Authors’ biographies

 

LISSANT BOLTON is the section head, Oceania, in the British Museum. An anthropologist, her research focuses on gender and kastom in Vanuatu, and on the Indigenous use of collections and cultural knowledge, with a specific interest in textiles. She has worked in Vanuatu annually since 1989, collaborating with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre (VKS) in the development of programs to document and revive women's knowledge and practice. Bolton was lead curator for the permanent gallery Living and Dying (2003), and curated the exhibition Power and Taboo: Sacred Objects from the Pacific (2006), both for the British Museum. She previously worked for the Australian Museum, Sydney, and for the Australian National University. She has undertaken a series of major research projects, the last two with colleagues from London University.

GREG DENING (1931-2008) has been described as ‘one of the most imaginative, original and reflective minds working in the fields of history and historiography’. From 1974 to 1990 he held the Max Crawford Professorship of History at the University of Melbourne and from 1996 to 2008 was adjunct professor at the Research School of Humanities at The Australian National University. He was the author of many books, including Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774-1880 (1980); The Death of William Gooch, History's Anthropology (1988); Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Power, Passion and Theatre on the Bounty (1992); Performances (1996); Beach Crossing. Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self (2004); and Church Alive! Pilgrims in Faith, 1956-2006 (2006).

NIGEL ERSKINE is curator of exploration at the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM). He has a strong maritime background that combines academic qualifications in history and maritime archaeology with a trade certificate in ship and boat-building. He has undertaken archaeological work on several eighteenth-century British naval vessels lost in the Pacific and was leader of the Pitcairn Project, investigating the remains of the Bounty at Pitcairn Island in 1998-89. He was director of the Norfolk Island Museum from 2000 to 2003 and led the 2002 Sirius expedition. In 2004 he represented the ANMM in the ongoing search for Cook's Endeavour, scuttled in Newport, Rhode Island in 1778.

MICHELLE HETHERINGTON joined the National Museum of Australia as a curator in 2005, having previously curated a number of exhibitions for the National Library of Australia, including Paradise Possessed: The Rex Nan Kivell Collection (1998), Follow the Sun: Australian Travel Posters 1930s-1950s (1999), The World Upside Down: Australia 1788-1830 (winner of the Centre for Australian Cultural Studies Award 2000), Cook and Omai: The Cult of the South Seas (2001) and For the People and Parliament: Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Parliamentary Library and National Library of Australia (2001). At the Museum she has worked on the Horizons and Australian Journeys galleries and a number of temporary exhibitions, including Cook's Pacific Encounters (2006) and, most recently, Symbols of Australia (2009). Michelle is the author of a number of publications reflecting her interest in European voyages of discovery, the eighteenth century and the cult of celebrity, and the work of Australian and British artists.

ADRIENNE L KAEPPLER is curator of oceanic ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. She has carried out extended fieldwork in the Pacific and extensive research in museums, especially on collections from the voyages of Captain Cook. She has published widely on museum collections and the visual and performing arts of the Pacific. Her research focuses on interrelationships among social structure, ritual, and the arts, especially dance, music and the visual arts. She has recently served as lead curator for the exhibition, James Cook and the Exploration of the Pacific, at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, Germany, and contributed three essays and 115 object entries to the catalogue. Her recent book, The Pacific Arts of Polynesia and Micronesia (2008), was published by Oxford University Press.

DOREEN MELLOR is an Indigenous Australian of North Queensland Mamu and Ngadjan heritage, currently director of development at the National Library of Australia. Formerly project manager of the National Library's Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, she co-edited with historian Anna Haebich the associated major publication, Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation (2002). Prior to her work in Canberra, Doreen was director of Flinders University Art Museum in Adelaide, following her role as visual arts coordinator and curator at Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute. She served on many national and state boards and committees, chairing a number of them. In addition to curating exhibitions at Flinders and Tandanya, Doreen curated a number of exhibitions independently. She has prepared major reports on heritage and cultural issues and, with Indigenous legal practitioner Terri Janke, edited and co-authored Valuing Art, Respecting Culture: Protocols for Working with the Australian Indigenous Visual Arts and Craft Sector (2001).

HOWARD MORPHY (FASSA, FAAH, CIHA) is director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. He is an honorary curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and adjunct curator of the Kluge Ruhe collection at the University of Virginia. Prior to returning to the Australian National University in 1997, he held the chair in anthropology at University College London. He has written extensively on Australian Aboriginal art with a monograph on Yolngu Art, Ancestral Connections (Chicago, 1991), a general survey Aboriginal Art (Phaidon, 1998) and, most recently, Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories (Berg, 2007). He has also produced a pioneering multimedia biography The Art of Narritjin Maymuru, with Pip Deveson and Katie Hayne (ANU epress, 2005). In addition to his writing he has curated many museum exhibitions, including Yingapungapu at the National Museum of Australia, and worked over many years with Ian Dunlop on his Yirrkala film project.

PAUL TAPSELL is a member of a prominent family from the Bay of Plenty and Waikato region of North Island, New Zealand. His family traces its roots back to the main tribes of Te Arawa and Tainui, two of the dominant Polynesian migrant canoes that sailed from Taputapuatea to Aotearoa/New Zealand some 25 generations ago. Paul was curator of the Rotorua Museum from 1990 to 1994 and the first Tumuaki (Director Maori) at the Auckland War Memorial Museum (2000-08). During this time he was responsible for implementing the Human Remains repatriation program, curating the international exhibition project Ko Tawa, publishing two books: Pukaki (2000) and Ko Tawa — Maori Treasures of New Zealand (2006). He was also adjunct senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Auckland and co-coordinator of the Museums and Cultural Heritage program for graduates. Writer of numerous journal articles and chapters concerning taonga (Maori treasures), Paul took up the position of Dean of Te Tumu, School of Maori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies at the University of Otago, in 2009.

PAUL TURNBULL is professor of ehistory at the University of Queensland. He is the creator of South Seas: Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (1760-1800), a major online resource devoted to James Cook's momentous first Pacific voyage of 1768-71. Paul has also written extensively on racial science and its uses of Aboriginal Australian bodily remains. In recent essays he has investigated the connections between frontier violence and skeletal collecting in nineteenth-century Queensland (‘Theft in the name of science’, Griffith Review, 2008) and the entanglement of Aboriginal remains in Darwinian and anti-Darwinian scientific debates, 1860-80 (Douglas and Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750-1940, 2008).