Berlin’s Australian Archive: Addressing the Colonial Legacies of Natural History

Following in the footsteps of Alexander von Humboldt, nineteenth-century German naturalists sought to explore and categorize the world. To them, the Australian continent offered a welcome opportunity to test Humboldt’s methods on a terrain hitherto largely unknown to European voyagers and researchers.

Long before the arrival of these highly influential scholars, however, the place now called Australia was already well known. Its lands, waters, and skies had been named and described in the numerous languages of the first inhabitants of Australia and the Torres-Strait Islands. Indigenous knowledge systems gave meaning to the natural world and the relationship between human beings and their environment.

German naturalists at times heavily relied on the expertise of Indigenous intermediaries, who acted as guides, collectors, trading partners or translators in their endeavors. From preserved animals and plants to rock samples, or drawings of fish and birds – the vast natural history collections held by museums across Australia and Germany today are not only objects of European scientific inquiry. They also embody Indigenous knowledge and stories about the natural world that have long been overlooked or excluded from dominant Western scientific systems.

How can this knowledge be recovered and reinvigorated today? How can we tell an entangled and truly global history of these collections that focuses on their continuing significance to Indigenous peoples?

Since August 2022, the project “Berlin’s Australian Archive” examines the collections of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin in order to address these questions. The project is supported by the German Lost Art Foundation’s funding line for provenance research on cultural goods and collections from colonial contexts. One of the goals of Eva Bischoff and Anja Schwarz, who are directing the project with the guidance of an Aboriginal Advisory Board, is to initiate dialogues between experts from Indigenous source communities and representatives of German museums.

One of the project’s main hypotheses is that these dialogues can open up new perspectives onto natural history collections. Indigenous knowledge systems, as historian Lynette Russell (Wotabaluk) has emphasized, reject categorical distinctions between “nature” and “culture.” Animals, plants, or minerals are understood as part of “Country” – the area of land to which Indigenous Australians and their communities have a personal and spiritual connection. The researchers seek to understand how the Indigenous knowledge embedded in natural history collections might inform the development of new approaches to the care and representation of these materials in German museums.

The project team, which brings together Australian and German researchers, focuses on collections associated with four prominent Prussian naturalists, who were active in 19th-century Southeastern Australia: Wilhelm von Blandowski, Ferdinand von Müller, Richard Schomburgk and Gerhard Krefft. Together, the team is working to reassemble these materials across the national and disciplinary divides that led to their dispersal between multiple museums in Australia and Germany. The acquisition and historical study of these collections occurred in a colonial context. By investigating these histories, the researchers are seeking to develop a critical understanding of the conditions under which the materials were severed from the Indigenous communities and lands they are historically and culturally connected to.

The first phase of the project consisted of a broad stock-take of all holdings associated with Blandowski, Krefft, von Müller, and Schomburgk. Based on this data, researchers are currently working to reconstruct the historical and cultural contexts of specific collections. This work can draw on transcriptions of primary sources held in the museum’s archives, which were created by the participants of a transcription workshop led by Eva Bischoff and Diana Stört. A selection of images and prints from Blandowski’s collection in the historic archive has recently been published in the museum’s data portal.

Up until now, all project meetings were limited to virtual workshops. From August 28 until September 9, a first in-person meeting will take place in Berlin. The team is coming together to study specific aspects of the collection and to jointly develop sustainable and culturally appropriate strategies for making this material accessible to Indigenous community members.

Future phases of the project will be dedicated to a dialogic transfer of knowledge that aims to uncover and reactivate the collections’ relationship to Indigenous histories and lived cultural worlds. Based on the results of their research, the project team will develop guidelines that offer practical suggestions for the research, preservation, and display of Australian natural history collections held in Berlin. These protocols will also identify points of contact at the project’s partner institutions, who can act as advisors in the context of future inquiries. In addition, the team will develop a concept for the collections’ presentation in an online exhibition.

Project partners:
Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
Museums Victoria, Melbourne
Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne
The Australian Museum, Sydney

The project is funded by the  German Lost Art Foundation.