Bookblog #66: Ochre and Rust



Today I booked tickets for the Sydney Writers' Festival, with hope in my heart that first impressions will prove unfounded. I seem to have filled quite a few of my days, with a good balance between things read and unread, free and 'ticketed', fun and earnest. I'm shelling out for the Premier's Literary Awards Dinner, having read only six of the books, seen two TV programs and one play, from the long list of shortlisted works. As for the Festival proper, there's the man who beat my niece to the Iremonger Award a couple of years ago, at least one work I copy-edited, and a couple of excellent reads from the last year: The Tall Man, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, and now

Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield Press 2007)

It's not very long since I first heard the term 'material culture', which describes the stuff that museums deal in. Philip Jones is a curator at the South Australian Museum, and a historian. The book, as the subtitle suggests, deals with pieces of material culture (artefacts). In a sense, its nine essays are extended versions of the information you see on cards pinned up next to museum exhibits, except where those cards are generally, in my experience, tantalisingly unforthcoming, these essays take their time to explore their subjects. Part of their brilliance is that they move beyond purely ethnographic description ('This is a string bag from the Darwin region') to historical identification ('This string bag was collected by William Webster Hoare, who was the surgeon's assistant and artist who accompanied ...) and meditation on meaning. Each of the nine objects is the kind of thing you might easily have walked past without a second glance; some, such as that string bag, would probably have left to gather cobwebs in the museum's back rooms. But their meanings are unpacked here, they become revelations. A whip belonging to one of the officers on the First Fleet turns out to have been made by fitting lashes to the handle of an Aboriginal club, and this opens up, among other things, the whole question of the divergent understandings of barter in those first years of White settlement. A broken shield leads us to the story in the 1840s of William Cawthorne, a young South Australian white man 'tormented by guilt for his people's dispossession of the Adelaide Plains Aborigines', and the Aboriginal warrior Pullami. An axe with a metal head hafted using Aboriginal techniques is identified as somehow connected to a mission of exploration whose members mostly died, and gives rise to fascinating discussion of Aboriginal responses to the arrival of iron. A set of fire making sticks turn out to have belonged to the young man known as Cubadgee, a forgotten hero of nineteenth century South Australia. There's an essay on tourist plaques created by Albert Namatjira before he took up water colours -- an essay that challenges easy categorisation of Namatjira's work; and one on Daisy Bates. Piece by piece, detail by detail, they build towards a picture of the frontier as a fluid zone of give and take, a much more nuanced place than any grand narrative history would show it as.

The book is beautifully written. It's full of broad insights and sparks of revelation. It's clearly informed throughout by a sharp ability to listen to Aboriginal points of view, and a deep love of history. one of its many pleasures comes from Jones's deployment of quotes from the frontiers, from both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speakers, that speak to our concerns 150 odd years later. For example, this is South Australian Police Commissioner Warburton in 1864:
I am unable to follow the reasoning which states that if a sufficient force to protect the Settlers be not supplied by Govt, the natives must be shot down like dogs – supposing more Police to be there are they to be sent there to relieve the settlers from the necessity of taking care of their lives & property?

Which reminds me: throughout, quotes are treated as something akin to material culture themselves. Misspellings and weird punctuation are left untouched, except for an occasional fairly arbitrary sic. I'm a bit late coming to Ochre and Rust: it won the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Will reviewed it ages ago. Philip Jones has another book in the Premier's Awards shortlist this year.

Posted: Wed - April 29, 2009 at 04:09 PM           |

©