About Winifred Glover
Winifred Glover was the first dedicated Curator of Ethnography at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, where she began work in 1967. In addition to curating collections from Ancient Egypt, she was responsible for human history items from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. These were displayed in the gallery dubbed the ‘boat room’, as it is the location of the 39-foot tomako (war canoe), taken from the Solomon Islands by John Casement of the Royal Navy in 1897. This is now the Inclusive Global Histories gallery. Winifred curated sixteen exhibitions from the Museum’s collections, and wrote associated publications, including Land of the Brave (1978), Polynesia (1987), Travelling at Port Phillip (1988), Realms of the Pacific (1994), and Exploring the Spanish Armada (2000). Before her retirement, she worked on the refurbishment of the Museum’s exhibitions, until it reopened to the public in 2009.
“You couldn’t help but be attracted to the idea of freedom. Freedom, you know, that sort of thing. The freedom thing. It was tremendously attractive. I think it still is for people, right? That’s why people trudge away off and they travel all around deserts and all sorts of – because they want to find out and they want to get away from really well I suppose a lot of civilisation as we live in nowadays or what’s called civilisation. And I think that idea of freedom and almost being in a way self-sufficient.”
In Conversation with Winifred Glover
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