A little piece of Yass aboriginal history will soon be on display in the National Museum of Australia and stories about how Yass aboriginal people lived will be taken to the British Museum in London.
Jonathan King, a Keeper at the British Museum, spent a “wonderful, fantastic” day in Yass last week, in the company of Elder Eric Bell and two members of staff from the National Museum of Australia, Karolina Kilian and Jay Arthur. Both women work in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander section of the Canberra museum.
Mr King is Keeper of material relating to indigenous people in Africa, Oceania and the Americas. This was the first time he had visited Australia, and his visit encompassed several missions involving his work at the British Museum. One aim related to a project linked to the National Museum of Australia, which is in the preliminary stages of collaborative research and an exhibition project, working with the British Museum on early Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander museum collections. The project is one of the national Museum’s partnerships with international museums. His final project, which will take place this week, is to pack up the Charles Darwin exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney for its return to London.
Mr King was also keen to discover how indigenous people live in different areas of our country. He took advantage of being in Australia to travel to Kintore, in central Australia, to meet aboriginal people for the first time. He attended an Aboriginal Art show in Darwin, where he bought items for the British Museum, and discovered the beauty of Kakadu. When he reached Canberra he expressed a desire to see a local community in Australia’s south-east, and was directed by museum staff to Yass and to Elder Eric Bell as his guide.
Mr King was delighted with his day in Yass, looking at former aboriginal sites, finding evidence of the ways in which Aboriginal people lived in the past, and of both traditional and contemporary aboriginal culture. The visitors saw many areas, including the paintings under the bridge over the Yass River, the site where Hollywood was, and the old campsite. Jonathan said he gained a sense of how Aboriginal people formerly lived in the Yass area.
The British visitor was given a ball of wattle gum, with some indication from Eric about its uses in aboriginal society. Children enjoyed chewing on wattle gum, and it was also used to secure a handle to an axe. The handle would be taped to the axe using bark, and a mixture of gum and, traditionally, roo poo would be added, which would set as hard as araldite. Wattle trees, Jonathan also learned, provided witchetty grubs, which were eaten or could provide bait for fishing, especially if you were after cod. Mr King will take the ball of wattle gum, and the stories of its use, back to the British Museum.
Jonathan was very impressed with how positive Eric Bell is about the Yass community and the movement towards integration here. He found Eric able to turn memories of hard times around and find positives in Yass and the Yass community.
A little piece of Yass will also be on display in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra from September 9. On that date an exhibition will open, titled “From little things big things grow: Fighting for Indigenous Rights 1920 – 1970”. The Yass memento will be a piece of tin from a building at the Hollywood mission, another relic of Yass’s aboriginal past.
Eric was able to tell Jonathan about the people’s Sunday ritual in summer, when they would go down to the area of the river shown above, to countryside which was once Ngunnawal homeland. The women would do the washing, hanging it to dry on nearby bushes while the children would swim, fish and hunt rabbits.
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