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Material Culture and Consumer Society

Dependent Colonies in Colonial Australia

  • Book
  • © 2003

Overview

Authors:
  1. Mark Staniforth

    1. Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

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  • Discusses the beginnings of Australia and argues that material goods were a necessary adjunct to the establishment of the colony
  • Contends that the role of consumption and the part played by material goods were more important to the negotiation of social position in the colonies (Including North America) than in Europe
  • Drawing on the archaeological evidence found in shipwrecks and the historical record of ship logs and other documents, it demonstrates how important material goods were to the colonial society.
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Part of the book series: The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology (SSUA)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 1-12

  3. The Archaeology of the Event

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 13-31

  4. Capitalism, Colonialism, and Consumerism

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 33-45

  5. Methods and Sources

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 47-64

  6. Port Jackson and the Wreck of Sydney Cove (1797)

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 65-99

  7. Port Phillip and the Wreck of William Salthouse (1841)

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 101-123

  8. The Swan River Colony and the Wrecks of James Matthews (1841) and Eglinton (1852)

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 125-141

  9. The Meanings of Things

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 143-151

  10. Conclusion

    • Mark Staniforth
    Pages 153-158

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 159-185
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Keywords

About this book

The establishment of a consumer society in Australia has not been a particularly well explored area of academic inquiry. My interests lie in the concepts and meanings that underlie the material world; ideas like, in the words of Madonna, "I am a material girl and I live in a material world" (terminology taken to be not gender specific), the classic graffiti paraphrasing of Descartes: I shop therefore I am or perhaps simply in the "world of goods" in the more academically respectable terms of Douglas and Isherwood (1979). This book arises out of my longstanding interest in the early colonial period in Australia. In part it represents an extension of the purely "historical" research conducted for my Master's thesis in the Department of History at the University of Sydney which explored aspects of the diet, health and lived experience of con­ victs and immigrants during their voyages to the Australian colonies within the timeframe 1837 to 1839 (Staniforth, 1993a). More importantly, it is the culmina­ tion of more than twenty-five years involvement in the excavation of shipwreck sites in Australia starting with James Matthews (1841) in 1974, through the test excavation of William Salthouse in 1982, continuing with my involvement between 1985 and 1994 in the excavation of Sydney Cove (1797) and most recently with shore-based whaling stations and whaling shipwreck sites. In this respect, this book may be seen as an example of what Ian Hodder (1986, p.

Reviews

From the reviews:
"Staniforth's work offers particular strengths to those engaged in the study of consumer society and capitalism...this work will remain important as part of the bridge between land and sea."
(Stacy C. Kozakavich, Historical Archaeology)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

    Mark Staniforth

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Material Culture and Consumer Society

  • Book Subtitle: Dependent Colonies in Colonial Australia

  • Authors: Mark Staniforth

  • Series Title: The Springer Series in Underwater Archaeology

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0211-1

  • Publisher: Springer New York, NY

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

  • Copyright Information: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York 2003

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-306-47386-9Published: 31 January 2003

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-4613-4967-9Published: 18 September 2012

  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-4615-0211-1Published: 06 December 2012

  • Series ISSN: 2730-7018

  • Series E-ISSN: 2730-7026

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVII, 185

  • Topics: Archaeology, History, general, Anthropology

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