Gweagal
Historically clay was used to line the base of their canoes so they could light fires, and also as a white body paint, (as witnessed by Captain James Cook).
[5] The Gweagal decorated their caves and homes with carvings, sculpture, beads, paintings, drawings and etchings using white, red and other coloured earth, clay or charcoal.
[citation needed] Middens have been found all the way along tidal sections of the Georges River where shells, fish bones, and other waste products have been thrown into heaps.
[7] In sailing into the bay they had noted two Gweagal men posted on the rocks, brandishing spears and fighting sticks, and a group of four too intent on fishing to pay much attention to the ship's passage.
Using a telescope as they lay offshore, approximately a kilometre from an encampment consisting of 6–8 gunyahs, Joseph Banks recorded observing an elderly woman come out of the bush, with at first three children in tow, then another three, and light a fire.
[10][11][12] Cook and his crew stayed at Botany Bay for a week, collecting water, timber, fodder and botanical specimens and exploring the surrounding area.
Cook's party made several attempts to establish relations with the Indigenous people, but they showed no interest in the food and gifts the Europeans offered, and occasionally threw spears as an apparent warning.
[13][b][14] In 1770, after returning to England from their voyage in the South Pacific, Cook and Banks brought with them a large collection of flora and fauna, along with cultural artefacts from their most recent venture.
Although the Gweagal Spears remain in the ownership of Trinity College, they are now on display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
[20][21] Rodney Kelly, sixth-generation descendant of Gweagal man Cooman, went to see the exhibition and immediately started a campaign for the return of the shield, along with the spears in held in Cambridge.
[22] In April 2016, the British Museum offered to display the shield in Australia on a loan, but its permanent return was the only acceptable outcome for the Gweagal people.
[22][23] On this trip, Kelly discovered that the Ethnological Museum of Berlin holds another shield also said to be connected to Cook's 1770 visit to Botany Bay.
The results of the workshop were reported by Maria Nugent and Gaye Sculthorpe, an Aboriginal curator at the museum, and published in Australian Historical Studies in 2018.
[27] Historian and archivist Mike Jones of the eScholarship Research Centre of the University of Melbourne and ANU School of History,[28] while not disputing the outcome of the workshop or Thomas' claim, has challenged the use of purely European sources and perspectives to provide the provenance Indigenous artefacts, saying that the shield has become a "cultural touchstone".
[29] Sarah Keenan, Leverhulme Fellow and senior lecturer at Birkbeck College Law School in London,[30] said that Indigenous perspectives and methodologies were not used in the workshop, and a different conclusion may have been reached, or other knowledge gained about its significance, had such methods been applied.
[33] Three of the spears were sent from Cambridge to the National Museum of Australia for the exhibition entitled Endeavour Voyage: The Untold Stories of Cook and the First Australians,[34] from 2 June 2020 to 26 April 2021.
