Ochre And Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers
Wakefield Press, $49.95 hb, 446 pp
Ochre And Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers by Philip Jones
Behind Philip Jones’s Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers are many books about the interaction of settlers and indigenes. Writers relevant to this book include the museum curator Aldo Massola (writing in the 1960s and 1970s) and retired archaeologist John Mulvaney (writing in the 1980s and 1990s). Massola brought out objects and archival material from the Museum of Victoria, writing their stories for a tourist or localhistory readership. He was a pioneer whose work is no less valuable for presenting an undifferentiated mix of hearsay, intuition, document, object, science and human observation. Although he rarely named his sources, they exist for most, if not all, of what he said so lightly.
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