What these spears tell us about Captain Cook’s contact with Indigenous people
Rare Aboriginal spears seized by Captain Cook’s crew in 1770 are back home and about to go on display. Their symbolism ‘is huge’.
‘We however thought it no improper measure to take away with us all the lances which we could find about the houses, amounting in number to forty or fifty.’’ – Botanist Joseph Banks on Captain James Cook’s party removing Aboriginal spears from Botany Bay (Kamay) in April 1770
They lie side-by-side on calico pillows and tyvec – the same type of polyethylene fibre used to make hazmat suits – in the conservation lab at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum.
These four Aboriginal fishing spears were clearly designed to be useful rather than objects of ornamentation and display. Made from wood, three have prongs while the fourth is honed to a single, sharp point like a javelin. One of the triple-pronged spears is secured with kangaroo sinew and sealed with black resin made from organic plant material. Two of the spears have kinks in their shafts.
At first glance, these handcrafted implements, known as the Gweagal spears, seem incongruous in this hi-tech museum lab, with its emergency shower station (used to deal with rare chemical spills) and enormous extractor fan that rises from floor to ceiling like a prehistoric caterpillar.
However, these fishing spears are being kept in this carefully-controlled environment for a reason: They are fragile – and incredibly rare. They are the same “lances” that were taken – or stolen – from Botany Bay by Captain James Cook’s party during their first recorded contact with Australia’s Indigenous people on April 29, 1770.
According to Cook’s and Banks’s journals, the spears were collected after Cook’s crew shot at Aboriginal men who tried to prevent the HMB Endeavour crew from landing on their territory.
These Gweagal men, whose descendants still live in the Botany Bay and La Perouse area, ran away after a musket was fired three times and one of them was struck.
Indigenous heritage activist Raymond Ingrey says the symbolism of the spears “is huge’’, as they represent “the first point of contact between the British and Aboriginal people in this (eastern) part of Australia. It’s where our shared history between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people started. It’s where Australia, as we know it today, began.’’
Now, these recently repatriated spears will be the main attraction in an exhibition that focuses on Indigenous fishing traditions at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum.
Opening on April 5, the exhibition is titled Mungari: Fishing, Resistance, Return. (Mungari is an Indigenous word that refers to a fishing songline in Dharawal culture, the broader group to which the Gweagal clan belongs.)
Chau Chak Wing’s curator of Indigenous heritage, Marika Duczynski, says the spears are “hugely significant” and “have a palpable presence for me – I do often get stopped in my tracks when I see them here”.
Ingrey, a Dharawal man from Kamay (Botany Bay), believes the two Gweagal men on the shore on that tense April day in 1770 were attempting to warn the Endeavour crew “to not come onto their country – in Aboriginal culture, going onto somebody else’s country without permission was actually against the law of the day”. He also says the men who threw stones and spears as they resisted the British coming ashore thought these alien figures were “ghosts” – spirits that had returned from the dead.
In April 2024, amid a flurry of headlines, Cambridge University repatriated the Gweagal spears to the La Perouse community and its heritage-focused Gujaga Foundation, where Ingrey was the founding chairperson.
He attended the repatriation ceremony – the culmination of years of lobbying by La Perouse elders – at Trinity College and says it “was an experience I will not forget’’.
Professor Nicholas Thomas, director of Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, tells Review the spears “are really of very exceptional importance. They are the material legacy of that confrontation (in April 1770), that moment of misunderstanding, that moment of Indigenous resistance at the very start of the British intrusion onto country”.
“(They) materialise that initial moment of intrusion that, of course, inevitably foreshadows the history of dispossession. But I think what’s really special about them is … they also exemplify the daily life, the subsistence activities of the people who were at that place, at that time.’’
Thomas and other experts say the spears’ provenance is well established: in 1771, Cook gave them, along with other artefacts collected on his first Pacific voyage, to his patron, Lord Sandwich of the Admiralty. Sandwich, in turn, gave them to his alma mater, Trinity College at Cambridge University. They were subsequently transferred to Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1914.
Professor Thomas says the spears were repatriated last year because of their “exceptional” significance to the Gweagal people and the broader Australian community – and because they were taken from their traditional owners in the aftermath of violence.
He says most of the artefacts collected from Cook’s first Pacific expedition (1768-1771) “were, so far as we know, gifted or bartered or otherwise fairly traded … between (Pacific) Islanders and the European mariners’’. In contrast, Cook’s and Banks’s journals document how the spears were taken in the aftermath of the 1770 confrontation at Botany Bay.
Previously loaned to the National Museum of Australia and the Chau Chak Wing Museum, they will be held at the latter institution until they can be permanently displayed at a new visitors’ centre being constructed at Kurnell, close to where they were seized in 1770.
Duczynski believes the high-profile repatriation of the spears will “set a really interesting precedent for future repatriations’’. She says that in the past, Indigenous objects repatriated from overseas museums were limited to ancestral remains and secret sacred objects. Yet the spears are “everyday items”.
She says: “What museums have supported in the past has often been the repatriation of secret sacred objects or the repatriation of ancestral remains. But these spears are fishing spears – they are everyday objects of utility. … I think it may well set an interesting precedent of future requests for similar objects to return home.’’
Ingrey doesn’t necessarily argue for the wholesale return of Indigenous artefacts from UK and European museums. He points out that if the Gweagal artefacts had not been housed at Cambridge University and its archaeology museum “for those 254 years, we wouldn’t be looking at the spears today’’.
He agrees, however, that their repatriation highlighted Indigenous communities’ requests for cultural materials to be returned or loaned. He says British and especially European museums hold tens of thousands of Indigenous objects acquired during the colonial era, but rarely display them publicly.
“(They) sit in basements,’’ he says. “They’re not even on display for visitors to see, so we’re saying, ‘Loan them to us if you don’t want to return them to our custodianship, so that we can put them on display for people to see here in Australia’.’’
He believes UK museums are open to such loans and to using new information from Indigenous experts that corrects misinformation about artefacts in their collections. He says: “It’s a two-way street. It’s not just museums returning objects.’’ In 2023, the State Library of NSW displayed 30 Indigenous objects held by five UK cultural institutions that were acquired in Sydney and coastal NSW during the early colonial period. Interestingly, these tools, weapons and adornments were chosen for that exhibition by members of the La Perouse community.
In the Mungari exhibition, historic Indigenous objects including a woomera and shell fish hooks will be displayed alongside contemporary fishing objects and the Gweagal spears. The exhibition will include modern spears fashioned by Gweagal elder Rod Mason and a film that explores the craft of spear-making and the journey of the repatriated spears. “By showing old and new, the intention is to showcase cultural continuity,’’ says Duczynski.
The curator argues that Cook’s party removed 40 to 50 spears from Gweagal people’s homes in 1770 because of a misunderstanding about the implements’ purpose: “The crew of the Endeavour didn’t realise that they were fishing spears … that is what the journals suggest.’’ Instead, they feared the fishing tools might be hunting spears with poison tips that could be used against them. This is why they collected so many, says the curator, depriving the Gweagal clan of their means to catch fish and sustain themselves.
“It was theft by their own admission,’’ Duczynski says, adding: “Misunderstanding abounds throughout this kind of story, and I think the Mungari exhibition in particular will be a really great way for people to learn about that encounter that is so storied from the perspective of the people on the shore. And that’s not the perspective that we learn about in schools, necessarily, but it is a vital one.’’
Do we know what happened to the dozens of other spears taken by Cook’s party? Professor Thomas says it’s a “fascinating” question but adds: “We don’t know how many actually came on the Endeavour all the way back to England. … It seems to be clear that apart from the spears that were in Cambridge, there were at least a dozen, if not more, that were in English collections in the years immediately after the voyage, which presumably came from that (first contact) moment in 1770.’’
Researchers have not yet tracked down these spears, if they still exist. However, investigations are continuing, says the museum director, who hints that “it may be in coming years that more artefacts from that (Cook) encounter will be identified’’.
When the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia teamed up in 2015 and 2016 to present twin exhibitions, in London and Canberra, of early Indigenous objects from the UK institution’s collection, the star object was not the Gweagal spears but a shield that had also been linked to the first contact encounter of April 29, 1770.
However, in a 2017 paper, Professor Thomas concluded the shield “is not the one taken from (the) Gweagal in April 1770’’. He says of his shock finding: “The identities of things in museums are often more uncertain than labels and catalogues would lead people to think, and this is a case where there was a plausible identification, but one that turned out to be incorrect.’’
It is now widely agreed that the shield is made from a red mangrove wood not found in the Sydney area, and that a hole thought to be made when Cook’s party shot at the Gweagal warriors was not made by a bullet. Moreover, the shield’s shape is different to that of a 1771 shield drawing commissioned by Banks.
The British Museum’s website now says that the shield, “irrespective of any association with Cook, is of significance as probably the oldest known shield from Australia in any collection’’.
Asked about the BM’s altered position, Duczynski says: “It probably says more about the negligence of museum record-keeping throughout time than anything else, or perhaps a lack of understanding about cultural objects at the point of collection.” She says that when it comes to legacy museum collections, more is often known about the collectors than the objects they acquired, or the objects’ source communities.
Happily, there is no confusion over the Gweagal spears’ provenance. Professor Thomas believes their symbolic and historical power “has been enhanced by their return. In Cambridge they were exceptionally significant objects in the museum. But they are more significant now.’’
Mungari: Fishing, Resistance, Return opens at the Chau Chak Wing Museum on April 5.
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