The first encounter

Saffron Walden Museum is a place of wonderment. For £2.50 visitors can see an Egyptian mummy, a lock of Napoleon’s hair and Wallace the lion, stilled by his taxidermist since 1838. When I first visited the museum nearly ten years ago, my interest took me up a wooden staircase to a space perhaps less visited. The ‘Worlds of Man’ gallery was filled with indigenous-made artefacts from around the world, many of which had been there for more than 150 years.1 African statues, Hawaiian bark cloths, American tomahawks, and what I had come to see: the wooden Indigenous artefacts collected by surveyor John Helder Wedge at the close of the Tasmanian ‘Black War’ and in the first months of settlement in Victoria in 1835.