Journal of Museum Ethnography, no.29(March 2016), pp.11–28 ©Museum EthnographersGroup 2016

THE NATURAL OBJECT: EXHIBITING THE MACLEAYMUSEUM’S SPECIMEN COLLECTIONS

JUDE PHILP

This paper reflects on fiveyearsofresearch involving natural and cultural objects at the MacleayMuseum, University of Sydney.WhatIcall the ‘natural object’ is also known as taxidermy,astatue of an animal formed from its own skin. In taxidermy,nature is both the subject and the means of exhibiting the subject.Within the museum context natural objects are understood to speak for nature, in asimilar wayascultural objects have been employedtospeak for a specific human society (Danto 1995). By calling taxidermy a‘natural object’ I want to drawattention to the fact thatitisaproduct of aparticular time, place and purpose. Ta xidermy is made differently depending on whether it is for decoration, education or research.The natural objects Iwork with at the MacleayMuseum were created for anineteenth centurynatural historymuseum, aperiod when there waslittle separation between the educational and research spaces of the museum. In contrast, the Powell–Cotton Museum where the 2015 Museum EthnographersGroup conference washeld is atwentieth centurynatural history museum. By the twentieth centurymanymuseums began to reorganize their exhibition spaces.Exhibition halls employednew techniques to deliver ideas to apublic audience, while storage and laboratoryspaces were restricted to those conducting scientific research. The difference between these twoperiods can be discerned in the material formofthe natural object, as Iwill demonstrate through an examination of the context of manufacture and materials of natural objects in both the Powell–Cotton and Macleaymuseums. Academic discussion about the production of natural objects in the nineteenth centuryhas tended to focus on the business side of things (Coote 2013, Harrison 2011) and the morality of aculture of big game shooting thatgavebusinesses access to sensational material (cf. Jones 2015: 227–269). Ethnographic analysis of the natural object has generally been concerned with understanding the nineteenth centuryshared space of the natural with the ethnographic in the museum, and the shared spaces of their collection in the field (cf. Brown 2006; O’Hanlon 2000). Except in relation to its proximity to things seen as explicitly cultural, the natural object has thus largely been ignored.

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The collections of the MacleayMuseum are the primaryfocus here. Between 2009 and 2013 Imanaged aproject generously funded by Sir Michael Hintze called the Preservation of Victorian Ta xidermy:seeking abetter understanding of preservation and collecting methods of nineteenth centurytaxidermy.Our aim was to research methods and purposes of taxidermy in the Victorian period in order to understand more about the Macleaycollections, their historic pasts and their material futures.The research culminated in the Stuffed Stitched & Studied exhibition held at the Macleayin2014–2015. Prior to thatexhibition, Yo l ŋ uelder and University of Sydney academic Joseph NepparrŋaGumbula had worked with the Macleaycuratorsand collections on another exhibition which included the Macleay’staxidermy material. His work with the collections influenced the thinking for Stuffed Stitched &Studied as Iwill nowdiscuss.

Cultured nature

The historyofethnographyinmuseums is rich with analysis of howcultural objects can be made into museum creations through their exhibition (cf.Vogel 1989). In 2009 Gumbula refuted the idea of the ‘museum object’ through an exhibition of natural and cultural objects in which Yo l ŋ uspace wasasserted. In Makarr–garma,curated with the assistance of Rebecca Conway,Gumbula reconfigured the Macleaytemporarygalleryspace as aYolŋuplace populated with human and non–human actors. In Gumbula’sconcept the natural and cultural objects are reflections of the same thing,asheput it ‘everything is telling us who we are’...

…the animals are related to human beings.AsYo l ŋ u youimitate your being as the animals to incorporate thatsense of expertise, youknowthem because they are your daily partners. Yo utalk with them through the songline of the Manikay(Gumbula 2009).

The exhibition waspartofGumbula’slong–termproject to locate Yo l ŋ ucollections and resources in the world’smuseums and archives and return knowledge of them to north–east Arnhem Land communities.Partofthe process wasalso to provide knowledge to institutions about the people and places in photographs, singersand names of songs in recordings and the purposes of production and names of cultural things in their collections.Ifsomething was not appropriately exhibited, stored or recorded Gumbula helped curatorsto understand why. Gumbula and his family have long worked with balanda (foreigners) to share understanding of their world. The connection with the MacleayMuseum was just one small partofalife’swork.1 Over the nearly nine yearsofAustralian Research Council funded work (2008–2015), Gumbula painstakingly worked

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with anumber of Australian and overseas curatorsininterpreting his world to foreigners, and interpreting foreignersactions to his community. Makarr– garma wasalso partofthis community–based work. The title of Makarr–garma wasaplayonYolŋulanguage to suggest aspace for aceremonial meeting. In exhibition design and planning meetings, Gumbula explained whythis needed to be the focus.Meeting spaces are shared between insidersand outsiders; they are places where distant kin meet for ceremonyand where peace is negotiated in times of dispute. Whatwas not said at exhibition meetings, butobvious to all of us, wasthatwhen the exhibition wasinplanning, Australia wasengaged in adispute with NorthernTerritorycommunities.The Intervention, as it wasinformally called, had been adaily news feature, often with sensationalist language and images.Asthis blog excerpt explained, the consequences of the action were extensive:

In June 2007, the Federal government staged adramatic military-like takeoverof Indigenous communities in the NorthernTerritory, which wasorchestrated around amoral panic concerning allegations of paedophile rings and the sexual abuse of children. Exploiting agrowing public awareness of serious social problems in remote Indigenous communities, the subsequent measures known as the NorthernTerritory Intervention were exempted from the Racial Discrimination Act (Accessed 9January 2016 from http://arena.org.au/embedded–anthropology–and-the-intervention/).

In some Aboriginal communities and by some individuals across the Northern Te rritory, theInterventionwaswelcomedasaway tomakechange.Forothers,and for Gumbula, it wasahurtful and racist act thatstigmatized and misrepresented his community. Makarr-garma was, for Gumbula, an opportunity to offer healing between the twoworlds,Yo l ŋ uand balanda,toextend awelcome and an invitation to learnabout their world and their society. Conceptually the exhibition wasorganized around asingle day, from munhakumirr ‘dawn’ through waluy–dalyu ‘when the daybegins to shine’ to dämbuy–waluy ‘midday’, wärrarramirriy ‘sunset’ to munhagu ‘night–time’. Objects and animals were placed in front of painted backdrops thatrepresented these parts of aday.Aseparate section, wuŋuli waŋgany waltjan ‘a mirror of the year’,reflected on the whole daythrough historic and contemporaryphotographs of community life and land. As with the photographs which documented Yo l ŋ ulife regardless of whether they were from the 1930s or 2000s, there was no distinction between an animal and arepresentation of an animal, or indeed a person. As Gumbula explained in the introduction to the exhibition:

…Yolŋupeople are twogroups of people, we are Dhuwapeople and we areYirritja people. Dhuwaand Yirritja—the key element to understand Yo l ŋ uknowledge. The ancestorsgaveusthis structure and shaped people to have thatidentity.This identity isn’tonly to do with the human beings, it is also animals, land, and the greatnumbers of things surroundingYo l ŋ upeople.These are the twoworlds: this is Dhuwaand this

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Figure 1. Lobster and figure in Makarr–garma. Courtesy and copyright, MacleayMuseum.

isYirritja.This guides ceremony, howtoperformour Manikay(songs), the artwork thatgoes with it and whatwedoineverydaylife…. Iknowit’ssortofstrange to understand and complicated to explore these levels of Yo l ŋ upeople (Gumbula 2009: 4).

In the exhibition Gumbula created aYolŋuspace where the natural objects were lively and animated and interacted with cultural objects and with and between people through careful placement. Repeated across the exhibition were natural objects, photographs of people and cultural objects in conversation. Thus alobster specimen (Figure 1) waspositioned facing asmall figure on which waspainted aclan chest design relating to snakes.‘These twoanimals always fight’ explained Gumbula, so they have to face each other (Gumbula pers. comm 2009). The liveliness and interaction between natural and cultural objects was an expression of the sensible arrangement and order of theYo l ŋ uworld. This liveliness wasalso in direct contrast to the linked exhibition thathad gone before it, People, Power, Politics: the first generation of anthropologists at the University of Sydney (2008), which Gumbula had visited.2 It wasfollowing thatvisit thatweinvited him to respond with his ownexhibition using material from his Countryinnorth–east Arnhem Land thathad been collected by this first generation of anthropologists at Sydney University.3 As he had with

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natural objects, Gumbula liberated the ‘cultural’ objects and images from their historical context. His exhibition drew attention to the Yo l ŋ ucultural world as aliving,vibrant place, one filled with the ancestorsofthe past as much as the future generations to come.

Natural objects

Whilst Gumbula wasworking on the Makarr–garma exhibition with Conway, othersinthe Museum were planning the Victorian Ta xidermy Project.The final output of this project Stuffed Stitched &Studied (2014–2015) wasanexhibition about the historic contexts of westernscience.4 Gumbula had brought a particular focus to the natural historycollections, and his interpretation of whatwereferred to as ‘specimens’ exposed the manydifferent understandings people bring to museums. Visitor responses to natural objects are often emotive, as manyteenage and adult visitorshavesaid to me ‘I don’tlike these dead things, it’scruel’. Cruelty, and the evident ‘dead–ness’ of the specimen are twoareas thathavebeen keenly studied in academic works about taxidermy (cf. Kayla McKinney 2015, Jones 2015) In trying to explain the purposes of taxidermy,natural historymuseums often provide information about the collector, the taxidermist or the broad historyoftaxidermy itself, butmore often than not this is only asingle panel, asmall section of interpretation within alarger display. The majority of the information invites the audience to see the natural objects as dead examples of living creatures, through associated displays or accompanying information giving details of the species’ geographical and behavioural traits. This kind of text is influenced by twentieth centuryscientific interest in the ecology and behavioural relationships between animals in aparticular habitat. In the natural historymuseum of the nineteenth century, however, taxidermy wasexhibited explicitly to extend knowledge of aclassificatorysystem through which the natural world wasunderstood. As Lynn Nyhartmakes obvious in her discussion of natural history, there wasabreak in howand whatnatural historymuseums displayedatthe beginning of the twentieth century(Nyhart 1996: 437). Where science waspartofthe visitor experience in the nineteenth century, it waspushed to a‘behind the scenes’ activity in the twentieth century. Through the Victorian Ta xidermy Project we grew to appreciate whyand how the natural objects created in the nineteenth centurywere physically different, something Iwill explore further below. In order to explain this different history and understanding of the natural object to the visitor, Stuffed Stitched &Studied deliberately took away the liveliness of the natural object. Through design and text we sought to give visitorsaninsight into the purposeful role these natural objects playedinthe application of scientific knowledge.

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The particular kind of scientific knowledge applied through the Macleay collections wastaxonomy, specifically the Linnean system of classification. The Linnean system is so intertwined in the historyofthe Museum itself thatashorthistorical summaryisuseful here. The storybegins in London shortly after the death of Carl vonLinné (1707–1777), creator of the modern classification system applied to the animal kingdom Systema Naturae.Botanist James Smith, with the encouragement of fellowRoyal Society member Joseph Banks, purchased the biological collections thatLinnaeus (aka vonLinné) had used to devise his system. Around this most important collection, asociety was founded. The Linnean Society of London wasthe first to be solely devoted to biological subjects, specifically to issues of taxonomy. From 1798 until 1825 wine merchant, civil servant and entomological collector Alexander Macleay wasSecretarytothe Linnean Society.His era wasone of frenetic collection, butalso of the purposeful application of intellectual ideas to arrangement and labelling. This visual application of classification through the manipulation of entomological specimens into particular groups persists in the ways entomology collections are stored today. Alexander’sextensiveentomology collections were judged one of the three best in Europe by the time he movedthem, and his family,tothe colonyofNew South Wales to take up the position of Colonial Secretaryin1826. Alexander’s collection and interests clearly influenced his children: his son William Sharp obtained some fame as anatural philosopher from the 1820s for his development of Linnean principals into aQuinarian System (Holland n.d.; Di Gregorio 1996); his son George sent numerous Australian animals to London Zoological Society’szoo and museum; and his daughter Fannywas employedincurating his botanical collections (Earnshawand Hughes 1993). Alexander’snephew William John Macleay(hereafter Macleay) inherited his uncle’sfamous entomological cabinets, much increased by the collections of his cousin William Sharp. Macleay’senthusiasm for extending knowledge in the biological sciences wasextensive. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s he engaged in avariety of activities customarytozoological, botanical and ethnological collectorsand institutions: Macleaysent out collectors, purchased from overseas suppliers, exchanged internationally and funded and led an expedition.5 He did this in partbecause he had decided to donate the material from three generations of his family’swork to the University of Sydney for the benefit of research and teaching. It is at this point thatthe materiality of the object becomes especially important, the wayinwhich animals were prepared for scientific collections were specific and particular (Larsen 1996). At the hand of acollector,specimens within drawers of entomological cabinets maybearranged in avariety ways.Those reflecting pre–Linnean systems and collections made purely for enjoyment are often visually splendid. Influenced

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Figure 2. Historic entomological pinning,MacleayMuseum. Courtesy and copyright, MacleayMuseum.

by arrangements from literature, such as Albertus Seba’s Natural Curiosities (1731) and Ernst Haekel’s Kuntsformen der natur (1904), large glamorous specimens were decoratively surrounded by smaller groups.Circular patterns, even letterswere, in some collections, picked out through arrangements of size and colour.6 Those of the Macleaycabinets are altogether different. They are Linnaean in character and scientifically purposeful, with individual specimens pinned in lines reflecting aworking arrangement of individual species relevant to aparticular family or order grouping. These drawers often appear messy with specimens pinned in haphazard lines precisely because they showworking ideas (Figure 2). In the collection developed for the University,Macleaysought to join these specimens with ‘representative’ examples from across the animal kingdom in order to teach the scientific work of classification, and to expand the research material available to the Linnean Society of NSW,aSociety he formed and funded in 1874. Research museums, like thatwhich Macleaycreated, have several distinct kinds of natural historyspecimens, few of which are ever exhibited: wet(in jars of ethanol); pinned (insects generally dried and pinned to aboard); cleaned

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bone material; skins and mounted specimens.These last twopreparations largely constitute the material of taxidermy.7 Skins are ‘flat–packed’ animals, prepared for traveland/or storage at the time of their death. They have as little done to them as possible butgreatcare is (or should be) taken to remove all moisture. If prepared in the field the collector would have to remove the brain, heart, guts, mouth parts, eyes and flesh before drying out the skin as thoroughly as possible. In humid climates this wasacomplicated and difficult task but drying agents such as alum might be applied, or light cotton or jute stuffing inserted to assist. Because of the danger of getting this wrong,orfor the skin to become mouldy or suffer insect attack on the journey back to the collector, containersofalcohol (ethanol or spirit of wine mixed with distilled water) were also used to transportthe specimens from the field.8 Specimens could then be prepared by the taxidermist in acontrolled environment, butasthe importation of alcohol often involved customs tax, manyseemingly avoided this additional cost to collecting. Unless the skin wasintended for displaythere wasnofurther reason to change the specimen at this stage, although generally the skin would be cleaned and, in the nineteenth century, asolution of arsenic and other agents applied to keep the specimen dryand free from insect infestation. It became standard in the twentieth centuryfor scientists to use this kind of preparation, the skin, for their research.Visitorstomuseums rarely sawthese specimens in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.Instead they were shown ‘mounted’ specimens, flat– packed skins thatwere manipulated to make alife–like statue of the animal.9 But crucially in the twentieth centurythe natural object wasnot prepared in the same way, particularly for those museums which reorganized their spaces onWilliam Fowler’s‘new museum’ model, and separated out their research and exhibition material into distinct spaces (see Nyhart1996: 437).The specimens collected by Macleayand those of the privately wealthyconservationist and naturalist PercyPowell–Cotton are good examples of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of these changes. The change waspartly areflection of the diversity of scientific interest in the investigation of the natural world, and partly one result of museum development responding to long–standing ideas about public education, displayand research in the museum. In the nineteenth centurythe natural objects on view for the public were the same as those accessed by scientists and their arrangements reflected classificatoryand geographic orderings of aworld thatwas still dramatically in the process of being established. This kind of displaycan be seen at theTring Museum in Hertfordshire and the Natural HistoryMuseum in Genoa. In the 1900s the public slowly lost direct visual contact with ‘the science’ of amuseum, as natural objects were created purely for exhibition purposes in public areas.The diorama, involving the placement of natural objects posed in theatrical scenes against painted backdrops becoming typical of this era (Tunnicliffe 2005).

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Figure 3. Dorcopsis macleayi, NHM.381MacleayMuseum. Courtesy and copyright, MacleayMuseum

The MacleayMuseum

From the mid–1870s Macleaysourced specimens to be used in his own research and for the Museum to be built at the University of Sydney.Skins were turned into mounted specimens in ataxidermy workshop at the back

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of the family’sElizabeth Bayproperty by the professional collector Edward Spalding who Macleayand his curator George Masterstrained in taxidermy. Other specimens were purchased from international dealerssubsequent to the Museum’sopening in 1892.10 Macleaypersonally influenced the wayinwhich skins were turned into mounted forms so to illustrate classificatoryprinciples.Manywere unique specimens from which classifications had actually been made.These specimens, known as type specimens, were not only representations of scientific principles; they were also artefacts through which new scientific statements had been made. In the case of the animal represented in Figure 3the statement was‘this is a Dorcopsis macleayi’(atype of wallaby). All other animals related to this one could and needed to be understood in respect to this particular specimen. Given the importance attached to these natural objects it stands to reason that particular care wastaken in howthey were mounted. Ta xidermy howeverisatechnical art, and no matter howmuch Macleaymay have been invested in the process, the results were dependent upon the skills of aseries of workers. The natural object is acombination of their work. The first in the chain is the person who killed the animal employing methods that mayhavemutilated the pelt.This is an area where twocultural forms of killing and preparing meet. The most spectacular example are the Birds of Paradise in natural historymuseums which showthe preparation methods common to people across New Guinea from at least the fifteenth century, distinctive because of the complete absence of bone material and feet (Swadling 1996). In the common European method, for birds, the feet and some bones including the skull and wing bones were kept within the skin.This could cause mutilation of the pelt if the wetmaterial from the head wasnot removedthrough the beak buttaken out by removing the head altogether.This latter method meant that the twoseparate parts of the bird needed to be reattached at alater date and at time resulted in distorted neck dimensions and posture. In the New Guinean and European methods the skin of the birds’ body wascut and then pulled back so the interior fully cleaned and dried, before being shipped from field to the collector’sbase. Whether the animal wasreceived dried or in spirit, the taxidermist preparing it for mounting needed to clean and dryitand prepare an internal armature to supportthe skin. It is at this point thatMacleay’spurposes (and otherslike him) can clearly be seen in the final natural object. Birds belonging to the order of passerine, such as aBird of Paradise were mounted with their feet clawing a perch. This wasnot just because it wasthe usual attitude of the animal: it was to reflect an aspect of their biology and classification, the three forward and one backward facing toes.While biologically this enabled the bird to perch, it raised problems for the taxidermist who needed to counterbalance the weight so thatthe body of the bird, from beak to legs, could be placed forward from the perch without tipping.The problem wassolved by threading wires attached

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Figure 4. Slender loris; Loris tardigradus,NHM.146. Macleay Museum. Courtesy and copyright,Anne Ferran, 2014.

to the internal armature through the legs and anchoring the whole to aperch, concealing the wires by the arrangement. Where animals were presented in gendered pairs, amale might be manipulated to showit’smating display, while the female maybemanipulated to present an upright and facing forward view. Another aspect thatneeded to be preservedfor scientific research were the dimensions, adifficult exercise for skins if all bones had been removed, as the skin can shrink and later distortwhen rehydrated prior to taxidermy.Skin collections in the Museum showthatMacleaypurchased flat–packed skins of mammals and birds with the bones of the limb and crania still intact. These were not removed prior to mounting,but manipulated to become partofthe internal armature.

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Consequently the head shape wasfaithfully maintained, along with the size of limbs.The final natural object also kept intact the classificatorymarkersofclaws or toe–pads.Inorder to ensure thatteeth did not fall out of the mandibles, the mouth of most mammals is stitched together, occasionally revealing asingle tooth if this wasaparticular diagnostic feature of the animal (Figure 4). Macleay’sspecimens are both particular to his museum and vision, and typical of late nineteenth centurymethods.Similar specimens can be seen in Tring and the Grant Museum (University College London); museums created through taxonomic research. This kind of natural object also dominates the older halls of the Natural HistoryMuseum in London. To understand how different they are from natural objects of the twentieth centurycreated to show bio–geographical data more clearly,one needs only to look towards some of the animals exhibited in the Powell–Cotton Museum, which quite literally formed the backdrop to the 2015 Museum EthnographersGroup conference. These represent both abreak with the nineteenth centurystandard and are typical of specimens created for the purpose of education and enjoyment.

The twentieth–centurynatural object

PercyPowell–Cotton, like manynatural historyfield–collectors, wasparticularly interested in questions of geographical specificity.Variations in animals across habitats, specificity of agroup of animals to aparticular ecology and behaviour between animals were all questions thatwould be of increasing importance for museums in the new century. Anew style of taxidermy,based on modelling, came to be used thatreflected some of these biological interests.Inthe early twentieth centurythere emerged anew exhibition style for the deliveryof broad educational messages to the visiting public: the habitatdiorama. Using deep glass–fronted cases, the diorama employedaseries of shelves disguised as trees, plants and mountains against atrompe d’oeil painted backdrop.11 This allowedcuratorstoexhibit dramatic scenes and panoramic vistas with natural objects placed on their suitably disguised shelves as if they were animals in their habitat(Kamcke and Hutterer 2015: 13–19). Working from the late nineteenth centuryinto the twentieth, PercyPowell–Cotton wasideally placed to experiment with the formwhen he began to invest in the expansion and new fit–out of his collections for the visiting public.In1896, 1909 and 1922–38 galleries were built which included specimens he had personally collected. He had money,space, afamiliarity and interest in geographyand natural history and alarge number of animals at his disposal thatcould be displayedwithin and against abackdrop of their habitatand in relation to other animals of agiven region (Ward 1913: 87).The specimens displayedshowboth older methods of taxidermy thatwould have been familiar to Macleayand those prepared using methods which became dominant in the twentieth century. 12

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Figure 5. Diorama of buffalo being mauled by alion in Gallery3,Powell- Cotton Museum. Copyright, Hedley Basford. Courtesy of The Tr ustees of the Powell-Cotton Museum.

Roland Ward, ahighly successful taxidermist of the time, wasthe man chosen by Powell–Cotton to make his natural objects.Ward wasanenormously successful businessman–taxidermist, ahighly trained and skilled artist and a hunter.Heapplied all three talents in his taxidermy,specialising in imparting emotiveexpressions and attitudes.Inthe perspectiveofKaren Jones,Ward was anecrogeographer, able to suspend the hunter’sparadise in perpetual animation (2015: 228).13 His style of taxidermy suited manipulating skins so the natural objects reflected an event, such as the group ‘buffalo mauled by alion’ which is exhibited in the Powell–Cotton Museum (Figure 5).14 Foratime he had a healthyline in animal furniture and nick–knacks made from animal parts.He

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worked to order for the Natural HistoryMuseum and he worked on the animal dioramas for Powell–Cotton. In the early twentieth centuryleading taxidermists, likeWard, were exploiting sculptural techniques to create the desired life–like and dramatic postures from the skins flooding into European and American markets.Using observation from life, an artistic skill he practiced at London Zoo,hefaithfully worked up amuscle–rich body shape with moulds and stuffing over which the skin was stretched.Wrinkles and emotiveexpressions were all employedtocreate as life– like an object as possible. No longer did alion’smouth have to be stitched together over the crania and jawsotobest showthe comparativeshape of the head; the lion could be made to roar to impartanidea of the ‘wild’.These were less ‘specimens’ and more ‘replicas’.15 The skins prepared for Powell–Cotton created taxidermy thatbest showed animal posture, relationship to the environment and discrete stories between the animals in the shared vitrine. In Gallery3ofthe Powell–Cotton Museum is one extreme example of the role of taxidermy in replicating abiogeographical space, which contrasts with the Macleay–type natural object created for classificatory research. This diorama features awonderfully populated savannah at the back of which is placed agroup of giraffes.HereWard has been extremely innovative. To be able to showanumber of very large animals together within aset case height and width, one of the adult giraffes wascreated from the skin of the head and neck which is mounted out from the wall. Using trompe d’oeil technique the remaining body waspainted in. While Powell–Cotton’smuseum is adramatic view onto adifferent kind of natural object, his wasalso amuseum for research.The Museum wasevidently influenced by Fowler’sdevelopment of museum spaces, with spaces maintained for research and attendance to classification away from the visiting audience. Preserving type specimens and extinct animals with male, female and juvenile representatives in the research collections mean thathis specimens continue to be an important scientific resource long after his death (Almquist 1973).

Nature and culture and the museum

This paper explored the natural object. Ihaveargued thatweshould be more attentivetothe different kinds of natural objects thatexist to understand their use and context. Exploring taxidermy made for natural historymuseums, I employedethnographic analysis, specifically an attention to the materiality of the specimen, to understand the specific purposes of the production of natural objects over time. Concentrating on the internal structures employedinanimal skins, allowedaview to the changing purposes of the natural historymuseum. In the nineteenth centurythe stiff, forwardly–posed and perched natural objects were produced to suit the comparativemethod for determining evolutionary

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relationships and taxonomy. This kind of natural object wasequally available to scientists’ for research and to the public; education and scientific research were intertwined in the exhibition. In contrast the twentieth century’staxidermist used casts and modeling to create adramatic replica for museum dioramas that recreated an animal’snatural environment. Exhibition areas offered awindow into the spaces scientists travelled to in their research, through creating dramatic scenes of biologically diverse, geographical spaces.Research specimens, and the scientists who worked on them, were movedlargely out of sight. In Stuffed Stitched &Studied we sought to explain this to our audience, by making the nineteenth centuryquality of our natural objects explicit through x–rays, half–stuffed and wonky taxidermy,recipes and explanations of methodologies.Wealso invited acontribution from PhD student Leah Lui–Chivizhe who wasresearching environmental knowledges in relation to the turtle shell masks of her To rres Strait Islander heritage. Her partofthe exhibition brought together ethnographic,scientific and artistic objects from the Macleaycollection to encourage reflection on environmental knowledge and cultural practice relating to turtles in theTo rres Strait. As partofthe Stuffed Stitched &Studied exhibition, her work wasanessential inclusion so to be able to emphasize the cultural world in which science wasenacted, and to reposition classification through the manipulation of animal parts as aworld–wide practice. Gumbula’sexhibition, explored in the first half of this paper, wasboth a complete novelty and acontinuation of the MacleayMuseum’sfocus.From the 1960s the Museum’scuratorshavebeen concerned with the interplay of science and historythrough exhibitions which explored ethnographyand Indigenous knowledges, the biological world and the natural historyspecimen. Gumbula’sexhibition of the natural and cultural in aYolŋuday is also an example of the increasingly common practice of ethnographyinthe modern world: curatorswho used historic material made by their kin acenturyago from an ‘ethnographic’ museum collection to communicate ideas about the current social and political place of their culture. Makarr–garma demonstrated how nineteenth centurycollections of natural and cultural objects can be lifted out of their pasts and used to explore contemporaryissues and ideas.Bymaking obvious the incorporation of the environmental spaces on which culture is lived through natural objects, Gumbula didn’trecreate adiorama in the Museum, so much as teach us howtobehave onYo l ŋ uCountry.

Acknowledgements

This is arevised version of apaper givenatNature and Culture in the Museum,the annual conference of the Museum EthnographersGroup,held at Powell–Cotton Museum, Kent 20–21 April 2015. Iamgrateful to the conference organizersand participants and editorsofthis paper for helping to give my thoughts shape. My thanks

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to curatorial colleagues at the Macleayfor their intellectual contributions to the research and thinking thatwent into the paper, RobertBlackburn, JanBrazier, Rebecca Conway, AnthonyGill and Matt Poll. Leah Lui–Chivizhe’swork on Stuffed Stitched and Studied wasalso invaluable.

This article is dedicated to the memoryofDrJ.N.Gumbula who passed away in 2015. His generosity and patience in teaching others, and his enormous contribution to the MacleayMuseum and to ethnographic museums across the world is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

1. See Hambyand Gumbula 2015. This chapter not only givesaview into the extraordinaryreach of Gumbula’swork in anumber of disciplines, it also shows the influence of Millingimbi–based cultural styles in the shaping of Arnhem Land collections internationally. 2. Curated by Rebecca Conway,textually and visually the exhibition gave the anthropologists’ view looking out of atent to people in ‘the field’. It wasdesigned with the expectation of alocal view to be curated by acultural expertsuch as Gumbula. 3. Anthropologists associated with Sydney University who collected material made by Gumbula’scommunity and took photographs in the region, include Ronald and Catherine Berndt (1946–47), William Lloyd Warner (1927–29) and A.P.Elkin (1949– c.1955). 4. The exhibition wascurated and written by Jude Philp,AnthonyGill, Leah Lui– Chivize and Rob Blackburn. 5. The Chevert Expedition (May–October 1875) wasthe first Australian overseas expedition. Both natural and cultural collections were made from sites on the south– easternAustralian coast (from Port Jackson to Cape Yo rk), in the Central and Eastern islands of the To rres Strait and at Mawatta and Hall Sound on Papua New Guinea’s south–westerncoast (Davies 2011). From 1877 the results were published in the journal Macleayhad established, the Proceedings of the Linnean Society New SouthWa les. 6. F. P. Dodd’sentomological collection, made from 1895, wasarranged in this way. See the on–line exhibition The Dodd Collection (2015) at https://www.google.com/ culturalinstitute/exhibit/KALSjjRMfGL4IQ?position=0%3A0 Bornemissza’scollection at the Ta smanian Museum and ArtGalleryisamodernexample. (Accessed 9January 2016). 7.The Victorian Ta xidermy Project revealed thatlarge insects were also taxidermied in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. 8. This discussion predominantly describes the collection of mammals.Fish collection and preparation wasdifferent due to the different physical form. 9. This flat–packed skin is the reason behind the occasional ‘bad’ or ‘weird’ piece of scientific taxidermy,particularly when the taxidermist wasunfamiliar with the movements and features of the liveanimal from which the skin came. 10. The decades over which the collection waspurposely assembled coincided with changes in the teaching of biology.Within twenty yearsofopening in apurpose–built museum, the gallerywas movedtoanattic.Now after 100 yearsofcramped space the

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University is returning the whole building to its original use. It is planned to reopen as the Chau Chak Wing Museum in 2018 encompassing the collections of the Macleay, Nicholson and University Artmuseums. 11. Kamcke and Hutterer (2015) have surveyedthe much older tradition from which the biological groupings in habitatdioramas emerged. 12. My thanks to Inbal Livne for her insights into the collection. 13. There is adanger in focusing too much on hunting and trophy–keeping in understanding natural historymuseum displays, as these are activities primarily concerned with large mammals which generally formonly asmall corpus of amuseums’ holdings.Similarly ascribing the trophyhunters‘victoryand implied masculinity and of his masteryoverspace both wild and domestic’ is difficult to sustain when the zest is for the capture of the jellyfish or intestinal worm (Jones 2015: 244). My emphasis here is thatwhile scientific exhibits fed into the nineteenth and twentieth centurypassion for hunting and trophykeeping,the taxidermy product wasnot the same—even if the taxidermist was. 14.The lion mauling the buffalo is one thatattacked Cotton–Powell, and wasshot by a member of his party http://www.quexpark.co.uk/museum/museum–galleries/gallery–3. html accessed 9January2016. 15. Foranexplanation of his vision see Rowland Ward (1913).

References

Almquist, Alan 1973. ‘More on primate skull collections in European museums’, Current Anthropology,Vol. 14 (3), pp.264–265. Brown, Alison 2006. ‘The Kelvingrove ‘New Century’ project: changing approaches to displaying world cultures in Glasgow’, Journal of Museum Ethnography,No. 18, pp. 37–47. Conway,Rebecca and Jude Philp 2008. ‘People, Power, Politics: the first generation of anthropologists at the University of Sydney’, http://sydney.edu.au/museums/ publications/catalogues/people–power–politics–catalogue.pdf accessed 15 February 2016 Coote, Anne 2013. ‘Shop front natural historydealersinnineteenth centurySydney’, Sydney Journal,Vol. 4, No.1.pp. 1–18. Danto,Arthur (ed.) 1989. Art/artifact: African artinanthropology collections, New Yo rk: Centre for African Art. Davies, Susan 2011. ‘In the “Land of the rare Bird of Paradise”: three collectorsin southernNew Guinea, 1875–1887, in Susan Cochrane and Max Quanchi (eds.) Hunting the Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums,Art Galleries and Archives (second edition) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge ScholarsPublishing, pp.67–94. Di Gregorio,Mario A. 1996. ‘The Uniqueness of Charles Darwin: His Reading of W. S.Macleay’sHorae Entomologicae’, Historical Records of Australian Science,vol. 11, no.2,pp. 103–117. Earnshaw, Beverly and JoyHughes (eds.) 1993. FannytoWilliam: the lettersofFrances LeonoraMacleay1812–1836, Sydney: Historic Houses Trust.

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Gumbula, Joseph Neparraŋa2009. Makarr–Garma: Aboriginal collections from aYolŋgu perspective, Sydney: MacleayMuseum, University of Sydney. Hamby, Louise with J.N. Gumbula, 2015. ‘Development of Collecting at the Milingimbi Mission’, in P. G. To ner (ed.) Strings of connectedness: essays in honour of Ian Keen, Canberra: ANU Press, pp.187–214. Harrison, Rodney 2011. ‘Consuming Colonialism: curio dealers’ catalogues, souvenir objects and indigenous agencyinOceania’, in Sarah Byrne, Annie Clarke, Rodney Harrison, Robin To rrence (eds.) Unpacking the Collection: networks of material and social agencyinthe museum, London: Springer Science +Business Media, pp.55–82. Holland, Julian n.d. ‘Diminishing Circles: William SharpMacleayinSydney (1839– 1865)’ http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=HR9961120119.pdf, accessed 18 January2016 Jones, Karen 2015. Epiphanyinthe Wilderness: hunting,nature and performance in the nineteenth–centuryAmerican west, Boulder:University Press of Colorado. Kamcke, Claudia and Hutterer, Rainer 2015 ‘HistoryofDioramas’ in Sue Tunnicliffe and Annette Scheersoi (eds) Natural HistoryDioramas: history, construction and educational role,London: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Larsen, Anne 1996. ‘Equipment for the field’, Cultures of Natural History, pp.359–377. McKinney,Kayla K. 2015. ‘Life and Death Writing: Rowland Ward and the literature of taxidermy’, The Victorian, 3.2 http://journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/ viewFile/168/87, accessed 18 January2016. Nyhart, Lynn K. 1996 ‘Natural historyand the ‘new’ biology.’ in N. Jardine, J. Secord and E. Spary(eds) Cultures of natural history Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.426–444. O’Hanlon, Michael and RobertWelsch 2000. Hunting the Gatherers: ethnographic collectors, agents,and agencyinMelanesia 1870s–1930s, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Philp,Jude et al. 2014. Ta xidermy,Stuffed Stitched and Studied:taxidermy in the nineteenth– century,Sydney: MacleayMuseum, University of Sydney. Swadling,Pam 1996. Plumes from Paradise: trade cycles in outer Southeast Asia and their impact on New Guinea and nearby islands until 1920, Queensland: National Museum of Papua New Guinea and RobertBrown and Associates. Tunnicliffe, Sue and Annette Scheersoi (eds.) 2005. Natural HistoryDioramas: history, construction and educational role. London: Springer+Business Media Dordrecht. Vogel, Susan 1989.‘Introduction’ in Arthur Danto Art/Artifact:African artinanthropology collections, NewYo rk: Center for African Art, pp.11–17. Ward, Rowland 1913. Anaturalist’slifestudy in the artoftaxidermy, London: R.Ward.

About the Author

Jude Philp has been senior curator of the MacleayMuseum for the past ten years. Her research centersonmuseum collections relating to the nineteenth centuryhistories of To rres Strait Islandersand people of the south–east coast of Papua New Guinea.

Address forCorrespondence [email protected];MacleayMuseum,A12,University of Sydney,Camperdown NSW 2006.

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