Kurzfassung

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...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.» weiterlesen» einklappen