Notes for a Networked Biography: The P.G.T. Black Collection of Oceanic Things

In 1938, the Buffalo Museum of Science acquired some 62 hundred objects collected between 1886 and 1916 by and for P. G. Black, a branch inspector for Burns, Philp & Company Ltd., the famous Sydney-based mercantile and shipping firm. Despite the collection’s size, breadth, and significance as a product of the colonial encounter in northern Australia and Melanesia, its history is still largely unrecorded. This article begins to trace the social life of the collection by narrating a formative moment in its biography: the period of Burns, Philp’s expansion into the southwest Pacific during which Black assembled the collection. It also identifies two other moments: the years after Black’s death in 1921 when the overseas purchase of the collection was decried in Australian newspapers and the years after the collection came to Buffalo when objects were loaned for display at American fine arts museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At these particular biographical moments, objects in the collection were differently construed as native curios and ethnological specimens, national patrimony, and primitive art. This article advances a trend of recent scholarship in anthropology and museology by foregrounding the historical circumstances and social relations that condition the appropriation of objects. [Buffalo Museum of Science, P. G. T. Black Collection, Oceania, Australian Museum, art/artifact, object biography, national patrimony