David Abulafia slams return of Indigenous spears as needless ‘virtue signalling’

A leading Cambridge historian has criticised his university’s decision to repatriate four Indigenous spears to Australia.

The four Indigenous spears, taken by Lieutenant James Cook in 1770, will be repatriated from Cambridge University.

A leading Cambridge historian has criticised his university’s decision to repatriate four Indigenous spears to Australia as needless “virtue signalling”, claiming the return of the objects marks a loss to the history of Europe rather than Australia.

Historian David Abulafia, who is professor emeritus and fellow at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge, condemned the move after the university’s Trinity College last week agreed to permanently return the artefacts to the La Perouse Aboriginal community in Sydney.

“The extraordinary story of the Australian spears needs to be told within Europe too, and virtue signalling of this sort is more destructive of knowledge than capable of adding anything to it,” Professor Abulafia wrote in The Spectator UK. “Objects of this sort provide important testimony to growing European knowledge of the world. The peoples of Australia had a natural fascination for Europeans in the Age of the Enlightenment.”

Historian David Abulafia

The repatriation of the four spears – which were among dozens of others taken by James Cook at Botany Bay during his first encounter with Indigenous Australians in 1770 – has been part of more than a decade of campaigning led by the La Perouse Aboriginal Land Council.

“These are the first recorded objects, having been collected and transported back to England,” La Perouse Land Council chairwoman Noeleen Timbery told the ABC last week. “The four that Trinity have are the only four in existence and there’s a lot riding on that. We want to display them on country. There are plans for a purpose-built visitor centre with an exhibition place in it, so that will be the end goal … We’ll work out how we are going to store them and look after them in the meantime.”

Ms Timbery agreed the objects had historical value but said there was “such a high cultural value in bringing them back and having them in country”.

The Australian sought comment from Ms Timbery and the La Perouse Land Council.

The spears were presented to Trinity College soon after Cook returned to England, and have been part of the college’s collection since 1771. Since 1914, they have been cared for by Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where they have remained on display.

Professor Abulafia, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians, wrote that it was a mistake for Cambridge’s museum curator, Nicholas Thomas, to link the story of the four spears to the broader history of colonial Australia.

“The treatment of the native peoples of Australia is a truly terrible story. But it is a later story disconnected from the era of Cook. Nineteenth-century settlers regarded the Aborigines as subhuman and sometimes hunted them to death like animals, as the all but total extinction of the Tasmanian population reveals.

James Cook landing at Botany Bay in 1770, as painted by E.P. Fox in 1902.

“The museum curator in Cambridge notes that ‘they are the first artefacts collected by any European from any part of Australia that remain extant and documented’. That remarkable fact surely points to their importance in the history of Europe rather than Australia, where they had no special significance, and were just items in daily use,” he wrote.

Professor Abulafia also took aim at Trinity College’s claim that it was “committed to a better understanding of the college’s history” and its role within the history of the British Empire.

“How disposing of the spears will enhance that understanding is a profound mystery,” he wrote. “The fellows of Trinity should resist … enthusiasm for giving away important objects in the university collections.”