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The Photographic Collections

The Berndt Museum has a photographic collection with more than 35,000 images. These include photographs, negatives and colour slides. The collection consists of many small collections which have been donated to the Museum by their collectors, and several larger key collections, which include the RM and CH Berndt Collection, the Akerman Collection, the AO Neville Collection, the P Lucich Collection, and others.

Copyright

The Berndt Museum respects the inherent intellectual and moral rights of all artistic creators, and makes every effort to contact the relevant copyright holders and and their communities before displaying or making artistic works available for third party reproduction.

All requests for photographic images, whether of objects held by the Museum or historical images, must be made on the prescribed form, which is available for download.

Download Application Form for Aboriginal Community and Individual requests

Download Application Form for Private Study requests

Download Application Form for Publishing requests

Highlights

Some highlights of the photographic collection can be seen in the Virtual Tour.

List of Collections

The principal collections are as follows.

Collector	Date	Location
AAPA	1936	Moore River
Akerman	1974	Kimberley
Baines	1980	South-West
Bird	1981	South-West
Birdsall	1980-1982	Carnarvon
Chesson	1930s	Moore River
Clifton	1870s	Moore River
Douglas	1950-1970	Eastern Goldfields
Edenburg	1940s-1950s	Carrolup
Gray	1977	Carnarvon
Lillburn	1900	Central Australia
Lucich	1963	Mowanjum and Kalumburu
McCaskill	1975	Murchison
Neville *	1915-1953	Western Australia
Perrot	1930s	Moore River
Petri	1954	Anna Plains
Petri	1960	La Grange
Phillips	1940s-1950s	Carrolup
Sansom	1977	Darwin
Shaw	1972	Kununurra
Wallace	1967	Ernabella and Amata
Watkins	1927	Murchison
White-Hardy	1940s-1950s	Carrolup
Winmar	1940s-1960s	Badjaling
Wright	1970s	Pilbara

* A.O. Neville was the Chief Protector of Aborigines between 1915 and 1953. Station owners, missionaries and welfare workers from all over Western Australia sent him their photographs to use in his public talks.

’Bringing the Photographs Home’

PURPOSE OF PROJECT

In the Berndt Museum’s photographic collection there are approximately 15,000 photographs that relate to Western Australia’s past. These archival photographs are from government and mission settlements and pastoral stations from 1920 to 1970. Until the commencement of this ATSIC-funded project, these photographs were available only as contact proofs on small file cards, which were difficult to access. A small fraction of the records were computerised and usable photographic prints were not available.

Today, the entirety of the photographic collection has been added to the Museum’s computerised data base, and a portion of the archival negatives have been digitally scanned in preparation for the second phase of the project, both as part of the ATSIC project.

The Stolen Generation deserve the opportunity for people to reconnect to their families, even if it is only in photographic form. Sometimes, a photograph is the only record of their forebears. Not only is it important for the older generations to identify their family history, but it is also crucial that this information is passed to younger generations, which is imperative for reclaiming and forming identity.

The project is based at the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, Nedlands, where the Photographic Collection is housed.

Objectives:

• To complete the transfer of digitised images to the Museum’s Photographic Database;
• To prepare prints from the digitised images and to return photographs to the Stolen Generations and information about them to relevant families and communities;
• To document the return of this information for inclusion in a planned national travelling exhibition to publicise the Photographic Project.

OVERVIEW

This project, "Bringing the Photographs Home" is ATSIC’s response to the "Bringing Them Home" Report and is in its second phase. The objectives and activities of this project are to:

• Inform Aboriginal communities about the Photographic Project in particular and the work of the Museum and the nature of its collection in general;
• Provide copies of relevant photographs held by the Museum to individuals and communities requesting them, to assist in the healing process of community recovery from the impact of the Stolen Generations Report; and
• Improve the level of documentation associated with these photographs in order to assist subsequent requests for assistance from Aboriginal community members.

A launch of the Project was held at the Museum mid-way through June 2000. The launch was opened by Commissioner Preston Thomas and attended by Mr Alf Taylor and Ms Marlene Jackamarra as guest speakers. Since then, copies of photographic materials have been repatriated to communities in the SouthWest of the state, the Kimberley and, shortly, to the Yamatji people of the Murchison/Gascoyne. Other communities in the Western Desert and Pilbara will follow. As a whole the project as been successful with wide ranging interest with participants requesting follow up visits. A future project will focus on the digitisation of the Museum’s extensive sound recording collection, mostly assembled by Ronald and Catherine Berndt, but also including the work of other fieldworkers. Little of this material has been registered: the project will digitise and annotate these recordings for repatriation to communities. A pilot project, relating to both the photographic and sound collections, returned materials to the people of Gloulburn Island (N.T.), where the Community School acts as a repository.