National Museum of Australia resurrects close encounters

Rare indigenous artefacts collected in the early days of white settlement are coming home from Britain for the first time.

National Museum of Australia images to run Nov 20/daily arts page -- British Museum/indigenous exhibition called Encounters Caption: On Murray Island 1892 painting by Tom Roberts donated by the artist in 1922 Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum

It began amicably enough. On a winter’s day in 1821, the crew of HMS Bathurst encountered the Worrorra people at Hanover Bay, a landscape of soaring red bluffs, big skies and deep blue seas, in northwest Western Australia.

Despite the spectacular surroundings, nerves were frayed; neither the party on board HMS Bathurst, led by Australian-born explorer Phillip Parker King, nor the local Worrorra tribe knew or trusted each other.

Once King’s party offered the traditional landowners fresh fish, the mood shifted — the locals reciprocated, giving the ship’s crew a belt and club. Sadly, the conviviality did not last.

Soon after the goods were exchanged, the ship’s surgeon was speared in the back (he survived). The following day, the Europeans retaliated by shooting a local indigenous man in the shoulder.

During this revenge attack, King helped himself to Worrorra implements, including a stone spearhead with almost perfectly symmetrical serrations.

At once elegant and lethal, that spearhead found its way into the collections of the British Museum. Freighted with the violence, misunderstanding and panic of that Hanover Bay incident, it will feature in Encounters, an ambitious National Museum of Australia exhibition that opens in Canberra on November 27.

The culmination of a history-making partnership between the National Museum and the British Museum, Encounters will showcase more than 150 items from the BM’s highly regarded Australian indigenous collection, as well as dozens of works by contemporary indigenous artists.

Most of the BM objects — including a shield collected at Botany Bay in 1770 — have not been exhibited in Australia since they were collected in the early days of European settlement.

Encounters follows a closely related, critically acclaimed exhibition of indigenous treasures that opened at the BM in April. That exhibition — Europe’s first major survey of Australia’s indigenous history told through artefacts — was opened by Prince Charles, patron of the London and Canberra shows, who visited the NMA last week.

NMA director Mat Trinca says the sister exhibitions comprise the Canberra museum’s most ambi­tious project to date. He reiterates: “This is the most important work the museum has done.’’

Peter Yu, chairman of the NMA’s indigenous reference group, says the return of the BM artefacts to these shores “begins a new chapter in the story of the nation’s history. By celebrating the uniqueness and resilience of Australia’s first peoples — from first contact in 1770 to modern times — the Encounters exhibition will provoke serious reflection on the evolution of our shared experiences and history.’’

One of the Canberra show’s objectives is to deepen Australians’ understanding of the breadth of relationships between indigenous people and Europeans, as white settlement advanced inexorably across the continent. Artefacts sourced from the BM’s collection were acquired in the aftermath of frontier violence, but also through trade, friendship and gift-giving.

Says Trinca: “It’s why I think this exhibition is so important, because it asks us to consider with greater precision and care the complexities of what transpired in this country, both those narratives that are wholly expected and known to us now, and also those that are more unexpected.’’

One of the closest cross-cultural relationships on the frontier was that between Alexander Collie, the first government resident at Albany in Western Australia, and his Aboriginal guide, Mokare. These men formed such a strong bond, they eventually were buried side by side. A traditional axe and knives collected by Collie in the early 1830s (possibly with Mok­are’s help) will feature prominently in Encounters.

The exhibition also boasts the world’s oldest known didgeridoo. Resembling a flute, it is made from bamboo, and at 99cm long it’s smaller than the didgeridoos we are familiar with today. Collected from the Northern Territory’s Port Essington area before 1844, this type of didgeridoo is rarely seen today, but a similar instrument features in a startling image, published in 1835, that will also appear in Encounters. This image shows 11 traditional Aboriginal men and two British soldiers enjoying a night-time corroboree in Fort Wellington. the temporary (and often strife-torn) Northern Territory settlement.

Wearing a wrinkled top hat, one soldier claps in time to the music. Even more startling, a senior British officer, a commandant, stands with his arms slung casually around the shoulders of two naked indigenous men. On the ground sits another Aboriginal man playing a reed-like didgeridoo.

Given its depiction of soldiers and Aborigines partying together, the corroboree image, originally published in the book Narrative of a Voyage Round the World, “stunned’’ Don Christophersen, an indigenous Northern Territory man who was consulted for Encounters.

Trinca calls the drawing “incredible’’. “It’s an important image,’’ argues the museum director, “in that it alerts us to the sheer complexity of what took place on the Australian frontier.

“These are the other narratives in our past, apart from the undoubted and repeated episodes of violence on the frontier that led to deaths on both sides, but disproportionately deaths among Aboriginal Australians.’’

As previously reported in The Australian, Encounters’ star exhibit is a large wooden shield collected by Captain James Cook’s crew at Botany Bay in 1770. Thought to have been made by the Gweagal people, this large, unadorned shield, with a ragged spear hole near its centre, is the oldest Aboriginal artefact taken from the mainland. It transports us back to those first, fraught moments of contact between British colonisers and indigenous people on Australia’s east coast. The shield was collected (along with fishing spears) after Cook’s party shot at two Aboriginal men who tried to resist the landing of HMB Endeavour. The men eventually ran away, after one was struck by a bullet. Despite its overwhelming historical significance, the shield has never been exhibited here.

The joint exhibitions are the culmination of seven years’ work and have involved the biggest consultation in the NMA’s history. The museum’s curators (alongside some BM staff) travelled to 27 urban, regional and remote indigenous communities that had historical links to BM artefacts; some clans had no idea that jewellery, sculpture, weapons and artworks potentially created by their ancestors were in the BM’s collections. (Representatives from all the consulted communities are expected to attend Encounters’ official opening.)

Inevitably, there have been calls for objects to be repatriated to their source communities: it is an issue that divides even the NMA’s indigenous advisory group. While advisers Russell Taylor and Henrietta Marrie welcome both exhibitions, they have also called for repatriation of artefacts. Taylor, whose relatives have lived at La Perouse in Sydney, near where the Botany Bay shield was taken, has said: “The objective we are striving for is, ultimately, repatriation.’’

Other activists including Yu advocate a more nuanced approach. While he “deeply respects’’ the pro-repatriation view, the West Australian Aboriginal leader argues that “a mature discussion would appreciate that repatriation is sensitive, complex and problematic. After a history of attempted cultural eradication, contemporary indigenous ownership of the material can often not be clear, and in all honesty we should not shy away from this.’’

To underline how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures endure and evolve, the NMA show will feature 138 contemporary works, juxtaposed with artefacts. A striking turtle shell mask, pipe and carved drum collected from the Torres Strait Islands in the 1840s are among the oldest surviving artefacts from that region. They will be displayed alongside vivid contemporary sculptures of tropical fish and a 3m dinghy made from discarded or lost fishing nets.

Noongar man Peter Farmer, who met Prince Charles when he visited the NMA, is among the contemporary artists represented in Encounters. The West Australian’s elegant wooden surfboard sculpture combines a contemporary Australian icon, his traditional totem (the turtle) and locally sourced jarrah. The surfboard is inlaid with glass images of turtles, the result of Farmer’s collaboration with non-indigenous stained glass artist Kim Fitzpatrick.

Farmer “can’t wait’’ to see the exhibition. He doesn’t have strong views about repatriation (“I don’t mind either way’’) but adds pointedly: “There’s a lot of politics.’’ He says those demanding the return of objects should be asked: “Would they have kept them in the same state as they are in now if they had had them? We are the oldest living culture around and we should be very proud of the things that are being shown.’’

The NMA has invested heavily in this project, which is likely to have an enduring legacy. Certainly, it may give the 60,000-year-old indigenous Australian narrative an international profile it previously lacked.

The BM’s outgoing director, Neil MacGregor, has told The Australian the London museum is considering a radical plan to rework its collections and make the story of indigenous Australia part of its permanent galleries for the first time.

Such a move would give the indigenous story a sizeable global audience, given that the BM attracts seven million visitors a year. MacGregor said: “In the story of the cultures of the whole world, the oldest surviving one has got to be a rather important part.”

Trinca reveals the NMA, BM and Australian National University have won a second Australian Research Council grant to investigate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collections held elsewhere in Britain. And new scholarships for young indigenous museum workers will be partly funded by the royal charity, the Prince’s Trust.

The deep research that informs the Canberra and London exhibitions has led to dramatic discoveries. Curator Ian Coates — the first person to see the potential for major exhibitions drawn from the BM’s previously neglected indigenous treasures — found several lost artworks by celebrated painter Tom Roberts that will be exhibited for the first time in Encounters.

Coates’s “eureka moment’’ came when he discovered four missing paintings attributed to “Mr T Roberts of Camden’’, wrongly classified as ethnographic material in the BM’s archives. These paintings, including the watercolour On Murray Island (1892), which shows elaborately masked Torres Strait Islanders dancing vigorously around a camp fire, fitted the dates when the painter visited the area.

“People knew that Tom Roberts had been in the Torres Strait, but no one knew where the images that he created were,’’ says Coates.

For him, another crucial experience was consulting the communities that have a direct lineage to the BM artefacts.

“That has been an amazing experience, one that has really challenged me as a curator,’’ he says. The priority was not just finding out about the significance of objects but facilitating indigenous people’s access to them.

Coates has been “blown away’’ by the generosity of those first Australians who come from places with a “horrendous history’’, who nonetheless want to share their stories.

He reflects: “There is something about objects that’s different to written history. When you look at those objects you think, ‘That’s something that’s coming out of the past and speaking to me.’ It does move people.’’

Encounters opens at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra, tomorrow. In Culture magazine on Saturday: Time Travellers