Significant Aboriginal objects come back to Country after 200 years
Aboriginal communities, families, Elders and makers will for the first time have direct access to 30 ancestral objects removed from Country around 200 years ago when the exhibition Wadgayawa Nhay Dhadjan Wari (they made them a long time ago) opens at the State Library of NSW, from Saturday 7 October.
“These extraordinary objects – adornments, weapons, containers and tools – were collected from the Sydney region and coastal NSW between 1790s and 1890s,” says Noeleen Timbery, La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. “Some were probably stolen, but our people also traded their objects and made them for sale.
“When they were taken away, no information was recorded about the people who made them or how they were acquired, and they have been largely ‘asleep’ in overseas institutions ever since,” she says.
The exhibition is part of a larger project, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), to bring a selection of objects back to Country and rebuild knowledge and understanding with Aboriginal communities working alongside historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, scientists and curators.
Noeleen says this work to bring objects back on Country must be led by Community “so they can be wrapped again in knowledge, language and culture. This is a first step in a much longer journey. We do not yet know where that journey will lead, but we know it has begun and we won’t turn back.”
The 30 objects, held by five cultural institutions across the United Kingdom, were selected by members of the La Perouse community to travel back to Sydney.
When exploring the exhibition, visitors will mostly see traditional objects from Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) and Botany Bay, as well as a few from the Shoalhaven River and Port Stephens regions.
The exhibition includes a bark container (or ‘workbox’) – the only known surviving one of its kind – which would have been used to carry work tools such as fishing lines and hooks, as well as food like shellfish and water. They resemble the design of bark canoes (nawi) used in the coastal Sydney region. There are also objects likely to have been collected within years of the British arriving, such as the parrying shield made of grey gum or the spearthrower with a Venus shell insert held together with gum resin.