Writing Heritage: The Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European-Australian Writings

Published in association with the Australian National Museum, this book explores the constructions of indigenous heritage in European-Australian writings. From the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, European-Australians were actively recording, documenting and collecting Aboriginal heritage. This book examines how they did this, exploring perceptions of authenticity and innovation in Aboriginal heritage and approaches to ethnographic collecting. If indigenous people were present at all in these texts, they were often represented as passive objects of Europeans' gaze or amusement, or as bystanders in an ongoing process of collecting, recording and commenting. The idea of Aborigines as a dying race stimulated a sense of urgency in Europeans' collecting activity, which was also seen as a way of preserving the 'remnants' of the disappearing indigenous cultures.