A Fine Spearthrower

• Lot Sold $9,500 (Hammer Price)
• $11,400 (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

SOUTH EAST AUSTRALIA  
carved hardwood   
LENGTH: 72CM  

Provenance: 
Jim Economos, USA 
Private collection, USA 
Private collection

Cf. Carol Cooper, et al., Aboriginal Australia, Sydney: Australian Directors' Council, 1981, pp.100-101 (illus.) for related examples.
 
While settler Australian art from contact zones includes many images of Aboriginal Australians, the reciprocal representation of whites by blacks is relatively rare. Images of sailing ships, white men, livestock and guns appear across the rock art sites of Queensland and the Northern Territory, Andrew Sayers has documented 19th century drawings by Yackaduna (Tommy McRae), Johnny Dawson, Oscar and others,  and there are also various examples of traditional weapons and other utensils decorated with pictures of white people. This latter group, the ‘acculturated artefacts', originated with the introduction of metal blades for carving and the opportunities for the sale and trade of ‘curios' through missions and government settlements. The surveyor Philip Chauncy recorded that ‘On the Murray River the young men often amused themselves with carving, or drawing in charcoal various objects and scenes in illustration of any events which they desired to record. They often record events deemed worthy of note on their throwing-sticks.'  Indeed, as Carol Cooper has observed, ‘spearthrowers were the chief focus for an efflorescence of innovative carving , with the appearance of representations of men wearing hats, animals including horses and cattle, and the new artefacts that had intruded into the landscape such as houses and paddle steamers.'
 
The present work, with its two portraits of European men both button-fronted (?) and bearded, one with 1860s-style side-whiskers and a top hat is a particularly fine, early and important example of the genre. The history of the artefact is obscure, though there are strong clues to its origin. To begin with, its morphology is suggestive: elongate, leaf-shaped spearthrowers with solid cut wooden hooks were the common form in Victoria and along the Murray River.  The decoration suggests a more precise locality; finely-incised chevron patterns on the dorsal surface closely resemble those on a spearthrower in the Burke Memorial Museum, Beechworth, collected by R.E. Johns at Swan Hill in 1860.  
 
1. (foot note) Robert Layton, Australian Rock Art: a New Synthesis, Cambridge University Press, 1992, (esp. ch.4, ‘Rock art and the colonial impact', pp.89-113)
 2. Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne, 1996,  passim.
 3. Philip Chauncy, ‘Notes and Anecdotes of the Aborigines of Australia', in R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria: with notes relating to the Natives of other Parts of Australia and Tasmania, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1878, vol. II, Appendix A, pp.258-259
4. Carol Cooper (ed.), Aboriginal Australia, Australian Gallery Directors' Council, Sydney, 1981, p. 38
5. See D.S. Davidson, A Preliminary consideration of Aboriginal Decorative Art, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1937, p.478
6. Cooper, op. cit., p.100 (cat. S100