Written by a curator and historian from the South Australian Museum, this excellent book was the winner of the Non-fiction category in the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Philip Jones obviously has a deep fascination for Aboriginal culture and history, and, married with his comprehensive knowledge of the Museum and its collection, is in a prime position to unearth some of the less well-known episodes in early Aboriginal-European contact.He does this through the simple but powerful device of starting each of the nine chapters of the book with a photograph of one item from the Museum's collection, and using this item to provide a flashpoint for the historical events surrounding it. There are weapons and artefacts, of course, but also some unexpected items, like an early artistic work by Albert Namatjira and one of the dresses belonging to outback heroine/eccentric Daisy Bates. Jones chooses his items well to present his thesis that objects themselves can become historical examples of the grey area where one culture overlaps another. Each chapter is embellished with many more images of further items, documents, geographical settings, and most evocatively for me, contemporary photos of Aboriginal people peering hauntingly at the camera in some of our most remote locations. Much like the recent photo book First Australians, which accompanied the TV series of the same name, these photos are almost incredible records of that time when the photographers were stealing their subjects' souls while their countrymen were likewise stealing the very ground the people sat on.
Jones writes, however, with great restraint. For this is a scholarly work, despite the user-friendly images reproduced within the text and the helpful maps of the areas discussed, and he refrains from judgements of either side in these often bloody cultural struggles, saving his criticism for professional misconduct like the greed and insincerity of some of the Lutheran missionaries and the questionable map-making methods of some explorers. But while Jones always remains objective and thus humble I could not help but be impressed by his familiarity with so many disciplines. He jumps effortlessly from ethnography to historiography to anthropology to art history to lexicography to cartography and even to pyrography, the process of burning designs on wood or leather, in case you don't know what that is (I didn't). This makes for a fairly focussed reading effort, but as I said it is amply leavened with images and other prompts.
Not that the events he describes need a whole lot of "sexing-up". Every chapter reveals more and more obscure episodes from Australia's early settlement history; all of them fascinating if only for the extreme conditions faced by the Europeans, and the poignancy of what we know to have occurred as a result of European occupation of this country. Its hard to chose a favourite vignette, but the ochre-gathering expeditions that were once a staple annual event for the peoples of the Central desert and eventually warded then killed off by selfish white landowners came close for me. This chapter opens with a photo of a luminous, almost other-worldly lozenge of ochre collected around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, and it is that powerful image that keeps intruding on my thoughts, of how dust from a rock can be such a potent symbol of one civilisation's long decline and another's usurpation. The word Jones keeps coming back to is syncretism - the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles or practices - and the elephant in the room is that it has been always the earlier, less aggressive culture that has had to give way. Like a one-man museum himself, with Ochre and Rust Philip Jones successfully saves some of these items, people, and episodes from oblivion.
The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Covers some of the most important Australian themes - our connection to country, our shared history, our stained future.
Australian characters - Features unforgettable but largely forgotten Australian characters like the doomed Cubadgee, linguist John Bennett, and first curator of the South Australian Museum Edward Stirling.
Australian settings - Here you will find language group maps, photographs, and extensive cultural backgrounds of vast areas of Australia often passed over in popular Australian colonial history writing: the Central Desert, Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
Australian voices - Always fascinating, Jones reproduces many letters, scientific articles and journal entries to enhance his book with the weight of primary sources.
Australian focus - It is refreshing to read something so unapologetically focussed on the Australian experience, giving equal importance to the contributions of the colonisers and the first Australians.
