Gweagal spears on display in Australia

In Cambridge they were exceptionally significant objects in the museum. But they are more significant now.

Professor Nick Thomas, Trinity Fellow and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Cambridge.

Professor Thomas was speaking about the Gweagal Spears, displayed for the first time since their permanent return to Australia and to the Indigenous people from whom they were taken 254 years ago by the crew of Lieutenant James Cook’s HMB Endeavour.

The key exhibit in Mungari: Fishing, Resistance, Return at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, the four Gweagal Spears are the only items known to have survived from the first recorded contact between the British and the Gweagal people of Kamay (Botany Bay.)

Mungari is a fishing songline in Dharawal culture.

Named after the Gweagal clan of the Dharawal Nation to whom they belong, the four spears were presented to Trinity College in 1771 by Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, and a Trinity alumnus, along with other materials from Cook’s voyage across the Pacific. From 1914, the spears were held at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge.

Ray Ingrey, Founding Chairperson of the Gujaga Foundation, said that exhibiting the spears was ‘an opportunity not only to tell our story our way, but show that a place like Sydney still has a strong Aboriginal cultural presence and our old practices still remain in our present.’

The Mungari exhibition, which opens 5 April, includes a contemporary spear made by Rod Mason with Dharawal descendants and other items related to Indigenous fishing tradition, as well as a film charting the return of the Gweagal Spears from Cambridge to Australia in April 2024.

The Gweagal Spears will eventually be displayed at a new visitor centre at Kurnell, Kamay, from where they were taken in 1770.

Mungari: Fishing, Resistance, Return

Return of the Gweagal Spears to the La Perouse Aboriginal Community – Trinity College Cambridge