There is a term used in archaeology to describe the process of collecting material from the top of the ground as opposed to digging or excavating for it. It’s called ‘surface collection’. I learnt this recently when I read a new book by that name on archaeology and heritage in South-East Asia by the Sydney-based archaeologist Denis Byrne. It was a useful concept to have in mind as I read Writing Heritage: The Depiction of Indigenous Heritage in European–Australian Writings, which overflows with vignettes and descriptions about men (and it was mostly men) who spent their time scouring the Australian landscape’s surface for things made by indigenous people.

One such collector is George Aiston. A policeman in remote areas in central Australia in the opening decades of the twentieth century, he developed ‘a lifelong interest in Aboriginal culture’. In a 1920 letter to one of his many correspondents, he wrote: ‘I walked over the creek here yesterday just for exercise – and before I came back I had filled both pockets with good specimens of all sorts – I thought of how you enthusiasts would enjoy yourselves among these stones – I wonder that someone does not come up here and have a look at them.’ Returning from a walk with bulging pocketfuls of stones is an apt image of the surface collector. In fact, this type of ‘relic’ collecting was so intense in south-eastern parts of the country that by the 1930s very little material remained on the ground’s surface to collect. ‘A good collector was someone who left very little for followers to find’, observed the historian Tom Griffiths in his seminal work Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996).