In the late nineteenth century, the islands of the southwest Pacific played host to a number of Europeans keen to collect items of local material culture, and photograph Indigenous inhabitants. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery holds a collection of such photographs and artefacts, which act as a microcosm of the many interconnected imperial institutional networks of collection and exchange which stimulated the cultural production of knowledge of race and anthropology in the British Empire. This paper reflects upon archaeological methods of inquiry into museum archives and how such methods may aid in ‘decolonising’ museums and their modes of cultural production into the present. Collections of Oceanic photography and artefacts are scattered throughout multiple Australian cultural institutions; however, they are infrequently displayed despite representing some of the largest and most valuable collections of their kind. Theoretically and historically deconstructing TMAG’s collection illustrates the connection of museum collections to histories of Indigenous agency and resistance, the legacies of colonial racism in the Pacific, and the often overlooked entanglements between Australia and our closest island neighbours, which have continuing contemporary political significance.