Ceremonial spear

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

Type: Spears
Place: Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia
Materials: Pigment, Wood
Collection: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Art (ATSIAA) collection no. 1
Accession number: 2007.0053.0599

Description

A spear carved from one piece of wood featuring a flat blade spear head with pointed tip and eight lines carved through the wood, two straight lines at the top and six curved lines along the sides. The spear head is decorated with pigmented design of cross hatching and dot pattern in brown, light brown and white. The shaft is pigmented brown and is cylindrical and tapered slightly to a truncated end.

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, 6:55:18 am). Record last updated by the Museum 2025-02-23. Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.