Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers

by Philip Jones

Takes Aboriginal and colonial artefacts from their museum shelves, and traces their stories, revealing charge and nuanced moments of encounter in Australia's frontier history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic - a brilliant book that is a real pleasure to read.

Beginning with the chance discovery of a medallion that Captain Cook gave to Aborigines on Bruny Island, the book traces the histories of artefacts that represent the collision of Aboriginal and European culture. In the early days of settlement, artefacts were ‘traded’ or misappropriated i.e. borrowed, taken by accident or by design, or deliberately stolen. European collectors rarely documented their provenance and many if not most of these things were taken back to England where (if they made their way into a museum) they were catalogued more as exotica from a culture about to be subsumed than as an examples of an ongoing one. Jones sets out to show his readers a much more interesting way of looking at these objects.

To read the rest of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201...

[Thomas Isern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the past twenty years historians have been breaking free of the determinisms that dogged their works for most of the twentieth century and embracing the conferral of agency. People make decisions, actions have consequences, contingency, chaos, all that sort of thing. It makes for history that is more human and more interesting. Philip Jones, an anthropologist doing history as a curator at the South Australian Museum, now has upped the ante as to agency. In his work, people, including Aborigines, have agency, sure; but even artifacts have agency, have lives of their own. They live on the frontier, where Europeans and Aborigines exchanged objects and all sorts of other stuff. Every artifact featured in Artifacts and Encounters comes from the South Australian Museum. Thanks to Jones, however, it is no longer imprisoned in the timeless gaol of ethnological exhibition, but lives with a narrative and trajectory through history that is its own. Perhaps my opinion of the book is influenced in that I bought it at Imprints, on Hindley Street in Adelaide, following a study visit to the South Australian Museum. Of course it is, but I know also, on return to the states, I am recommending the work to graduate students and friends and colleagues as must-read material for public historians.

[Helpen]

appauling research and offensive reads like he is on drugs when he refers to satellites etc see p 109 onwards what a pretender of factual events!