Academic Book Launch: Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties

Book Launch: Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties

Nicola Froggatt, Research Manager at the National Trust, launches their first book Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties: Aboriginal Objects and Western Australian Frontiers, 1828–1914, as part of Routledge Studies in Cultural History (link)

The book publishes Nicola's PhD thesis completed with Royal Holloway, University of London and the British Museum in 2022. It considers the Aboriginal objects from Western Australia that spread across British and Irish museums over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is the first full scholarly treatment of the part that they played in fashioning colonial relationships and identities.

The book examines the complex and sometimes contradictory ideas and experiences that informed collecting, including notions of the Australian ‘frontier’, comparisons between different sites of empire, and the destructive (and false) trope of Aboriginal ‘extinction’. By studying diverse surviving objects, scrutinising records to unpack how non-Aboriginal collectors understood Aboriginal cultural heritage, and seeing how we can hear the voices of other individuals, Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties shows how these objects, too long overlooked in western scholarship, tell us something new about the relationship between collecting and empire.

Location:

Royal Holloway University of London, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RF (please access the building by ringing the bell).