Philip Jones, South Australian Museum

Philip Jones has been a curator in the South Australian Museum’s Department of Anthropology since the 1980s. His doctoral thesis concerned the history of Australian ethnographic collecting. He has undertaken fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in Central Australia, the Simpson Desert and South Australia, and has curated more than 30 exhibitions, ranging from Aboriginal art to the history of anthropology and natural science, expeditions, and frontier photography.

Philip’s book of essays on museum objects and the Australian frontier, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers, won the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction (2008). In recent years he has completed books on the Yuendumu school doors, Spencer and Gillen’s 1901-1902 pioneering anthropological expedition, and the Australian and New Zealand expeditions undertaken by the colonial artist and naturalist George French Angas. During 2018-2020 he undertook fellowships at Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies, working on the history and implications of a 1938-1939 fieldwork collaboration between Adelaide and Harvard Universities and researching networks of European collectors of Aboriginal objects.