COLLECTORS AND COLLECTIONS
by David Andrew Roberts
In the early years of the twentieth century,
two men seeking evidence of Aboriginal "workshops" in
coastal NSW, visited Newcastle "with little result"
(Etheridge and
Whitelegge 1907). In fact, the physical evidence of an ancient
Aboriginal presence in the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie region
is abundant, though much has been destroyed by erosion, and by
agricultural, mining, urban and industrial activity. Surface evidence
documented to date includes a wide variety of scraping and cutting
implements, quarried from sites at the foot of cliffs at Nobbies,
Merewether and Glenrock, and ochres acquired locally from sites
at Murdering Gully and Merewether Beach. The region has a high
proliferation of axe-grinding grooves and trees scared by the
removal of bark for canoes, and there are numerous galleries of
stencils and paintings in the Wattagans and in sandstone rock-shelters
along Yango and Narone Creeks near Wollembi.
Archaeological examination of the Newcastle
region has been limited, with the primary work to date undertaken
in 1971 by Professor Len Dyall of the University of Newcastle,
who excavated an occupation and burial site near Swansea Heads
in 1971, yielding remains that were radio-carbon dated at just
under 8000 years old. Dyall also documented around 100 Aboriginal
"campsites" along the coast between Catherine Hill Bay
and Birubi Point (Dyall
1971), many marked by "middens" of accumulated shell,
bone, implements and waste flakes. More recently, in 1998, National
Parks and Wildlife excavated a large midden site at Moonee Beach
near Lake Macquarie, which evidenced the significant size"
of the populations sustained in this region over thousands of
years.
By the early twentieth century many locals possessed
small artefact collections, as did a number of organisations such
as the Newcastle Technical College and the Australasian Society
of Newcastle (Cooksey
1926). The first major collection of Aboriginal occupational
evidence was undertaken by Daniel F. Cooksey of Mayfield, who
in the 1910s and 1920s could be seen "filling his pockets
with stones, or crawling in ungainly attitudes over the sand looking
for stone knives not much bigger than pins" (Cooksey
1925). Cooksey collected over 5000 "excellent specimens"
from the Newcastle-Lake Macquarie area, "evidence of a very
high degree of skill and monuments of their industry and patience"
(Voice of the North, 10 June 1926: 18). Much of this material
was donated to the Australian Museum in Sydney, and apparently
some to the British Museum in London. In the 1920s, Cooksey led
community lobbying to establish a museum in Newcastle, supported
by others such as Mr. C.C. Humphreys of Waratah, who donated a
stone axe (NMH,
7 April 1926).
Cooksey's approaches to the Australian Museum,
the Museum sent its ethnologist, William Walford Thorpe, to undertake
field research in the Lake Macquarie, Newcastle and Port Stephens
districts in 1926. Thorpe retrieved an enormous collection of
flaked stone implements to supplement the Cooksey collection.
He also found skeletal remains, including a skull at Morna Point
(NMH, 25
March 1926, 15
June 1926, and 6
August 1926). The material was described an illustrated as
"Ethnological Notes" in the Records of the Australian
Museum in 1928 (Thorpe
1928). Thorpe's work was supplemented by collections at Morna
Point by Lesley D. Hall from the Department of Geography, the
findings also published in Records of the Australian Museum
in 1928 (Hall 1928),
and by Roy H. Goddard (Goddard
1934).
In more recent times, the chief collector of
local Aboriginal artefacts was Percy Haslam, who procured a great
range of wooden implements, made of gum, myrtle and wattle, mostly
from the west side of Lake Macquarie. The Haslam collection, including
a hand shield, a woomera, a woman's digging stick, hunting and
fighting clubs, boomerangs and spears, was donated to the Auchmuty
Library during Haslam's tenure as the University's Convocation
Research Fellow from 1977. The collection is now housed in the
Newcastle Regional Museum, forming the backbone of the Mixed Mobs
exhibition that was opened in March 2001. The University also
housed the Laut Family Collection of artefacts, including flints,
ochre and graved stone from Burwood Beach and Swansea beaches,
now displayed in the University's new Umulliko Centre.
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