The Australian Message Stick Database is a meta-repository-in-progress of all known message sticks located in museums around the world. The database also stores digitally reproduced sketches and photographs of message sticks that are no longer extant.

The purpose of the database is to:

  • build a meaningful archive of digital cultural heritage subject to the control and approval of community representatives;
  • provide a reliable source of comparative data for recovering the history, function and significance of Australian message sticks;
  • revisit artefacts of unknown origin in order to identify their traditional country of origin and probable communicative intent;
  • correct contradictions, ambiguities or deficiencies in the labelling of existing artefacts;
  • situate Australian Indigenous symbolic culture within a global understanding of graphic communication systems.

Many of the message sticks known today are missing vital contextual data including the details of the intended message, and the ethnolinguistic affiliation of senders, messengers and recipients. By aggregating as much information as possible from multiple sources, the AMSD hopes to fill in some of these blanks.

Nonetheless, at least 183 artefacts (or twelve percent of the total) are scrupulously documented and it is hoped that these will help to reconstruct core elements of the graphic systems in use, with assistance elicited from Indigenous consultants. Even for very poorly documented artefacts the place-of-origin is often preserved and this information, in aggregate, will help identify regional stylistic differences and plot the diffusion of the practice over the continent at the time of contact.

Please be aware that the AMSD is not an archive so much as a meta-repository, and thus the public availability of the information is subject to the approval of Indigenous advisory boards at the institutions that supplied it. (The relevant Indigenous advisory boards are listed below.) Accordingly, no secret, sacred or restricted cultural materials of any kind are recorded in the database. Some objects in institutional collections are ambiguously labelled and these too have not been included in the database. If you need guidance on distinguishing between a message stick and a sacred object of similar appearance, please see this information here.

In accordance with the values of Indigenous data sovereignty, the project team has relinquished all copyright, even for images and analysis produced by team members. Wherever the likely Traditional Owners can be established, these are indicated in each entry in the ‘Linguistic area’ fields. Note that there may be more than one community with Traditional rights. Certain images have legal copyright owners, and these are also listed where possible. Textual metadata, however, is not subject to copyright but should nonetheless be attributed correctly.

The database is structured on the principles of country-centred design (Harle et al 2018). In practice, this means that the entries can be filtered according to the degree to which Indigenous knowledge-holders themselves provided information about a given object. The most ‘country-centred’ are those tagged as ‘glossed artefacts’. For these entries, the Traditional country is known and an Indigenous cultural authority has provided information about the meaning of the message stick and the relationship between the meaning and the inscribed signs. For those tagged as ‘interpreted artefacts’, the meaning is preserved, but not the relationship between signs and meanings. All remaining entries may have contextual information but no direct insights from Traditional Owners.

The database is managed by Piers Kelly, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, and affiliated with the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne. The data-entry interface was developed by Junran Lei at The Australian National University (Canberra), while the public-facing interface the database itself is maintained by Robert Forkel (MPI, Leipzig). Language coordinates are provided by Claire Bowern at Yale (see Chirila; and Bowern, Claire. 2016. “Chirila: Contemporary and Historical Resources for the Indigenous Languages of Australia.” Language Documentation & Conservation 10:1-44). Current Research Associates can be found here and partners are here.

Today, the AMSD has 1764 entries. These include sticks that are physically conserved in public museums all around the world, most of which were collected in a brief period between the 1880s and 1910s. A further 276 exist as sketches or photographs and their physical whereabouts cannot yet be traced. As the project progresses, more message sticks are coming to light in museums, private collections and manuscripts.

We would love to hear from private custodians of message sticks. We may be able to help you understand more about your collection. Make contact here.

The National Museum of Australia (Canberra) was the first cultural institution to collaborate with the project, contributing over 50 high-resolution images with associated metadata.

A full list of contributors can be found at the bottom of the Team page.

Individuals who provided access to private collections:

  • Jane Buchan
  • Richard Davies
  • Guan Lim