With their light skin they appear dead. They're coming closer.
The white people are approaching the shore in boats.
Two men gesture a warning from the land. Their land. Their home.
The men shout: "They're all dead."
They throw rocks and spears to make them stop.
It becomes a stand-off.
The tension's broken with a shot. A man named Cook has fired his musket.
Then another shot, and another. One of the men is hit in the leg. A shield, with a hole straight through it, is dropped as the men retreat.
The British come to shore. The shield and the spears are bundled up, bound for Britain.
It's a story Rodney Kelly's been telling for years and almost of all of it is accepted as fact — the shield is the exception.
The shield, that's become known as the Gweagal Shield, has spent most of the last 250 years on the other side of the world, sitting in the British Museum.
Rodney, a Dharawal and Yuin man, wants it back.
Not for himself, but so it can sit in an Australian museum. A symbol of that first contact, of resistance, of dispossession, of colonialism. A symbol of survival.
It's a lot to put on one piece of wood — and not everyone is as convinced about this shield's story.
'Make things right'
Rodney traces his ancestry back to one of the men of the Gweagal Clan who opposed Captain James Cook's landing on the shore of Kamay or Botany Bay on that day in 1770.
"Something terrible happened to them that day. And now I try and make things right again," he says.
About five years ago, when the shield briefly visited Australia for an exhibition, Rodney drove three hours to see it and stake his claim — demanding it, and all other artefacts in the British Museum, be permanently returned.
But the shield was once again taken to the other side of the world — returned to its cabinet in the British Museum.
Rodney wasn't going to let it rest.
He flew to London to meet with the British Museum officials. He says their cheery smiles faded when the QC he brought along began questioning the legality of the museum's ownership of the shield.
"I went there prepared so that shocked them, because I'm not an academic, I haven't got a PhD. I'm not doctor or anything like that," Rodney says.
It's not just museum officials standing in his way — they're bound by a UK law forbidding the repatriation of objects from the museum.
Rodney has kept up his campaign, staging protests and holding 'Stolen Goods' tours to point out to visitors the shield and other objects taken from all over the world.
"I take my didgeridoo in, I take boomerangs with clap sticks in. [We had] a couple hundred people standing around, security guards going crazy."
His campaign has shone a spotlight on an object that has gradually become of more and more interest to academics, writers, museums, and members of the La Perouse community (the area around Botany Bay).
All this attention has had an effect, but not exactly the one Rodney wanted.
The shield's been subjected to a range of tests and inspections. Tests designed to determine definitively whether the shield is from that moment of first contact with the British.
"The timing of it is all just so wrong. They send it over to Australia on display as 'Cook 1770', and then when somebody comes along and says, 'this belongs to the people', they turn around and say, 'well this might not belong to you, this might not be the shield from 1770'," Rodney says.
Is it the shield?
Dr Shayne Williams is a Dhungutti and Dharawal man from La Perouse.
He found the red colour of the shield's wood unusual and asked the British Museum to have it tested.
They discovered it's made from red mangrove.
Red mangrove didn't grow around Sydney.
Shayne says you'd need to go about 400 kilometres north to Port Macquarie to find red mangrove, but it's much more abundant another 300km north at Ballina, and is found all the way up to far north Queensland.
So the shield's probably not from Botany Bay.
Some, like Rodney, argue it was likely traded from another region.
Dr Maria Nugent says that is possible, but why trade it?
"If they are already making shields around Botany Bay from a different type of mangrove, why would you need to trade in a red mangrove one, unless it has perhaps other kind of ceremonial significance?" she says.
Maria, a historian from the Australian National University, co-wrote one of the papers that investigated the shield's origin.
The investigation answered some questions.
That hole in the shield? Maria says after being inspected by a firearms specialist and examined for traces of lead, the evidence is conclusive. It's not a gunshot.
Holes in shields from the time aren't that unusual. One theory is this one could have been made by a spear.
The research also tried to work out how it got in the museum, and when and how the link with Cook was first made. It found the evidence of a connection between the shield and that first contact in Botany Bay "relatively scant" and "patchy".
Maria gets that if it was that shield, it would come to embody that encounter.
"And in a way that short and momentary contest on the beach in 1770 is symbolic of the violence by which British settlers wrestled land from Aboriginal people across the colonial period."
But she questions whether a definitive answer on the shield's origin really matters.
Whether or not it's that shield, she says its value — as probably the earliest surviving shield used on Australia's east coast — is undeniable.
"Would it really make any difference to its symbolic significance, which it's acquired over the last 50 and 60 years and in a more intensive way in the last five to 10 years?" she asks.
"I think we should try and loosen this idea that things associated with Cook have greater value than other things."
Noeleen Timbery is the chair the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council and is, like Rodney, descended from the people who lived where the encounter took place.
She isn't convinced one way or the other whether the shield is the shield from that confrontation.
But she says if it isn't, "for us, it's still a 250-year-old-plus shield and it hasn't lost that cultural value for us".
"It is a strong cultural item that talks about our history and our connection and our cultural ties to this land," Noeleen says.
The British Museum argues, as it does for most items like this in its collection, that the shield tells a story of both Australia and the British.
The museum's Oceania curator Gaye Sculthorpe, who is herself Australian and Indigenous, says the country's history and the consequences of that first encounter need to be understood around the world.
"By having the exhibits of material in Britain, it does disseminate that history," Gaye says.
Survival, defence, resistance
While the shield has been the subject of focus and debate, there are other objects central to the story of that first encounter that don't attract as much attention.
Objects like the spears. Cook and his men took up to 50 spears from the area. At least four survive and are held at a museum in Cambridge.
While they want the shield returned, Noeleen and her Land Council deputy chair Ray Ingrey both agree the spears are a more significant symbol of the dispossession of their ancestors' land.
"Our people lived off this water, they needed that to spear fish. They needed that to survive and feed their families," Ray says.
"Bundling all those big 40 to 50 spears up — that's just like shutting down a Woolworths or Coles these days."
So why does the shield dominate the debate?
"The shield is different … it's defensive," Maria says.
"It really does embody or engender that idea that here was an assault that you had to defend yourself against. If we think about narratives in Australian history, there's a sense that there are conquerors and victims.
"So it fits much more into the image that we have."
Rodney also sees the shield as a symbol.
"It's our symbol of resistance. That's who we are. That's our resistance," he says.
"We've always got that resistance in us because we've always got to fight over something."
Once it's returned, he says, people will be able to look at it and "feel their power".
New symbols
Ray stands on the shore of Kamay (Botany Bay), a place he says there are mixed feelings about.
"This is where we were annexed to the British Empire and the start of what then became known as the invasion for us. But it's also a place to reflect and go, hey, we're here 250 years later, still."
"Despite being at the ground zero of colonisation, our families have adapted over the last 200 years or so.
"We've survived, we're here and we're still a people that are trying to find our way in this world."
For a long time the main symbols of the importance of the place where first contact was made were a bright red buoy showing where the Endeavour dropped anchor, and an obelisk dedicated to Captain Cook.
These weren't symbols of resistance, as Rodney sees in the stolen shield.
They weren't symbols of the dispossession that Noeleen and Ray see in the stolen spears.
But there are new symbols on the shoreline now, a series of sculptures, unveiled in April last year.
There are canoes, a whale, and seven twists of metal depicting both the bones of a humpback and the shape of the Endeavour.
"There's some Dharawal wording, and there's also some quotes from Cook's own diary etched into it," Noeleen says.
And etched into one of those big metal bones, here 250 years after the white people first came, is a man with a spear.
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2021-01-24 19:00:00Z
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