Creative Commons (CC0 1.0)
The conventions described on this page have been developed in consultation with Australian First Nations communities as well as scholars, collection managers and archivists. They can be understood as a set of abstract ‘fields’ for indexing, notating and organising message sticks. As such, they do not themselves instantiate Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property. This property is instead embodied in the knowledge expressed within those fields.
The project strongly encourages collecting institutions to make free use of these standards in catalogues, databases, exhibitions or other applications and to do so without attribution. It also encourages GLAM workers to challenge or improve the standards. The use of such standards in publications, including display labels or exhibition catalogues cannot be held in copyright by the publisher or institution.
For information on the project’s ICIP policy, see this page.
Why create standards?
Since 2016, the Australian Message Stick Project has developed various standards and conventions for describing, notating and classifying Australian message sticks. The primary goal of these standards has been to promote interpretive clarity and to mitigate, as far as possible, colonial biases in existing descriptions. From the 1880s to the 1920s, when message sticks were acquired in the greatest numbers, collectors often emphasised material characteristics of the objects over and above the identities of creators, the circumstances of the original communication, the oral message, and the meaning of individual marks. Further, they homogenised communicative practices instead of investigating regional diversity. From the early twentieth century, message sticks were increasingly made for the purposes sale in collector markets, a fact that challenged settler values of ‘authenticity’ and may have discouraged productive dialogue with the communities that produced them. An emerging prejudice that message sticks did not have any information content may have also contributed to poor documentation practices. For all these reasons, the project has sought to draw attention to archival silences by producing more comprehensive fields in databases and diagrams, even if these fields are often left empty out of necessity.
A powerful motivation for sharing standards across stakeholders is to have a framework for comparing message sticks that brings their diversity and complexity to light, emphasising that these are objects made with care by individuals whose names may or may not be remembered today and whose intentions may or may not be recovered. It is hoped that these standards will provoke scholars, public viewers, institutions and cultural owners to think expansively about message sticks recognising that the objects embody knowledge that may not be accessible, but may in some cases be recovered later.
Metadata standards
The following fields are used in the Australian Message Stick Database. They include standard fields from the Dublin Core Metadata Terms but have been enlarged to incorporate the values of the Indigenous Archives Collective and other attributes that are specific to message sticks. A full explanation of these fields and the decisions behind them can be found here.
AMSD ID, Title, Keywords, Description, Creator of Object, Date Created, Notes on date created, Place Created, Item type, Subtype, State or territory, Cultural region, Linguistic area, Linguistic area 2, Linguistic area 3, Notes on Linguistic area(s), Term for ‘message stick’ (or related) in language, Message, Motifs, Motif transcription, Semantic domain, Dimension 1 (mm), Dimension 2 (mm), Dimension 3 (mm), Material Technique, Source citation, Source type, Date Collected, Institution/Holder: file, Institution/Holder: object identifier, Collector, Place Collected, Creator Copyright, File Copyright and ICIP, Latitude, Longitude, Notes on coordinates, URL (collecting institution), URL (source document), URL (source document 2), IRN, Related entries, Notes ,Data entry (OCCAMS), Linked Filename.
Diagrams and summaries
Message sticks are visual and tactile objects, meaning that diagrams and succinct summaries can be better at capturing their essence than highly descriptive or analytical fields. For message sticks with documented meanings, the project has developed a series of intuitive conventions for conveying the essential message as clearly as possible. This involves foregrounding the verbal message with double angle brackets, followed by ’email’ style fields (From/Sent/To/Subject). Double angle brackets could be replaced with ordinary quotation marks, however their use is consistent with the way single angle brackets are used in writing systems studies to enclose sign values at the level of an individual sign. The double angle brackets indicates that there is a corresponding sequence of signs that incapsulates a complete and coherent message.
Note that in the above example, displayed here with permission, that names of people, such as Pumi are in bold. Note also that the Indigenous source is cited in the bottom right corner and the AMSD ID is in the bottom left corner.
Coding motif sequences
No standard has yet been developed for coding sequences of motifs on message sticks. This is especially challenging when considering highly iconic or diagrammatic message sticks as in the example above. It is extremely hard to reduce icons to notational strings! Furthermore, characteristics such as shape and timber species sometimes have information content and sometimes do not. This is before considering the specific context of a message stick interaction that may rely heavily on orality, social category, and the structure of the social institutions that manage communication. As such an object with low information content in terms of its markings may nonetheless be embedded in a communicative event that has high information content.
However the team is tentatively developing a system based on two existing attempts at coding marks. The first is the system developed in:
Wu, Katherine, Jennifer Solman, Ruth Linehan, and Richard Sproat. 2012. “Corpora of non-linguistic symbol systems.” LSA Annual Meeting Extended Abstracts 3:4-1-5.
The second is the SignBase sign coding system applied in:
Bentz, Christian, and Ewa Dutkiewicz. 2026. “Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123 (9):e2520385123. doi: doi:10.1073/pnas.2520385123.