Person

Bundock, Mary Ellen (1845 - 1924)

Born
February 1845
Merton, New South Wales, Australia
Died
9 April 1924
Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Occupation
Anthropological collector
Alternative Names
  • Murray-Prior, Mary Ellen (married name)

Summary

Mary Bundock was, from childhood, interested in Aboriginal culture. Growing up on the Wyangerie Station on Richmond River, New South Wales, she and her sister Alice spent much time with the women of the local Bundjalung people, learning their language, observing their basket-making, listening to songs and stories. Mary documented and collected objects made by the women. Some of the material she collected was exhibited in international exhibitions such as Chicago and Amsterdam. The Mary Bundock Collection in the Australian Museum (reference number AM0042) was collected between 1870 and 1897. Other objects collected she sent to overseas institutions, including the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, Netherlands. Bundock seems to have ceased collecting in the late 1890s.

Skip to

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Books

  • Marcus, Julie, First in their field: women and Australian anthropology (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989), 205 pp. Details

Book Sections

  • McBryde, Isabel, 'Museum collections from the Richmond River District' in Records of times past: ethnohistorical essays of the culture and ecology of the New England tribes, McBryde, Isabel, ed. (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1978), pp. 135-201. Details
  • McBryde, Isabel, 'Miss Mary, ethnography and the inheritance of concern: Mary Ellen Murray-Prior' in First in Their Field: Women and Australian Anthropology, Marcus, Julie, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989), pp. 14-45. Details

Journal Articles

  • Grimshaw, Patricia and Evans, Julie, 'Colonial Women on Intercultural Frontiers: Rosa Campbell Praed, Mary Bundock and Katie Langloh Parker', Australian Historical Studies, 27 (106) (1996), 79-95. Details
  • McBryde, Isabel, 'A remarkable life - Mary Ellen Murray-Prior and her contribution to Australian ethnography', Richmond River Historical Society bulletin, 160 (1997), 3-8. Details
  • Syme, Ella, 'Material histories: Mary Bundock, Bundjalung objects,and the making of a collection in nineteenth-centuryNew South Wales', History Australia, 26 (3) (2026), 1-22, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2026.2695107. Details

Helen Cohn

Created: 27 October 2026, Last modified: 29 October 2026

EOAS ID: biogs/P008190b.htm

This Edition: 2026 November - Keith Boardman (1926-2026) Memorial Edition
Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - Early summer: mid-November to late January
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-ballambar-season-of-butterflies

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P008190b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260