De/post/colonial Legacies and Futures: The Surprising Afterlife of a Statue of Biologist and Ethnologist Baldwin Spencer

• In Event: How Collections End: Objects, Meaning and Loss in Laboratories and Museums - I

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when many museums around the world forged new ways of displaying Indigenous heritage. Named Bunjilaka (a Woiwurrung word meaning ‘place of the ancestral eaglehawk’), the permanent Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At its heart was a life-size model of Baldwin Spencer, author of the classic anthropological monograph The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). When Bunjilaka was replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria in 2011, the model was informally retained by museum staff. Initially sitting awkwardly on a trolley in a narrow room where objects were processed for accession, Spencer himself remained unrecorded in any database. With no official existence but considerable gravity, he ended up housed in the secret/sacred room, surrounded with restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected. This article traces the Spencer’s journey from a postcolonial pedagogical tool to a transgressive pseudo-sacred object in an emerging era of decolonial museology. I argue that Spencer’s fate indicates a distinct period of postcolonial museology (ca 1990-2010) that has ended, and illustrates how the shifting historical legacies of science operate in the present.

Author

• Emma Kowal, Deakin University