Urrempel Men: A Collaborative Interrogation of T.G.H. Strehlow's Collection

A detailed ethnographic and historical study exploring the making and interpretation of one of the most important ethnographic collections of any Indigenous group in Australia. Focusing on the work of T.G.H. Strehlow, this thesis challenges existing scholarly and popular understandings of ethnographic collections as either being exemplars of reified historical records or simple instruments of colonial dominance. By re-examining this collection in collaboration with some of the Aboriginal people most closely connected to it, the thesis recasts Strehlow’s work as a ‘co-production’, actively made with informants who responded to their unequal relationships with ethnographers and Euro-Australian society more generally.