Reports, silences and repercussion: wondering about the ballistic biography of the Leichhardt gunplate

ABSTRACT

One of the most mythologised Australian explorers is the Prussian-born Ludwig Leichhardt, who famously ‘disappeared’ in 1848. The only seemingly authenticated relic from his final journey is a gunplate, purchased by the National Museum of Australia in 2006. In a context conditioned by the Australian History Wars, the Museum presents the plate in singularising, largely heroicising fashion and occludes the uses to which the gun was once put. However, an expanded object biography – a ‘ballistic biography’ that wonders about trajectories, interactions with the media through which an object travels, and terminal impacts as well as subsequent repercussions – can contemplate the significance of guns and their parts in Indigenous lifeworlds, and their after-effects. Plumbing these hidden histories and effects can add nuance and complexity to the simpler story of colonial nostalgia accreting around objects like this gunplate in its current institutional setting. By encouraging speculation it can prompt museum visitors into a more activated state.

KEYWORDS:

• Object biography
• cultural biography
• historical wonder
• Australian colonial history
• history Wars
• museology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Archival sources

Bristow-Smith family, collection of correspondence and newspaper cuttings, courtesy of Darrell Lewis, private collection.

J.D. Somerville collection, SLSA PRG 15/62 6&7.

Notes

1. Thanks to Darrell Lewis for kindly supplying copies of various historical sources. Thanks to Lindsay Barrett and Paula Hamilton for reading drafts of this article and giving me their views. Thanks also to the peer reviewers for their suggestions.

2. For other recent Indigenous engagements with the Leichhardt story, see (Hurley 2018): Chapter 8.

3. For an overview of the Museum’s creation, and the debates surrounding it, see e.g. (Attwood 2006; Trinca 2013). See also (Macintyre and Clark 2003): Ch 10. For a copy of the published review, see Carroll, Longes, Jones, Vickers-Rich 2003.

4. The historiographical basis for making this statement is founded on an address by the President of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia (South Australia) in the late 1930s, itself based on the enquiries of the amateur historian J.D. Somerville (Parker and Somerville 1935-36). Parker/Somerville drew tentative conclusions, including that there was ‘very little doubt’ that the gunplate was authentic, that there was ‘no reason to doubt’ Harding’s statement about where it had been found, and they thought it ‘reasonable to suppose that Leichhardt could have reached the vicinity of the Western Australian Musgrave Ranges.’ (1937: 68, emphasis added) That divergent conclusions were possible was evident soon after, when other alleged last relics of Leichhardt were found in a different location, or when the doctor and anthropologist J.B. Cleland suggested that the plate had more likely been found in Queensland, where Leichhardt was hitherto thought to have died (Cleland 1939; Price 1937-38 [1939]-38). Parker/Somerville’s article omitted certain unhelpful things too, such as the view that some of their informants may have been mendacious (Letter, Ellis [Geol. Survey of WA] to Somerville, 28 April 1937). Letters, unless otherwise noted are from the State Library of South Australia (SLSA) Somerville papers.

5. These links have been progressively elided from the historiography about the gunplate. In the 1930s, there was some isolated discussion of possible Indigenous meaning adhering to the gunplate, including in the private correspondence between the two amateur historians and Leichhardt enquirers, J.D. Somerville and E.E. Larcombe. However, this was far from a major focus of Somerville’s published paper (Parker and Somerville [1937]1935-36. See also Price 1937-38 [1939]-38). Giving too much credence to posthumous Indigenous ownership of the gunplate was to admit that it might have travelled ‘hundreds of miles’, as Larcombe pointed out in a letter to Somerville (Letter, Larcombe to Somerville, 20 October 1935). That was inimical to Somerville’s desire to pin down where it had been found, and thereby solve mystery of where Leichhardt had died.

6. On the whole, Leichhardt was in the habit of preferring to use the sword he carried with him, which had the advantage of dispatching animals without expending valuable powder and shot, but which also subsequently gained him the contempt of various Europeans, for whom ‘bushmanship’ and success as an explorer – often seen during the early and mid-19^th century as a type of subset of military activity–consisted partly in the ability to use a gun.

7. On Jandamarra, see e.g. (Pedersen and Woorunmurra 2011). See also (Gapps 2018) on how some Indigenous people actively engaged with guns during the ‘Sydney Wars’ in the Sydney basin.

8. It is thought, for example, that Indigenous people would not have been inclined to take something until well after the fact of a murder, as they tended to shun such a spot (Price 1937-38 [1939]-38).

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Wright Hurley

Andrew Wright Hurley is a cultural historian with a background in German studies.  He is the author of Ludwig Leichhardt’s Ghosts: The Strange Career of a Traveling Myth (Camden House, 2018) and the co-editor (with Lars Eckstein) of Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements (Routledge, 2020). Other monographs include The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West-German Cultural Change (Berghahn Books, 2009) and Into the Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction (Camden House, 2015). He teaches International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.