Melanie van Olffen

Melanie van Olffen coordinates the operational side of the First Nations Cultural and Archaeology collections with a team of dedicated collection officers. Drawing on 20 years of experience in collection management, collection research, and digitsation of cultural collections in both Australia and overseas, she is passionate about facilitating access to the First Nations collections by community in order to enable and nurture ongoing connections with cultural objects in the collection.

Melanie started her museum career in 2000 at the Wereld Museum in Amsterdam as loans registrar and collection researcher, and after moving to the U.S.A. gained more experience as volunteer at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh assisting in the Oceania Collections, alongside her post-graduate studies.

At the Australian Museum she first joined the Cultural Collections team in 2005, but in 2012 moved to Fiji with her family for four years where she implemented a collection database system and led a collection storage upgrade project as Consultant Curator at the Oceania Centre’s Gallery at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, as well as working closely with colleagues at the Fiji Museum. Back in the Netherlands she joined the Board of the Aboriginal Art Museum Utrecht and worked outside the museum sector for a few years. Since rejoining the Australian Museum’s First Nations Division in 2022, Melanie now coordinates the operational side of the First Nations Cultural and Archaeology collections, under direction of the First Nations’ leadership team.

• Master’s degree in Arts & Culture (Radboud University, Netherlands)
• Graduate Diploma in Development Studies (University of the South Pacific, Fiji)
• Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

• Lawson, A., Eklund, P. W., Goodall, P., Wray, T., Daniel, V. & Van Olffen, M. (2010). Designing a digital ecosystem for the new museum environment: the Virtual Museum of the Pacific. In H. Yeatman (ed.), The SInet 2010 eBook (pp. 227-239).
• Ocean crossings: the material traces of voyaging. Contemporary perspectives on Pacific Islander voyaging, investigating archaeological evidence and museum displays. Vaka Moana Series, presentation at National Museum of Australia, July 2009.
• Eklund, Peter, Peter Goodall, Tim Wray, Vinod Daniel, and Melanie Van Olffen. (2009) "Folksonomy with practical taxonomy, a design for social metadata of the Virtual Museum of the Pacific." In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Technology and Applications, pp. 112-117.
• Olffen van, M. (2008) Anthropology collections' contribution in: McPhee, J. (ed.) Great Collections of the Art Gallery NSW, Australian Museum, Botanic Houses Trust, Historic Houses Trust, Museums of Contemporary Art, State Library of NSW, State Records NSW. Sydney: Museums & Galleries NSW