Spatio-Temporal Disjunctions in An Enduring Civilization: Reflections on Two Exhibitions of Indigenous Australia

This lecture will reflect on two linked exhibitions of objects from Australia in the British Museum collections. The first, held in London in 2015, was Indigenous Australia, Enduring Civilisation. A companion exhibition, Encounters, was held the following year at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The exhibitions included many of the same objects but had different curatorial teams and different audiences in mind. While as a post-colonial nation-state Australia is imagined as a whole, the objects exhibited often reflect different space-times existing contemporaneously in different parts of the continent during the process of colonization. In this lecture Howard Morphy considers the theoretical implications of different relationships to the past in the development of policy in the present.