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.

First Speaker
Spoils from ‘The Tour of the East’
with Professor Emerita Margaret Allen

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
with Professor Penelope Edmonds

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.

Logos from the Old Treasury Building, Deakin University and Australian Catholic University.