Dr Jane Lydon
Research Fellow
Building 55, Room 217
990 51658
jane.lydon@arts.monash.edu.au
Jane Lydon’s research centres upon the material and visual dimensions of cultural encounters in colonial Australia – that is, the ways that objects and images, spatial, embodied and material practices and ways of seeing shaped our diverse history. Her books include Many Inventions: the Chinese in the rocks 1890-1930 (Monash Publications in History, 1999), Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australian (Duke University Press, 2005) and (co-edited) Object Lessons: archaeology and heritage in Australia (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005).
She is currently working in collaboration with the Indigenous community on an Australian Research Council-funded interdisciplinary archaeological project at Ebenezer Mission, north-western Victoria, which draws from neglected visual and material sources in exploring the central role of material culture within Indigenous-white encounters and missionization in south-eastern Australia. This research forms the basis for a forthcoming book titled Fantastic Dreaming: Transformation and Material Culture at Ebenezer Mission, Australia (Altamira ).
This research is also the basis for Entering the 'Contact Zone': an IT gateway to the colonial past, a project that draws upon visualisation and simulation IT technologies to allow viewers to experience the consecutive cultural landscapes of 1. traditional Indigenous life and 2. the European settlement created from 1859 onwards at the former Ebenezer Mission.
In 2008 she began a new project (with Lynette Russell) titled Aboriginal Visual Histories: Photographing Indigenous Australians. This four year ARC-funded project will for the first time review photographs of Aboriginal people in key collections around Australia and in Europe, produce the first systematic and comprehensive history of photographing Aboriginal people from the Australian inception of the medium in 1841 to the present day, place this genre within a global visual economy, and will collaborate with descendants to incorporate Indigenous perspectives.
Research
Jane has worked as a historical archaeologist on many sites and projects around Australia for over twenty years, including as the Sydney Cove Authority's archaeologist (responsible for the Rocks area of Sydney), curator/ archaeologist on the Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House, for government agencies such as the Australian Heritage Commission and the former Victoria Archaeological Survey, and coordinator/lecturer of a new heritage program at La Trobe University.Her current research centres upon the visual and material aspects of Australian colonialism. She is available to supervise students in the following areas:
* heritage
* historical archaeology (especially postcolonialism, gender and urban archaeology)
* visual cultures of colonialism
Recent Publications
Books
(forthcoming) Fantastic Dreaming: Transformation and Material Culture at Ebenezer Mission, Australia (Altamira)
(forthcoming) (editor, with Uzma Rizvi) Handbook of Postcolonialism and Archaeology, World Archaeological Congress Research Handbooks in Archaeology Series, Left Coast Press.
2005, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. Duke University Press. http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3572-7
2005, (editor, with Tracy Ireland), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australian Society. Australian Scholarly Publishing.
1999 Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks 1890-1930, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne.
Articles and Book Chapters
(forthcoming) (with Uzma Rizvi) 'Introduction: Postcolonialism and archaeology. Concepts, contexts, directions'. In Handbook of Postcolonialism and Archaeology, World Archaeological Congress Research Handbooks in Archaeology Series, Left Coast Press.
(forthcoming) (with Uzma Rizvi) 'Epilogue'. In Handbook of Postcolonialism and Archaeology, World Archaeological Congress Research Handbooks in Archaeology Series, Left Coast Press.
(in press) ‘“Fantastic Dreaming”: Ebenezer mission as Moravian utopia and Wotjobaluk responses’. In P.Edmonds and T. Banivanua Mar, Making Space: Settler-colonial perspectives on land, place and identity. (Palgrave Macmillan)
(in press) 'Young and Free: the Australian past in a global future' In L. Meskell (ed) Cosmopolitan Archaeologies. Material Worlds Series, Duke University Press.
(in press) 'Contested Landscapes' in B. David (ed.), Handbook of Landscape Archaeology, World Archaeological Congress Research Handbooks in Archaeology Series, Left Coast Press.
(in press) ' Imagining the Moravian Mission: space and surveillance at the former Ebenezer Mission , Victoria , south-eastern Australia ', Historical Archaeology.
2007 ‘Archaeology and museum interpretation, or, telling stories about the past’ in H. Burke and C. Smith (eds) Archaeology to Delight and Instruct: Active Learning in the University Classroom. One World Archaeology Series No. 49, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, pp. 241-44.
2007 'Women, colonialism, history: publishing on women's history in race and colonialism journals' Hecate 33(2):164-68, 175-77.
2006 'Pacific Encounters , or Beyond the Islands of History', In M. Hall and S. Silliman (eds), Historical Archaeology. Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology, Oxford , pp. 293-312.
2005 (with T. Ireland) 'Introduction: Touchstones' In J. Lydon and T. Ireland (eds) Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australian Society. Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 1-30.
2005 '"Men in black": the Blacktown Native Institution and the Origins of the "stolen generations"' In J. Lydon and T. Ireland (eds) Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia. Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 201-224.
2005 '"Watched over by the indefatigable Moravian missionaries": colonialism and photography at Ebenezer and Ramahyuck', La Trobe Journal 76: 27-48.
2005 'Australian Idyll: Domesticating the Victorian landscape', Art Bulletin of Victoria 45: 19-25.
2005 '"Our sense of beauty": visuality, space and gender on Victoria 's Aboriginal reserves, south-eastern Australia ', History and Anthropology 16(2): 211-233.
2005 'Driving by: visiting Australian colonial monuments', Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):108-134.
2004 'Archaeological Heritage Management in Australia : from professionalism to democratisation?' in T. Murray (ed.) Archaeology From Australia. Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 85-97.
2004 'A strange time machine: The Tracker, Black and White and Rabbit Proof Fence' Australian Historical Studies 123:137-48. (to be reprinted in an anthology of critical articles on Australian Literature, edited by Amit Sarwal)
2003 'The experimental 1860s: Charles Walter's images of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria' Aboriginal History 26:78-130.
2003 'Seeing each other: colonial photography in nineteenth-century Victoria', In S. Lawrence (ed.), Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600-1945, One World Archaeology Series, Routledge, pp. 174-90.
2002 'This civilising experiment': photography at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station during the 1860s' In R. Harrison and C. Williamson (eds), After Captain Cook: The archaeology of the recent Indigenous past in Australia, Sydney University Archaeological Methods Series 8, Sydney, pp. 59-72.
2002 'Archaeology in the Workplace: teaching heritage in a changing world' in S. Ulm, C. Westcott, J. Reid, A. Ross, I. Lilley, J. Prangnell and L. Kirkwood (eds), Borders, Boundaries, Barriers: Proceedings of the 2001 Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference. TEMPUS 7:129-36.
2002 'Historical archaeology, cultural exchange and the Chinese in the Rocks, 1890-1930' In P. Kee, C. Ho, P. Macgregor and G. Presland (eds),Chinese in Oceania. Association for the Study of the Chinese and their Descendants in Australasia and the Pacific Islands, the Chinese Museum, and the Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, Victoria University, pp. 7-20.
2001 'The Chinese community in the Rocks area of Sydney : cultural persistence and exchange', in H. Chan, A. Curthoys and N. Chiang (eds), The Overseas Chinese in Australia : History, Settlement and Interactions. Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, National Taiwan University and the Centre for the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University , Canberra , pp. 117-25.
2000 'The disturbing history of Sydney 's Rocks, the "birthplace of a nation"', World Archaeological Bulletin 11, pp. 94-109. http://www.worldarchaeologicalcongress.org/site/bulletin/wab11/lyndon.php"