This book is a revelation. It brings into view extraordinary expressions of Indigenous Australian heritage from an unexpectedly diverse range of collections and institutions. - Professor Nicholas Thomas, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Using Indigenous Australian art and artefacts preserved in museums across Great Britain and Ireland, the authors present a global history that entwines ancestral pasts with epochs of empire and colony leading to the contemporary moment.

• Presents stunning photography of recently discovered and never-before published material
• Innovative and incisive analysis and interdisciplinary scholarship
• Advances contemporary endeavours to grapple with the challenges and legacies that museums with valuable historic ethnographic material now face 

Museums across the United Kingdom and Ireland hold over 39,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artworks and artefacts. Gifted, sold, exchanged and bartered by Indigenous people, and accepted, bought and taken by explorers, travellers and colonial collectors and these rare objects date from 1770 to the present day, representing all regions of the vast Australian continent.

Dispersed and distanced from their origins, 160 objects are gathered together for the first time in Ancestors, artefacts, empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums. Selected from 30 public museums, they are evidence of the complex and often difficult relationships between Indigenous Australians and British people and institutions and are powerful conduits for re-telling that history.

Twenty-two Indigenous, Australian and international experts interweave accounts of objects, makers and communities with collectors, networks and institutions. These multi-strand narratives, entwining ancestral pasts, expanding empires and colonisation with the contemporary moment, explore the importance of this material connecting Britain and Ireland and Australia.

Author: Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy
ISBN: 978192195345
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
Dimensions: 224 x 283 mm
Publisher: National Museum of Australia
Published Date: October 2021