We live surrounded by material things. Some are mundane and utilitarian, others exotic objects of desire, but all our belongings have something to say about who we are and how we live. Objects reflect both culture and history. Individually and collectively, they shape our lives, link us to others and connect us to the past. Yet objects are often strangely absent from accounts of past lives. This seminar series aims to unpack some of the stories that objects can tell about the present and about the past. We also hope to provide a forum for discussion for those of us interested in material histories. We aim to cast the net widely, with no limitations on either time or space.
In presenting this series the Old Treasury Building is working in partnership with colleagues from Deakin University and the Australian Catholic University. We have chosen a lunchtime slot (1-1.50PM AEST), to keep presentations concise and focused, but still allow audience participation. This is a free digital seminar series, with recordings available after each seminar for anyone who cannot join us on the day. Access information will be provided on registration. To register for the next seminar in the series please click on the link below.
Each seminar will present two researchers who will speak for 12-15 minutes each on objects that are linked by a common theme. If you are engaged in research on any aspect of material history and interested in presenting in the series, please contact the convenors via the MHSS contact form.
View recordings of previous presentations here.
Objects of Connection: The Overland Telegraph
Friday 16 May at 1pm
In 2022, a virtual exhibition was launched to mark 150 years of the Overland Telegraph Line. A collaboration between Australian Catholic University, the History Trust of South Australia, the State Library of South Australia and the South Australian Museum, the exhibition re-tells the Line’s significance through a more inclusive cultural narrative, beyond its place in European-centred colonial history. In particular, it seeks to emphasise First Nations perspectives on the Line’s paths through Aboriginal Country, and highlights the vital role of other non-European actors in its construction. It reveals the Line’s important transcultural history - both as a tool of colonial expansion and as a complex zone of cross-cultural contact and exchange. The exhibition draws on the collections of three of South Australia’s cultural institutions, and the re-interpretation of items of material culture is a key aspect of the exhibition’s approach.
Speakers:
Mandy Paul is responsible for the management of the South Australian State History Collection. Understanding and sharing complex and contested histories has been a thread running through her career, informing her work over three decades as a social history curator, museum director and collections manager, and as a consultant historian on native title claims. Mandy holds postgraduate qualifications in history and museum studies and has published widely in on Australian social history, museology, and native title. Mandy is also a member of State Records Council and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide.
Amanda Nettelbeck is a Professor of History at the University of Adelaide and the current Australia-Japan Foundation Visiting Professor in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo (2024-25). Her fields of research include a focus on the application of colonial law to Indigenous people, including through policing and the courts, and the history and memory of Australia's frontier wars. Her last book, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood (Cambridge University Press, 2019) won the 2020 Australia & New Zealand Law & History Society legal history prize. She is a member of the South Australian Libraries Board, and is current chair of the Editorial Board for the journal Australian Historical Studies.
Colonial Tourism: Objects of Martindale Hall
Friday 22 August at 1pm
First Speaker:
Spoils from ‘The Tour of the East’
In 1930, the white colonials, Jack Mortlock, of Martindale Hall, near Clare S.A., and his younger brother Ranson, and their manager, E. E. Scarfe, made a three month ‘Tour of the East’, travelling in Java, Singapore, Ceylon and India. We have been able to trace their journey, creating a Time Layered Cultural map (TLC), drawing upon the movie they made of the trip, diaries, newspaper reports and itineraries. En route they collected souvenirs and artefacts, which they displayed in Martindale Hall.
This paper will examine some of these souvenirs, such as the Javanese lampshade, the Sri Lankan masks and the Taj Mahal lamp, drawing attention to the colonial power relations which pervaded them.
Professor Emerita Margaret Allen, University of Adelaide has researched gendered histories, and also transnational and postcolonial histories, focussing upon India-Australia 1880-1940. In the ARC project, ‘Beyond Empire transnational religious networks & liberal cosmopolitanisms’ she examined the emergence of faith-based cosmopolitanisms in the interstices of multi-faith, multi-cultural and multi-racial connected webs around India in late colonial period. This paper emerges from ARC project, 'Slow digitisation, community heritage and the objects of Martindale Hall.’
Second Speaker:
Joe Timbery’s boomerang and the politics of 1938
The Smoking Room at Jack Mortlock’s Martindale Hall, an Italianate Georgian mansion in the Clare Valley SA, displays some fifty Australian Aboriginal objects, including shields, spear throwers, clubs and boomerangs. The artefacts and objects in the Hall’s opulent Smoking Room are portals to new stories that take us through, in Delia Falconer’s words, the ‘back door of history’. These new ways of looking at Martindale Hall seek to show the hidden material relationships of class and race that underpinned the wealthy lifestyles of its inhabitants.
One object is described as ‘an urban boomerang’ and was most likely purchased by Mortlock in Sydney in 1938. This ornately decorated boomerang was made by Joe Timbery a famous boomerang-maker and -thrower from the Aboriginal community of La Perouse, Sydney. The designs and the object biography of this boomerang opens an unexpected window onto the modern political history of Australia in the twentieth century.
Professor Penelope Edmonds is Matthew Flinders Professor, History, Flinders University. She researches in 19th century British empire and setter colonialism in the Australian/Pacific region, transnational and postcolonial histories, heritage and museums. She brings a critical theory perspective to questions of colonialism, race, reconciliation and redress, humanitarianism, slavery and unfreedom in the Australian and Western Pacific region. She has broad industry and professional experience in the GLAM sector. On the Board of the Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, she was involved with the development and delivery of its landmark apology to Tasmanian Indigenous peoples in 2021.
Material Histories is presented by Old Treasury Building in partnership with Deakin University and Australian Catholic University.
