How to address a ‘curation crisis’: rethinking collection storage at the Museum of Tropical Queensland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the establishment of early colonial museums, concerns around collection storage, funding, and staffing levels have continued to exacerbate ‘curation crises’. In 2020, the Museum of Tropical Queensland began to address its own ‘curation crisis’ by restructuring the First Nations collections in storage and auditing collection knowledge. The project reconfigured embedded colonial structures where objects were stored by ‘object type’ or ‘collector’, and instead grouped collections by Country and Traditional Owners. The restructure enabled curators to identify the extent of provenance information missing from the collections and highlighted the need for more in-depth and continuous engagement with First Nations communities to better understand and give voice to the collections in the care of cultural institutions, and to the communities they belong to. This paper intends to challenge the global museological issue of ‘paralysis by provenance’ and encourage new ways of prioritising collection knowledge.