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Selected Works

Australian Studies

Gareth Knapman

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in History

Curiosities Or Science In The National Museum Of Victoria: Procurement Networks And The Purpose Of A Museum, Gareth Knapman Dec 2011

Curiosities Or Science In The National Museum Of Victoria: Procurement Networks And The Purpose Of A Museum, Gareth Knapman

Gareth Knapman

No abstract provided.

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Adelaide And The Birth Of Anzac Day, Gareth Knapman Dec 2011

Adelaide And The Birth Of Anzac Day, Gareth Knapman

Gareth Knapman

No abstract provided.

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Mapping An Ancestral Past: Discovering The Charles Richards’ Maps Of Aboriginal South-Eastern Australia, Gareth Knapman Dec 2010

Mapping An Ancestral Past: Discovering The Charles Richards’ Maps Of Aboriginal South-Eastern Australia, Gareth Knapman

Gareth Knapman

Drawn in 1892, the Charles Richards’ maps locate 208 Aboriginal linguistic groups in south-eastern Australia. In 2009 the maps were rediscovered in the departmental archives of Museum Victoria. The maps are an important new nineteenth-century source for understanding the boundaries of language groups at that time. Richards interviewed Aboriginal people and recorded their languages and customs. As an ethnologist, Richards seems not to have been involved in many of the correspondence networks that were central to nineteenth-century ethnology and he was therefore little known in his own time and subsequently. Some of his word-list/dictionaries were published in 1902 in the …

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The Pacificator: Discovering The Lost Bust Of George Augustus Robinson, Gareth Knapman Nov 2010

The Pacificator: Discovering The Lost Bust Of George Augustus Robinson, Gareth Knapman

Gareth Knapman

IN ONE OF THE BACKHANDED compliments for which Mark Twain was famous, he observed ‘in memory of the Greatest man Australasia ever developed or ever will develop, there is a stately monument to George Augustus Robinson, the Conciliator, in – no, it is to another man, I forget his name’.1 As a critic of imperialism and colonialism, Twain saw Robinson as a like-minded being who was on the right side of history. As far as Twain was concerned, this humanitarian hero and critic of colonial expansion was forgotten in the gilded age of 1890s high imperialism. In Twain’s time, stately …

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Exchanging Totems: Totemism In Baldwin Spencer's Overseas Exchanges, Gareth Knapman Dec 2008

Exchanging Totems: Totemism In Baldwin Spencer's Overseas Exchanges, Gareth Knapman

Gareth Knapman

Between 1899 and 1908, the director of the National Museum of Victoria, Walter Baldwin Spencer dispatched, as either gifts or exchanges, multiple collections of Aboriginal objects to museums in Europe and North America. He initially used these collections to promote his and Francis Gillen's ideas and research into totemism. Totemism was one ofthe hot debates of early twentieth century sociology/anthropology, and the collections constructed by Spencer and Gillen were representative of illustrations published in their books. In building his collections, Spencer developed a hierarchy of totemic symbols and 'manufactured' the nurtunja1 (Anartentye) as an Arunta (Arrernte) equivalent of the American …

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