Putting Nature in its Place: The Australian Museum, 1826 to 1890.

Abstract

The Australian Museum was established in Sydney in 1826. It brought order to Australian nature by collecting, processing and classifying it and presented that order back to the Sydney public. Establishing museum natural history as self-evident was complex, contested work. It required the deliberate, continual making and re-making of the museum's mission, materiality, and agency over the next six decades, during a period of great shifts in global mobilities, colonial politics and colonial science. In this thesis I show how the Australian Museum both grew from and used the machinery of colonialism to find a settled public role, and to graduate from situated nature into natural history, and then on to natural science.

Natural history is found in some surprising places. To uncover its changing structures, modalities and practices, I examine a selection of the museum's people, places and events, and its habits and routine activities. My study moves from governance structures to specimen registration, and into collection stores. I follow naturalists into the field and I trace specimens as they moved from field to museum and travelled the world. Two men dominated this period: Gerard Krefft (Curator, 1861-1874) and Edward Ramsay (Director, 1874-1894). I eavesdrop on their near-constant negotiation of trust, authority and value to show how each man used the museum as a theatre for action and as an epistemic trading zone.

The invention of museum natural history in Australia was never seamless, but it has been remarkably successful and long-lasting. Still there are deep and unresolved tensions within colonial natural history museums like the Australian Museum, dedicated to knowing, recording and remembering nature in the uncertain, unnatural present. Thinking critically about the museum's past and the nature-museum-state relationship is vital to both its own future and to larger quests to acknowledge and understand the histories and legacies of natural history in Australia.