Paper short abstract:

The paper reports on current research with Lamalama people of Cape York Peninsula, Australia, and discusses the way in which identity is embedded and sustained through interactions with ethnographic images depicting people, objects and practices of the past.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the role of museums in the shaping of memory. In a current team research project, we are collaborating with the Lamalama people of Cape York Peninsula in investigations of the Donald Thomson Ethnographic Collection held by Museum Victoria in Melbourne. The Collection contains many images of their forebears taken by Thomson in the late 1920s, when they still lived a relatively autonomous bush life before eventual removal by the state.

The Thomson images are the location of memory and associated discourses of recollection which the Lamalama use to plot the historical trajectory of their collective sense of 'family' and unity. In recognition of the close connection between meaning, objects, and their social location, we bring the people to the objects in their museum location and the objects to them on country. In doing so we seek to expand the museum beyond its institutional walls and more easily facilitate the relationship between the Lamalama and the proof of their past. The process of recall and identification so engaged is technologically mediated at all points.

Despite some unexpected difficulties, the Lamalama have remained resolute in their intention towards participation in the research, an active process through which they re-embed the knowledge contained in the Thomson materials in contemporary identifications. The paper focuses on discussion of these processes and the way in which the Lamalama are using the project to sustain their collective sense of self in an increasingly fragile social environment.