A calligraphy pen on an Aboriginal mission site?
There has been a little interest in this image below and so I thought a brief post was worthwhile to give it the context it deserves. Full credits for the image go to Amy Della-Sale, who is working towards completing her archaeology Masters Thesis at Flinders University on the post-contact histories of Indigenous people in a colonial frontier setting in Cape York Peninsula, north eastern Australia.
[caption id=“attachment_862” align=“aligncenter” width=“539” caption=“Close up of the nib of a caligraphic pen found on the former Weipa mission site. Date reads: ‘June 15.86’. Photo by Masters in Archaeology Student Amy Della-Sale”]
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The full image of the pen is below however I much prefer Amy’s photo since it brings out a critical detail: the date. The scale is approximately 1 cm across the nib from top to bottom.
I have next to no knowledge of 19th century calligraphic pens however this one is interesting because of its context. It was found in an Aboriginal settlement or ‘village’ area (as it is referred to in historic documents) at the margin of a Presbyterian Mission site near Weipa that I’ve been working on for a few years now. If the date on the pen is correct (June 15 1886) then it pre-dates the mission site (1898-1932) and looking at the images now I wonder whether it is silver plated (if there are any readers with expertise in this area I’d love to hear from you!).
I suspect the dates don’t match up because like many Aboriginal missions in Australia, the Weipa mission sometimes received donations of money and goods from organisations or individuals in large cities to the south (often Presbyterian congregations). My view is that this pen may have been part of one of those packages, donated by a well-to-do Church-goer in Melbourne or Brisbane and mailed to the local Mission Superintendent along with other items such as children’s dolls, clothing and toys before being given to a local Aboriginal person. The historical evidence suggests that exchanges such as these were usually loaded with social meaning and intent; for example, it may have been part of a range of incentives used to encourage a particular person to comply to missionary norms and expectations in a context where the desire was to shape and modify their social, ideological and material worlds.
[caption id=“attachment_977” align=“aligncenter” width=“573” caption=“Full image of calligraphic pen located on the Weipa Presbyterian Mission site, 1898-1932”]
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We discovered the pen eroding out of a low earth mound site (5 m diameter, 0.8 m high) and this was one of around eight mounds that we recorded adjacent to the remains of small cottages, arranged in two neat rows. Most of the artefacts we identified (glass, metal, ceramics, marine shell, stone artefacts) appear to cluster around these mounds, rather than in or near the cottages, however we’re still unclear as to what the mounds were used for: ie., camping/sleeping, cooking or rubbish disposal? During our most recent field work (2011) we created a detailed plan of all of the buildings, mounds, depressions, surface artefacts and so on, with excavations to come in the future. I’m in the process of creating our final site plans as well as doing some spatial analysis on artefact distributions in order to understand whether certain artefact types more frequently occur near cottages, mounds and so on, a technique that I’ve written about elsewhere.
The photo was taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T3i with a 10-20 mm Sigma macro lens. I’ve never owned or used a macro lens before this field trip, but what a difference they make to field photography! They’re brilliant for artefact photography, particularly capturing fine details such as this. They also enable a great deal more creativity with their limited depth of field. A creative eye helps, though; I don’t really have such an eye which is why it’s great to take creative students along (thanks Amy!).