Summary

The Kamilaroi peoples travelled extensively over their country, hunting kangaroos, emus, bandicoots and possums, using wooden clubs, spears and murula (spear-throwers).
Most commonly made from Ballee (Cherry Tree) or Moeyang (Blackwood), the spatula shaped murula enabled a spear to be thrown a great distance with precision. With the right hand drawn backwards over the shoulder, a man could throw a spear with immense force, killing a kangaroo to at 75 metres.
Men were very careful with their spears and murula, which they used both in hunting and during battle. When a murula was broken, the body was kept and a new hook was fitted using kangaroo-tail sinew, which was then covered in resin or gum. The new hook could be made from wood or animal bone.

Local Name

Murula

Physical Description

Wooden and vegetable fibre spearthrower, lath-shaped. The nib is detachable, held by fibre and resin.

Significance

The Kamilaroi people are the second-largest Aboriginal Nation on the eastern side of Australia. Kamilaroi lands cover more than 50,000 square kilometres in New South Wales along the Barwon, Bundarra, Balonne and upper Hunter Rivers and in the Liverpool Plains.
Kamilaroi/ Wiradjuri artist and researcher Jonathan Jones provides insight into the ways in which First Nations peoples negotiate the multi-layered circumstance of their cultural items being held in museum collections;

'Throughout the process of colonisation, south-east communities have faced a number of obstacles in connecting to our ancestral objects housed within museums, including those within the British Museum and the National Museum of Australia. Anthropology has played a complex role, often impeding and disenfranchising south-east communities and causing untold harm. Within the south-east a handful of historical anthropological texts dominate how we understand and interpret museum objects and, in turn, our cultural heritage, often obscuring our ability to see our objects and claim them as our own.'
Jonathan Jones, 2015.
Reference: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/unsettled/jonathan_jones

More Information