Collecting the West (2025) is the new book by Alistair Paterson, Andrea Witcomb, Baige Zylstra, Gaye Sculthorpe and Tiffany Shellam that explores the history of collecting in Western Australia across multiple disciplines, from natural history to social history to art to First Peoples.
In this interview, UWAP intern Jess Burns speaks with Alistair, Gaye and Tiffany on how collections helped Western Australia discover a sense of place, the entanglement of colonisation in collecting and the important role Indigenous peoples played in this history.
Jess Burns: This book is one of many outcomes of your Collecting the West linkage research project, which you said pioneered a new approach to understanding collections and museums, libraries and galleries using the lens of one region. How did this project come about?
Alistair Paterson: All of us have had a deep interest in collections from our various disciplines. We also had worked with each other or knew people who had worked together as well. So, we were able to build on existing networks to create a new multidisciplinary team in order to do something quite new, which was to take a whole state and look at collecting in a very broad way across various silos that had existed previously to see what would happen as a result.
Gaye Sculthorpe: Perhaps we could contrast that with many other studies of collecting that focus on a small region or a particular collector, and part of the ambition of this project was to look at a very large geographical area, being Western Australia.
Jess: That actually leads me to my next question. It’s been stated that Collecting the West is the first book to deal with collecting in Western Australia from various disciplines, including natural history, art, First Peoples and social history. What is the significance of combining these perspectives and what do you think is missed in previous works that are less diverse in the disciplines they explore?
Tiffany Shellam: One thing that I think is really striking about what we’ve been able to do is that we’ve been able to work across the sector. This includes not only historians, archaeologists and anthropologists but also working with curators as well. Working with personnel in the collecting institutions has been a really important part of the project and has enabled a deeper academic understanding of the collections.
Gaye: If you look generally at the work of museums, museums are generally split up into departments of natural history anthropology and social history. Also, much of the published work of museums is either about the history of an institution or publications about one of those disciplines, and often journals are interested in particular things like maritime history or archaeology. However, what we tried to do was actually work across disciplines to look at a place from a multifaceted perspective as opposed to most studies that are generally confined to one disciplinary lens.
Jess: Something you highlight in the book is the true diversity of those who collected the artefacts of WA. Can you speak on the importance of highlighting contributions made by Aboriginal peoples and women like Georgiana Malloy?
Tiffany: A lot of those stories have been hidden for a long time or veiled by colonial collectors themselves or the museums that house them. So, unearthing those stories has been a really important part of the project – we really tried to break open those practices that don't celebrate Indigenous labour and Indigenous intermediaries who were key parts of collections and collecting practices. I think that the women have had a similar, but although not quite as dismissive, history as the Indigenous stories, and that's been a really key part of pushing back on those narratives and making sure that we are really attentive to the hidden Indigenous and women's histories within their collections.
Alistair: We had a theme during the project, which was to reverse the gaze. The whole idea of that was trying to turn away from focusing on the well-known collectors and then using that as an opportunity to reveal the processes that were happening. That may have been women and various other people who were involved in making these really important collections, but who, otherwise, you couldn't really see because the name of either the big collector or the big museum had acted as the proxy for the whole collection. So, I think the reverse the gaze methodology was a very deliberate attempt to look back at Western Australia from the perspective of those collections and trying to reveal new insights into, particularly, the colonial world, because that was a really interesting and important period.
Tiffany: I think our approach of understanding collections in different ways – looking at the labour behind collections and the economic extraction process of collecting – also enabled us to really draw out those hidden histories.
Jess: In the book, you also talk about how histories of collecting are entangled with histories of colonialism. How so?
Gaye: If you look at the north-west of Western Australia and the expanding colonial frontier in the late 1800s, when land was needed by pastoralists, they took over Aboriginal lands and, in doing so, displaced Aboriginal people. Many of the collectors of objects at that time were people like police officers, judicial officers and early explorers. So, as the frontier moved forward, the expansion of colonialism also occurred hand in hand with the collecting of Aboriginal objects. Whereas Tiff could explain that the situation was somewhat different down in Albany, in King George Sound.
Tiffany: King George Sound was much more about intimate interactions through relationships between colonists living in the town and the Menang people, who had developed their own sort of exchange economy to trade their own cultural material and animals for flour and other rations. They developed this from very early on, from visiting explorers, right through to the colonial period. So, it's a very different kind of collecting network there, but still very much part of the colonial structure. The Menang people really took charge of that in a different way.
Alistair: One of the things that happens is that project data at this scale reveals how we've separated the making of collections from everything else that happened in the colonial world. The colonial world, in part, is about turning Australia into economic prospects, and so, collections have largely just been generated to enable wealth by colonists. Whether it's sometimes wrapped around ideas of education and new knowledge, much of that new knowledge is about the generation of capital, through aspects like mining or access to land. Seeing collections as part of a bigger colonial project, which is inherently extractive in nature, then makes those collections part of an extractive process as well and conducted by the same individuals who are involved in things like setting up new industries and what have you.
Gaye: And maybe some examples of that are included in the book in relation to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, whereby part of the reason people from Western Australia were collecting things to send to London for that exhibition was to show the economic potential of the state, the importance of timber as a product, and also to encourage immigration. So, trying to attract people, population and business to Western Australia, and also in doing so competing with other Australian colonies at that time.
Alistair: That's rather depressing as well, that kind of analysis, but there are bits and pieces in the project that are actually much more about how the Western Australian identity also emerged. One example would be the tradition of drawing the local West Australian landscape that emerges in Perth and becomes part of the art gallery. So, there are forms of collection that are more about people's growing sense of place and being in an old Western Australia as well, and not all about the money.
Western Australia court at the Intercolonial Exhibition, Melbourne, 1866–67. National Library of Australia, 7050888. Photograph by T. Ellis & Co. Image courtesy National Library of Australia.
Jess: The book also explores the importance of including Indigenous perspectives in collecting. How can collecting Indigenous art aid in broadening understandings of life in the West?
Gaye: It partly depends on how you define art because what people might have considered weapons in the past, like a shield, is often looked at today as a means of expressing Aboriginal identity, meaning and symbolism with designs. So, things that were once relegated to items of weaponry, in effect, are expressions of Aboriginal art and knowledge. As some of the later chapters in the book explore, the whole lived experience of Aboriginal people is often expressed through various forms of art and dealing with issues such as the Stolen Generation, matters of identity and child removal. They often deal with a whole range of historical issues and shed light on difficult topics that may engage the public in understanding these issues in a way that perhaps a text would not.
Jess: Oral traditions also play an important role in Indigenous culture. Can you speak on how oral history can enrich perspectives on items found in collections?
Alistair: In the present, you can return to collections that have been made in the twentieth century and try to reconnect those art collections with forms of knowledge about Country. Perhaps the most beneficial way of viewing that is that you can actually bring material, whether it's images or objects themselves, back into a Country perspective. So, it's by engaging with Indigenous knowledge holders that collections gain all of these new meanings, which are inherently coming from an Indigenous knowledge space rather than whatever knowledge base they've been existing in since the moment of their creation and collection. I think that it's again a bit like that reverse of the gaze thing. It's by engaging with knowledge holders that collections can actually gain new forms of meaning and life.
Jess: How can the inclusion and exclusion of items in collections impact perceptions about groups, particularly marginalised groups like Indigenous peoples and the queer community?
Alistair: One thing we did in the project, which perhaps informs the book a little bit, is that we did a big training exercise with the State Library and the Western Australian Museum to look at the ways in which collections reflected past forms of diversity. So, where the State Library did this well was in the fact that they were a leader nationally in the collections of oral histories, which was a nice example of how they actually had data there that other libraries around Australia didn’t. But there are also groups where you always need a policy-driven perspective on how you would meet the gap. So, where's your gap? Identify the gap, and then look at your collections and think, how can we use existing collections, or do we need to create new collections that actually address the gap? The work of Collecting the West was interested in that, and we were able to enable the WA institutions to think about their collections in these ways. It’s more in the research that we did that allowed that kind of conversation to happen. It's also a policy thing. To have a policy, you need to understand what's missing and where you're weaker.
Gaye: Another point about what's missing is that, because the Western Australian Museum wasn't established until the 1890s, even though the Swan River Mechanics Institute had had some collections, so much of the mid-nineteenth-century material for Western Australia is not held within the state and is rather held in institutions overseas. The book highlights many examples of plant specimens at the Herbarium at Oxford, Aboriginal objects that are in Cambridge, London and Scotland, and animal specimens at the Natural History Museum in London. These are really early significant cultural materials that aren’t held in Western Australia due to the relatively late formation of the state institutions.
Jess: In Collecting the West, you not only look at the past and the present of collecting but also the future of collecting. How can your research guide the future of collecting in Western Australia?
Tiffany: We do point out, as Gaye has just mentioned, the gaps in some of the collections and the siloed nature of the way that these collections in WA are catalogued or housed now. Our approach to trying to break down silos or explore the siloed nature of collections tells a good story about how things could change in the future for a better understanding of collections and more access to collections by diverse people and interdisciplinary groups. I think that's a really key part of what we've achieved.
Alistair: The big scale, team-based approach to collections that tries to break down silos, particularly the ones between nature and culture, is evident in the Collecting the West project publications, particularly the book as well. So hopefully by having them out there, they play a role in allowing museums to think differently about the extraordinary resources they have at hand, particularly those overseas. We often forget that museums overseas hold, as Gaye pointed out, really significant early colonial collections of natural and cultural materials but don't necessarily have any curatorial capacity to actually do anything with this, and there's not really anyone knocking on their door saying to do something. So, there's a great opportunity there in collections in Australia and overseas to do new work, and hopefully the project highlights some of that.
Tiffany: And maybe the networked approach that we've taken to – for example, working with the major collecting institutions in WA and overseas – has at least started to locate and connect material across collections that were previously not connected.
View of the interior of WAM taxidermy workshop in the old museum era; shown are a blue-pointer shark specimen, a tapir skeleton and workbench with tools used, n.d. Western Australian Museum Archives, PH79-129-13. Unknown photographer. Image courtesy Western Australian Museum.
Jess: Thank you so much for speaking to me today. Is there anything else about the book that any of you wanted to mention, or any final words?
Alistair: It’s important to mention that, even though the book is about the history of collecting, the last parts of the book really do deal with ways in which collections helped West Australians find a sense of place. And I think that that could easily get overlooked by focusing just on the colonial world. They emerged from the 1900s and into the twentieth century with a growing sense of place, some of it quite flawed, but it’s an important thing to recognise.
Gaye: I think it's also important to say, and it's sort of implicit in our opening remarks and your first question, that this project in Western Australia is an approach and an outcome that hasn't occurred in Australia before. So, there's nothing similar from any other state in Australia, or around the world or from another region, on such a scale. In this sense, Western Australia, and the people associated with the project, have been leading this approach to collections, place and identity in a way that potentially others might choose to emulate.
Alistair: That's a good point, Gaye. West Australians are very lucky to have this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Professor Alistair Paterson is Chair of Archaeology at the University of Western Australia, on the Oceans Institute Executive Research Team and a Research Associate at WA Museum. His research examines the historical archaeology of colonial coastal contact and settlement in Australia’s Northwest and the Indian Ocean. His key interests are Western Australia and Indian Ocean history, Aboriginal Australia, the Dutch East India Company, colonialism and exploration, rock art, and the history of collecting in Western Australia in collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, State Library, Art Gallery, and the British Museum.
Distinguished Deakin Professor Andrea Witcomb is an internationally renowned museologist at Deakin University, Australia. Her research engages with issues surrounding the representation of cultural diversity in museums, the interpretation of difficult histories, the uses of multimedia in staging cross-cultural encounters and the history of collecting. Best known for her book Reimagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (2003), she was also the author, with Kate Gregory, of From the Barracks to the Burrup: A history of the National Trust in Western Australia (2010), which was shortlisted for the WA Premier’s History Award. She has received numerous ARC grants and authored multiple journal articles, book chapters and edited books.
Gaye Sculthorpe is a palawa woman from Tasmania with qualifications in history, anthropology and Museum Studies. She has worked in local, state, national and international museums, most recently at the British Museum (2013–2022), where she was curator and section head of Oceania, in the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. In that position, she curated the major exhibition ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation’ in 2015. Since August 2022, she has been Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century Aboriginal collections held in museums around the world.
Baige Zylstra has a PhD in Art History from the University of Western Australia. She has held academic and curatorial roles at UWA, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Murdoch University Art Collection, with a focus on object-based research and engagement. Her research centres on Western Australian visual and material culture, the history of collecting and display in the State’s collecting institutions, and international and intercolonial exhibitions.
Professor Tiffany Shellam is a historian at Deakin University. Tiffany works collaboratively with Menang Noongar families, historians, museum curators and archivists to critique colonial archives and museum collections to unearth alternative histories of encounters between Noongar people and explorers, colonists and government agents in the nineteenth century. Her book Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal encounters in the Archipelago (2020) was awarded the Prime Minister’s prize for Australian History in 2020.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Jess Burns is an upcoming graduate of Curtin University, completing a Bachelor of Arts double majoring in Professional Writing and Publishing, and English and Cultural Studies.