Collecting Colonialism: Souvenir objects and Indigenous agency in Oceania

This project will focus on a series of objects from Australia, New Guinea and the Pacific featured in the 1929 catalogue of a small museum which operated from Sydney over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, selling Indigenous curios to visitors and the general public. While much of the literature on collecting and colonialism has focussed on the role of institutional collecting and the colonial project, this project will produce a book and series of journal articles which examine the dialogics of production, consumption and value as expressed through the co-production of colonial objects of desire by Indigenous people and the colonial souvenir market.