Ursula Frederick

Australian National University | ANU · School of Archaeology & Anthropology

This paper discusses the Australian boab tree and its potential for research as living historical archaeology. Boab trees play an important role in the economy, culture, and cosmology of Indigenous people in northwest Australia and continue to hold a powerful presence in the Kimberley region today. Working with Nyikina and Mangala Traditional Owner...

Found only in a restricted area of north-west Australia, the Australian boab ( Adansonia gregorii ) is recognisable by its massive, bottle-shaped trunk, and is an economically important species for Indigenous Australians, with the pith, seeds and young roots all eaten. Many of these trees are also culturally significant and are sometimes carved wit...

Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with pictographs and petroglyphs found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces – in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms. First Nations people have been marking these places with figurative imagery, abstract designs, stencils and prints for tens of thou...

The Australian rock art research community is no stranger to epic battles between individuals with differing viewpoints on rock art. These disputes are not a new phenomenon, as this paper outlines. It is rare, however, for these arguments to reflect major shifts in the nature of rock art research and, more broadly, archaeological research. In this...

Introduction to the volume Histories of Australian Rock Art Research. In every field of research, there comes a time when its early practitioners are viewed as founding members and their actions become the subject of critical reflection. Now is that time for the study of Australian rock art. This complex history of research is imbued with unique p...

Last Drinks at the Hibernian (Frederick & Ireland 2016) is a collaborative art work that explores what happens when archaeological materials are reconstituted as art and how the ‘creative turn’ might swivel archaeology’s critical lens back onto its own practices and materialities. This creative engagement explores the history and political economy...

Sam Byrnand met with Ursula Frederick to discuss her approach to the curation of the exhibition Promised the Moon (ANU School of Art and Design Gallery, 20 June to 26 July 2019), and wider issues about art and culture.

From the 1830s to the 1880s, non-stop voyages from the United Kingdom to the Australasian colonies created highly structured and insular shipboard communities. Emigrant experiences were shaped by the social spaces aboard sailing vessels, alongside layers of formal superintendence and informal communitas. While these increasingly literate travellers...

Scribbling Through History: Graffiti, places and people from antiquity to modernity, edited by C. Ragazzoli, Ö. Harmanşah, C. Salvador & E. Frood, 2018. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-4742-8881-1 hardback $103.50, 264 pages, 72 b/w figs - Ursula K. Frederick

This is a visual essay with accompanying text exploring automobilities through the lens of photography and aesthetics of car cultures

This forum aims to go beyond the usual art/archaeology discussions to explore the possibilities – and challenges - for work which might push beyond what is traditionally accepted as either art or archaeology. The articles comprise a diverse range of responses from academics and practitioners working creatively with heritage—in its broadest sense—fr...

Immigration has played a particularly significant role in shaping settler-colonial societies, including Australia. Successive governments have taken instrumental roles in constructing narratives of Australia’s immigration history. Contrary to the images we see today – of capsizing boats and desperate people seeking refuge – the picture of post-Seco...

Quarantine was used by British colonial authorities and later by Australian governments to manage and control the introduction of infectious diseases. Facilities at North Head, Manly, New South Wales, were initially built as a specialist institution but as the need for mass quarantine declined over time, the site was used for other forms of social...

Memorialising lives, deaths and events in landscapes can be authorised, official and highly regulated, or spontaneous, unsanctioned and anti-authoritarian. Interpreting and connecting two sites spanning the Pacific Ocean, this paper explores the inscribed and affective landscapes of Angel Island, San Francisco, and North Head, Sydney. Both sites en...

Over the last five years many industrialized economies have been shifting their analogue television networks to digital transmission. This photographic essay captures the accumulated ruin of this transition as it continues to play out on the streets and screens of contemporary Australia. As an artefact of the changeover period, the glitch is render...

In this paper we present an analysis of the differences and similarities in the spatial distribution of graffiti in two Sydney suburbs: Newtown and Miranda. The research examines the extent to which factors of surveillance, location and legislation affect the range, production and spatial distribution of graffiti. Through the application of convent...

The papers in this themed section on historical and contemporary graffiti derive in part from a two-day workshop, That was Then, This is Now: Contemporary Archaeology in Australia, that we (Clarke and Frederick) organised at the University of Sydney in February 2012. The Editors of Australian Archaeology invited us to submit a set of papers from th...

Following on from the inroads archaeologists have made into the study of graffiti, this project set out to examine graffiti production through the lens of its associated material culture. A graffiti midden comprising the detritus of mark-making paraphernalia and other contemporary residues was recorded. The study reveals that aerosol painting was t...

Disciplines of the PastDefining Contact Rock ArtRock Art in Watarrka National Park, Central AustraliaCharacterizing the Rock Art AssemblageInterpreting the Watarrka AssemblageDrawing from a DistanceThe Art of EncounterConclusion References

In this paper we explore the historical inscriptions at the North Head Quarantine Station, Manly through the lens of biography to examine what the archaeological record can tell us about some of the people who found themselves in quarantine and who chose to mark their presence in the landscape. In particular we focus on two inscriptions located in...

Articles included in this volume focus on the social role of “things” to examine the relationships between material and media artefacts, the construction of social identities, and the production and use of culture. As a collection, the articles reiterate a shift in contemporary object-based research which sees the study of things as an expanded dis...

In recent years there has been a strong resurgence in the production and visibility of graffiti/art in Australian cities. This paper considers what we may learn about this practice by adopting an archaeological approach to its study. The results yield interesting insights into two contemporary phenomena of graffiti/art production that offer intrigu...

The Study AreaMessing about with BoatsBoats and Rock Art on Groote EylandtPrau PaintingsPeople on BoatsConclusions References

This paper offers an account of rock art research on contact and challenges some of the basic assumptions underlying previous approaches to contact rock art. It is argued that many Australian rock art studies incorporating contact art offer merely descriptive accounts of introduced objects without exploring the underlying social processes motivatin...