An Indigenous message stick database has been launched by researchers at the University of New England and the Australian National University.
Message sticks are wooden objects used by First Nations Australians for communicating over long distances. The Australian Message Stick Database (AMSD) pulls together records and information on message sticks housed in museums and archives around the world.
It contains images and data from more than 1,500 individual message sticks sourced from museums and supplemented with information derived from published and unpublished manuscripts, private collections, and field recordings involving contemporary Indigenous consultants.
For the first time, knowledge about Australian message sticks can be evaluated as a single set allowing scholars and traditional owners to explore previously intractable questions about their histories, meanings and purposes.
Authors of the launch paper Piers Kelly, Junran Lei, Hans-Jörg Bibiko and Lorina Barker say that, for the first time, knowledge about Australian message sticks can be evaluated as a single set.
The intent is the repatriation of Australian historical forms of knowledge, and the return of these narratives to the Aboriginal hands. The database will also enable comparison with other forms of communication used by traditional cultures across the world.
The authors hope that the database will help First Nations People to identify and reconnect with ancestral knowledge.
“While message sticks were still being used in a traditional way in Western Arnhem Land up until at least the late 1970s, today they feature in public interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations, in art production and in oral narrations. Accordingly, many questions concerning the history, pragmatics and global significance of message stick communication remain unanswered,” they said.
“Indigenous scholars have long drawn attention to issues of bias in museum records where standard metadata fields have emerged from colonial taxonomies that overlook, or overwrite, Indigenous epistemologies.
“As well as perpetuating the ongoing marginalisation of Indigenous voices, such ‘standardised’ fields introduce distortions into the data itself. Meta-repositories such as the AMSD that aggregate knowledge from more than one source, have the potential to challenge colonial biases as much as perpetuate them.”
In the context of a failing Indigenous policy environment, this might seem like low-priority research. But in the wake of the failed referendum on a voice to parliament, many leading indigenous figures have argued the loss reflects a lack of general understanding about Australian Indigenous cultures and a lack of interest in history.
From a political perspective, it’s the mutually agreed-upon narratives that matter more than the truth in a lot of cases — a frustration for more hard-nosed policymakers.
Artefacts like message sticks not only serve an important role in research but remind Australians of the antiquity, complexity and continuity of Aboriginal cultures. The fact researchers had to search the world for information on a distinctly Australian artefact itself points to the way Indigenous Australians were severed from their own culture during the long process of colonisation.
The authors said the database was a timely development, as collection holders become stingier about sharing information.
“Message sticks are poorly understood objects, due to the ravages of colonial expansion, the under-documentation of artefacts, and consistent misrepresentations of Indigenous knowledge,” they said.
“The database has been developed at a time when Australian collecting institutions are suppressing information about individual items of Australian material culture in their care, making it harder for Traditional Owners to access cultural property, or for researchers to investigate provenance and meanings.
“As such, we expect that the database will serve as a growing and changing resource that will help Traditional Owners to identify and reconnect with ancestral knowledge.”
The Australian Message Stick Database will be hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and The Australian National University in Canberra.
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