbury Museum’s display of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone tools in the early 20^th century, which museum curator Edgar R. Waite explicitly noted was intended to demonstrate that the Tasmanians were “the nearest representatives of primitive man” (Waite 1906, pp. 138–39). It was integral to visually guiding visitors sequentially through a range of objects supposedly illustrating humanity’s evolutionary development from the earliest and most ‘primitive’ to the most recent ‘advanced’ racial types. By virtue of their supposed primitivity, Tasmanian Aboriginal material culture and ancestral remains were highly prized and commanded comparatively high prices in sales to museums during this period (Taylor 2017).

Just as museums in Aotearoa New Zealand collected First Nations material, all Australian colonial museums acquired taonga Māori for their collections, and these taonga were most often catalogued and exhibited with otherwise large and globally significant Pacific collections. The large Pacific collections held by Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand museums reflect patterns of imperial interest and expansion in the region.

Collections of Māori material in Australian museums were smaller than collections from elsewhere in the Pacific. However, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) exhibited taonga Māori alongside Australian First Nations and Pacific objects in a way that intentionally emphasised an ‘Australasian’ conceptualisation of the region (Gleeson 2022). Australasia, an elastic colonial term grouping British possessions in the Pacific region, was shaped by geographic proximity, but also the shared political and cultural realities of the colonies.¹⁵

The Tasmanian museum’s curator (and later director) Alexander Morton was intent on establishing a high-quality and representative ethnology room comparable to those in Britain. The international orientation and ambition apparent of the room was matched at the Canterbury Museum. By contrast, in the limited exhibition of ‘ethnographic’ objects at the Colonial Museum in Wellington, Māori and Pacific objects took precedence over ethnography from elsewhere. In that regard, the Colonial Museum was something of an exception in its era, although, we argue, this was a result of circumstance rather than design.

The Colonial Museum demonstrates well that – although a central component in the cultural projects of empire – museums of the time were also uncoordinated, fragmented and diffuse institutions that came to reflect local circumstances and personalities as much as (or more than) a unified imperial vision.¹⁶ At smaller museums in particular, the influence and resources of only one or two individuals could come to define an institution’s direction, and the shape and nature of its collections and displays, well into the 20^th century.

The prime reason why the Colonial Museum’s ethnology collection displays differed from those elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand can be traced to James Hector’s appointment as Director of the Colonial Geological Survey in 1865, and his conviction that the survey should be supported by a museum.¹⁷ The Colonial Museum was not alone in its enthusiasm for geology during this period. As historian David Dorward highlighted, “Of all the natural sciences, geology reigned supreme. It was the great science of the 19^th century, serving as the core of evolutionary evidence and the classificatory science par excellence” (Dorward 1996, p. 102). The Australian Museum was similarly inspired by geology during this period, noting in its annual report of 1892 that expensive installation arrangements had been made for the exhibition of a recently purchased “beautiful and instructive” geological and mineralogical collection (Australian Museum 1862, p. 2). The discipline’s popularity in both Australia and New Zealand is not surprising moreover given the value of geological knowledge for settler colonialism. It was the leading science for identifying natural resources suitable for extraction to fuel colonial economies and drive the expansion of British settlements. Hence for the 38 years of Hector’s leadership, the museum necessarily prioritised expanding the Geological Survey’s reference collections, limiting the time and resources available for non-geological collection areas.

By the time F.A. Bather, keeper of the department of geology at the British Museum, conducted his well-known review of colonial museums during a holiday tour of some British colonies in 1893, his assessment of the arrangement at the Colonial Museum was blunt – there was “practically none” (Bather 1895, p. 207). “Even in the cases,” he despaired, “the things are badly arranged, and the labels, if found at all, are often attached to the wrong specimens” (p. 208). Bather observed, “At some distant period there seems to have been an attempt to keep the geological specimens in one room, the zoological in another, and the ethnological in a third; but now specimens are simply placed where room can be best made for them” (pp. 207–208). The museum was criticised by Bather for incomplete displays that did not reflect modern museum standards, which upon his visit gave the appearance of a collection storeroom, as opposed to a scientifically arranged gallery.

Bather himself laid responsibility for the state of Aotearoa New Zealand’s national museum squarely at the feet of the colonial government, not the “hard-working gentlemen connected with this institution”, lamenting that such a prosperous colony should be home to the “worst-managed institution of the kind in probably the whole of the Southern hemisphere” (Bather, p. 208). Hector’s rejection of Wragge’s offer was, in all probability, due to the practical challenges of collecting beyond the weighty demands of housing the Geological Survey’s collections, rather than any conceptual opposition or neutrality towards an institutional emphasis on ethnology. In fact, Wragge’s collection entered the stores of the Colonial Museum in 1917, and it remains in Te Papa’s collection today.¹⁸

Te Papa’s First Nations collection contains several dilly bags, but this one is unusual because a precise location of origin was recorded. The dilly bag (Fig. 6), made from string, plant fibre, bark and vegetable dye, was collected by Clement Wragge from Quinkan Country on Cape York peninsula in North Queensland. The creator of the bag and the precise circumstances of its collection are unknown, but dilly bags are mainly designed, made and used by women to gather food. Quinkan Country, incidentally, has some of the largest rock art galleries in Australia. They are located in the sandstone escarpments of the Laura River, the ancestral country of the Ang-Gnarra people.¹⁹

Figure 6. 

Dilly bag, place of production and maker not recorded, Laura, North Queensland. Purchased in 1917. Te Papa (FE001361).

First Nations people resisted the incursions of mining and pastoralism into Quinkan Country, beginning in the 1870s. The town of Laura was named by government surveyor, A.C. Macmillan, after his wife Laura Bower. Macmillan led a party of engineers and Native Police from Cooktown to the Palmer River goldfields in 1873.

As is often the case, much more is known about the colonial collector of the dilly bag than its creator. Wragge was a significant colonial collector, having sold more than 500 cultural objects to the Queensland Museum, more than 312 to the South Australian Museum, 6 to the Melbourne Museum, and 5 to the Australian Museum. He collected 90 of the roughly 400 First Nations objects in Te Papa’s collection, which makes him an important figure in understanding and contextualising its origins. His collection includes 13 objects classified as boomerangs, clubs (19), parrying shields (11), spears (12) and woomera (2) as well as axe heads, corroboree plumes, dilly bags, grinding stones, knives, necklaces, pendants, ruddle stone, spinners wax, a copai, a rite stone and a mourning chaplet. We also know that Wragge’s personal papers were destroyed in a fire in the early 20^th century, but a number of his publications documenting his travels and work as a meteorologist survive.²⁰ He has been the subject of biographical history focused on his life and career as a meteorologist (Fraser 2023; Higgins 2020), but the only scholarship explicitly concerning Wragge’s collecting are brief mentions in PhD theses about First Nations collections at the Queensland Museum (Burden 2017) and the South Australian Museum (Jones 1996).

Wragge began collecting First Nations material culture in South Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. Though he was an amateur collector with no formal training or affiliations in the nascent field of ethnography, he was sufficiently interested in the field to not only amass large collections of First Nations objects, but to use his inheritance to establish a museum in his hometown of Stafford, England. The Wragge collection was first displayed in the dining room of a municipal hall in 1879, which was later renovated to include a museum space for Wragge’s collection, a library, and a school of art. Given Wragge’s movements at this stage of his career, most of the First Nations objects displayed would have been from South Australia – in particular from Adnyamathanha Country in the Flinders Ranges, where Wragge had undertaken surveying work. In 1914, the Wragge Museum became the Stafford Museum, and its focus drifted from ethnography and natural history to local history and decorative arts as the 20^th century wore on. The material Wragge donated was not catalogued, and objects were sold or disposed of without records being kept. By the time a collection catalogue was completed in 1961, there were no collection items associated with Wragge retained by the museum, and no way to trace where they had been dispersed.²¹

By the time Wragge arrived in Queensland in the 1890s to set up meteorological stations in outback Queensland, mining activity in the region had slowed. Many Aboriginal men had taken up work in the pastoral industry, and government reserves and ration depots had been established by the Queensland Protectors of Aborigines, Walter Roth and Archibald Meston. Curator Phillip Jones has noted there were ration depots in proximity to many of the locations that Wragge collected from in Queensland (Jones 1996). The closest ration depot to Laura was in Cooktown, 141 kilometres east, so it is possible that Wragge encountered the Ang-Gnarra owner of the dilly bag on Quinkan Country, or during a visit to Cooktown.

Given that Wragge collected in Queensland and South Australia while employed as a meteorologist in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, his collecting can be understood in the context of settler colonial exploration and expansion. He was, as Jones has deemed him, a frontier official (Jones 1996, p. 225). Though Wragge’s collecting took place in Australia, we can draw parallels between his motivations and those of the Colonial Museum’s director, James Hector. Hector established a geological collection that reflected the surveying and categorisation of land as a key part of the process of settler colonial expansion in Aotearoa New Zealand. Across the Tasman, Wragge was engaged in a similar venture, amassing a collection through his colonial work and amateur interest.

George Bowen had a long imperial career and, like many other Australasian colonial administrators, served in posts in colonies across the British Empire (Lambert & Lester 2006). Bowen was the first Governor of Queensland between 1859 and 1868, he then served over the years as the Governor of New Zealand (1868–1873), Victoria (1874–1879), Mauritius (1879–1882) and Hong Kong (1882–1886). Thirty-nine First Nations cultural objects in the Te Papa collection are provenanced to Bowen, acquired by the museum under a loan agreement shortly after Bowen’s arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand. Similar to the Wragge collection, the main categories of cultural objects are spears (11), shields (5), boomerangs (3), clubs (9), swords (4) and woomera (3) as well as two chisels, a basket, and a gourd.

One of these objects was recorded in Te Papa’s historical documentation as a parrying shield (Fig. 7), luna-shaped with rounded ends, with the facing surface slightly convex. The shield has a reverse flat with a cut-out handle level with the back, and it is decorated with a central boss. The shield’s size, curved shape, and vibrant geometric pattern suggest it is a rainforest shield used for deflecting spears, not a parrying shield used for deflecting clubs at closer range. Queensland rainforest shields are made by men of the Yidinji Nation whose ancestral country includes modern-day Cairns and other traditional owners of North Queensland’s coastal wet tropics region. For the Jirrbal people whose country extends inland near the town of Tully to Ravenshoe and Herberton, these shields are known as bigan (also spelled bigin and big-uun). Bigan are, on average, much larger than shields from other parts of Australia – up to one metre long. The Te Papa bigan (Fig. 7) measures 1,005 millimetres long and 360 millimetres wide. The curved, kidney shape of many bigan results from the natural root curvature of the native fig trees that the shields are fashioned from.²² Bigan are only made and used by initiated adult men, although Jirrbal Elder, Dr Ernie Grant, has indicated that smaller versions of bigan were made for younger boys.²³

Figure 7. 

Bigan, place of production and maker not recorded, Queensland. On loan from Sir George Bowen, 1868. Te Papa (FE000504).

It is unlikely Bowen personally collected the bigan and other First Nations cultural material he came to possess. Secondary collectors such as Bowen acquired objects through private dealers, personal networks or as gifts, rather than by direct interactions or relationships with First Nations people, which can further obscure provenance. The bigan is one of the few cultural objects loaned by Bowen that has a location of collection recorded, albeit without any specificity about geographical location or cultural group – ‘Queensland’ is the only provenance clue in the museum’s records. Based on Bowen’s career movements, many of the other objects loaned to the museum – which include nulla nulla (clubs), spears, woomera, and a woven basket – are likely also from Queensland.

Colonial governors acquired First Nations cultural material, like the bigan, from the earliest days of colonisation. At the request of naturalist Joseph Banks, Arthur Phillip (the first Governor of New South Wales) acquired cultural objects and possibly human remains from Sydney coastal Aboriginal people, which he is thought to have returned to England in 1793 (Fullagar 2017). By the interwar period in the 20^th century, systematic ethnographic collecting was a formal pillar of the Australian colonial administrations of Papua and New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), where government anthropologists were employed.²⁴ Historian Patrick Wolfe (1999) articulated the close relationship that has existed between ethnography and colonial governance in the settler colonies of the British Empire, highlighting how ethnographic collecting was, in many ways, a key feature of colonial governance. The reasons for colonial collecting can vary, but often fall into the categories of curio collecting, symbols of conquest, salvage collecting of cultures that the colonists presumed to be lost, or as a part of the ‘scientific’ endeavours of the then-burgeoning ethnological and anthropological fields (Thomas 1989). Colonial administrators also increasingly saw the rise of ‘ethnographic expertise’ as a necessity for the effective governance of Indigenous populations.

Extant records relating to Bowen do not appear to demonstrate that he had a particular interest in ethnology, meaning that his motivations for collecting more likely fell within the categories of curio collecting or as symbols of conquest. Bowen’s own book about his career makes only the most cursory reference to the First Nations peoples of Queensland, over whom he held authority as Governor (Bowen 1889). Much more of the book is concerned with chronicling his government’s administrative responses to the pressures of the Māori resistance to British colonial occupation in the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. This silence is significant given the enormous ramifications of the formal colonial settlement of Queensland from 1859 on First Nations peoples, as is explored in an extensive body of scholarly literature.²⁵

Contemporary newspaper reports concerning Bowen from the period he was Governor of Queensland similarly make scant mention of First Nations peoples. One of the few references to First Nations peoples in Queensland in relation to Bowen was criticism in local newspapers after he ordered a detachment of Native Mounted Police from Rockhampton to escort him to Dalby (a 550 kilometre journey) – the primary concern being a perceived waste of resources.²⁶ Yet Bowen’s desire to be escorted while travelling into more remote districts also hints at these fraught and frequently violent relations between First Nations custodians and the colonists who were alienating large tracts of Country in Queensland for pastoral use during this period (Burke et al. 2020).²⁷

The traditional practice of making bigan has been reinvigorated over the past several decades, notably by Yidinji artists such as Michael Boiyool-Anning and Paul Bong. The bigan creation by contemporary artists not only strengthens traditional knowledge and craftmanship but serves to make a political statement regarding the continuity of First Nations culture and sovereign rights in Australia. As Bong has stated, “My ancestors defended our country and our people with these shields. I defend my culture today with my shields – in art” (Bong 2022).

We cannot yet trace this Tasmanian model bark canoe’s (Fig. 8) provenance prior to its purchase during the period the museum was known as the Dominion Museum (1907–1972) from McKenna’s auction house in Wellington in 1929. It is possible that the object arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand because of trans-Tasman migration, common in the nineteenth century. At the time of its acquisition, it seems that neither the auction house nor the museum realised that the canoe was possibly Tasmanian; it was thought to be Māori. The McKenna’s auction catalogues for 1929 record no listings for Tasmanian model canoes, which is perhaps how the object was misidentified. The canoe was displayed in a ‘canoe case’ in what was known as the Māori Hall, until the redevelopment of the gallery in the 1980s. At some point a Dominion Museum registration label was affixed to the canoe, which identified it as Tasmanian, though it remained on display in the Māori Hall.

Figure 8. 

Model canoe, place of production and maker not recorded, Tasmania. Purchased in 1929. Te Papa (FE002144).

Determining whether the object is a genuine Tasmanian model canoe is challenging due to its uncertain provenance, though if it is Tasmanian, it is incredibly rare. There are only nine known model canoes made by First Nations Tasmanians in museum collections – five at the TMAG in Hobart, three at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (Figs 9, 10), and one in London.²⁸ Palawa curator and artist Julie Gough convincingly suggests some canoes were likely made as souvenir gifts for official visitors to Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island between 1831 and 1847 by exiled Tasmanians.²⁹

Figures 9, 10. 

Model Tasmanian canoe, made before 1843. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (1893.50.14).

From the mid-1820s to the early 1830s, contest over land between colonists and First Nations Tasmanians resulted in what is known as the ‘Black War’, or in more recent years the ‘Vandemonian War’ or the ‘White War’.³⁰ George Augustus Robinson, a bricklayer from London, made a career for himself as a supposed conciliator and intermediary between the colonial government and the Tasmanians at the height of the war. He was appointed Chief Protector of Aborigines, and he collaborated with a number of Tasmanians from the southeast around Hobart who had witnessed the extent and impact of the rapidly expanding colonial settlement. These Tasmanians included well-known historical figures Truganinni and Woorrady, who acted as guides and intermediaries for Robinson, setting out on what were known as the ‘Friendly Missions’. The purpose was to try and convince other Tasmanians to cease the war and surrender, in exchange for a protected area of land where they would be able to live free from settler incursions. A number joined Robinson voluntarily; others were killed in the conflict or were forced to ‘come in’ due to the devastating effects of pastoral expansion and ongoing conflict with colonists. The final group walked into Hobart town and surrendered to the colonial government at Government House in 1834, agreeing to temporary removal from their land in exchange for resources for their survival from the government (Reynolds 1995). This agreement was not honoured.

The holding place the 134 surviving Tasmanians were sent to was on Flinders Island, in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. There, Robinson was charged with setting up a government settlement called Wybalenna. Wybalenna was established according to standard ‘civilising mission’ principles, which included Christianisation, suppressing traditional language and culture, living in stable dwellings, domestic work for women, and subsistence through agricultural production rather than hunting (Plomley 1987).

The settlement was an overwhelming failure, and people died in huge numbers. The exiled Tasmanians were plagued by respiratory disease, and the European diet offered to them compounded poor health outcomes. Children were removed from their families and placed in the Orphans School in Hobart. Robinson abandoned the settlement and the surviving Tasmanians in 1839 to take up a position as Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District (now Victoria). In 1847, the surviving 47 Tasmanians were relocated to a disused convict station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, where their movements were restricted and they lived in poor material conditions (Harman 2018).

Men were the traditional makers of bark canoes, a practice that has been revived and reinvigorated in recent years by craftspeople such as Rex Greeno.³¹ But Tasmanian Aboriginal women were, and are, also highly skilled craftspeople.³² The references to craft in the journal kept by Robinson at Wybalenna do not identify individual makers or their genders (Plomley 1987). However, given the traditional status of palawa women as holders of knowledge of artistic practices, and the emphasis at Wybalenna on women adopting practices associated with British feminine domesticity such as handicrafts, it is quite possible at least some of the model canoes were created by women.

The three model canoes held by the Pitt Rivers Museum were collected by the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, John Franklin, and his wife, Jane Franklin, during an official visit to Wybalenna in 1843.³³ They took the canoes with them when they returned to England that same year and they were later donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum (Sculthorpe 1990).³⁴ The British Museum canoe was sent to London for display in the Great Exhibition in 1851. Newspaper records from the time seem to indicate that more than one model canoe was sent for that exhibition, meaning it was possible a number of these were produced – perhaps during the period that the Tasmanians were living at Oyster Cove.³⁵

Visually, the Te Papa canoe is most like those held by Pitt Rivers, though each of the canoes still in existence is slightly different.³⁶ The Te Papa canoe is made of bound reeds, the same material as the Pitt Rivers canoes. The British Museum canoe is the most visually distinct from the others and has been made using slightly different materials. This could reflect the location of creation and availability of materials.

As Gaye Sculthorpe has highlighted, the Tasmanian model canoes represent some of the few items of palawa material culture held by museums that are connected to known people, at a known time (Sculthorpe 1990). This is significant, given the use of palawa objects in museums from the mid-19^th century onwards to perpetuate the myth that Tasmanian First Nations people were extinct by ethnographic displays which disavowed the continuity of palawa culture.

Two cultural objects identified as boomerangs in the Te Papa collection are thought to have been collected from the Tank Stream at Sydney Cove on Gadigal land in 1800. The Tank Stream runs into Sydney Harbour and was the principal source of fresh water for the British settlement at Port Jackson, which was established in 1788. The stream divided the early settlement, with officers and soldiers camped to the east, and convicts to the west.

The boomerangs were said to have been collected by John MacDonnell. A descendant of MacDonnell’s based in Christchurch donated the boomerangs to the museum in 1935, providing the story of their supposed origin. One of the boomerangs, however, looks quite unlike others that were collected from Sydney during this period. FE004000 (Fig. 11) has an L-shaped design with a handle that curves at a 90-degree angle and is more consistent with a fighting club known as a leangle. Leangles originate from southeastern Australia and were used alongside parrying shields in armed combat.

Figure 11. 

Leangle, place of production and maker not recorded, Australia, 1800. Gifted by Mr A.J. MacDonnell in 1935. Te Papa (FE004000).

During the period the two cultural objects were collected, the First Nations people who lived on Gadigal Country around Sydney Harbour belonged to a number of different clan groups. These survivors had joined together after large population losses resulting from the impacts of British colonisation – particularly introduced diseases such as smallpox (Fullagar 2023, p. 176).

The question of whether boomerangs were even a part of the traditional material culture of the First Nations peoples of coastal Sydney remains unresolved. Determining the types of objects that were used by First Nations peoples in Sydney is complicated by several factors. One of these complications is that colonists frequently lacked familiarity with the material culture they observed, described and acquired. As Sculthorpe and Simpson have highlighted, “the word ‘boomerang’ itself has been frequently used as a catch-all for a heterogenous and unique series of object types,” which creates challenges in identifying these objects and determining their provenance (Sculthorpe & Simpson 2023, p. 151). Their point has been well illustrated in the apparent misidentification of FE004000 as a boomerang. In addition, the decades following the establishment of the British settlement at Port Jackson represented a period of massive and rapid social change for First Nations peoples across the greater Sydney region. Could this upheaval have impacted the distribution, trade and use of certain types of material culture, meaning objects historically used outside of the Sydney region may have ended up there? It is a question worth further exploration in consultation with Sydney coastal Aboriginal communities.

Archaeologist Val Attenbrow has noted that boomerangs seemed to have been unknown in the Sydney region prior to 1802, though settler accounts describe their appearance in Sydney town shortly after this time (Attenbrow 2010, p. 95). Early visual records of the material culture provide some clues as to the types of boomerangs that may have been used by the First Nations peoples of coastal Sydney. For example, the Port Jackson Painter (active 1788–1792) recorded two objects in a painting from 1790 (Fig. 13)³⁷ that could be considered non-returning boomerangs of the type often referred to by colonists as ‘swords’ or ‘scimitars’ in early colonial historical documents (Attenbrow 2010, p. 95).

In their recent research, Sculthorpe and Simpson (2023) identified two boomerangs (Figs 14, 15)³⁸ in the collections of the British Museum that are attributed to Port Jackson and thought to be collected during a similar period as the Te Papa boomerang (Fig. 12). FE003887 (Fig. 12) bears some similarity to the British Museum’s boomerangs attributed with a Port Jackson provenance. At 62 centimetres long, FE003887 is of similar dimensions to the British Museum boomerangs, which measure 75 centimetres and 66 centimetres (though they are slightly less curved than FE003887). Boomerangs FE003887 (Fig. 12) and Oc.979 (Fig. 14) each have markings made with carving and fire, though the patterns used on each boomerang are distinct. Boomerang Oc.978 (Fig. 15) is smooth, unmarked and made from a wood with a deeper red tone.

Figure 12. 

Boomerang, place of production and maker not recorded, Australia. Gifted by Mr A.J. MacDonnell in 1935. Te Papa (FE003887).

Figure 13. 

Detail from ‘Aboriginal hunting implements and weapons’ by Port Jackson Painter, circa 1790. Rex Nan Kivell Collection; NK 144/F, National Library of Australia.

Figure 14. 

Boomerang, Aboriginal Australian, 19^th century (before 1844). Port Jackson, Sydney. Gifted by Henry Christy, 1860s. The British Museum (Oc.979).

Figure 15. 

Boomerang, Aboriginal Australian, 19^th century (before 1844). Port Jackson, Sydney. Gifted by Henry Christy, 1860s. The British Museum (Oc.978).

It is possible the Te Papa boomerang and leangle were acquired further afield and brought to Sydney specifically to trade and were thus associated with Tank Stream, not as the place of creation, but of collection. If so, they provide an example of the operation of extensive and organised First Nations trade networks that operated in various locations across the continent both pre and post European settlement (Attenbrow & Cartwright 2014; Hayward 2020). Also, Sculthorpe and Simpson have noted, locations such as Port Jackson and Botany Bay could have been used at the time as a general label for the entire greater Sydney region, which could call into question the accuracy of provenance locations recorded in museum catalogues (Sculthorpe & Simpson 2023, p. 167).

Objects such as the Tank Stream boomerang and leangle exemplify the limitations of colonial record-keeping and provenance research on objects obtained in the initial years of colonization. The probable origins of the boomerang and leangle might be determined through material analysis by First Nations knowledge holders. In April 2024, four Gweagal spears were examined first-hand by community members who confirmed that they were collected by James Cook and Joseph Banks in 1770 during the Endeavour voyage.³⁹ They were then permanently repatriated to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community in Sydney from the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. For, as Sculthorpe and Simpson have highlighted, it is often the loan, exhibition, or repatriation of objects to their communities that triggers research into, and identification of, cultural objects that have often drawn little attention for decades or centuries (Sculthorpe & Simpson 2023, p. 18).

This brief, select survey of First Nation artefacts at Te Papa highlights what is currently known about the small but significant collection formed since the founding of the Colonial Museum in 1865. Across 160 years trans-Tasman connections have occurred sporadically in relation to institutional and administrative histories, through national events such as the South Pacific Festival of Arts in 1976, and through shared histories of colonisation and settlement. It is through developing an understanding of the contexts in which these objects were acquired that we may gain a deeper insight into how the collection was formed.

Acknowledging this history is vital not only for understanding the collection’s origins, but by recovering its complex history, we can better understand both the significance of the objects and the responsibility Te Papa carries in their preservation and interpretation so as to deepen our knowledge in ways that respect the peoples, cultures and histories these cultural objects represent.

The authors would like to acknowledge our colleagues for their kind support with the research: Gareth Watkins, Carolyn McGill (Te Papa Museum), Imelda Miller, Karen Kindt (Queensland Museum), Dr Mariko Smith and Laura McBride (Australian Museum), and Chris Copp (Eastgate House). Our thanks to Dr Ben Dibley and Professor Emeritus Paul Turnbull for their review of our manuscript and very helpful comments. We also thank the reviewers and editors for their insightful comments which have greatly improved this paper.