In 1977 Jenny Boddington curated a joint exhibition of the works of Jon Rhodes and of the landscape photographer Laurie Wilson at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Rhodes' Kundat Jaru mob exhibition grew out of the After 200 Years Project and features the unique combination of his and community members' photographs at Yaruman (Ringers Soak).
The subsequent exhibition, Whichaway?, the final in his trilogy of photographs from Aboriginal Australia, shows subtle refinement in “the art of stopping”, with his nuanced and understated sequences and series.
[11] In 1992 Rhodes and the painter Carol Ruff were both inspired after reading The Arrernte Landscape of Alice Springs by anthropologist David Brooks, who documented how the infrastructure of Alice Springs[12][13] had desecrated many of the Arrernte sacred sites – three species of Ancestral “caterpillar beings” formed much of the landscape on the eastern side, while “the activities of the wild dog” shaped many of the hills and valleys on the western side.
Site Seeing, Rhodes’ and Ruff's collaborative exhibition consisting of 20 paired works, was shown at the Araluen Centre in Alice Springs in 1994, and toured to Brisbane, Cairns and Sydney in 1995–1997.
[14] Inspired by Site Seeing, in 1994 Rhodes began searching for and photographing some of the "physical reminders of Aboriginal occupation in south-eastern Australia, where the impact of European settlement has been the longest and most intense".
[4][15] By the time Rhodes was awarded an H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship in 2006, he had photographed about 36 Aboriginal sites around Sydney, Melbourne, south-east Queensland and western New South Wales.
He intermingles “these esoteric narratives with his personal observations”, and although “solves many of the intriguing puzzles he investigates”, Rhodes “raises the one big question yet to be answered – when will the fundamental truth of the 140-year-long Australian Frontier War finally be publicly acknowledged, and memorialised?”[17] Cage of Ghosts won the 2019 NSW Premier's Community and Regional History Prize, the judges commenting that "Cage of Ghosts is a book of unusual originality.
At once personal and scholarly, stories presented in words and in pictures, it is a subtle exploration of the way that thousands of years of Indigenous history are both visible, and hidden, in Australian landscapes.
Jon Rhodes evokes a multilayered country whose meanings have been shaped by the ancient cultures of First Nations peoples, but also by the complex, tragic history of settler colonialism.
Beginning each chapter with a question, Rhodes expertly and sensitively guides the reader through a discussion of several significant events – ranging from the spearing of Captain Arthur Phillip by an Eora man at Collins Cove in 1790, to the first burials of Scottish Presbyterians near a Bundjalung bora ground in the 1880s, and the removal of Anaiwan carved trees from Boorolong in 1962 – to reveal how landscape and place can tell complex, intertwined histories.
This multi-layered, multi-generational analysis offers a thought-provoking rendering of Aboriginal connection to Country, of colonists’ efforts to exert their influence over the land and its Indigenous inhabitants, and of frontier violence.