In wooden drawers that line the hallways of the Geology Department of the Natural History Museum in London is a geological specimen that the crew of Phillip Parker King’s hydrographic survey of the Australian coasts (1817-22) collected. Sitting amongst several other geological specimens and soil samples collected during King’s expedition, this specimen instantly caught our attention due to one side of it being neatly chipped away. Like the other rocks, a label is attached, and, in King’s hand is written: ‘164. Stone found near the Fire places at Point Cunningham of which the Natives make Hatchets’. King acknowledged that this Warton sandstone is also a core artefact – a stone from which other flakes are taken off it to produce other artefacts. The specimen bears concave scars that were formed when flakes were struck off it by Bardi Jawi people whose country includes Point Cunningham on the Dampier Peninsular.

This object, and its placement in the Natural History Museum geological collection, tells the story of an interesting moment in the categorisation of rocks when different cultural values sometimes came together. Both Aboriginal people and Europeans were interested in the property of stone: Aboriginal people had a deep understanding of stone and how to use it to make artefacts while European interest in rocks in this era was of scientific value, and collecting them was a means of understanding the history of the earth. Tracing the biography of this artefact and unpacking the rock collection with an archival or curatorial lens, rather than a geological one, allows us to explore this specimen and the collection in which it sits, as a historical artefact, with a biography of its own.

Phillip Parker King was instructed by the Colonial Office to make a collection of ethnographic and natural history specimens and, in particular, to take note of ‘minerals, any of the precious metals, or stones; how used or valued by the natives’.i King’s expedition was at Point Cunningham in February 1822 and while the botanist, Allan Cunningham, for whom the Point was named, and John Septimus Roe, the midshipman, were collecting specimens and undertaking surveys, Roe came across a few Aboriginal fireplaces: ‘The traces of natives, dogs, turtle-bones, and broken shells, were found strewed about; and several fireplaces were noticed that had very recently been used ... Near the fireplaces Mr. Roe picked up some stones that had been chipped probably in the manufacture of their hatchets’.ii The Bardi Jawi people were close by, as King observed: ‘On one of the sandy beaches at the back of the bay … eight or ten natives were observed walking along the beach close to the low water mark, probably in search of shell-fish; some of them were children, and perhaps the others were women, except two or three who carried spears; a dog was trotting along the beach behind them’.iii It is possible that Bundle, the Dharawal intermediary who was a member of the crew, was also on shore, assisting with the crew’s assessments of the artefact.

At the end of King’s expedition in 1823, he returned to London to work on the publication of his journal and charts and to collate his collections. Some of the expedition’s collections were gifted, or transacted in a variety of ways with antiquarian and natural history networks. This rock from Point Cunningham numbered as no.164, was collated at the end of King’s expedition and sent to W H Fitton, the Secretary of the Geological Society of London.iv King donated rocks in clusters between June 1823 and September 1831 where they remained until 1911 when the Geological Society disposed of its museum and sent this collection to the British Museum (Natural History) which opened in 1881. King’s rock collections of Western Australia exist today due to his donation of them to the Geological Society of London. At the NHM still attached were King’s original labels, which had been stuck on in-situ. The rocks include additional labels which add the BM specimen numbers, the year 1911 when they came to the BM, as well as the Geological Society of London’s specimen number. Notes made by the curator of the Geological Society Museum, Charles Sherborne, on 31 August 1897, reveals that in that museum this collection was found by him in ‘an old box in the darkroom’. The curator evidently did not know anything about King or his voyages, writing ‘Australia, East Coast, Specimens from an old collection evidently the result of a voyage along the E Australia coast from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria. No history’. King’s voyages were predominantly along the west and northern coasts of Australia.

The Point Cunningham core artefact embodies the era before the nature/culture divide in science. While King’s natural history and ethnographic collections were dispersed into discipline-specific collections, there was not always a neat divide between natural and cultural collections. This core artefact from Point Cunningham was recognised as an Indigenous utility by King on the label but it remained part of his geological rather than ethnographic collection.