Welcome
Martindale Stories: ‘Walking through the Back Door of History’
author: penny edmonds
Making objects the entry point of research is like ‘walking through the back door of history, you don’t necessarily end up at the front of the same house’.
—Delia Falconer, ‘The Books of Last Things’, The Best Australian Essays, 1999
The historic sandstone country mansion Martindale Hall was built in 1879–1880 in the Clare Valley at Mintaro, South Australia. In the pages of this site you’ll discover the fascinating lives of the families who lived at Martindale Hall and the many objects they collected that still furnish its rooms. Take your time to explore the untold stories of Martindale’s workers and learn about the Hall’s place in Indigenous Ngadjuri country then and now.
Martindale Stories is a collaborative project run by a team of scholars at Flinders University. By placing the Mintaro region in the context of national and imperial histories, the project seeks to ‘re-world’ Martindale Hall and show the connections between family, nation and empire.
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’.1 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.
Like people, objects come into the world, they travel, and they tell us something of the times in which they were made. ‘Object biographies’—in which objects themselves are used as ‘doors’ into the past—allow us to see the economies that produced them and the labour of the workers that enabled the upper-class leisure pursuits, such as hunting and horseracing, that demanded them.
The project’s interdisciplinary team is a mix of historians, archaeologists and digital-humanities specialists working closely with the wider community. This large project emerged from a research grant titled ‘“Slow” Digitisation and the Community Heritage of Martindale Hall’ (SR200200900) thanks to a Special Research Initiative in Australian Studies by the Australian Research Council.
This site is the result of community and academic research conducted over three years, which has aimed to generate new knowledge about Australia’s rich colonial history through community-based collaboration. It investigates how community history, heritage and cultural collections can be preserved and made more accessible through slow practices of digitisation and 3D technology.
Martindale Hall
Martindale Hall is a large Georgian Italianate-style mansion located in Mintaro, South Australia. Built in 1879–1880 by the Bowmans, a wealthy pastoralist family, it was later purchased by the equally, if not more, wealthy Mortlock family in 1891. It was bequeathed to the University of Adelaide in 1979 with its contents and interiors intact and subsequently passed to the South Australian Government in 1986. It now functions as a house museum.
Martindale Hall is located on Ngadjuri country, which extends from what is now known as Gawler in the south through to Koonamore in the north, and its collections contain Australian Aboriginal artefacts. But a Ngadjuri perspective has, to date, been largely missing from this history. The Flinders research team is grateful to Vince Copley Junior and research partner Ngadjuri Elders Heritage and Land Care Council Inc. for bringing their valuable First Nations knowledge and expertise into this project.
The team is also grateful to Sharon and Mick Morris, community partners and official caretakers of Martindale Hall, and the South Australian Government Department of Environment and Water for their support.
Themes
Martindale Hall is explored here through nine main themes. Explore the site through the main navigation menus above or click through to the themes below.
The Smoking room and its Objects
This imperial trophy room, which displays the collections of the Mortlock family and their travels, is one of a kind. Many of Martindale’s stories are illuminated through the objects of the Smoking Room. Some of these have been digitised and can be viewed in virtual 3D. Explore the objects and their stories through the main navigation menus above or click through to objects below.
Footnotes
- Delia Falconer, ‘The Books of Last Things’, in The Best Australian Essays, ed. Peter Craven (Bookman Press, 1999), 165–83. ↩︎