Discovering Cook's Collections

The symposium will explore the significance of ethnographic collections made during Captain James Cook’s 18th Century voyages in the Pacific. Many of these remarkable objects will be on display at the Museum in an exhibition from late June to September this year. These objects from the University of Gottingën’s Cook-Forster collection provide insights into the worlds of both European and Pacific peoples during the second-half of the eighteenth century. The exhibition evokes a range of fascinating questions which will be addressed in the symposium. These include: Why did the voyagers acquire these objects? What were the meanings and values of the objects for the people who created them? How do these objects contribute to our understanding of Pacific cultures around the time they first encountered Europeans? What did Pacific people make of the European Strangers? What is the contemporary significance of the collections to Pacific peoples? The symposium will also introduce some of the main figures associated with the collections, including the two German natural scientists, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg, who accompanied Cook on his second Pacific voyage and who collected and documented many of the rare cultural objects contained in the collections. The history of the collections themselves since the late 18th Century, their importance to the descendants of their makers as well as to anthropology, art and museology will also be explored.

Extra Information

Accommodation in Canberra
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