When is a shield not a shield? Interpreting Indigenous versatility in an East End match factory

Abstract

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’.