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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Australian Indigenous & Oceanic Art
• Sale Date:
  21 Jul 2015 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  175
• Lot Description:
  A Collection of Mission Artefacts
  Lake Condah Mission, Victoria (circa 1900)
  carved hardwood
  104.5 cm; 75.2 cm; 60 cm long (3)
• Provenance:
  Joshua Chamberlain, Lake Condah Mission; (operated the general store circa 1900); Jessie Sharrock (nee Chamberlain), Victoria; Marion Hanlon, Victoria; By descent; Private Collection, Sydney
• Notes:
  The collection of a shield, a digging stick and a leangle club, carved from hardwood and decorated in adzed or chiseled designs, possesses an impeccable provenance dating back to the original owner Joshua Chamberlain who operated the general store at Lake Condah Mission around 1900. Lake Condah is situated in south-western Victoria in the lands of the Gunditjmara people. The Gunditjmara are renowned for their traditional stone and timber dwellings, and for an extensive system of aquaculture built around a series of stone fish and eel traps on the southern reaches of the lake that dates back some eight millennia. Europeans first came into the region in the 1830s and a period of conflict known as the Eumerella Wars ensued for some twenty years. Despite the strong resistance put up by the Gunditjmara the advent of white settlement saw the Church of England establish a mission at Lake Condah in 1867. Thus these artefacts were made at a time when that period of conflict would have been still fresh in peoples' minds. Joshua Chamberlain, however, appears to have been on good terms with the Aboriginal inhabitants of the mission as he is recorded as having received as gifts Ômany beautifully carved weapons', as described by Chamberlain's granddaughter Marion Hanlon, neŽ Sharrock? in Vanda Savill's history of the mission at Lake Condah, Dear Friends - Lake Condah Mission, Hamilton, Victoria: Kalpint Graphics, 1976, pp. 111-112. By 1913, the population of the mission had dropped to less than forty people and it was closed in 1918 (Howie-Willis, I, ÔLake Condah' in Horton, D. (Ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, society and culture, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, Vol. 1, p.576. Wally Caruana
• Estimate:
  A$10,000 - 15,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Tribal

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.