Softwood and hardwood spear with three bone barbs

View this record on the National Museum of Australia's website

Type: Spears
Place: Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia
Materials: Wood
Collection: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Art (ATSIAA) collection no. 1
Accession number: 2007.0053.0617

Description

A wooden spear. The spear is long and narrow with an cylindrical hard wood head and a cylindrical soft wood shaft. The head and shaft are joined together with a black adhesive. The head has three narrow and pointed white bone barbs attached with black adhesive. The barbs are slanted in a haft woods direction. The shaft has a truncated end which is hollowed out and covered in a black adhesive. The spear is pigmented with faded red bands.

About the collection

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Art collection comprises 2050 artworks and other objects. The artworks - which numerically dominate the collection - were produced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities throughout Australia. The accumulation of these artworks into a single collection has resulted from the choices and selections made during a 38 year period by a variety of staff working for the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA), the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA), the Aboriginal Development Commission (ADC) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) at the national, regional and local levels. The collection spans the years following the 1967 referendum, when dramatic changes in the governance of Aboriginal people took place, up to 2005 when the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was dissolved. It provides a snapshot of the diversity and changes in Indigenous art and its representation which occurred during the period of its formation. The small number of 'non-art' objects in the collection is also significant in providing insights into the working of the various Commonwealth bodies involved in Indigenous affairs. As well as the significance of many of the individual pieces, the collection is also significant as a whole, as a complex artefact stemming from Australia's history of governance of Australian Indigenous peoples.

Read live from the Museum's Collection API (12/11/2026, 6:20:31 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-02-23. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.