Froggatt explores ‘ethnographic’ objects from Western Australia now in British and Irish museums and their part in fashioning colonial relationships and identities over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She scrutinises a body of material that once sparked extensive scholarly and popular interest, but has since been largely overlooked in scholarship into the relationship between collecting and empire.
Considering objects now spread across the British Isles, it examines intersecting impulses that informed collecting: notions of the ‘frontier’, the navigation of one’s experiences across sites of empire, and the Eurocentric narrative of Aboriginal ‘extinction’, to show how colonial ideology intersected with personal experience.
She also scrutinises collectors’ own accounts as well as the voices of other individuals involved in collecting episodes, showing how ideas about indigenous peoples were being developed and contested.
