Photo by Trish Barnard
Accession Number: QE1127
Museum: Queensland Museum
Date Acquired: 1916
Collector: Joseph Campbell (1856-1933)
Date Collected: 1914-1916
Where from: Wrights Creek
Description: L920 x W350mm
Collected from Gossypium Park on 28 September 1916 and sold to QM (QE1006-QE4186). In 1910 a cotton plantation called Gossypium Park, was established south of Cairns at Wrights Creek, (near Kamma), which employed local Aboriginal labour. Five years later the plantation went into receivership and one of the cotton gins were sent to Yarrabah. In 1916, Joseph Campbell, former Director of Cotton Culture for Gossypium Park Estates Ltd., and supervisor of Aboriginal people on the plantation in 1914, sold a collection of artefacts including shields and baskets to the Queensland Museum for 30 pounds (Trish Barnard, Collection Manager, Aug. 2005).
This shield design represents ‘Bama’, which is the language word for Aboriginal people from the rainforest region of north Queensland, see contemporary Yidinji shield designs by Napoleon Oui from Cairns and Michael Boiyool Anning’s (1955-) shield ‘Bama – The people’ 2004.162 held in the Queensland Art Gallery collection (Barnard 2013).
See: ‘Joseph Campbell’ authored by Trish Barnard