Significance 2.0: a guide to assessing the significance of collections
Roslyn Russell, Kylie Winkworth
© Commonwealth of Australia, 2010
ISBN 97 80977544363 (pbk)
Provenance across the collections of an archive, library and museum
A group of Seventh-day Adventists arrived in Australia from the United States in 1885. In 1898, Adventist missionaries opened a small health food business in Melbourne, which grew into the Sanitarium Company, the creators of an Australian icon, Weet-Bix breakfast cereal. Later that year, Sanitarium relocated to Cooranbong, NSW.
Adventist missionaries commenced work in the islands around Australia, beginning in 1886 with the remote community on Pitcairn Island, then moving on to the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Kiribati.
The records of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Australia and the Pacific region, spanning over a century, are held in the Adventist Heritage Centre at Cooranbong, NSW. The nearby South Sea Islands Museum also holds a large collection of items that have been donated by former missionaries and Church members. The entire collection has been assembled as a direct result of the Church's many activities, and has high provenance integrity as a result.
The Church's Heritage Centre provides evidence to build a very sound provenance for the items in the Museum. The archives and library in the Heritage Centre contain large numbers of photographs, movies, historic books, teaching materials, Church publications and reports from the various churches and mission fields documenting the Church's missionary activity in the Pacific Islands and in Indigenous Australia. Some photographs show particular items with their creators or owners. These rich and diverse records of provenance add to the significance of items in the museum. These in turn can be used as a point of reference and comparison for similar undocumented artefacts from the region.
The same shield in the South Sea Islands Museum
Reproduced courtesy of Adventist Heritage Centre and South Sea Islands Museum, Cooranbong, New South Wales
Photo: Roslyn Russell
Solomon Islands man with traditional woven shield and axe
Reproduced courtesy of Adventist Heritage Centre and South Sea Islands Museum, Cooranbong, New South Wales
Detail of photo by Roslyn Russell
