Morton’s memento? Reading Indigenous counter-networks in the ‘post’-colonial museum

Abstract

This article considers the use of Indigenous counter-networks as a methodology for the research and interpretation of Pacific objects and images in Australian museum collections. A photographic album from the collections of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is used as a case study to demonstrate how historical visual materials may be comparatively analysed alongside written archives to excavate Indigenous networks. The article considers the migration of eleven Queensland South Sea Islander (SSI) men to the Australian Territory of Papua (Papua New Guinea) in 1907. It seeks to reinscribe the album with Indigenous presence and perspective, uncovering traces of SSI movement, resistance, and acculturation to colonial society in response to the White Australia policy in Queensland and Papua in the early twentieth-century.