What can Australian Message Sticks teach us about literacy?

Few people have ever heard about a fascinating form of visual communication used by Indigenous Australians: message sticks. When I teach about the invention of writing, I usually mention them in a little side note to illustrate the complexity of the question who invented writing, and what writing even is:

Whether #writing was invented even more often is complicated because (1) incomplete record (2) unclear connections between writing systems (3) the history of writing is a colonial story

Side exploration: #Australian #Indigenous message stickshttps://t.co/ExI5ZcgOHe pic.twitter.com/sgLlWAAyWq

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

One of the reasons I don’t go into detail is that I’m not an expert and don’t know all that much about Australian Aboriginal Message Sticks myself. However, taking my Literacies unit online has offered the opportunity to create a lesson about them by bringing the world’s foremost expert on the subject, Dr Piers Kelly, right into my classroom.

Piers and I met up on Zoom and I brought along some of my burning questions: What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19^th/early 20^th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How did message sticks fit into the multilingual communication ecology of precolonial Australia? And, of course, the million-dollar question: are message sticks a form of writing?

To find out the answers to these questions, and more, listen to this audio-record of our conversation.

Context, context, context

One of the most intriguing points that Piers makes in the interview is that the symbols engraved on message sticks probably didn’t make sense on their own but only worked as part of the overall context: the symbols needed to be “read” together with the material of the stick itself, the identity of the messenger, and the context of reception.

This may seem unusual at first glance: as users of the alphabet we have come to see writing as one of the greatest abstractions of all, entirely independent of context. The key point of literacy seems to be the product – the text – that carries the information. Writing allows us to strip away all that seemingly irrelevant context.

This is certainly how Europeans approached message sticks: objects of sufficient interest to be collected but really quite unsophisticated if compared to the libraries full of books and huge monuments that other literate civilizations have produced. So, the message sticks got collected and put away in museums, and hardly anyone bothered to learn how they were used.

However, our ways of seeing literacy have changed and the idea that the most interesting aspect of literacy is not the written artifact but the way it is used has recently gained traction in Literacy Studies. The analytic focus is now on literacy events:

A key concept for the empirical study of ways of taking meaning from written sources across communities is that of literacy events: occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies. […] In such literacy events, participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and sharing knowledge in literacy events. (Heath, 1982, p. 50)

Let me describe a modern literacy event to you that has many similarities to the way message sticks were used:

Once a day, five days a week, a representative of Australia Post rides their motorcycle through my suburban Sydney street. Outside each house, there is a letter box with a number on it and sometimes the postie puts an object into that box. If they put something into the letterbox in front of my house and I’m at home, I might get up from my desk and walk out to get it. Or I might put it off till later because, unless I’m expecting a delivery of some online purchase, the object they put into my mailbox is inevitably a bill.

In other words, the object is a piece of writing but I know its content without having even sighted it, let alone read it.

Once I collect the letter and see, for example, the logo of Sydney Water on the envelope, I know that it contains the quarterly water bill.

I don’t need to read the details of the bill: focusing on the amount due and the due date, the bill makes me take action. I will log onto my bank account and arrange payment. I then place a little check mark on the bill and file it away in some folder. Usually, arrival and payment of the water bill also leads to one or more family conversations about water consumption.

Now imagine aliens landing on earth and starting to collect mailed letters. Like the European colonizers of Australia, they might conclude that our writing systems was not particularly sophisticated because so much information was actually outside the writing symbols: part of the message is in the person of the messenger (if it’s not the postie but a teenager who stuffs something into my letterbox, I know it’s advertising); part of it is in its placement (if it’s a rolled object that’s thrown onto the driveway out of a running car, it’s the free local newspaper); part of it is in the design of the envelope (if it has the logo of the local council, it’s the council rates); part of it is in the colors (if the amount payable appears in red, payment is overdue); part of it is in a diagram; and so on and so forth.

They might also miss that the artifact itself is not particularly important. What matters is that the bill spurs the recipient into action (i.e. payment) and leads to a conversation about water consumption. Of course, they might also be more enlightened and take a holistic view and understand that the text is just a prop that enables us to do things with words.

Now, you might wish to argue that my comparison between message sticks and mailed bills is flawed because bills are only one text form among many genres that we use in our society.

That is true but it does not invalidate the point that the meaning of writing does not exclusively – or maybe not even predominantly? – reside in the symbols that make up the writing system, and in the selection from this system that is assembled into any given text. The context of use and the use event fundamentally shape the meaning of all writing.

Can you help demonstrate this point by adding a description of a literacy event you engage in? How does the context shape the meaning of the text? And what kind of action do you undertake with that text as prop?

Additional resources about Australian Message Sticks

1. Kelly, Piers. Ed. (2018). Australian Message Stick Database
2. Kelly, Piers. (2020). Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions. Journal of Material Culture, 25(2), 133-152. Open access
3. Kelly, Piers. (2020). A very short reading guide to research on Australian message sticks

Reference

Heath, Shirley Brice. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49-76.

Chats in Linguistic Diversity

Did you enjoy this conversation? It is the first in a series of Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In the past some of you may have enjoyed our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Due to Covid-19, we’ve obviously had to put this lecture series on hold. We hope that our occasional podcast Chats in Linguistic Diversity will make up for these for the time being. Feel free to contact us with topic suggestions.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on 15/03/2024)

Dist Prof Piller: You’re listening to Chats in Linguistic Diversity, brought to you by Macquarie University and the Language on the Move network, hosted by Ingrid Piller.

My guest today is Dr Piers Kelly, an anthropologist and literature researcher from the University of New England in Armidale. Piers’ PhD is from the Australian National University in Canberra on Eskayan. Eskayan is the utopian language that was created over 100 years ago by a radical prophet in the southern Philippines. That sounds super-intriguing, but he’s also an expert of something even more intriguing, and that’s Aboriginal message sticks, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

Piers is the creator and editor of the Australian Message Stick Database, a digital repository of more than 1,100 message sticks and their associated metadata, and he’s the author of a fascinating new article that has just come out to the Journal of Material Culture. The article is called Australian message sticks: old questions, new directions. Welcome, Piers.

Dr Kelly: Thank you.

Dist Prof Piller: Piers, how did you get interested in message sticks?

Dr Kelly: Well, I heard somebody in Europe give a talk, and in the talk she mentioned Australian message sticks as a kind of comparative aside, and I thought to myself, “Well why don’t I know something about this?”, and it was shortly before I was about to start a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in in Germany in a lab that was looking at the evolution of graphic codes of all kinds. And it occurred to me that I was the only Australian at the institute at that time, and I should bring something Australian to the topic.

So, when I was back in Canberra, I contacted the National Museum of Australia that had some terrific message sticks. The museum was very helpful, and they agreed to photograph the 50 or so message sticks in their collection at no cost. And this became the basis to the database that you mentioned, and I also got some help from ((((((. And back in Germany, I began very slowly developing the database mostly by visiting European museums.

I was surprised by just how many message sticks are in those museums, particularly in Germany and the UK. And I didn’t start out with any big questions, just a kind of curiosity to learn a bit more than I did. And it was never really my main project when I was at the Max-Planck Institute. I was mostly working on writing systems and the question of how communities that are traditionally not literate, how they appropriate or re-invent writing systems for their own purposes. And now I’m still interested in that, but I’ve kind of put that question on pause for a while, and I’m focusing more deliberately on message sticks.

Dist Prof Piller: Can you describe a message stick? What actually is it?

Dr Kelly: It’s a hard question because a message stick can look like anything, but a very typical shape, if you like, if you can imagine a piece of polished wood that’s about 20cm long maybe. It’s tapered at one end, and sometimes it’s tapered at both ends. It can be more or less flattened like a ruler, or it can be cigar-shaped, and then it has markings along its surfaces. So, the most common markings are simple notches and lines, and you also get dots or stippling, but there can also be quite elaborate and iconic pictures. And some of them are so fine and small that they are only visible if you look very closely in bright lights. That’s been my struggle in a museum setting where it’s not always possible to get a bright light. So that’s the typical shape – a tapered, polished stick that’s marked with signs.

But then there’s quite a diversity across Australia. So, there’s a message stick from Mornington Island in the National Museum of Australia that’s a metre and a half long, which is huge. It’s painted and it has emu feathers fixed to one end, a beautiful object. And in the database, the smallest one that I came across is just over 5cm long. It’s tiny and wrapped up in possum fur twine and it’s from people of western NSW.

But one of the things that I found that complicates the question even further of what a message stick is supposed to look like is the fact that, in a tight spot, Aboriginal people could use other things as message sticks. So, there’s a wonderful example of the spear-thrower from Victoria that was repurposed as a message stick, and sadly it’s been lost in a fire.

Dist Prof Piller: Now that we know what a typical message stick looks like, what did Aboriginal people do with it? How were they used? What is the purpose? Maybe you can break this up for us – how were these message sticks used in pre-colonial times? How were they used in the late 19^th/early 20^th century? And how are they used today? Or are they used today?

Dr Kelly: They are still used today in a different way than they were used before. They are certainly still used today. The traditional way that message sticks were used in pre-colonial times follow the kind of set routine that, to my understanding, is reasonably consistent across Australia. It goes something like this: Someone wants to send a message to another person or to another community that is outside of their territorial jurisdiction. They appoint a messenger, who is usually a man, and then they go off and harvest a small piece of wood which they then begin carving in the presence of this appointed messenger. While they are carving it, they explain the content of the intended message and the meaning of individual signs carved on it. For example, it might be “It’s fine to hunt kangaroos. They’re plentiful. We need to coordinate people for the hunt”. So, the person who is the sender is making the stick and explaining the message.

Then the messenger takes the message stick and sets off towards the camp of the intended recipient or recipients. And what’s important to say is that his identity and purpose as a messenger is made really clear. So, the message stick is displayed publicly. It can be hung on the end of the spear, or inside a net bag. It can be tucked in a waist girdle or a headband. There are examples of message sticks, really small ones, that have in fact been stuck through the nose or through the septum, but the point is that everyone must be able to see it. And the messenger can kind of signal his role through things like body paint as well. Everyone needs to know that he has a message because there’s a strong protocol of “We’re not shooting the messenger” (or not spearing the messenger) because once he passes into country over which he doesn’t have traditional rights of access he would otherwise be placed in danger of being killed as a trespasser on the spot.

So, he crosses over a political boundary without harm and approaches the camp of the recipient and usually sits some distance away, so everyone can see him and that he means no harm and that he has this kind of ambassadorial mission, if you like. And then eventually he’ll perhaps be given food and be invited to approach the camp, and at this point he delivers the message stick to the recipient along with a verbal explanation of what it means, as it was conveyed to him by the original sender. This, again, is all still done very publicly. The recipient might then carve a message stick as a response, or simply give a verbal reply which the messenger then takes back home.

So that’s the kind of classical routine with variance around the place. Some groups did all of that but without a message stick at all. For example, the Diyari people of South Australia didn’t use message sticks, but they still did that routine, and the messengers for the Diyari were women, always women. Most elsewhere in Australia it’s almost always men.

This routine of the messenger, sender and recipient began to change with the establishment of the colony. The Aboriginal people began to take advantage of different forms of transport, like horses, carriages, steamers and so on. The motifs that appeared on message sticks were also influenced by new finds, introduced by settlers. There’s an example of a message stick with a representation of a police insignia, for example. There’s one I saw at the Pitt Rivers Museum that has playing cards inscribed on it. There’s a few from the Kimberley region that have intriguing representations of what look like letters of the Roman alphabet.

It’s also in this time that there are cases of non-indigenous people, settlers, learning how to make message sticks and then using them to communicate with indigenous communities. So there becomes this kind of hybrid technology. Then as the 19^th century wears on it seems more common for women to be sending message sticks, or to be messengers themselves, even in places where women traditionally didn’t do that. So, the system is getting shaken up by the expanding colonies, and it’s finding ways to adapt.

By the early 20^th century, message sticks are no longer widely used in that traditional routine that I outlined before except in the Top End, in places like Arnhem Land, Tiwi Island, which are places that are very interesting for my research. It continues there in some places until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in the rest of Australia, there’s the emergence of the new tradition of what I’ve called “Artistic Message Sticks” or replicated message sticks. This tradition coincides with the rise of commercial indigenous art production. So indigenous begin making message sticks specifically as objects for sale to settlers. And in some cases, they may look similar, or even identical, to the traditional message sticks, but they’re not invested with any communicative meaning. And this is a practice that continues in various forms today. In fact, a large number of the message sticks in museums come from this tradition.

Meanwhile, back in the Top End, where the traditional practice was continuing, we get the emergence of yet another practice which is about using message sticks in very high-profile, political negotiations with non-indigenous institutions. For example, the earliest example I have of this is a group in the Tiwi Islands. They sent a message stick to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1951, and indigenous leaders from Acheron and Mornington Islands sent a joint message stick to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1974 to demand land rights. Bob Hawke got one in 1983. There was even a message stick tabled in the Senate in 2007. And last year you might have heard of a guy called Alwyn Doolan who’s an indigenous man from Queensland. He walked 8,000kms to deliver 3 message sticks to Scott Morrison who, in fact, refused them, which was kind of extraordinary.

So, this is a practice with kind of high-profile, political message sticks. It’s still going strong, and it’s very much a continuation of these earlier practices when message sticks could sometimes have a very strong diplomatic function. Late 19^th century ethnographies talk about message sticks being like a royal seal that authenticates the messenger and his message. And of course, one of the purposes, traditionally, was to solidify alliances. So, I think that’s a strong continuation of that, from a part of Australia where the tradition was very strong through the 20^th century.

What’s really different about the contemporary political use of message sticks is that they are almost being passed from an indigenous representative to a non-indigenous institution. Unlike the traditional routine, the sender and messenger are usually one in the same person. So, you make a message stick, and you carry it yourself to the Prime Minister or whoever else, so that’s an innovation.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s pretty shocking to hear, that the Prime Minister would actually refuse to accept a message stick. Unbelievable.

Dr Kelly: I was in contact with Alwyn Doolan at the time, and we were trying to together write something about this, but it was very hard because he had a smartphone but he was on the road so long. When he started out his journey, it was before the election, so this is how long his journey was. He arrived just in time for the results, so I wonder if it had have been Bill Shorten that had won the election, it might have been a different case. But it was a real missed opportunity, I think.

Dist Prof Piller: Indeed. And that kind of brings us to this question of why we actually know so little about message sticks. I have to tell you, the first I heard of message sticks was 2 years ago when I saw a tweet of yours about message sticks on Twitter. I believe this wasn’t the first time I actually saw message sticks because I had seen the Aboriginal collections of a number of the museums that house quite a few message sticks. I feel like I must have seen message sticks in museums before your tweet drew my attention to them. That, to me, in a sense, exemplifies that there is something going on with our lack of attention to them. Can you maybe explain why we know so little and also talk a bit about the lenses that have shaped our knowledge about message sticks.

Dr Kelly: Well, it’s interesting that all those museums are importing collections but, even so, you’re unlikely to have seen them on display. There’s quite a number of message sticks, but they’re all in storage. A few of them are on display in the local (German) library. But in the National Museum I’ve not seen them on display, South Australia maybe or maybe not, I’m not sure. It’s one of those curious things about museums. What you see is only a tiny fraction of what there is, and some of these things will never get seen unless someone asks to see them. They just sit there forever.

But yes, I don’t really know why there is so little written about message sticks. I was worried when I started out on this research area, that maybe they’re not that interesting in the end, maybe that’s why. And that’s certainly not true, it turns out. And it could have something to do with the fact that they don’t enter into the historical, public record until the 1870s. On the whole, settlers didn’t notice that this was going on, that indigenous people were communicating in this way. By the time they clocked onto it in the 1880s and 1890s, message stick communication was already entering into sharp decline across most of Australia. The colonies had expanded almost everywhere. There were, of course, restrictions placed on the movement and activities of indigenous people. Nonetheless, there was a strong wave of interest in message sticks from the 1880s through to the early 1900s. This kind of 30-year period is when most of the message sticks in museums today entered the collection.

But it’s also a period that coincides with the high watermark of social evolutionist theory in Europe, America and Australia. This idea that all human societies could be ranked on a continuum from “savagery” to “civilisation”. The aim of archaeological practice and anthropology was to go and look for those diagnostic markers that told you where a given society was on an evolutionary scale. The most important criterion in this model for attaining a civilisation was that you have writing. That was the crowning technology because it allowed records to be made and writing literally brought a society into history essentially. Indigenous people around the world were considered to be ahistorical or prehistorical because they didn’t have writing. They were kind of seen as representative of earlier phases of European prehistory. It’s important to recognise that this social evolution theory was not a fringe theory at the time. They were paradigmatic, and even critics of the theory who critiqued the model still took the premiss for granted. So very much hegemonic. Aboriginal people in Australia, in this framework, were placed on the lowest rung in that evolutionary scale on the basis of things like an absence of pottery, an absence of metallurgy and, of course, writing.

But then a German anthropologist by the name of Adolf Bastian got wind of message sticks in Cooktown when he was there in the 1880s. It was just as he was about to catch a boat home, and he talks about being so excited that he was debating whether he should miss his steamer in order to find out more about message sticks. He didn’t miss his boat, but in the few hours that he had he found an Aboriginal trooper who volunteered to make a message stick for him and to explain how it worked. And Bastian started thinking, “Hang on, this looks pretty much like writing. And if that’s the case, we really need to re-think what we understand civilisation to be”.

And this preceded a lot of discussion in various scholarly forums about message sticks, what they were. The well-known anthropologist AW Howard sent a questionnaire to settlers all over the country and asked, “Well what do you know about message sticks?”. Then he compiled and summarised the responses, and it led to a debate among settler scholars in a few journals about whether message sticks represented writing. It was framed as a debate, but really the hypothesis that message sticks represented some kind of language was always set up as a straw man – “Well, there are some people who maintain the view that message sticks are writing, but this is ludicrous because of x, y and z”. The consensus position was really that message sticks were largely meaningless and that all the real information was carried in the verbal exchange, and the message stick was really only a kind of token of authentication or a prompt to help the messenger remember the message. At the same time though, the very same people admitted that the signs on message sticks potentially had conventionalised semantic values. They even went so far as to identify them and gloss these meanings in these objects.

So, there was a contradiction at the heart of what settler scholars were doing, and I think it comes down to the fact that they were approaching message sticks from a very Euro-centric perspective that kind of admitted that the only significant or real graphic code out there was writing, something that modelled the sounds of language. If you did anything else with visual signs it was just a kind of noise or decoration. And I think this was a real missed opportunity because after having “solved the question” of what message sticks were, the research energy really waned. Tragically, collectors decided at this point that there was no need to make any effort to consult message stick makers, to understand what the objects were intended to mean. Collecting institutions are filled with message sticks that have ultra-detailed physical descriptions, you know, it’s 16.5cm long, it’s made out of this kind of timber, here’s the Latin name, it has fine cross-hatching, but nothing about who made it or what its intended meaning was. Sometimes not even where it’s from, or you get a label like “Western Australia” which is not very helpful. This is why I think the very best descriptions of message sticks were made before this prejudice took hold. So, settlers and ethnographers like Bastian were open minded about the possibilities, so they recorded much more detail, assuming everything to be relevant.

But after deciding that message sticks were not that interesting because they were not writing, we get these very extraordinary events cropping up in the archives and newspapers and so on. Accounts of message sticks that are successfully interpreted without a messenger, so there is no verbal message that is going alongside them. There are cases of messengers who died on their mission, but the message stick is recovered and then read. A bishop in the NT even conducted a kind of experiment where he was asked to deliver a message stick with a verbal message from Darwin to Daly Waters, and he decided, as an experiment, to withhold the verbal message and just hand over the stick to the recipient. And the recipient of the message took it and accurately read it. He correctly read it as a request for headbands and boomerangs, and he correctly identified the sender too.

Indigenous people also started sending them through the post, for example. There was one that I love that was sent by an indigenous soldier serving in WWII which got intercepted by the military censor, and it was released without censorship, which I think is glorious. Of course, no one would have been able to read it in the censorship office, I assume, let alone the enemy, whoever that was. So, it’s clear that these message sticks were doing something communicative. They’re not just redundant tokens or prompts for memory. I think the short answer to your question of why we know so little about them is that, very early on, message stick communication was mischaracterised, which derailed research. This is why we have ended up with so little, I think, in the way of substantial knowledge.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s so sad and such a loss. Do we actually have a chance of ever finding out more about message sticks and their use in precolonial times? Or do we just need to go, “Oh well, unfortunately these settlers had the wrong idea, and not only did they not leave us any information, but they also messed up the practice, so it’s just lost”?

Dr Kelly: No, I think there is a chance. Certainly, there are about 150 or so message sticks that are reasonably well-described, where we get some detail about the context, the message. In very rare cases, we get the original transcription of the original language of the verbal message. We know where, we know when, we even have individual motifs that are glossed in even rarer cases. So that’s good. That’s one way to approach the question. There’s also, I mean some of my work up north is where message sticks were used quite recently, so there are people alive today who can still make a message stick, who can interpret a message stick, who can talk about message sticks. There are very few, I could probably count them on one hand, that I know of.

But as for finding out, going back before 1788, that’s a challenge. There are no message sticks, really, that are recovered from archaeological sites, which is not unusual because Australian climates and soils are not kind to things that are made of wood. There are very few wooden objects that turn up in Australian archaeology and even fewer that pre-date colonisation. There’s possibly one from a cave in Arnhem Land, but it’s perhaps not a message stick. I haven’t examined it yet.

To turn the clock back to before 1788 without recourse to archaeology, my clues that I’m hoping to be able to work on are firstly distribution, so figuring out where message sticks are traditionally used, and where they are not. So, we do have documentation, and maps can be powerful because they reveal patterns that otherwise weren’t obvious, so that’s something I’m trying to work on now. And connected to that process of figuring out the distribution, I’m looking at words for “message stick” in various Australian languages. I’ve only got about 60 so far, but I hope that this information will tell us something about contact and diffusion and inheritance and other wonderful things that historical linguistics can do on that lexical level.

And lastly, it’s a bit of a moon-shot, but I’m looking into oral histories. So I’ve been interviewing senior knowledge-holders in the Top End about their memories and stories that have been passed down to them. And this history is sometimes quite recent and sometimes potentially quite ancient. There are terrific stories that are nursed as temporal markers in the story. It’s not always easy to establish whether they relate to pre-colonial or post-colonial events. And I have one story, but I really need to work on this, so it’s a challenge.

Dist Prof Piller: Wow. You’ve just mentioned that you are looking at the different words for “message stick” in the different Australian languages. One of the hypotheses that you mention in your article is actually that message sticks may also have been used as a means of communication across linguistic boundaries. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about linguistic diversity and multilingualism in pre-colonial Australia.

Dr Kelly: Yeah, I mean that’s interesting too because I’ve just been looking at the words. I’ve been going back to that recently, and there are words for “message stick” that co-lexify often with words for other things, like “stick” or “wood” or whatever. But then, up in the Top End and in parts of the Kimberly and far north Queensland, the word for “message stick” is mark which is, I’m pretty positive, a borrowing from Creole, in parts of Australia where Creole isn’t really used as much. So, I’m just thinking about this. Why would you have a borrowed term, especially in places where the tradition in strong? It points to this kind of multilingual environment. And also, the fact that these are mobile objects. They are moving across territories where different languages are spoken. So, it presents another challenge, I think.

We do know that message sticks were certainly used across linguistic boundaries to the extent that language boundaries coincided to a greater or lesser degree with political boundaries, so that point where you must not cross unless you had permission. So, what this means is that the original verbal message might have been communicated to the messenger in one language, and then that messenger may have passed on the message to its recipient in another language. We have to bear in mind, of course, that we know indigenous communities were and still are highly multilingual. Multilingualism is not and never has been a barrier to communication. On the contrary, languages multiply your capacity for communication. They give you a bigger repertoire.

Having said that, I’m interested in the extent to which message sticks might have been used as an additional semiotic resource alongside language, alongside things like body paint and gesture. One thing that 19^th century ethnographers universally believed was that message sticks had an authenticating function and a pneumonic function. It authenticated your role as a messenger, it authenticated the message, and it helped you remember what the message was. And I think the authentication is real, but I don’t think they really had a pneumonic function because the messages that we have that are all recorded, that are documented, are all very short. At most, they amount to about 6 lines of text when you write it out, and traditionally Aboriginal people could and still can recall song cycles that went all day long. So, I think it comes from a mentality to assume that we can’t remember anything unless it’s written down.

What I think is more likely is that message sticks are about mutual reinforcement, so they reinforce and authenticate the oral message, but the oral message also reinforces and authenticates the message stick. So, if you’re delivering a message into a community with a different language, I can imagine that precisely because the message sticks are not linked to a specific language, they have the capacity to kind of mutually reinforce the message even across language boundaries. So that’s the way I’m thinking about it at the moment, keeping in mind that these are multilingual communities so those resources are there to communicate. But I wonder then, what is a message stick doing when all these other things are available to help handle the message in a particular way.

Dist Prof Piller: That brings us, really, to the million-dollar question – Are message sticks a form of writing? How are they related to other writing systems?

Dr Kelly: I think that’s a really great question. It’s worth revisiting that question because, of course, 130 years ago people were asking it. But we can revisit it, I think, from a less Eurocentric, or a less literacy-centric perspective. A standard definition of writing is that it is a system of visual signs that models some kind of linguistic structure. Usually what it models is phonology, so that’s why we talk about writing systems as being phonographic. They are coding for and reproducing salient sounds of language. But a writing system can also sometimes model morphology but in a more limited way. So we can call that process logographic or morphographic. An ampersand, for example, models the English word “and”, but it will also stand for counterpart words for “and” in other languages like und in German or et in French because it’s not latching on to a phonetic signal. It’s simply standing in for a word.

On the whole, message sticks don’t do anything like this. The signs on them convey meaning, but they are not phonographic or logographic on the whole. So, two people, interpreting the same message stick, will not come up with the same form of words. There are potential logographs on some message sticks. For example, some message sticks have signatures on them (what amount to signatures) that identify the messenger or even the recipient with specific emblems. There is an amazing message stick from Victoria, sadly it’s lost, we have a sketch of it. It has a rebus on it in the form of a picture of a hand, and the word “hand” in that language, spoken near Wannamal, is munya which is also the local word for “meeting”. This is very much writing according to the strictest definition of it because you’re drawing attention to the sound of the word by referencing a homophone.

But it’s clear from commentary that explanations produced by Aboriginal message stick makers and messengers that this is not a principle that’s generally at work in the production of motifs. But if message sticks are not, on the whole, writing as we understand the term then I don’t know how to account for these cases when message sticks were interpreted with accuracy without the benefit of a verbal message to gloss it, those cases where we don’t have a messenger. This is a central puzzle in my research.

I do have a few inklings, though. Certainly, when it comes to the most traditional or classical message sticks, there is only a finite range of themes that a message stick can actually be about. Most commonly it will be an invitation to ceremony. That’s the number one message – a young man’s initiation or a funeral, for example. These are the kind of ceremonies that involve large groups of people that are communicated about with message sticks. This is right across Australia. Then you get message sticks that are for coordinating hunting, you get declarations of war, requests for political alliances, you get requests for items, especially tradeable or luxury items of value. Sometimes you get a kind of a news bulletin, and so on.

So, if you’re seeing a messenger approach, you already perhaps have an idea about what the likely message will be on the basis of probability. The messenger could be painted up in a particular way, for example covered in pipeclay for mourning, so that gives you a good guess that it’s probably about a funeral. I’ve seen message sticks that have got pipeclay on them with fingerprints of the pipeclay, so it makes me imagine that the messenger was covered in pipeclay and that this has rubbed off onto the stick. Then the message itself will be from a specific named individual to another specific individual, and when you know who that person is and their relationship to the recipient, this again contains the possible topics. So, when my dad calls me and I see his number pop up on my phone, it’s often about fixing his computer, you know? I can pretty much guess, as soon as I see his number that’s probably what the topic is going to be. If my brother calls me, well that topic of communication is less likely. It could be a number of other things. And in Aboriginal Australia, we know kinship and social categories can regulate the kinds of things you can talk about as well as the way you’re expected to talk about them. There are expectations, in other words, based on the identity of the sender and recipient and their entire relationship. In many Aboriginal societies, as we know, the whole universe is divided along kinship or social category lines.

So, the kind of timber that’s selected for the message stick might be meaningful in terms of what it’s pointing to in the world, or rather who it’s pointing to in the world. So, in some of the fieldwork I did in Arnhem Land, message stick makers have used, for example, wood from paper bark tree. I asked about it and they said, “It’s soft wood, so it’s really easy to work”. On another occasion they produced a message stick from salvaged timber because we couldn’t get a 4-wheel drive, so we found some salvaged timber that was lying around the backyard and probably just an off-cut from construction. So, the point is with everything I’ve said so far is that, even before we get to the signs, even before we get to the motifs, there is already a pretty well-constrained frame of reference.

When it comes to the signs themselves, they can be quite basic and abstract. I mentioned notches and lines and dots. Nothing that jumps out at you as being pregnant with deep meaning. They can be quite multi-valer too, so a notch is often a person but it can also be a place. It can be a countable object. It can be an element in a narrative. A large part of my work is to try to identify signs and meanings and figure out what general class of information is being coded where. What’s being talked about in the verbal message, what’s recorded on the stick, and what’s entirely unspoken and implicit in these exchanges.

So, to sum up, I think a message stick can achieve results that are very like writing without actually being writing. You could make the case that the signs have, to some extent, semantic value but not language-specific linguistic value. When it comes to looking at how message sticks relate to other systems, I think it’s important to understand writing or language-based writing as just one kind of conventionalised visual code that’s out there in the world. There are many others, like Andean string quipus that are knotted cords once used in the Incan empire for quite complex accounting and administration. There are lots of symbol systems in west Africa and indigenous North America for recording information, sometimes ritual related, and I like to get a sense of where message sticks sit in that whole spectrum.

There are those who make the case that we need to come up with a bigger, more inclusive definition of writing. I actually don’t agree with it. I think the definition of writing being a representation of spoken language is a good one. It’s well-grounded. It’s the connotations that we need to challenge. Thinking in terms of decolonisation, I worry about well-intentioned moves to try to award prestige to a cultural practice on the basis of its underlying or superficial similarity to a western or European model. Instead, I think, let’s decentre writing in literacy as somehow being preeminent. Let’s accept and value that there are other ways to communicate with signs, with visual signs that are perfectly adequate. These should be defined on their own terms, not just in relation to writing. You want to compare, but you also don’t want to centre the colonial metric, if you like.

Dist Prof Piller: These are all such difficult and important questions to discuss. We could go on all day because this is so fascinating, but I’m very mindful that I’ve already taken quite a lot of your time. Before I let you go, if someone has been listening to this and gets really interested in this and wants to learn more, where can people go if they want to learn more about message sticks? Is there a way for anyone to actually join the research?

Dr Kelly: Yes! Yes to all of that. The best way to start is to google the Australian message stick database and click around. Down the bottom of the screen there’s a little map. You can click around and find what’s in your area from parts of Australia that you’re interested in or where you might be from. If you live in Australia, most towns will have a local cultural centre or keeping place where you might be lucky enough to see a message stick, and you can maybe join a locally led, indigenously led research on the ground. At the moment, I’m hoping to work with Aboriginal artists from in and around Armidale, NSW to reconstruct traditional techniques for carving message sticks. I’m really looking forward to that. Starting locally is always a great idea.

The fact that there hasn’t been very much written about message sticks is disappointing but that means there is very little that you have to read to be fully up to date. I have an annotated pdf online called “A Very Short Reading Guide to Research on Australian Message Sticks” which is just a beginner’s guide to get you started. There are endless topics in this area, so if you’re interested in pursuing research topics don’t hesitate to get directly in touch with me. I can point you further into the right direction, especially if you’re perhaps doing a Masters topic or an Honours topic I’m very happy to help there.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks so much, Piers, and we’ll make sure to actually put up all those links together with this particular podcast and make them available. Thank you very much for your time, and good luck with your research.

Dr Kelly: Not at all, thank you very much.