RT Journal Article
T1 When is a shield not a shield? Interpreting Indigenous versatility in an East End match factory
A1 Nicola Froggatt
YR 2023
VO 
IS Spring 2023
K1 Australia
K1 collections research
K1 decolonial approaches
K1 exhibitions
K1 fire
K1 Indigenous
K1 UK museums
AB A wooden shield, made by a once-known Aboriginal person in Western Australia around the beginning of the twentieth century, sits in the Science Museum’s London stores. This paper focuses on its life in an East London match factory from about 1928 until 1937, when it was transferred to the Science Museum. The shield stands out among its Aboriginal counterparts now held by museums because curators at the Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances (and subsequently at the Science Museum) did not prioritise its links with conflict or ceremony, nor the skill with which it was carved. Instead, unprepossessing marks on its back captured their attention. These saw-marks showed that this was not ‘just’ a shield: it had sometimes been used to make fire. Valued now as an example of global fire-equipment, it was subsumed into an English collection of fire making technologies. By tracing the shield’s early museum life, this paper considers how and why European collecting cultures have marshalled indigenous objects to promote narratives of supposed ‘progress’.
NO Science Museum object no. 1937-682/109
NO ‘Aboriginal’ in the context of this paper refers to the first peoples of mainland Australia and Tasmania. 
NO The shield first appears in an undated photograph of the Bryant and May Museum taken between 1926 and 1937, although it does not appear in the 1926 and 1928 catalogues. It does feature in a list of the items transferred to the Science Museum in 1937 on unconditional or permanent loan. See W T O’Dea to Mr Lindsay, 13 October 1937, Appendix: ‘Bryant and May’s Collection. List of Objects Received Which Are Not Catalogued – with a Short Description of each’, Sheet 1. Science Museum nominal file, 6106 Pt. 1. In 1996 John Arlett of Wilkinson Sword recalled having arranged the 1937 loan to the Science Museum because the old factory building housing the museum was closing. The shield’s legal ownership between 1937 and 1996 is unclear. In 1966 all loaned items from the Bryant and May Collection of Fire-Making Appliances that were being exhibited in the Science Museum’s Fire Making Gallery were given to the Science Museum. Unfortunately, we do not have conclusive records of which these items were. Only in 1996 was ownership of the entire collection transferred to the Science Museum. Wilkinson Sword Ltd formally gifted the collection, as it had emerged that Bryant and May was in fact part of Wilkinson Match in 1937. For further details see Science Museum technical file, T/1937-682; Dave Chalkley (Science Museum Documentation Section) to Dr B Bowers and Mr D Woodcock, 27 February 1996, ‘Bryant & May Firemaking Collection’. Science Museum nominal file, Wilkinson Sword Company.
NO Document dated 13 October 1926, p 2. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/766(B). 
NO Key literature on the development and role of corporate museums includes Danilov; Lehman and Byrom; Nissley and Casey; Mariacristina Bonti, 2014, ‘The Corporate Museums and Their Social Function: Some Evidence from Italy’, European Scientific Journal, 1 (November 2014), pp 141–50; and Ileana Stigliani and Davide Ravasi, 2007, ‘Organizational Artefacts and the Expression of Identity in Corporate Museums at Alfa-Romeo, Kartell, and Piaggio’, in Lin Lerpold, Davide Ravasi, Johan van Rekom and Guillaume Soenen (eds), Organizational Identity in Practice (London: Routledge), pp 197–214.
NO Document dated 13 October 1926, p 2. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/766(B). 
NO Document dated 13 October 1926, p 2. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/766(B). 
NO Letters to Edward Bidwell, 13 March 1923 and 15 May 1923. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/766. 
NO A few flint-and-steel firemaking methods from places including Burma, India and Persia were included, as well as some sulphur matches from China and Japan; however, European examples dominated the collection (Christy, 1926, pp 26–43).  
NO Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances, 1926–1937. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/654, photograph of ‘FIRE SAWS & PLOUGHS’ case.
NO Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances, 1926–1937. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/654, photograph of ‘FIRE SAWS & PLOUGHS’ case. 
NO The smaller shield is also in the Science Museum’s collection, object no. 1937-682/108.
NO In Aboriginal communities across Western Australia, the making of shields was typically a task performed by men.
NO Bryant and May Museum of Fire-Making Appliances, 1926–1937. Bryant and May Archive. Hackney Archives, D/B/BRY/1/2/654, photograph of ‘FIRE DRILLS’ case, object no. 40. Now Science Museum object no. 1937-682/40.
NO See, for example, Science Museum object no. 1937-682/43D/2/1. 
NO See, for example, Bård Aaberge, Trish Barnard, Shelley Greer and Rosita Henry, ‘Designs on the Future: Aboriginal Painted Shields and Baskets of Tropical North Queensland, Australia’, etropic 13:2 (2014), pp 56–74; Jo McDonald and Sam Harper, ‘Identity signalling in shields: how coastal hunter-gatherers use rock art and material culture in arid and temperate Australia’, Australian Archaeology, 82:2 (2016), pp 128–138; Maria Nugent and Gaye Sculthorpe, ‘A Shield Loaded with History: Encounters, Objects and Exhibitions’, Australian Historical Studies, 49:1 (2018), pp 28–43; Shawn C Rowlands, ‘An Artefact of Colonial Violence? A North Kimberley Plateau Shield and the Record of a Massacre’, in Tom Crowley and Andy Mills (eds), Weapons, Culture and the Anthropology Museum (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp 37–54. The use of shields with fire-drills and fire-saws is briefly discussed in D S Davidson, ‘Fire-Making in Australia’, American Anthropologist, 49:3 (1947), pp 426–37. 
NO For helpful works that discuss the use of re-enactment of non-European technologies in museum practice, see Isaac (2010) and Chris Gosden, Frances Larson and Alison Petch, 2007, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt-Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 
NO A similar seven-sectioned shield from Western Australia can also be found at Museums Victoria. Museums Victoria, object no. X85264. 
NO Western Australian Museum, object no. E4954. Correspondence with Moya Smith, Head of Department, Anthropology & Archaeology, Western Australian Museum
NO Important texts on Aboriginal cultural burning knowledges and practices include Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2011); Sylvia J Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Land Usage and European Usurpation in South-western Australia (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1975; revised 2014); Marcia Langton, ‘“The Fire that is the Centre of Each Family”: Landscapes of the Ancients’, Visions of Future Landscapes. Proceedings of 1999 Australian Academy of Science Fenner Conference on the Environment, 2–5 May 1999 Canberra (Kingston: Bureau of Rural Sciences, 2000), pp 169–78; and Victor Steffensen, Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia (Richmond: Hardie Grant, 2021).
NO There are a few exceptions, for example Philip Jones, 2017, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Adelaide: Wakefield Press). 
NO Jonathan Jones, artist’s statement accompanying installations for the exhibition Unsettled: Stories within, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 27 November 2015–28 March 2016. See Wally Caruana, ‘Working on the line: The art of Jonathan Jones’, Museums Australia Magazine, 24:3 (Autumn 2016), pp 18–21.
NO Andrew Snelgar, artist’s statement accompanying installation for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, 26 March–31 July 2022. See Ceremony (National Gallery of Australia Digital Publication, 24 March 2022) https://publications.nga.gov.au/ceremony/andrew-snelgar (accessed 1 January 2023). 
NO G Bartholomew (Bryant and May Ltd) to Col E E B Mackintosh (Science Museum), 23 April 1937. Science Museum nominal file, 6106 Pt 1
NO D G Chalkey (Science Museum Documentation Section) to John Arlett (Wilkinson Sword Ltd), 22 April 1996. Science Museum technical file, T/1937-682.
PB The Science Museum Group
SN 2054-5770
LA eng
DO 10.15180/231905
UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/when-is-a-shield-not-a-shield-interpreting-indigenous-versatility-in-an-east-end-match-factory/
WT Science Museum Group Journal
OL 30