People considering museum or war memorial depictions of the Australian Wars are often told there is a lack of artefacts to tell the stories. Ray Kerkhove has nailed that furphy for Queensland with his work on how settler architecture — examples are extant — took account of the likelihood of attacks by First Nations warriors.
Now, recent work by Gareth Knapman and associates has shown the extent of collections of artefacts relevant to the Australian Wars. Defending Country President, Professor Peter Stanley, has commented that Knapman et al's work 'not only shows how colonial police engaged in large-scale disarmament of "troublesome Blacks", but also how State museums are groaning with Indigenous weapons that the Australian War Memorial could use in its galleries — provided it devotes more space to the Australian Wars than the current planned tiny allocation'.
The Knapman et al article brings together a number of historical events: settler, particularly police, violence against First Nations; collection of First Nations body parts and heritage objects, including for sending to overseas institutions; the legal status of current overseas collections, and the prospects for their repatriation. Examining four collections, the authors 'argue that the current extent of police involvement in collecting is little known, although it seems clear that police collections share a distinctive pattern of focusing on objects classified by museums as weapons'.
The article includes more than twenty pie-charts (analysing collections of less than ten to up to 300 objects) and a table classifying objects found. Crucial findings and commentary:
Our findings to date suggest that police involvement was far more extensive and organized than previously acknowledged. Crucially, it appears to have been backed by government officials and senior police in response to overtures — including offers of payment — by museum curators and trustees eager to advance their anthropological and ethnographic goals. We consequently raise the question whether police collecting was not merely opportunistic but an integral, state-sanctioned aspect of breaking Indigenous resistance in frontier regions across northern Australia.
We ask whether the collecting of Indigenous cultural property by museums was yet another mechanism of control, deeply rooted in the machinery of colonial governance. And we conclude by considering the legality of police collecting of Indigenous cultural property in view of contemporaneous Anglo-Australian law and police regulations in respect of the protection or seizure of property.
Colonial authorities often classified as 'weapons' First Nations objects that had multiple uses. 'The categorisation of Aboriginal objects as weapons constituted part of the epistemic violence of colonisation ... [T]he display of these "weapons" as trophies in colonial era museums acted to justify conflict, control, and dispossession of Aboriginal people.'
Although police took an interest in various aspects of Indigenous Australian life-ways and culture, and collected clothing, string bags and other items, the vast majority of items were classified as weapons and particularly spears. This preponderance of weapons cannot be a coincidence and must reflect the seizure of Indigenous property as part of the routine practices of policing. In doing so, the overwhelming quantity of these categories of objects point to collecting occurring as part of disarming the natives in the course of dispossessing Indigenous Australians of their ancestral lands ...
Traces of the conceptual vocabulary of frontier policing — "disarmament", "seizure", and "dispersal" — within documents in museum and government archives speak to the entanglement of knowledge-making and the routine operations of colonial power — surveillance, confiscation, and punitive expeditions — in the history of Australian settler colonialism ...
Critically assessing collections by police and other agents of the colonial state — how they were made, by whom, and at what cost — are resources with not only the potential to understand and redress the past, but to beneficially recalibrate relations between cultural institutions and First Nations people in the light of their aspirations to achieve recognition of their ancient and abiding sovereignty.
Defending Country adds that beneficially recalibrating 'relations between cultural institutions and First Nations people' should extend to the Australian War Memorial making arrangements with the current custodians (Museums Victoria, the South Australian Museum and the British Museum) of these artefacts to borrow or buy items that help tell the stories of the Australian Wars. Where these artefacts belong to First Nations, their permission for use should, of course, be obtained.
This post has used an open access pdf version of the Knapman et al article (provided by Dr Knapman). The original article: Gareth Knapman, Paul Turnbull, Cressida Fforde & Jocelyn S. Bardot (15 Nov 2025): Disarming the Resistance: Police Collecting of Indigenous Australian Cultural Property for Museums, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2025.2581033. To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2581033. An earlier article by Dr Knapman.
Picture credit: Figure 2 [of the Knapman et al pdf]. Percentage breakdown of the object types in the Foelsche Collection. Total of 184 Objects. (Waterhouse, “Report on the present requirements of the Museum February 1879” GRG19/168/4, Reports by the Museum Curator 1878-1880. South Australian Records, Adelaide. Australia.)
