ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists came into central Australian Aboriginal societies, looking to document people and collect their material culture before it was ‘too late’. These collections were then used to produce an image of Indigenous Australians in the popular imagination through publications, museum exhibits, and the generation of anthropological data. Focusing on the photographic and related artefact collections produced by anthropologist Spencer and Gillen, this chapter analyses how increased access to anthropological collections among the Arrernte and Warumungu of Central Australia has led to informed engagements with their legacies of production and forms of representation. Rather than simply accepting the museum and archival collections as instruments of colonial domination and, therefore, tainted by colonial forms and logics of knowledge, these engagements are resulting in innovative responses involving digital media, artistic practice, and the reinterpretation of anthropological collections via local Indigenous cultural categories. By devising novel ways of repurposing these collections, which were originally made to salvage Indigenous cultural practices from assumed oblivion, themes of ‘decline’ are being transformed into fields of discovery, intervention, invention, and intergenerational agency.
