‘Pioneers of culture’: Australian natural history and the German colonial imaginary

Many contemporary efforts to attend to the coloniality of nineteenth-century natural collections rely on the reconceptualization of items held in these collections as cultural belongings. After describing the significance of this development, the article seeks to complicate the hope invested in 'culture' in this particular context. It argues that it resonates rather strangely, at least with the German historical record, where a particular understanding of natural history as performing the work of culture was articulated at precisely the time these collections were being made. With a particular focus on what nineteenth-century German-language publications wrote about Richard Schomburgk, a Prussian-trained naturalist and long-time director of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, it analyses how German-speaking actors moving within British colonial networks were framed as 'pioneers of culture'. The article argues that the figure of the 'pioneer of culture' embodied a German investment, real and imagined, in Anglophone settler colonialism; that it helped to describe natural history collecting as central rather than peripheral to this colonial imaginary; and that it denoted a wilful refusal to acknowledge the violent nature of both enterprises.