Aggregating Cultural Heritage Data to Explore the History of Colonial Collecting: Reconstructing Western Australian Collections in the “Collecting the West” Project

The earliest preserved indigenous objects and natural specimens from Western Australia were collected between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by Western explorers, colonial administrators, and entrepreneurs, as part of the processes of European “discovery”, settlement, and colonization, and are now located in cultural institutions around the world. Collections of the earliest surviving moveable evidence for the cultural heritage of Australia’s largest state cannot be found in Western Australia itself and must be sought out in Britain, Europe, the United States, and the eastern states of Australia.

The Collecting the West (CTW) Project has been assembling descriptive data about these items into a single nodegoat database, which can be explored for themes related to the nature of collecting in Western Australia, the exploitative ideology underpinning much of this collecting, and the relationship between colonialism and these collecting practices. This article explains how this database was developed and discusses some of the findings from it relating to the types of items collected, their places of production and cultural associations, their geographical spread in museums today, and the processes by which they were collected. For the first time, this dispersed cultural heritage can be viewed and analysed in a holistic way.

The work reported here represents an initial contribution towards a much larger programme aimed at transforming collections infrastructure and rebuilding knowledge systems, especially those connected with indigenous knowledge. Future work building on the CTW Project’s database will include opening up the data to indigenous perspectives, enriching the data from external sources like Wikidata, and reusing the data in emerging knowledge systems.