Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines some of the ways the collection and loss of artefacts from North Queensland has contributed to successive regionalisations of the area's indigenous cultures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper outlines some of the ways early artefact collecting contributed to the definition of the region around Cairns now known and marketed as the 'World Heritage Wet Tropics'. Reviewing the collecting activities of Hermann Klaatsch, Walter Roth and Norman Tindale the paper outlines how various factors, including their interpretive frameworks and market demands, contributed to the kinds of 'representative' collections they made. The paper shows how variations in our three collectors' definitions of the typicality and uniqueness of their collections involved changing understandings of the wider 'region'. We argue that these understandings of region, and the now widely dispersed artefacts, maintain a lively, albeit transformed, presence in current debates about Aboriginal regional culture, linking assertions of rights to lost and stolen cultural property with notions of large scale environmental management within the 'Wet Tropics'.