IDNO

P.609.ACH1

Description

On Catalogue Card: "Gnalluma natives on the Upper Sherlock sheep Station, helping the Squatter in shearing time. N.W."

Group of Ngaluma [Gnalluma] men and women on the Upper Sherlock sheep Station, helping the squatter in shearing time. The women are wearing long skirts and the men long trousers. One woman is wearing a blouse and one man is wearing a shirt. Most of the men have cicatrisation on their upper bodies. Some of the people are wearing hats or scarfs on their heads. They are sitting on a tree trunk. The landscape in the background has a few sparse trees. [WV 8/5/2009]

Place

Oceania Australasia; Australia; Western Australia; Upper Sherlock River

Cultural Affliation

Ngaluma [historically Gnalluma]

Named Person

Photographer

None

Collector / Expedition

?Clement, Emile

Date

circa 1895 - 1900

Collection Name

Mounted Haddon Collection

Source

?Clement, Emile Louis Bruno (Dr.)

Format

Print Black & White Mounted

Primary Documentation

Other Information

Photographer: The information on the photographer comes from Ian Coates (Murray-Darling Basin Project Co-ordinator), who is of the opinion that CUMAA acquired this photograph from Clement. See also Coates, I. 2001, ‘Golden Reflections: Depictions of Aborigines on the north-west Australian goldfields?’, in McCalman, I., Cook, A. and A. Reeves (eds), Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, Cambridge University Press. [S. Guha, 21/3/2005]

Collector: "Emile Louis Bruno Clement (1844-1928) was a prominent collector of ethnographic artefacts and natural history specimens from northwest Australia at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Emile Clement was born in Muskau in Prussia, Silesia in 1844 - now called Bad Muskau and situated in the Federal State of Saxony on the border with Poland (Polish name: Muskau (Muzaków)). He died at Hove in Sussex on 4 August 1928, aged 84 and was buried in the south aspect of Hove cemetery, near Brighton UK - His wife Emily Elizabeth died two years later and was also buried at Hove cemetery, alongside her beloved husband.
Throughout his life, Dr. Clement pursued a variety of occupations, including archaeologist, teacher [1] , naturalist [2] , mining engineer, ethnographer [3] , children's book author [4] , and ethnographic dealer. During the period 1877 to 1890 Dr. Clement undertook a series of archaeological excavations in Silesia, and sold collections of Silesian Bronze Age archaeolgical material to museums throughout the United Kingdom including the British Museum, the Department of Science and Art museums in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Dublin, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Reading Museum.
However Dr. Clement’s largest contribution to museums are the numerous collections of Western Australian Aboriginal artefacts he sold and donated to museums throughout Britain and Europe. During the period 1896-1928, Clement sold over 1600 Australian Aboriginal artefacts from Western Australia to museums throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, and continental Europe. In many of these museums the Clement material comprises a substantial part of their total holdings of Australian Aboriginal material.
Dr. Clement made three trips to Western Australia:
• 1895
• 1896-1898
• 1899-1900
A study of the acquisition of different museums holdings of Western Australian Aboriginal objects related to Clement material suggests there were two distinct stages to Dr. Clement's involvement. The early collections (1896-1910) were probably all collected by Dr. Clement - and possibly his son - personally. In contrast, the collections acquired by museums during the second stage (1923-1928) seem to be derived from residents from the North-west area of Western Australia, who sent the material to Dr. Clement in England, who then sold it to museums.
As well as the ethnographic and archaeological material, Dr. Clement contributed substantial quantities of botanical material from Northwest Australia to the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew between 1898 and 1900, as well as to herbariums in Leiden and Berlin. Collections of his zoological material, containing many type specimens, are held in the British Museum (Natural History), Liverpool Museum and the Oxford University Museum." [WV 8/5/2009]

This catalogue record has been updated with the support of the Aboriginal Visual Histories Project, Monash University. [Wonu Veys 8/5/2009]