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Commissioning Indigenous Australia

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The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795–1855

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Pacific History ((PASPH))

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Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between naval collecting and the fulfilment of non-naval objectives, with reference to the diverse cast of persons who interacted in ambiguously official ways with the Admiralty, its scientific infrastructure, and the ‘commissioning’ of Indigenous Australia. Through a wide-ranging study of the development of British political interest in Indigenous Australians between 1795 and 1855, the chapter demonstrates how extant collections now at the British Museum can be associated with various colonial ‘moments’. Examples include the diplomatic function of awarding ethnographic collections to foreign powers in the post-Napoleonic War period, the relationship between naval collecting and aristocratic patronage, and the dawn of public and intellectual interest in Indigenous Australians, and their material culture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am grateful to Jennifer Margaret Snell, a historian of Ulverston, for locating this and other original newspaper accounts relating to Barrow’s donation.

  2. 2.

    This has been deduced from a record which states that Mountnorris presented ‘30 birds from Africa’ to the British Museum between 1816 and 1821 (Trustees of the British Museum 1821).

  3. 3.

    One object—Oc1998,Q.25—was given by Bell to the United Service Institution, rather than the British Museum. This may have been because it was broken into smaller parts during the Fly voyage (see Chap. 1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

    Daniel Simpson

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  1. Daniel Simpson
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Correspondence to Daniel Simpson .

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Simpson, D. (2020). Commissioning Indigenous Australia. In: The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795–1855. Palgrave Studies in Pacific History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60097-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60097-6_3

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