Collecting the Pacific 1768-1977: Joseph Banks, Alexander Turnbull, Rex Nan Kivell

Abstract

This thesis examines the work of three notable collectors of Pacific artefacts, Joseph Banks (1768-1820), Alexander Turnbull (1868-1918), and Rex Nan Kivell (1898-1977). It sites their activities within an existing tradition in European collecting known as antiquarianism, and within the wider historical context of European / Pacific relationships. It considers the moments in which their amateur, antiquarian collecting practices complemented public strategies to define Pacific culture and institutional attempts to own Pacific history. While each case study forms an independent essay, collectively, they are intended to be read as evidence that there has been an enduring culture of European collecting of Pacific artefacts since at least the late eighteenth century. This culture is defined by amateurism, gentility, and antiquarian collecting methods. It is also defined by its complex relationship with disciplinary systems of cultural quantification and history-making: ethnography and anthropology for Joseph Banks and Alexander Turnbull, history and art history for Rex Nan Kivell. It is argued throughout that the collecting practices of these individuals were influenced by contemporary perceptions of Pacific history in the social, intellectual, and political environments in which they worked. I accept that this thesis is similarly influenced. In a sense histories are collections too. They are ideas, images, and objects accumulated and arranged to tell a story; a story which may itself be dismantled and rearranged over time. My work here is but one way of collecting the evidence of these three lives.