The first encounter

Saffron Walden Museum is a place of wonderment. For £2.50 visitors can see an Egyptian mummy, a lock of Napoleon’s hair and Wallace the lion, stilled by his taxidermist since 1838. When I first visited the museum nearly ten years ago, my interest took me up a wooden staircase to a space perhaps less visited. The ‘Worlds of Man’ gallery was filled with indigenous-made artefacts from around the world, many of which had been there for more than 150 years.¹⁰⁷ African statues, Hawaiian bark cloths, American tomahawks, and what I had come to see: the wooden Indigenous artefacts collected by surveyor John Helder Wedge at the close of the Tasmanian ‘Black War’ and in the first months of settlement in Victoria in 1835.

They were beautiful: clubs of warm yellow wood with beehive-shaped handles, boomerangs with the creases of the gum tree visible in their arcs, oval bark shields with white pipeclay ochre inlaid in sharp chevrons and rolling waves, and spears more than two metres long, some with deadly rows of barbs cut along their edges. The Wedge Collection is one of the most significant collections of early south-eastern Australian Indigenous wooden artefacts in the world. So, as I looked at it that day I wondered: why is it so little known? Why is it in a little museum in Essex? What is its story?