Audio on demand

Listen to members of the National Museum Registration team discuss the documentation, photography, uplift and transport that was needed to make the Saw Doctor’s wagon, now on display in the Main Hall, a part of the Museum’s collection.

For many decades, Sunshine Harvester Works was a significant landmark in Sunshine, a suburb in Melbourne’s industrial west. Museum curator Leah Bartsch explores research into the stories and objects of Sunshine.

In a good-practice study of where the Dreamtime meets the market, Paul Memmott discusses the Myuma Group (of three Aboriginal corporations) in far west Queensland, which successfully manages the interplay between demand for and supply of service.

Challenging the idea that equal wages caused mass eviction and unemployment for Aboriginal people, Fiona Skyring looks at other factors such as how government investigations in 1965 and 1966 discouraged station owners from appropriating pension payments.

Thorley and Greenslade consider Papunya Tula during the 1970s, as Indigenous art became recognised as fine art, and remote markets developed, shaping the art movement. But local markets persisted, and their effect on the movement warrants further study.

Alan O’Connor examines Anangu involvement in economic life from early records pre-contact, through the establishment of the mission Ernabella, in 1937, when dingo scalps were traded for flour, tea and sugar, to the enterprises that emerged in the 1970s.

Philip Jones explores the relations between Aboriginal people and ‘Afghans’, whose camel trains linked Central Australian outposts with supply centres and markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Judy Lovell describes Keringke Arts Aboriginal Incorporation and the effect of the ‘Emergency Response’ and government reforms; and Ntwerle Aboriginal Incorporation, a new initiative promoting and hosting whitefella leadership training programs.

Maria Nugent explores the 130-year-long practice of shell-working by Aboriginal women at La Perouse in Sydney’s south, and how the makers have been able to create or find new markets by adapting their products to appeal to new customers.

Curator Jennifer Wilson talks about her research into the fishing port of Robe in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, as an example of a place where people endeavoured to create a just society with equality of opportunity and participation.