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A Case of Identity: The Artefacts of the 1770 Kamay (Botany Bay) Encounter
Abstract
Collections of Indigenous artefacts made during the voyages of Captain James Cook have been extensively researched, but significant issues around the provenance and identification of artefacts remain complex and unresolved. This article considers the case of a shield in the British Museum, said for fifty years to have been appropriated by Cook at the time of first contacts with Gweagal in April 1770, and other artefacts associated with the same encounters.
... In doing so, the paper builds on the work of similar-minded researchers (e.g., Bolton 2003;Clifford 1997Clifford , 2013Golding & Modest 2013;Gosden & Knowles 2001;Harrison et al. 2010;Harrison, Byrne, & Clark 2013;Herle 2003;Horwood 2019;Karp, Kratz, Szwaja, & Ybarra-Frausto 2006;Peers & Brown 2003;Sandell 2003;Sleeper-Smith 2009 This article seeks to re-center the decolonizing discourse to look at the interventions that have led to museum collections being reenvisioned, repositioned, and reactivated in the present and for posterity, particularly through the engagement of Indigenous people with their cultural patrimony. These interventions involve a sensitive and critical approach to reframing and scrutinizing collections-deconstructing, reconnecting, and reassembling dispersed elements within and between museums, and disentangling the artificial layers of 'noise' that disguise their essential nature and histories (see Thomas 1991Thomas , 2018Ham by 2008;Harrison, Byrne, & Clark 2013;Allen & Hamby 2016;Nugent & Sculthorpe 2018;Torrence, Bonshek, Clark, Davies, Philp, & Quinnell 2020). These interventions combine to return the essence or 'feelings' that archaeologist Denis Byrne identifies as missing in relation to Australia's immovable cultural heritage. ...
... The design bears a striking resemblance to a shield photographed with a man known as Guangnurd or Redman of the 'Goulbourne tribe'; which refers to Taungerong [sic] people whose land includes the Goulburn River. (Jones 2015: 78) Nicholas Thomas's caution against misreading or misrepresenting the connections of ob jects in museum collections and ensuring myths are neither created nor perpetuated (see Nugent & Sculthorpe 2018;Thomas 2018) highlights the critical importance of getting things right and putting them back in the right order, as it was for the Daygurrgurr and others (see above). Similarly, it was important for the Lamalama to learn more about their past through the Port Stewart component of the Donald Thomson Collection. ...
Museums continue to be cast as anachroinstic - 'weary', 'tired', and 'out of touch' - trophy houses embedded in the colonial past, with object collections considered the hollow remnants of that past. This article in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea contests this notion and reveals how museums have emerged over the past fifty years as active field sites where Indigenous communities, scholars, artists, and artisans in the Pacific have been and are engaging with their cultural patrimony. This approach has seen new meanings and readings of, and new life breathed into, these collections in ways never imagined or anticipated. The museum is a space where differing epistemologies have engaged, conflicted, and negotiated, and enabling the reshaping and recovery of meanings within the things held in collections; a process that sits at the centre of the current decolonizing discourse. For Indigenous people, these museum holdings are a unique and tangible link to the past that can perhaps be found only in memory. The article provides a more nuanced understanding of the complexities associated with museum collections and their enduring legacies realized through the engagement of Indigenous people with their cultural patrimony.
... It reads: "CAP.COOK." [2]. In addition to navigator Captain James Cook, associated names in the online collection record include Sir Joseph Banks, and their ship the HMS Endeavour. ...
... The shield was presented in this historical context in the 89th episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects, and in both the Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation exhibition at the British Museum in London (2015) and the subsequent Encounters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra (2015-2016) [47,48]. While some, like museum director and curator Nicholas Thomas, question the shield's provenance [2], it has become a cultural touchstone, symbolising the violent dispossesion of Aboriginal Australians by Europeans and highlighting the inextricable link between colonisation and collecting. In the words of Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones: "We do know that Australia's collection methodology started with Captain Cook stealing shields after shooting at someone. ...
In 2017 archaeological evidence was published which indicates that modern humans first arrived in Australia around 65,000 years ago. Through the countless generations since, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples built deep connections to the landscape, developed rich material culture infused with story and myth, and used oral and ceremonial traditions to transmit knowledge over thousands of years. Yet, since European invasion at the end of the eighteenth century, the provenance of ethnographic and institutional collections has largely been documented with reference to white collectors and colonial institutions. Attitudes are starting to change. Recent decades have seen significant moves away from the idea of the authoritative institution toward relational museums and the co-creation of knowledge. But the structure and content of much museum documentation continues to lag behind contemporary attitudes. This paper looks at the documentation of Australian ethnographic and anthropological collections through the lens of changing perspectives on provenance, including archival notions of parallel and societal provenance. When placed in the context of recent developments in material culture theory, these collections help to highlight the limitations of existing documentation. The paper concludes with a call for community involvement and a more relational approach to documentation which better encompasses the complexities of provenance and the entangled institutional, archival, oral, and community perspectives that accumulate around artefacts in museums.
... The repatriation claim has to date been unsuccessful, largely due to the questionable interpretative leaps made by some of the claimants and the differences of opinion within the Aboriginal community about the object's future. These engagements have nonetheless generated new historical knowledge about the shield via intensive scholarship (Thomas 2018), produced incredibly positive collaborations between the relevant communities and museum professionals and academics, and stimulated the emergence of new Indigenous-led research and artistic practice. ...
... On account of the legal problematic explored above, it is complicated to demand these items are ''sent back'' to where they belong without a stronger basis of legal aid. However, according to Nicholas Thomas (2018), the Australian Senate and the New South Wales Legislative Council, along with the Gweagal Aboriginal community itself, back Rodney Kelly's petitions, seeking to establish a clear precedent with this restitution, that could pave the way for other causes of recovery of Aboriginal cultural material (9f). Thus, it may be only a matter of time before legal measurements are established. ...
For decades, the British Museum has been displaying an object in its collection as the shield which was used by Gweagal men defending against Cook's landing at Kamay in 1770. Following a loan of the shield to the National Museum of Australia in 2015/2016, Gweagal man Rodney Kelly lodged a claim with the British Museum asking for the shield to be repatriated. Soon after, the British Museum facilitated and partly funded research which aimed 'to test the argument-or widely held belief-that the shield was collected at Botany Bay in 1770' (Nugent and Sculthorpe 2018, 37). The research all but concluded that the shield was not collected at Cook's landing, and that that shield, if it exists, is now lost (Thomas 2018, 25). Despite this questioning of the shield's identity, it remains on prominent display in the British Museum's Enlightenment room. In this article, I critically examine the new research on the shield, making two related arguments. I argue first that the research is conceptually limited because it assumes that the Gweagal shield is an empirically definable object of property, and second that the research is practically limited because it has been produced in a material context through which the British Museum has reasserted its control and possession of the shield. Engaging with a range of scholarship that uses different methodologies from those used in the research in question, I argue that the 'truth' about the Legalities 3.2 (2023): 136-162
This article analyses the case of the dispute over the return of the Aboriginal shield from the collection of the British Museum, which up to 2018 was believed to have come from the First Contact with the Aboriginal people made by the crew of captain James Cook. The arguments exchanged between the parties are studied from the perspective of the theory of hard cases. The claim for the return expressed by Rodney Kelly is supported mostly by the arguments based on justice, and both personal and cultural affiliation. The British Museum responded to the claim with results of research questioning the provenance of the shield. The relevance of the research is evaluated in the context of the symbolic significance of the case. The author believes that application of the theory of hard cases allows to broaden the debate beyond the scope of positive law.
This chapter argues that modern research into colonial object provenances is frustrated by a poor knowledge of the motivations, methodologies, and networks of historical naval collectors. Asserting that an enduring fascination with the voyages of James Cook has overshadowed and prejudiced understandings of subsequent imperial surveys, the chapter explores the intellectual world of nineteenth-century naval scientific research. The chapter offers a much-needed summary of the existence and genesis of the Admiralty instructions that served to guide ethnographic collecting. It looks, too, at the multitudinous scientific and colonial functions that naval ethnographic specimens fulfilled. The chapter’s examination of the imperial supply of ‘trade gear’ demonstrates that collecting was a product of significant investment, and links the analysis of foreign material culture with commercial exploitation.
Heritage Justice explores how far past wrongs can be remedied through compensatory mechanisms involving material culture. The Element goes beyond a critique of global heritage brokers such as UNESCO, the ICC and museums as redundant, Eurocentric and elitist to explore why these institutions have become the focus for debates about global heritage justice. Three broad modes of compensatory mechanisms are identified: recognition, economic reparation and return. Arguing against Jenkins (2016) that museums should not be the site for difficult conversations about the past, Heritage Justice proposes that it is exactly the space around objects and sites created by museums and global institutions that allows for conversations about future dignity. The challenge for cultural practitioners is to broaden out ideas of material identity beyond source communities, private property and economic value to encompass dynamic global shifts in mobility and connectivity.
This paper explores the capacity for objects entangled in complex - and often painful - histories to become constituted of multiple agencies (Gell 1998) through their interaction with various actants in complex and ever-expanding networks of association (Latour 1993; 2005). It does so by analysing how such objects become symbols for multiple histories, presences, and political agendas throughout their social lives (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). The paper also examines how these objects influence and construct the pathways of their social lives through their polyagency. ‘Polyagency’ reflects a theory of object agency that I have developed through engaging literature on materiality and agency (Gell 1998), consumption and object movement (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986), and networks of relationality (Latour 2005). It considers the multiple gathered identities that objects come to embody through the sum of their interactions with various human actors during the objects’ social lives - agencies which then become efficacious in later interactions with people. The productivity of this theory is demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of a complicated repatriation case involving the Gweagal Spears, currently owned by Trinity College and held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. This application illustrates the impact that innovations in theory and repatriation cases can have on the perceived role of museums regarding object return, decolonisation and reconciliation efforts through relationship-building with source communities.
This article discusses an Aboriginal shield in the British Museum which is widely believed to have been used in the first encounter between Lieutenant James Cook's expedition and the Gweagal people at Botany Bay in late April 1770. It traces the ways in which the shield became ‘Cook-related’, and increasingly represented and exhibited in that way. In the wake of its exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in late 2015 and early 2016, the shield gained further public prominence and has become enmeshed within a wider politics of reconciliation. A recent request from the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council to the British Museum to review knowledge about the shield has contributed to a reappraisal of claims about its connection to Cook's 1770 expedition. Preliminary findings of this review are presented. In the process, the article addresses larger questions concerning the politics surrounding the interpretation of the shield as a historically ‘loaded’ object.
This paper explores inter-group signalling behaviour of hunter-fisher-gatherers living in arid and temperate coastal regions in Holocene Australia. We examine shield designs in the rock art of two visually similar engraved art provinces on opposite sides of the Australian continent: Port Hedland and Sydney. We explore the question of inter-group social signalling behaviour in arid versus fertile environments by testing the stylistic heterogeneity of shield designs in both art provinces. We examine the stylistic diversity of historically-collected and illustrated shields from both regions, and compare these with the engraved repertoires of the two style provinces. One of the precepts of information exchange theory (IET) is that publicly-displayed items/artefacts will provide the best vehicles for projecting cultural identity information. We assume that shields, as items of material culture which are carried publically, would have been ideally suited to signal individual, local and broader group identity. In more fertile areas it is usually argued that hunter-gatherers demonstrate increased territoriality and social boundedness as a result of demographic packing and focused resources, compared to groups in arid areas where there are widely ramified social networks. We test the hypothesis that a greater degree of stylistic heterogeneity should be displayed by engraved Sydney shields compared to those found in Port Hedland. However, our analyses demonstrate the reverse of this prediction. We suggest some alternative explanations for how style has been used in the arid coastal Pilbara, and suggest refinement is needed of some expectations in information exchange theory in arid zones where there is focalised resource availability and extreme language hybridity.