Spencer's double: the decolonial afterlife of a postcolonial museum prop

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when many museums around the world forged new ways of displaying Indigenous heritage. Named Bunjilaka (a Woiwurrung word meaning ‘place of Bunjil', referring to the ancestral eaglehawk), the permanent Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At its heart was a life-size model of Baldwin Spencer, co-author of the classic anthropological monograph The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). When Bunjilaka was replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria in 2011, the model was informally 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 by restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected. This article traces Spencer's journey from a post-colonial pedagogical tool to a transgressive pseudo-sacred object in an emerging era of decolonial museology. I argue that Spencer's fate indicates a distinct period of post-colonial museology ( c. 1990–2010) that has ended, and illustrates how the shifting historical legacies of science operate in the present.