Wood, Michael (2016) Dudley Bulmer's artefacts as autobiography. Memoirs of the Queensland Museum. Culture, 10. pp. 77-92.

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Abstract

During a visit to Yarrabah in 1938, Norman Tindale, then working for the South Australian Museum, collected and documented a number of artefacts given to him by Dudley Bulmer, who was originally from Starke River, north of Cooktown. This paper used Tindale's notes on these artefacts to show how Bulmer sometimes inscribed aspects of himself into his artefacts by combining events from his life with representations of Ancestral beings that were important in ceremony. Partly reflecting the power of the state to restrict his freedom, a feature of Bulmer's presence in his artefacts is his absence from his homeland.I argue these elements make some Bulmer's artefacts inscriptive equivalents to the life story genre of Indigenous writing.

Item ID:	48538
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2205-3220
Keywords:	Dudley Bulmer, Tindale, artefacts, the Dreaming, autobiography, Yarrabah, North Queensland
Related URLs:	Publisher
Additional Information:	Issue title: Transactions and Transformations: artefacts of the wet tropics, North Queensland.
Funders:	Australian Research Council (ARC), James Cook University (JCU)
Projects and Grants:	ARC Discovery grant for the project 'Objects of Possession: Artefact transactions in the Wet Tropics of North Queensland, 1870-2013' (DP110102291)
Date Deposited:	20 Apr 2017 23:11
FoR Codes:	44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4401 Anthropology > 440107 Social and cultural anthropology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9599 Other Cultural Understanding > 959999 Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified @ 100%
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