Manly mogo

Manly Cove in Sydney, New South Wales was named by Captain Arthur Phillip (the first Governor of the New South Wales colony) as a tribute to the “confidence and manly behaviour” of the Aboriginal men he saw there. When Phillip and his crew sailed in their longboat toward the cove during their explorations of Sydney waterways in January 1788, a group of twenty Aboriginal men swam out towards them, not afraid of these strangers or their weapons.^[1] Phillip admired their strong appearance; they looked very healthy from living in open, clean environments.

The colonists on the First Fleet had expected the local Aboriginal people to be how they were described by the likes of Sir Joseph Banks, James Mario (Maria) Matra, and Captain James Cook, who are referenced in the Recognising Invasions section of the Unsettled exhibition. Aboriginal people were often portrayed in these colonial accounts as weak, cowardly, inferior, helpless, and in need of salvation. These stereotypes were used strategically to dehumanise Aboriginal people and justify the taking of their land.^[2] Phillips’ own direct experience starkly contrasts with these selectively constructed representations, and in time the name Manly Cove has stood as a testimony of how impressive Aboriginal people appeared to him and his fellow colonists.

This mogo (meaning stone axe in the local Sydney and South Coast Aboriginal languages, and also called a ground-edged hachet in Western archaeological terms) was gifted by an Aboriginal man to a young girl in Manly sometime during the 1830s and remained in her family until it was donated to the Australian Museum in 1995 where it has since been on display in the Westpac Long Gallery until its temporary placement in the Unsettled exhibition. It is one of only two complete pre-European hafted (handled) axes dating back to likely the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century from the Sydney region known to have survived (although the string around the handle of this mogo was an addition made in later years).^[3] The other one is in Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Acc. No. 1922.995).

The stone of this mogo is metamorphic rock, which was typically sourced from quarries and traded across nations and geographical regions.^[4] It is possible to determine the origin of a mogo’s stone by examining it to compare and match with particular quarries, and it is said this one travelled 1,000 kilometres along trade routes. The stone is shaped the way it is from the action of someone grinding it on sandstone (which creates the sandstone grooves found along many waterways, including in the Sydney region), and it may not be just a coincidence that the Manly district is part of sandstone country.^[5]