More than 50 object biographies have been written as part of the development of the Australian Journeys Gallery. Individually and together, they have revealed some of the complexities of researching, communicating and understanding the interrelated life journeys of people and things. What began in the two cases here as object biographies of a dress and a musical instrument quickly revealed themselves to be interwoven with autobiographies created by the individual donors, and then further entwined with biographies created by the museum’s curators in acquiring and displaying the objects.

In both these examples, in which donors chose to part with their treasured object as part of marking a change in their lives, we had cause to consider the creation of collections as a form of autobiography. When Guna Kinne donated her Latvian national dress to the National Museum of Australia in 1989, she wrote:

When she donated the dress to the museum, Mrs Kinne established a strong link between her own autobiography, the material history of the dress and the larger and longer history of Latvian culture. In the narrative she wrote for the museum, her description of each part of the dress was interwoven with the story of her life history. This account contrasts with her published written autobiography, which focuses more on her Latvian heritage, her flight to Germany and migration to Australia and which mentions her national dress only once.^[40] Through the different media of her book and her dress, she expresses who she is as a person, a Latvian and an Australian, in different ways.

Not all of the object biographies in the gallery weave an individual’s story so closely with that of an object. Objects exert agency in diverse and often interconnected ways: as repositories of memories, mechanisms for the transfer of skills, as sites for negotiating cultural frameworks, as arenas for imaginative escape, modes of connecting with lost family, or metonyms for other places or things. In every case, however, objects work as conduits for simultaneous experience, collapsing geographical, temporal and perceptual differences. As people engage with them, the objects enable them to simultaneously experience and mediate multiple times, places and modes of being.

This, we hope, will also be true for visitors to the gallery as they encounter the objects in the exhibits. The display of Guna Kinne’s dress and Minh Tam Nguyen’s dàn tre in the Australian Journeys Gallery will represent a very different kind of transnational biography to those conveyed here in words. Exhibition making can also be seen as a form of biography, one that is non-linear, associational and that actively involves the experiences of the visitor.^[41] While preparing the text versions of object biographies, we noted how difficult it was to write so that the agency of people and objects—and the sensory and non-linear character of object knowledge—was retained within a biographical narrative. It will be instructive to compare these different biographies when the gallery opens.

The preparation of object biographies as part of the development of these and other exhibits in the Australian Journeys Gallery suggests that objects play a particularly important role in the shaping of transnational lives. Changes in a person’s location necessarily generate new interactions between a person and a different material world. These interactions—and efforts to sustain previous interactions by continuing to use, make and treasure objects from another place—shape how a person experiences their life across multiple places. Paying close attention to how a person absorbs, rejects, accommodates and reinvents these forms reveals valuable information about the nature and meaning of those experiences.