Animating the hand of the scientist: women colourists at the Australian Museum in the early twentieth century

The Australian Museum hosted a weekly program of public lantern lectures for over two decades at the beginning of the twentieth century. The slides from these lectures were based on photographs and illustrations made during the empirical pursuit of fieldwork and professional scientific enquiry, and remain intact and catalogue as a complete set in the Museum to this day. This Archive Feature examines women’s work in applying colour, to exacting standards, on a selection of the lecturing slides. It interrogates how colour was used to both enliven the scenes shown to non-specialist audiences and to bolster the authority of fieldwork expeditions and museum collecting.