Aboriginal artefacts from British Museum on show in Canberra

An exhibition of Aboriginal artefacts from the British Museum raises questions about cultural preservation.

Wool and twine bag, probably from Birdsville, collected in 1891. Picture: The Trustees of the British Museum

It is 250 years since the Admiralty, in 1766, commissioned Lieutenant James Cook to undertake a voyage to the Pacific Ocean, primarily to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti, but also to determine once and for all whether the South Pacific contained a vast unknown continent, the Terra Australis Incognita postulated since antiquity.

Cook set off in 1768, arrived in Tahiti in April 1769, and did not reach the east coast of New Holland, which he was the first to chart, until 1770. So it will be another four years before the official commemoration of this momentous event, which, more than a century after the Dutch had mapped most of the rest of the continent’s coastline, finally revealed land that seemed attractive or even amenable to European settlement, and ultimately proved that New Holland was the only Terra Australis to be found in the south seas.

A quarter of a millennium is a long time in a dynamic society, whether in ancient Rome or in Renaissance Italy. But no period has seen as much change as the past 250 years, in which the whole world has been transformed by the ­Industrial Revolution and subsequent waves of technological innovation, exported from Europe and America to every other continent in the course of colonial expansion and its postcolonial and more recently globalising sequels.

But it is also possible for nothing to change in the course of 250 years; the life of peasants in most parts of the world followed exactly the same rhythm for century after century, whether in antiquity, the Middle Ages or the early modern period — at any time, in fact, before the immense impact of the Industrial Revolution reached beyond the urban centres, which had been the focus of previous technological and social developments.

Tribal cultures change even less, or, to be precise, they do not develop in the linear or progressive fashion we usually associate with the word; they change in a cyclical manner, through a constant process of repetition where even individuals are in a sense identical with their own ancestors. Perhaps it is this radical disjunction between Aboriginal culture and the outlook of the modern world that is responsible for the lamentable disparities and failures of integration between the two peoples after such an extraordinary length of time. How, after so long, can we still be wondering how to induce Aboriginal children to go to school?

Both continuities and discontinuities within Aboriginal tradition emerge from an exhibition in which the British Museum has lent a selection of old and rare objects from the early days of exploration and settlement, and local Aboriginal communities have responded, commented and made new objects relating to those on display.

The items exhibited were collected by a range of amateur ethnologists and were keenly sought after at a time that could be considered the dawn of modern anthropology. The late 18th century was fascinated by natural history — the very name Botany Bay attests to a passion that was common to Banks and Goethe and many other contemporaries — but it was also interested in the peoples of other cultures.

The Enlightenment, though sometimes criticised as Eurocentric or even Gallocentric, gave us the concepts of universal human rights. It was also much more open to non-European civilisations than we often give it credit for. In fact precisely because Enlightenment intellectuals were so often hostile to the church, they delighted in finding that the Chinese or the Persians, for example, had some custom that was more rational than our own.

And even pre-civilised peoples became the object of interest thanks to the idea of the noble savage, which was given enormous impetus by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the middle of the century. In the customs of tribal peoples, it was felt, we could find models of an existence that was closer to nature, and Cook famously observed that if the Aborigines lacked many things that modern Europeans took for granted, they were not perhaps things Europeans really needed.

So it is all the more interesting to think of these early collectors acquiring items that for them illustrated the simple but real necessities of human existence in a particular environment. They were clearly collected with great seriousness, and in many cases given or bequeathed to the Royal Navy’s Haslar Medical Museum from which in 1855 they made their way to the British Museum.

What makes these objects even more valuable, however, is that they are in many cases the oldest surviving examples of their kind, and they would not exist today at all if they had not been acquired, taken away and stored carefully by collectors and then museums. All the tools and artefacts of the time that were not saved in this way were simply used, discarded and left to perish. Their survival is thus the result of a ­curious intersection between the linear idea of time in the West and the cyclical pattern of repetitive time in tribal culture.

The Aborigines had neither the idea of preserving examples of their own handiwork nor any infrastructure that would have made such preservation possible. And why would they take the trouble to do so? As one of the modern Aborigines quite rightly observes, tools and other things were used as long as they were useful, and then they were thrown away and new ones were made to replace them.

So a carved wooden spear, for example, collected in 1800, is really the repetition, the remaking, of one before it. There may have been small differences of decorative patterning or carvings specific to the tribe or clan or the anticipated prey, but such things themselves would be essentially repetitions of traditional motifs. A collector might have bought almost the same spear in 1600 or 1400 — or indeed 1000 or 2000 years earlier.

The collector who acquired one of these spears in 1800 was thus inadvertently interfering in a different chronological universe, almost in the way science-fiction films about time travel delight in imagining. Today this spear returns to the world of the present two centuries after all the other spears of its time have long rotted away into the earth. It would not have made much difference if a spear from 1600 had been rediscovered and shown to a tribesman of 1800, since nothing had really happened in the intervening period. But in the two centuries since 1800, everything has changed for the Aborigines. Cultural continuity has been brutally disrupted by the arrival of Europeans and of the modern world, which — in its present globalised and Eurasian incarnation — has only grown more ruthlessly incompatible with the tribal sense of time.

Consequently, these surviving artefacts, time-travelling to the present as it were from the days of first contact between the two worlds, have become precious evidence of a tradition that has in some cases been wholly lost since then. The contemporary Aborigines who have been asked to comment and respond are of course struck by this extraordinary survival, sometimes of things they still recognise as being made today, or in the recent past, sometimes of things now remote.

Predictably, there are a few who say these objects should be given back to the Aboriginal community, but more often there is a recognition that they would not have survived if they had not been taken away and looked after in London, and gratitude for their conservation. For those who have lost direct connection to their own traditions, these things are moving testimony to ancestral culture.

For some, however, they have a direct relevance to a living practice. Thus one woman who still makes water containers from heavy pieces of kelp, which are moulded like leather, held together with sticks and dried into cup forms, said the examples from the British Museum showed her she was making a mistake in her use of the sticks, and that since studying the old models, she has improved her design.

This is a telling example of the way the ­museum, with its memory bank of artefacts, can come to the aid of a tradition that has started to fray, if it is not entirely broken down. But of course storing things in museums is not a substitute for the continuity of practice and the teaching that passes skills down from hand to hand, as we in the West have experienced too with the loss of traditional skills in many fields. And in the end, relying on the model of the ­museum, of storage and preservation instead of continuous remaking, will prove fatal to that process of cultural repetition.

It is the same with libraries, which allow literate cultures to store almost infinite amounts of information; but that information does not become knowledge until it is animated and actualised in the mind of a living person today. It is interesting, in this regard, to ponder a New Testament written in the Dieri language (1896). ­Bibles have been translated into a number of Aboriginal languages, some of which are barely spoken any longer, and on the face of it, they must be extraordinarily valuable resources for almost lost linguistic traditions.

The problems of translation into languages with a much smaller vocabulary than the original, however, and without words for many of the things and phenomena spoken of by the biblical authors, is staggering enough in itself. And it also suggests some violence must have been done to the original language to bend it to the requirements of the scriptural text. Clearly such a text preserves the language in a certain form; but how easily could a non-English speaker infer even from a modern translation of the Gospel of St Matthew how to speak a fluent spoken idiom today — whether educated or colloquial?

This is an exhibition that is both simple — in its pairing of old artefacts with contemporary comments and objects — and complex in the issues it suggests to the attentive viewer. Perhaps the most striking thing of all is how finely and carefully each of the British Museum pieces has been made.

The Aborigines had a simple material culture, indeed, and yet as Cook perceived, they had nothing they did not need. And above all, those things that they did have — whether spear or woven basket — were extremely well crafted for their purposes. The things they made were vital to survival; they had to work, and they were made with corresponding attention and refinement.

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