ABSTRACT
The fact that John Alexander Todd’s collection exhibits so much women’s material confounds any straightforward notions of the influence of gender on collection practice, as Blackwood, our only female collector, had relatively little female material culture. Todd was on the south coast at the time of the coming of the missions, and his extant letters contain indications on the impact of missionaries on local life. Todd is unique amongst our collectors for having been a student, and his institutional affiliation was with Sydney University and a museum. Todd began his anthropological career, carried out fieldwork and left the discipline to study law all within a decade. Todd studied in the new department of anthropology which was founded at Sydney University in 1927 with Radcliffe-Brown as Chair. Todd had a good sense of how valuables were used and how they ranked above each other, giving an idea of the relative value of items.
