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 categorise 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 intimately known. Its lands, waters, and skies had been named and classified by First Nations people, within Indigenous knowledge systems and languages. German naturalists at times heavily relied on the expertise of First Nations intermediaries, who acted as guides, collectors, trading partners or translators in their endeavours. 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 silenced by the dominant frameworks of Western science.
How can German natural history institutions recognise the continuing importance of these collections to First Peoples? How can the information they hold about the entanglement of German natural history with Australian colonialism, but also about Indigenous knowledge and practices, be recovered? How can our work best support First Peoples claim sovereignty over these natural collections as Indigenous cultural belongings?
Our project tackles these questions by bringing together knowledge holders and experts from First Nations communities with museum and university researchers across Australia and Germany. Working collaboratively, we will critically investigate the collections associated with two prominent Prussian naturalists, who were active in 19th-century Southeastern Australia: Wilhelm von Blandowski and Gerhard Krefft.
Guided by the members of the project’s Aboriginal Advisory Board, our interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-sector team strives to:
- Reassemble this material record across the national, taxonomic and disciplinary divides that have led to its dispersal between multiple collecting institutions in Australia and Germany.
- Analyse how the making, circulation and scholarship of these collections interacted with colonial frameworks of knowledge production - including their infrastructural, ideological and economic foundations - in order to gain a critical understanding of the processes and conditions that severed these materials from the Indigenous communities and lands they are historically and culturally connected to.
- Develop sustainable and culturally appropriate forms of access to Berlin-based collections for First Nations communities, to whom they are relevant.
- Engage in a dialogic transfer of knowledge in order to address the interconnected nature of Indigenous knowledge embodied in Berlin’s Australian Archive, its relationship to Indigenous histories and lived cultural worlds.
- Develop guidelines that translate the historical and cultural significance and potentially sensitive nature of the collections into proper protocols for research, preservation, and display in German museums.
For further information & insights into the work in progress, visit
Project Partners in Year 3
Museums Victoria Melbourne
Museum für Naturkunde Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Berlin
Ethnologisches Museum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Further Project Partners in Year 1 & 2
Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne
The Australian Museum Sydney
Now in our third year of funding, we look forward to bringing the results of the project back to Country and communities in Australia.
Led by Tati Tati & Wadi Wadi Traditional Owner Uncle Brendan Kennedy and Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri & Yorta Yorta Master Weaver Auntie Glenda Nicholls, and with the support of Back to Country Curator Caine Muir and Senior Curator, History of Collections Rebecca Carland (both Museums Victoria), we are planning two workshops in rural Victoria in March 2025.
This format was suggested by Uncle Brendan Kennedy and Aunt Glenda Nicholls after their visits to Berlin in 2024. It is intended to give larger groups of representatives from the relevant communities access to these collections and the knowledge they hold.
Media
Blandowski, First Nations and the Natural History of Australia
The project is led by:
Prof. Dr. Anja Schwarz (University of Potsdam)
PD Dr. Eva Bischoff (University of Trier)
Coordinating researcher and contact for inquiries:
Fiona Möhrle, M.A.
