Message Sticks and Indigenous Diplomacy

Allen, Lindy

doi:10.4324/9781315812946-7

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…However, if the message conveyed an invitation to male initiation the same messenger might also carry restricted ritual objects carefully hidden in bark or cloth [4,39,40]. These additional items were intended as communicative props to be seen only by specific people [41], but they are very much distinct from the message sticks themselves.…”

Section: Cultural Sensitivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

Kelly,

Lei,

Bibiko

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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Message sticks are wooden objects once widely used in Indigenous Australia for facilitating important long-distance communications. Within this tradition an individual wishing to send a message would carve a stick and apply conventional symbols to its surface. The stick was entrusted to a messenger who carried the object into the territory of another community together with a memorised oral statement. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, settlers and international scholars took great interest in message sticks and this was reflected in efforts to document, collect and store them in museums worldwide. However, by this period, the practice was already undergoing profound changes, having been abandoned in many parts of the continent and transformed in others. 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. To address this we have compiled the Australian Message Stick Database, a new resource hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and The Australian National University, Canberra. It contains images and data for over 1500 individual message sticks sourced from museums, and supplemented with information derived from published and unpublished manuscripts, private collections, and from field recordings involving contemporary Indigenous consultants.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.

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Section: Cultural Sensitivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

Kelly,

Lei,

Bibiko

et al. 2024

PLoS ONE

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show abstract

“…Over the 20th century, this diplomatic function appears to have acquired greater prominence, especially in the north of Australia. In 1935, message sticks delivered by the anthropologist Donald Thomson were crucial in establishing a peaceful dialogue during the Caledon Bay crisis that erupted after Yolŋu men speared and killed a party of Japanese trepang fishers (Allen, 2015). Some years later Indigenous representatives from Bathurst and Melville islands sent a message stick to then Prime Minister Robert Menzies as a tribute for the 1951 jubilee celebrations marking Australia’s federation.…”

Section: What Is Known About Message Sticksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lindy Allen (2015) has taken a useful approach by decentring the message stick and focusing on the communicative encounter itself. In Allen’s account, emissaries relayed messages with the aid of an object that was ‘usually a message stick’ (p. 120), although alternative props – what Howitt (1889) termed ‘emblematical tokens’ – might also serve just as well as credentials.…”

Section: Remaining Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions

Kelly

2019

Journal of Material Culture

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Message sticks are tools of graphic communication, once used across the Australian continent. While their styles vary, a typical message stick is a flattened or cylindrical length of wood with motifs engraved on all sides. Carried by special messengers over long distances, their motifs were intended to complement a verbally produced communication such as an invitation, a declaration of war, or news of a death. It was only in the late 1880s that message sticks first became a subject of formal anthropological enquiry at a time when the practice was already in steep transition; very little original research has been published in the 20th century and beyond. In this article, the author reviews colonial efforts to understand these objects, as recorded in documentary and museum archives, and describes transformations of message stick communication in contemporary settings. He summarizes the state-of-the-art in message stick research and identifies the still unanswered questions concerning their origins, adaptations and significance.

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Message Sticks and Indigenous Diplomacy

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

AMSD: The Australian Message Stick Database

Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions

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