Gorgets and Breastplates: Frontier Diplomacy in North America and Australia

Gorgets and Breastplates: Frontier Diplomacy in North America

and Australia

By the late eighteenth century, colonial French and British powers in North America had a well-established practice of bestowing gorgets on individual Native Americans in recognition of their allegiance.  These crescent-shaped metallic discs, originally a decorative item of Western military uniform, were among the material objects of European colonization (such as beads, blankets and knives) that played a significant role in trade and diplomatic relations on North American frontiers.  However, as this paper demonstrates, the practice of distributing gorgets or breastplates was transported by the British to the Australian colonies.      

In the early 1800s, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who came to New South Wales after fighting in the British military in the American War of Independence, distributed several gorgets or breastplates to ‘chiefs’ of the Sydney region, including most famously to the influential Aboriginal diplomat, Bungaree.  By the mid-nineteenth century, government authorities, pastoral companies and settlers presented inscribed breastplates to Aboriginal people, mainly men.  The breastplates acknowledged employment or other service, and designated the perceived ‘rank’ (King, Chief, Queen) of individuals within their tribe. Today, while such breastplates are arguably the most potent and enduring objects of settler-Indigenous negotiation on Australian frontiers, their origins as and migration as objects of diplomacy have attracted little historical interest. 

This paper explores gorgets or breastplates in the context of the colonial circulation of material culture, the performative aspects of their bestowal in North America and Australia, and the meanings and legacies of these objects for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in both continents.