Message stick, north west Western Australia, c.1884, British Museum BM Oc.+.2424 L 25.4 cm W 2.3 cm

This rare message stick now housed in the British Museum was collected during the 1880s at a time of great cultural change in the northwest of Western Australia. It was given as part of a larger collection to the British Museum by Governor Broome. Broome was Governor of the Western Australian colony from June 1883 to December 1889. In September and October 1884 he visited the colony’s northwest, following similar tours through the south. Departing on 17 September 1884 on the SS Otway, Broome stopped at Geraldton, Carnarvon and Roebourne, arriving at Broome on 1 October. It is most likely that the material he donated to the British Museum– which comprises four spears, three shields, two spear-throwers, two message sticks, one boomerang and one bowl – was acquired during this trip. Shortly afterwards, Broome took six months’ leave to visit the United Kingdom, from November 1884 to June 1885; it was during this time that his collection entered the British Museum.

The incised and burnt designs on both sides of the message stick depict houses, a harbour, horses and the grave of a European explorer and may have been intended to signal a historical place and date: the ‘fleet of pearlers’ suggests that it may show scenes from the pearling town of Broome, and the date of its collection, c.1884, was shortly after the first graves dug in what is now known as the Broome Pioneer Cemetery. It seems likely that this stick was the one meticulously described  Broome's wife, Mary Anne (formerly Lady Barker) in a letter to her son at school in England:

Perhaps the ‘message sticks’ are the most curious, with their smooth surface on which all the news of the place is neatly and carefully drawn. It looks like etching, and is done with a finely pointed red-hot stick; it is really the newspaper of the district. You see the long strip of land, with its post and rail fence, or the two or three rude houses which constitute the nucleus of what is going to be a great city, perhaps; or else there is an unmistakable bit of a harbour, and the fleet of pearlers is just coming in, with every sail set and a fair wind. Here is the outline of a pathetic story, plainly told: There are some trees just indicated, men stand by an open grave, horses are picketed behind, and there is the rude cross in the corner, where a little clearing has been made to mark a former explorer’s grave. (Lady Barker 1885:181-2).

Like her contemporaries, Lady Broome was intrigued by the amount of information inscribed on its surface, likening it to a ‘newspaper’ and oblivious to the other possible ways the message stick conveyed meaning. Colonists began to take notice of them in the nineteenth century, just as their use among Aboriginal people declined, perhaps as their mobility became more curtailed by governmental interventions and other forms of communication became more accessible. The first colonial eyewitness description of message sticks was recorded in 1840, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that ethnographers took an interest. The 1880s marked the decade when scientists in Australia and Europe became interested in message sticks, and particularly in the question of whether their designs in some examples constituted a rudimentary step towards writing. From the beginning of the twentieth century, however, message sticks increasingly came to be used as ornaments, to be sold or displayed. In the twentieth century, message sticks continued to be used in Aboriginal ceremony in the Kimberley, and like elsewhere in Australia were also sometimes produced as decorative objects for sale to colonists, although most would not have incorporated the rich historical detail inscribed on Broome’s message stick.  The stick thus reveals how colonial sites became incorporated into Indigenous design lexicons depicting Country.