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What can objects tell us about the past? Kirsten Wehner talks to history teachers about the nature of exhibitions as histories.

Dr Peter Stanley, the head of the National Museum’s Research Centre, asks teachers ‘How can museum historians and curators best support history teachers?’

Whereas the 1948 Expedition presented vast collections of plant and animal life classified according to Linnaean taxonomy, Ad Borsboom explores how the Yolngu organise and present knowledge through mythological Dreaming stories.

Museum collections exaggerate the traditional lives of Indigenous Australians. Here, Mike Pickering seeks to expand Indigenous history to include items that, though the product of western industry, were mostly used by Indigenous workers.

Historian Darrell Lewis discusses his research on ‘the outback archive,’ unorthodox historical records from pre-European times to the present, concentrating on marked water tanks and trees along the Murranji Track in the Northern Territory.

Leading historians reflect on the ways in which collections can be used to interpret the past, and the issues and problems faced in doing so, in wrapping up the National Museum’s Collections 2008 symposium on material histories and objects as sources.

Poet and writer Sam Wagan Watson, historian and Indigenous biographer Peter Read and National Museum curator Margo Neale discuss Indigenous issues and the intersection between historical research and imagination.

Environmental historian Libby Robin and novelist Nicholas Drayson share an interest in nature and the history of science and discovery. They explore the dynamic relationship between historical evidence, recollections and the reconstruction of the past.

The convergence of history and fiction and the power of archives and objects to inform their work on Australian women and the League of Nations is explored by political historian Lenore Coltheart and author Frank Moorhouse.