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ItemMapping Dja Dja Wurrung Objects Through Global Museum Networks: Historiographies, inventories, and provenances( 2022)This archival and historical study explores the removal, exchange, and provenance data of cultural materials made by Dja Dja Wurrung people of central Victoria in southeast Australia, which are held within collecting institutions. As a result of colonisation, First Nations cultural material has been removed from Country and dispersed to collecting institutions globally through complex networks of exchange. Many items are poorly documented with records relating to who made them and where they were removed from often being incomplete, fragmented, or ambiguous. Decades of First Nations advocacy seeking repatriations, and, importantly, to ‘find what was thought to be lost through the process of colonisation’, has resulted in increasing numbers of projects seeking to inventory and provenance globally distributed collections. This dissertation presents the conceptual, methodological, and empirical findings of a scoping survey that involved inventorying Victorian First Nations cultural material and associated records held across 33 collecting institutions in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and mainland Europe. A key outcome of this survey is the creation of a digital archive generated through the methodological experiment of assembling Dja Dja Wurrung cultural material, and mapping and contextualising relationships between information fragments within the project archive as a strategy for provenancing. The process of assembling and ordering provenance records relating to Victorian First Nations collections more broadly within the archive revealed factors that significantly hindered the identification of individual Dja Dja Wurrung objects as records were distributed, fragmentary, and colonially constituted. While provenance and museum records are typically considered authoritative, this dissertation contributes to discourse which challenges this narrative and re-imagines the notion of provenance as one that is fundamentally ‘contextual’. It reveals the complexities and ambiguities inherent in provenance data by exploring the collection biographies of four Dja Dja Wurrung related items that revealed the multi-layered nature of provenance, and the questions generated in the process of interrogating the veracity of archival confidence in relation to provenance. A significant contribution of this dissertation is the collation of challenges specific to provenancing Dja Dja Wurrung material, which are the result of regionally specific ways in which First Nations cultural materials was collected in Victoria. It further aims to confront the colonial conundrum of First Nations cultural property identified (or provenanced) as regionally generic, such as being from “Victoria” or “southeast Australia”, rather than First Nations specific attributions, such as Dja Dja Wurrung. Drawing on research observations together with those of Dja Dja Wurrung cultural specialists given during interviews, the dissertation emphasises the need for rigor in establishing the provenance of items in museum collections and, in this, the need to ensure these recognise and give effect to First Nation’s needs for culturally safe provenancing practices.