Names
Coghlan Collection
Jeremiah Andrew Coghlan Collection
IDs
QM00032
Offline Only
Descriptions
The collection includes a diverse range of objects of Aboriginal material culture including spears, boomerangs, stone tools, knives, bags and baskets collected from 1891-1896, almost exclusively drawn from the Glenormiston and Boulia districts. The collection of Jeremiah Andrew Coghlan was both donated and sold to the Queensland Museum over the course of the 1890s, with some material being donated by Coghlan's brothers and daughter in the following decade.
Jeremiah Coghlan was the manager of a pastoral station at Glenormiston in the early to mid 1890s, during an extensive drought in the region. Coghlan only wrote one article on Aboriginal people, which was published in the journal Man. He had no aspirations to professional ethnography or anthropology and merely traded with local Aboriginal people as their objects became available to him. Coghlan's collection has rarely been studied in any detail and remains almost completely unknown, though Coghlan was acknowledged by other noted ethnographers for his assistance, such as by Dr Roth. Coghlan's collection is chiefly interesting because it is highly localised, exclusive to a specific region, and was not collected in a deliberate or planned manner to serve the purposes of ethnography.
Subjects
Anthropology; Australian Aboriginal culture; Ethnography; Indigeous artefacts; Late 19th century
Indigeous Australian Peoples
Jeremiah Andrew Coghlan
Coverage Spatial
Glenormiston, Queensland; Boulia, Queensland; Central-West Queensland
Related Collections
Dates
2012-05-30 23:43
2011-06-02 17:37