Tracking Captain Cook's Tapa Book
A little book – modestly bound, fragrant and full of... cloth. It started as an 18th century Western curio and found its way to the Rare Books Collection at the University of Melbourne. Collected on Captain Cook's journey to the South Pacific, it's become an object of obsession among Western collectors and museum curators alike. The swatches of cloth tell their own tales, of the first trades - sometimes coerced - between cultures, of an ancient Pacific artform practised only by women, and of so much more. In this episode of Uncurated, Clancy Balen and Qiushi Wang explore a side of Captain Cook's story that we weren't taught in primary school.
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Music on this episode was found on Freesound (https://freesound.org/), Looperman (https://www.looperman.com/) and toSound (https://www.tosound.com/).
The outro music is based off 'The Only Instrument of It's Kind In The World' by Ben Salter (https://soundcloud.com/user-839269279/ben-salter-the-only-instrument).
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