Two stone knives, Napier Broome Bay c.1910

In January 1914, two of four stone knives from the Western Australian Museum’s collection were part of a suite of 28 items sent on exchange to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin (NMI). Since there was no explicit reason for their inclusion we have wondered why these unassuming stone tools (unretouched, edge damaged primary quartzite flakes from archaeologists’ viewpoint) were selected as part of an international exchange.

The knives, and three other objects in the suite of exchanged items, were originally sent to the WA Museum via the Protector of Aborigines, CF Gale, in 1911 and 1912, and registered as collected by Rev Father Nicholas. Their source location, like all material derived from Father Nicholas between 1911 and 1912, was listed as Drysdale River Mission. This had been struck out, and Lombadina Mission overwritten in what has been identified as the handwriting of Ludwig Glauert, Keeper of Geology and Ethnology from 1914.

Over a century later, as part of the CTW project, Alistair Paterson visited NMI to examine WA collections, and found a small label attached to these knives. Not only does this redefine the source location of all four stone knives, including the two remaining in the WA Museum collections, but in addition it changes their significance.

“With these stones the wild blacks cut in pieces the sails of my boat” on scrap of paper attached. (Register, National Museum, Dublin, Art and Industrial Division page 225).

Until seeing the label, which is not duplicated in our museum’s own records, we had understood that the primary motivation for their inclusion in exchange was that, like other exchanged items, they were illustrative of Western Australian Aboriginal cultural materials. Additionally they seem to have been considered duplicates and thus somewhat expendable from the perspective of both the WA Museum and the Chief Protector. However, linking the label (written in Father Nicholas’ distinctive handwriting) with his history yields a richer narrative.

Father Nicholas Emo was a Catholic priest/ missionary in the Kimberley until his death in 1915. He arrived in 1895 in the third group of Trappist missionaries from Sept Fons in France to strengthen the five year old mission at Beagle Bay. His skills as a Spanish speaker were deemed particularly useful given the numbers of Spanish speaking Filipino residents of Broome, and much of his first decade in Australia was spent in Broome. Before participating in the 1908 establishment of the Benedictine Drysdale River Mission, in what is now the Balanggarra Native Title determination area, he also spent time at Cygnet Bay, and as manager of a Government Reserve in Broome. Following his disillusionment with the Drysdale River Mission, Father Nicholas‘s final post from late 1911 was at the Pallottine Mission at Lombadina (Ganter 2017).  It was from here that he sent his collections to the Chief Protector for lodgement at the WA Museum.

The early years of the fledgling Benedictine Drysdale River Mission are dramatic frontier encounters. This remote location was difficult to access other than by boat, and  Father Nicholas’ prized schooner/ pearling lugger the San Salvador was the Mission’s lifeline from its establishment, and ‘during the first year, it was 138 days on the move, in and out of Mission Cove on various errands’ (Nailon 2005:138). With a carrying capacity of 14 tons of cargo, it had to make several trips transporting not only vital supplies, but also the founding Mission staff including Abbot Torres, Frs Planas, Alcade and Br Quindos.

This period was characterised not only by access issues, but by confrontation with the local peoples, of Napier Broome Bay, the only people Father Nicholas describes as ‘wild’. The missionaries could not entice locals to join them. They battled isolation, floods, crop loss, and dissatisfaction of some who joined the mission as the founding population. Father Nicholas’ specific anxieties, tensions and distress are reflected in his journal entries and letters (Nailon 2005). He experienced oscillating tension between his desires to interact with locals and fear of them, compounded by tension with other priests, and ongoing challenges to his ownership of the San Salvador.

The loss of his sails is mentioned at several times and was clearly a grievous act. It is questionable however whether he saw anyone cut the sails, whether the stone flakes were found on the boat and have any evidentiary connection with the sails’ damage, or whether this is an assumption on his part. Even the date of the destruction is unclear. In the letter of 1911 accompanying the first group of materials donated to the WA Museum, he lists two other items ‘which I found in the possession of a wild woman who carried all her things in a piece of my cut sails’ (Father Nicholas to Chief Protector Gale, April 16, 1911). One of these is in a vial with a tag specifically mentioning Napier Broome Bay as source location. The same donation also included a white ochre sample wrapped in canvas and bound with plant fibre string, identified as deriving from Napier Broome Bay.  This canvas may be all that remains of the San Salvador’s sails. However none of his correspondence appears to describe the destruction of the sails, despite a reference ‘Father Nicholas orders a sail to repair the boat’ in 1910 (Nailon 2005: 148).

The impact of the destruction of the sails for a non-motorized boat was that the prime connection with the outside world was immediately severed. For Father Nicholas, the impact was trauma of disconnection with the world, and absolute confirmation of his failure to establish connection with the very people he had been determined to work with.

In this context the Dublin tag and the stone knives assume unexpected significance. This is an instructive reminder of the importance of maintaining close links between material and information. The tag, newly associated with the importance of the San Salvador in this frontier context clarifies a century long confusion about the source location of some objects, confirmation that at least some are from the ‘frontier’ at Drysdale River Mission. Far from being unassuming stone flakes, these can also be seen as symbols of Father Nicholas’s loss and sense of personal failure and of the resourcefulness and resistance of the Traditional Owners of Napier Broome Bay and the Mission area.