内容説明
This volume investigates Pacific collections held in Australian museums, art galleries and archives, and the diverse group of 19th and 20th century collectors responsible for their acquisition. The nineteen essays reveal varied personal and institutional motivations that eventually led to the conservation, preservation and exhibition in Australia of a remarkable archive of Pacific Island material objects, art and crafts, photographs and documents. Hunting the Collectors benchmarks the importance of Pacific Collections in Australia and is a timely contribution to the worldwide renaissance of interest in Oceanic arts and cultures. The essays suggest that the custodial role is not fixed and immutable but fluctuates with the perceived importance of the collection, which in turn fluctuates with the level of national interest in the Pacific neighbourhood. This cyclical rise and fall of Australian interest in the Pacific Islands means many of the valuable early collections in state and later national repositories and institutions have been under-researched and little material has been exhibited or published. But, as the authors note, enthusiastic museum anthropologists, curators, collection managers and university-based scholars across Australia, and worldwide, have persisted with research on material collected in the Pacific. The essays in this volume were presented at the inaugural conference of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies, Australia in the Pacific - The Pacific in Australia, held in Brisbane in January, 2006. The Brisbane-based editors, both with long and varied contact with the Pacific region, are Susan Cochrane, an Art Historian at the University of Queensland and Max Quanchi, a Pacific Historian at Queensland University of Technology.
