AUSTRALIANA Aboriginal Indigenous.
Studies in Australian history.
Biographical sketches of amateur scientists and humanists and their influence on popular perceptions of nature and the past; rise of the heritage movement; restoration of Aboriginal sites and artefacts; changing role of museums; environmental conflicts; includes accounts of the collecting of Aboriginal remains and artefacts; stone tools; radiocarbon dating; concept of wilderness; archaeologists; historians; cultural history; institutionalisation of the past; perceptions of Aboriginal peoples and culture.
Hunters and Collectors is about historical consciousness and environmental sensibilities in European Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is in part a collective biography of amateur antiquarians, archaeologists, naturalists, journalists and historians: people who shaped the Australian historical imagination. Dr Griffiths illuminates the way these avid collectors and investigators of the Australian land and of its indigenous inhabitants contributed a sense of identity at colony-wide and eventually nationwide level. He also considers the rise of professional history, anthropology and archaeology in the universities, which ignored the efforts of the amateurs. Griffiths shows how the seemingly trivial activities of these hunters and collectors feed into the political and environmental debates of the 1990s. This book is outstanding in its originality, interpretative insight and literary flair.
First Edition
- xiv, 416 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm. #270124
- Aboriginal Australians — Antiquities — Collectors and collecting
- Aboriginal Australians — Historiography
- Antiquarians — Australia — Biography
- Collectors and collecting — Australia
- Scientists — Australia — Biography
- Cultural heritage – Protection – Museums and keeping places – Conservation
- Technology – Stone
- Cultural heritage – Protection – Museums and keeping places – Collections and acquisitions
- Dating and chronology – Carbon dating
- Australia — Historiography
- Victoria (Vic)