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Paper short abstract:

This paper will trace the history of the statue Baldwin Spencer statue at Museum Victoria from postcolonial pedagogical tool to pseudo-sacred object.

Paper long abstract:

In the mid-1990s, the high point of postmodernism, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when Te Papa and the National Museum of the American Indian were forging new ways of organizing and displaying the Indigenous past. Named Bunjilaka (meaning the place of the ancestral eaglehawk Bunjil), the Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At the heart of the exhibit, and its most controversial part, was a life size seated sculpture of Baldwin Spencer, anthropologist and co-author of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). Under the curatorship of anthropologist John Morton, Spencer was placed in a glass case with a model of Varanus spenceri, the lizard named for him, at his feet. When Bunjilaka was redeveloped in 2012 and replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed and curated exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria, the giant glass case was dismantled and repurposed but the sculpture was retained by museum staff. Initially sitting awkwardly on a trolley in a narrow room where objects were processed for accession, Spencer himself remained unrecorded in any database. With no official existence but considerable gravity, he ended up housed in the secret/sacred room, surrounded with restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected. I ask: Why was Spencer retained and what might he mean to museum staff? Finally, I consider my own influence on Spencer's fate as my recent enquiries have inadvertently amplified these questions within the museum.