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.