This page contains access to the recordings and information about past seminars in our Material Histories Seminar Series.
For information about our coming program, please see the main page.
First speaker:
Crafting Absence: how art gives voice to absent stories
Recent acquisitions in Museum Victoria's migration-related collections demonstrate the importance of creative practice in the representation of refugee experiences and how this is made manifest through material culture. In particular, the Museum is seeking to give space to the stories of people who have actively tried to seek refuge in Australia - some who have been prevented from doing so.
These ‘absent stories’ are nevertheless Australian stories and it is extremely challenging to represent them through material culture. This activity also raises ethical questions about how to enable refugees and asylum seekers to give voice to their own stories, while ‘safely’ sharing publicly the stories of vulnerable people.
'Refugee Journey', drawing by Zahra Jafari, Indonesia, 2015. Museums Victoria Collection
Dr Moya McFadzean is Senior Curator, Migration & Cultural Diversity at Museums Victoria. Her curatorial work develops collections and exhibitions which consider Australian migration, refugee and asylum seeker narratives, and themes of identity, belonging and diversity. She is interested in the role of museums as sites of social activism and their potential for developing relationships of genuine engagement and reciprocity with communities.
Second Speaker:
Photo Album Woven Cover: Connecting family, documenting work, and depicting Displaced People in Germany after WWII
Photo albums can be fascinating objects of material culture, and are more than the sum of the images that fill their pages. I will focus on one such album, created by Esma Banner (1910-2001), who was a keen amateur photographer and was a post-WII reconstruction worker in Germany. This album, in Museum Victoria’s collection, was a 1946 Christmas gift sent to her sister. Through it, we can see how familial relationships were maintained, how Esma valued the professional relief work she did, alongside partial insights into the experiences of the refugees who were the focus of her work and photographs.
Photo Album, Museums Victoria
Dr Mary Tomsic is a Research Fellow in the Research Centre for Refugees, Migration and Humanitarian Studies at Australian Catholic University. She is cultural historian whose research focuses on visual representations of child refugees, children’s cultural expression in histories of migration and how these circulate in the public realm.
First speaker:
Whalebone and its Afterlife: Fashion Innovation, Adaptation and Sustainability, c. 1600-1950
For over four hundred years whale baleen (historically known as whalebone) was sought after for use in western fashion manufacturing where this plastic-like material was used to create a wide range of men and women’s garments and accessories, most notably corsetry. This talk draws upon objects of European and Australian provenance that utilised whalebone and its substitutes (reeds, cane, steel and plastics) between 1600-1950 to explore how the historical uses of whalebone intersect with concerns about innovation and manufacturing, economics and availability, and ethical questions about the environmental sustainability of fashion.
Sarah A Bendall is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She is a material culture historian whose work specialises in the roles of gender in the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500-1800.
Second speaker:
Needs Must: German Paper Suits and the legacy of wartime woollen shortages.
New Jersey’s Newark Museum holds two suits made of spun paper yarns, donated in 1920 as examples of the response to cloth shortages faced by Germany and her allies during World War I. As a fashion curiosity the suits have some interesting details of cut and construction. But the suits’ historical context takes us beyond fashion. This presentation explores their complexities and contemporary relevance, linking fashion with the murky worlds of politics, military strategies, economic warfare, and eventually, the triumph of synthetic over natural fibers: the subject of the speakers’ book-in-process, Fleeced: Wool, War and the Rise of Synthetics.
Photograph courtesy Stephen Harrison of Rogue Productions.
Madelyn Shaw is a textile curator, historian and author, recently retired from the NMAH, Smithsonian Institution. Trish FitzSimons is a documentary filmmaker, historian, author and adjunct Professor of Griffith Film School. They share a research project entitled Fabric of War: a hidden history of the global wool trade.
First speaker:
Happy little Vegemite soldiers: rationing, Vegemite and national identity in WWII
Vegemite might be an Australian cultural icon now, but the spread did not attract many fans when it was first launched in 1923. Though competitions in the 1930s increased brand recognition, it was not until Vegemite became a frontline rations staple in WWII that it began to be linked to Australian national identity. This paper explores how a yeast extract spread mixed with patriotism in wartime to create an enduring cultural legacy.
Dr Hannah Viney is a professionally accredited historian with a focus on Australian twentieth-century cultural, social, and political history. She recently completed a PhD in historical studies at Monash University on women's anti-nuclear activism between 1945 and 1965.
Second speaker:
Baking up an Australian icon: the Children’s Birthday Cake Book
The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, first published in 1980, has been described as 'the greatest book ever written in this country'. Appealing to children and mothers anxious to please them alike, the book contained precise, triple-tested recipes for over 100 different, highly decorative birthday cakes as well as instructions on how to pipe icing, make marshmallow flowers and colour coconut with food dye. This talk considers the Children’s Birthday Cake Book as an historical object, exploring what its pages can tell us about late twentieth century Australian tastes and changing gender roles. It also considers the cakes themselves, delicious yet ephemeral, as cultural artefacts which reflected children’s burgeoning identities and reinforced gendered expectations.
Dr Lauren Samuelsson holds a PhD in history and is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Lauren’s research interests include cultural history, the history of food and drink, the history of popular culture and gender history. Her PhD thesis considered the influence of the Australian Women’s Weekly magazine and cookbooks on the development of Australian food culture from the 1930s to the 1980s. She has also worked on the social and cultural history of liquor legislation in mid-twentieth century New South Wales.
Sarah Hayes:
Toileting early Melbourne: The political landscape and lived reality of chamber pots, cesspits and night pans
What made Smellbourne so smelly? In part, the glacial pace at which modern toileting was introduced to this supposedly global city. This talk will wade into the archaeological and historical evidence of toileting in 19th-century Melbourne, from beautiful chamberpots, to overflowing cesspits and nightmen asphyxiating while performing their duties. It will examine the class, power and financial influences on toileting decisions in this period, examine the health and environmental consequences, and reflect on their echoes in the present.
Dr Sarah Hayes is an archaeologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University. Her work focuses on the role consumption plays in quality of life and social mobility, and associated waste behaviour. She is an Australian Research Council - Discovery Early Career Researcher Award recipient and honorary associate at Museums Victoria.
Margaret Anderson:
Class, status and the (not so) humble toilet bowl
From the date of its completion in 1863 the Old Treasury Building housed the city office of the Governor of Victoria. For many years the Premier, the Treasurer, the Chief Secretary (when not the Premier) and other ministers were also accommodated. A series of earth closets, located along the back boundary of the property, took care of the bodily needs of those working in the building. But the Governor was provided with a splendid water closet, complete with a decorative, floral-patterned bowl. What can this singular item tell us about waste management in early Melbourne, or about the class distinctions that pervaded every aspect of colonial life, even in the lavatory?
Deborah Tout-Smith:
Wartime in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building
“We would have been better off in tents”, recalled Alan Walton, RAAF, based at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building in early 1942. The wartime occupation of the Exhibition Building began in October 1940, when the RAAF requisitioned the Building under the National Security (General) Regulations for use as a barracks and training facility. An aquarium and dance hall continued to function amidst the military bustle on the site. This paper will explore the little-known but significant story of the Exhibition Building and its unusual war-time occupants.
RAAF Personnel Digging Slit Trenches at Exhibition Building, World War II, 1942. Museums Victoria collection, donated by Jack Van Emden.
Deborah Tout-Smith is Senior Curator, Home & Community, in the History & Technology Department of Museums Victoria. Research for this paper began in the lead-up to the 75th anniversary of Victory in the Pacific Day (15 August 2020), for the Wartime Stories from the Royal Exhibition Building project, funded by the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, online at Wartime stories from the Royal Exhibition Building.
Lorinda Cramer:
‘No man is hard to fit’: Fletcher Jones’ Plus 8 trousers in post-war Australia
When Fletcher Jones opened his first Melbourne store in 1946, queues of men formed along Collins Street. They were there to purchase Jones’ ready-made trousers. Known as Plus 8s, the trousers were personally fitted in-store from 72 available sizes – a number that quickly grew. This paper explores Jones’ assurance that ‘no man is hard to fit’ against the backdrop of Australia’s returning Second World War servicemen, the complications of issuing civilian suits on demobilization, and the challenges of rationing and material shortages.
Lorinda Cramer is a Lecturer, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. The research for this paper was undertaken as Redmond Barry Fellow for the 2022 State Library of Victoria Followships.
Image: The "F.J." Plus "8" (advertisement), Herald, 19 June 1946, 10.
From the ‘little black dress’ to the ‘classic white shirt’, it seems as if black and white have been staples of fashionable wardrobes for ever. But was it always so? In this seminar, historians and curators Lorinda Cramer and Margaret Anderson take us on a journey through time. Their discussion spans the rise of the ‘white wedding’ and the demise of ‘mourning dress’, not to mention what went underneath! Along the way they consider the cultural, emotional, and even sexual meanings of black and white in fashion.
Lorinda Cramer:
Dressed in Black: From Funerals to Fashion
Melburnians are well-known for wearing black, so much so that some describe the dramatic shade as a uniform for the city. Across history, plenty others have worn black too: for religion or as royalty. It's now an enduring staple of a fashionable wardrobe - but how did it come to be this way? This talk explores black's different meanings across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from formal wear to mourning a loved one, and from the chic elegance of the little black dress to the rebellious qualities of black leather.
Dr Lorinda Cramer is a lecturer in cultural heritage and museum studies at Deakin University. Across 2023-24, she has worked with the National Trust of Australia (New South Wales) on the Back to Black exhibition, opening in March at Old Government House, Parramatta.
Margaret Anderson:
‘The bride wore white’: the rise and rise of white in fashion.
Late last year an email arrived in my inbox from a well-known Australian fashion brand. It was advertising ‘New Season Linens’ and began with the byline: ‘It doesn’t get more classic than white linens’. Clicking through to the website (as invited) I encountered clothing in many colours, but only white was described as ‘classic’. Why? This paper explores the complex history of dressing in white. It ranges from the rise of the ‘white wedding’ in the late-nineteenth century, considers the advent of the white blouse, reflects on the dominance of white in women’s (and men’s) underwear and touches on the white pinafore, worn by many little girls until well into the twentieth century. Not to exclude men’s fashion, it also considers the dominance of the white shirt, in day wear until at least the 1960s, in formal wear until the present day.
Clothing is always a powerful signifier and dressing in white was no exception. A ‘white collar’ or white kid gloves identified the wearer immediately as middle class, while women’s white underwear reflected modesty and respectability. And the bride dressed in ‘virginal white’? Well, that is a more complex story!
A proud participant in the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme 2024
Objects at Sea
Friday 7 June at 1pm
Luke Keogh: The Wardian Case: Lost at Sea or a Case for Stories?
In 1829, the surgeon and amateur naturalist Nathanial Bagshaw Ward accidentally discovered that plants enclosed in airtight glass cases could survive for long periods without watering. The Wardian case, as it became known, revolutionised the movement of plants around the globe. In the cases plants had greater chance of survival when in transit. After the first successful experiment on a journey from London to Sydney and back, the cases were used for over a century and had a major impact on the distribution of plants around the globe. As a museum object, the Wardian case is almost lost in collections worldwide, with only thirteen of these boxes remaining. In this presentation Luke Keogh travels across the oceans with live plants in Wardian cases and delves into the ways to approach the histories of lost museum objects.
Luke Keogh is a curator and historian. His book The Wardian Case (Chicago, 2020) won the NSW Premiers General History Prize and was Garden Media Guild’s Book of the Year. He lectures into the museums and history programs at Deakin University.
Dr Peter Hobbins: Pickled and preserved: a brandy bottle, a drunken sailor and a shipwreck
Why would a ship’s captain steer his vessel toward shore on a night that was literally dark and stormy? Did it have anything to do with the 3000 cases of brandy, spirits and ale in the hold? Indeed, was Captain Samuel Bache drunk when the barque Queen of Nations grounded just north of Wollongong on 31 May 1881? This presentation focuses on a fragile survivor of that shipwreck – a brandy bottle. What might this vessel and its tempting amber fluid tell us about materiality, mobility, consumption, labour, economics, environment, safety and psychology at a moment of technological transformation in sea travel?
Dr Peter Hobbins leads the curatorial, library and publications teams at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. As a curator and historian of science, technology and medicine, he focuses on what we can learn about the past when things go wrong, including snakebite, pandemics, aircraft crashes and shipwrecks.
Rediscovering ‘Lost’ Objects
Friday 1 November at 1pm
First Speaker:
Batavia and the personification of hope
This cordon pulle, or jug, is reconstructed from sherds collected from Batavia (1629), which was wrecked inshore from the reef on which it foundered. Decorated with distinctive cobalt blue rings and cordons around the neck, these large, spheroid vessels also have an apron of sprigged medallions on their bellies including masks, rampart unicorns and lions along with the coat of arms of Dutch cities. These reconstructed sherds depict something quite different — the female allegory of Hope — which are reinterpreted with reference to the fragmentary nature of the archive in relation to Dutch women both in Batavia, on the island of Java, and aboard the fated vessel of the same name. Judith Gijsbertsz, daughter of the ship’s predikant, provides a new perspective to this iconic story.
Corioli Souter is a curator, archaeologist, and head of the Department of Maritime Heritage at the Western Australian Museum (WAM) often working in collaboration with other state, national, international museums and collections; tertiary institutions; heritage agencies; community organisations and the private sector.
Second Speaker:
Tasmanian Aboriginal Kelp Water Containers
This paper will discuss methods of provenance research relating to a long lost rikawa – kelp water container – collected by Bruni d’Entrecasteaux in 1792 – and rediscovered in 2019. It will highlight the importance of research collaboration and community engagement in this work and the issue of making museum documentation records easily accessible. A workshop organised in Paris in 2022 brought together three kelp containers which were studied using different methodologies and the results which have recently been published will be discussed.
Gaye Sculthorpe is a palawa woman from Tasmania, currently working a Professor of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. She has previously worked at Museums Victoria and more recently as Curator, Oceania, at the British Museum (2013-2022). She has as strong interest in early collections of Aboriginal materials distributed around the world and is currently working on a project about Aboriginal objects sent to the Great Exhibitions c.1851-1939.
The Fashion Cycle: From Retail to Reuse
Friday 28 February at 1pm
First Speaker:
All the Latest Novelties: Modernity, Luxury and Consumer Desire in Australia’s Nineteenth-century Arcades
Nineteenth-century arcades were marketed as dreamworlds, where the desire for exclusive or exotic commodities could be indulged. They were curated spaces that aimed to have a specific mix of businesses, including shops, that offered diverse experiences and products to the consumer. In Australia, through advertising, displays and merchandising, arcade retailers particularly emphasised goods, including jewellery, clothing, and accessories, that had connotations of luxury, modernity, and cosmopolitanism. These often linked with international locations, trends, and fashions, to demonstrate the Australian colonies as places of progress, sophistication, and civility – where fashionable items could be attained just as they might in Britain, Europe, or North America. This presentation will look at some of the ways that businessowners created consumer desire for their products, from the humble to the extraordinary.
Nicole Davis is an urban historian, working in the museum and heritage sector, with a particular interest in retail and business histories. Her PhD thesis focused on the social, economic, and architectural history of Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades and their place in the contemporary world. Her latest co-authored book is The Story of Melbourne’s Lanes: Essential but Unplanned.
Second Speaker:
Alterations as evidence of garment life cycles: wedding dress 1875/1943
A wedding dress in the Henty Costume Collection at the Kew Historical Society, which was made for Alice Henty when she married John Hindson in Melbourne in 1875, was radically redesigned in 1943 when it was worn by three of her granddaughters at their weddings during WWII. This presentation will discuss the dress and its alterations and how such a well-provenanced item can provide evidence of life cycles of a garment that was treasured and reused across generations.
Dr Laura Jocic is a curator and historian with particular expertise in fashion and textiles. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne investigating dress in Australian colonial society and is interested in the materialities of surviving items of dress to elucidate the complex histories of garments and dress practices.
'The Fashion Cycle: From Retail to Reuse' is presented as part of the PayPal Melbourne Fashion Festival’s Independent Programme.
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.
