First database of Indigenous Australian message sticks [View all]

British Museum description: Message stick incised with designs including images of ship, house, trees and topographic features. British Museum collection acquired 1885

April 11, 2024

Daniru Jayasuriya

The founder of a rich data base of Indigenous Australian “message sticks” believes it showcases historic communication techniques of first nations people. Dr. Piers Kelly, a linguistic anthropologist at The University of New England, and his team created the Australian Message Stick Database (AMSD) of more than 1500 Indigenous Australian message sticks in collections around the world.

“It’s not accurate to say ‘message sticks are just like Western literacy […] because they’re addressing a different kind of problem that written practice isn’t adapted for.”

Kelly says we need to reevaluate beliefs about the use of the message sticks. Early literature makes assumptions about the message sticks being an aid to memory. “Message sticks aren’t writing but some of them can do things very similar to writing: convey accurate information over time and distance,” he told Cosmos.

“Nineteenth century scholars were very interested in the possibility that they represented language, but they don’t. My argument is that comparing message sticks to writing is the wrong way to approach it. They’re doing social coordination, validation, reinforcement and encoding of non-linguistic information.”

More:
https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/anthropology/first-database-of-aust-message-sticks/