‘Slow Digitisation and the Community heritage of Martindale Hall’, website launch and community research in the regions: Mintaro 175th Festival, SA
Author: Penny edmonds
On October 26, 2024, the Flinders CHASS team presented our research on Martindale Hall and launched this website at 175th celebration of the heritage listed town of Mintaro to a keen audience of community members from the Clare Valley and beyond. At this big Mintaro birthday event, we showcased the remarkable and sometimes misunderstood Martindale Hall, its families, objects, and legacy. We discussed the Hall’s place on Ngadjuri land, the people who have called it their home or workplace, the flows of people and objects to, from and around Australia, and beyond.
We are passionate about collaborative community research in the regions, and our mixed team of historians, archaeologists, digital humanities scholars and partners Ngadjuri Elders and Land Care group presented hidden and sometimes unexpected stories related to the Hall, and in particular the Smoking Room, a curious imperial ‘trophy room’. This Victorian-style room, which displays the collections of the Mortlock family and their travels, is one of a kind, and tells us much about empire, ideas of the exotic, colonisation, British settler masculinity, and the wealthy Mortlock’s travels to Asia, Egypt, and beyond.
We are passionate about collaborative community research in the regions, and our mixed team of historians, archaeologists, digital humanities scholars and partners Ngadjuri Elders and Land Care group presented hidden and sometimes unexpected stories related to the Hall, and in particular the Smoking Room, a curious imperial ‘trophy room’.
Lead CI historian Penny Edmonds and the team launched our new website, which is one of the major public outcomes our ARC project, ‘Slow Digitisation and the Community heritage of Martindale Hall’.
At the Mintaro festival, Ngadjuri lead partner Vince Copley Jnr. and Flinders archaeologist Claire Smith spoke about Ngadjuri country, archaeology, and cultural heritage. Digital humanities scholar Tully Barnett discussed the concept of ‘slow’ and curated digitisation’ of objects and archives, and the library collections.
Denise Noack gave presentation on Jeff Thrum, the little-known chauffer and sometimes personal cinematographer, to Jack Morlock, and their travels.
Penny Edmonds told the story of the so-called ‘urban’ boomerang that hangs in the Smoking Room. Our team has traced to this historic and rare artefact Joe Timbery, a well-known Aboriginal craftsman and activist from La Perouse, Sydney. Jack Mortlock and his chauffer Thrum likely purchased the Timbery boomerang while they were visiting Sydney for the sesquicentennial celebrations of Australia held in 1938 to mark the arrival of the First Fleet under Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788. This was the same day as the now famous 1838 Aboriginal Day or Mourning rally, which protested the sesquicentennial celebrations.
Seeking to place the Martindale Hall within its region, nation, and within imperial networks Eminent South Australian historian Margaret Allen spoke on the journey of the Mortlocks to Java, Sri Lanka, India in the 1930s, on a bespoke and lavish Thomas Cook tour that was very much in the style of a British imperil journey typical if the wealthy. Margaret showcased the website and the new data visualisation of the Mortlock Journey to SE Asia and India using the Time Layered Cultural mapping tool, from TLC project.
This event follows our earlier showcase of the 3D technology championed in this project. In this popular and well-attended presentation, we took visitors through the Smoking Room’s virtual twin, our new and in-progress experimental 3D visualisation in Flinders University’s VR/motion capture studio, The Void. Objects that have been captured in 3D can be found on this website.
A big thank you to our community partners Sharon and Mick Morris, wonderfully supportive caretakers of Martindale Hall, Simon Milcock of the Mintaro Progress Association, and Department of Energy and Water, South Australia for their support of our research.
We are grateful to the Australian Research Council for the grant, a Special Research Initiative in Australian Studies, 2021-2024. SR200200900