"to make and preserve on behalf of the community of the State collections representative of the Aborigines of the State..."

The Collections

The Anthropology Department has approximately 40,000 registry entries (which represent over 1,000,000 individual pieces, many entries being collections, notably of stone artefact assemblages from Aboriginal sites). The majority of objects in the collections are Australian Aboriginal artefacts, both prehistoric and post colonial, but around 10% of the total is made up of significant overseas ethnographic and archaeological items.

These collections have been built up through donation, exchange, purchase, and fieldwork. Archaeological programmes have established the early arrival of Aboriginal Western Australians, and have been responsible for discoveries of material of international significance such as 12,000 - 16,000 year old bone beads from Devil's Lair and 32,000 year old shell beads from Mandu Mandu near Exmouth.

The ethnography programmes have focused on compiling a representative sample of Aboriginal cultural material spanning the timeframe of European colonisation, and represents the finest collection of Western Australian Aboriginal cultural material nationally and internationally. Recently this effort has been targetted towards the acquisition of material that documents contemporary Aboriginal society, in urban and regional areas.

The Overseas Ethnographic Collection, although small, contains some significant collections of material from the Pacific, the Americas and Africa, with the Melanesian and ancient Egyptian material perhaps the most outstanding.