CAMEO: Connie Hart’s Basket

This essay was first published as an Epilogue to the book, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which was written at a time of rapidly changing sensibilities about the curation of Aboriginal culture in museums. The book explored the roots of Australian popular historical consciousness through a study of archaeology, collecting, museums, commemoration, memory, monuments, landscape, preservation, heritage and the writing of history. It analysed the culture of collection of Aboriginal artefacts by white settlers such as R E Johns, a clerk of courts and police magistrate in central Victoria, Alfred Kenyon, an engineer and amateur ethnologist, and Stan Mitchell, a mineralogist and stone tool collector. R E Johns’ collection of wooden Aboriginal hunting implements was sent as a colonial contribution to the Paris International Exhibition of 1878 and was placed there at the very beginning of an evolutionary display. This essay explores the paradox and potential of museums through a reading of a 1992 exhibition where the work of the collectors was subtly subverted by Aboriginal people themselves.