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Museums were an expression of the western conviction in the onward march of the rational. Local civilisations were also the prime focus in other Asian imperial museums. This is the first book that examines the origins and development of museums in six major regions if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyses museum histories in thirteen major centres in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Museums in Canada have a longer, though somewhat chequered, history than elsewhere in the British Empire. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and the Royal British Columbia museum in Victoria were two notable, yet very different, expressions of imperial expansiveness . The book then overviews two representative museums: the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town and the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. The origins and development of the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in Melbourne, South Australian Museum (SAuM) and Australian Museum (AM) are then discussed. New Zealand/Aotearoa, with its Canterbury Museum and War Memorial Museum, has discrete origins as a colony in the nineteenth century. Imperial museums in Asia were unquestionably distinctive compared with those of the territories of white settlement. A number of key themes emerge: the development of elites within colonial towns; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the modification of the key scientific ideas of the age.
Museums deal in history of one sort or another – or at least contemporary perceptions of such histories. It is perhaps not surprising that they attempt to push their own pasts back as far as possible. In the case of the South Australian Museum (SAuM – the ‘u’ to distinguish it from that other SAM, the South African Museum), it has been customary to identify its origins as
genuinely alarmed at the exporting of indigenous artefacts, in Australia there was some concern that international collections had missed out on Aboriginal materials. Chapters Six and Seven consider the founding of the Australian Museum (AM) in Sydney and, in more detail, the origins and development of the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in Melbourne and the South Australian Museum (SAuM) in Adelaide. The
Pacific ethnography display in the South Australian Museum, Adelaide. Notable examples of overall reconstruction and reformulation can be found in Victoria, British Columbia and Melbourne or Singapore. Some are redeveloped little by little, often limited by resource constraints. Some, like the Royal Ontario in Toronto, are so large and significant that landmark buildings have been added (by the architect
single blocks of granite transported hundreds of miles from Aswan would have made them very valuable. Six monolithic granite palmiform columns were excavated by Naville in 1891 from the pronaos of Herakleopolis Magna and sent to museums: the British ‘palmiform’ columns 439 Museum (EA 1123), the Manchester Museum (1780), Bolton Museum and Art Gallery (1891.14.1/1891.14.2), the South Australian Museum at Adelaide (inventory number not known), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (91.259), and the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (E636
’ artefacts before the anticipated demise of the Aboriginal ‘race’. 70 Indeed, capturing the spirit of the times, as one of his collectors, James Field, noted in a letter to Spencer in 1903, ‘I have not forgotten what you told me and am annexing all I can lay hands on’. 71 In his work on the South Australian Museum, Philip Jones has suggested that a key reasons for this
J. M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identity (Manchester, 2009), p. 9. Examples included Dr Andrew Smith, who established the South African Museum, Cape Town, and Frederick Water-house, first curator of the South Australian Museum of Adelaide. 10 J. M. MacKenzie (ed.), David
diversity of colonial empires around the globe, similar processes were going on within emergent European settler states in Australasia, the Americas and Asia. In Australia, the most substantial body of film of ethnographic interest of this period was produced by the Board of Anthropological Research (BAR), formally part of the University of Adelaide, but also closely linked to the South Australian Museum. From the mid-1920s until the late 1930s, when its activities were curtailed by the outbreak of war, the BAR supported a series of annual expeditions
) and describes itself as the oldest western-style museum in the southern hemisphere. But the reality is that the original museum was tentative and fragile. It lacked full-time staff and received little official encouragement. For these reasons, its foundation date for a long time was declared to be its second incarnation in 1855, second to the South Australian Museum, with which it developed quite a close relationship. 7 The