The perils of ethnographic provenance; the documentation of the Johnson Fiji collection in the South Australian Museum

This essay addresses the vexed questions of provenance and authenticity of objects that have been collected and made accessible for study. And calls for all exploration of the way in which these have often been uncritically accepted solely on the basis of notes and comments made by the original collectors. The difficulty is that the authority with which collectors were able to speak varied enormously, and even when the collectors obtained objects personally from the original owners, it cannot be assumed that they understood clearly the names, purposes or provenance of the objects they obtained.