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Objects from Sydney's past

Fish Hook, Bone points on Fishing Spear, Net Bag.

The Australian Museum houses approximately 120,000 ethnographic objects and around 1,000,000 individual archaeological specimens. While they are from many parts of the world, they come principally from Australia, the Pacific and South-east Asia. Only a very small number of the ethnographic objects comes from coastal Sydney.

The only fishing equipment in the Australian Museum's collections which possibly come from the Sydney region are the three spears on display. The only fishing implements definitely known to have survived from the Sydney region are five multi-pronged fishing spears that are housed in the following museums:

• three in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, England;
• one in the Museum of Mankind (British Museum) in London;
• one in the NN Miklukho-Maklay Institute in St Petersburg, Russia.

Hundreds of objects were taken back to Europe and other countries by the first British colonists and visitors to Port Jackson. Unfortunately, few have survived or can be identified in overseas museums. This is because many objects did not survive the ravages of time in private homes or were discarded as their importance for future generations was not appreciated. Another problem is that many objects were labelled as having come from either ‘New Holland', a name that originally referred to the whole of Australia, or 'New South Wales', a name that originally referred to the entire eastern Australian coast. Objects from the Sydney region which remained in Australia had a similar history.

For these reasons, the ground-edged hatchet from Manly, and archaeological materials which are known to come from Port Jackson and Botany Bay are supplemented in this exhibition with objects from the adjacent New South Wales south and north coasts which are believed to be similar in style and manufacture.

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