Dr Jane Lydon
Senior Research Fellow
View contact details in Monash Staff Directory
Jane Lydon's research centres upon the visual and material dimensions of colonial history - that is, the ways that objects and images, spatial and embodied practices and ways of seeing shaped our diverse past. She has worked as a historical archaeologist for over twenty years, including as archaeologist responsible for the Rocks, Sydney, as curator-archaeologist at the Museum of Sydney on the site of First Government House, for government agencies such as the Australian Heritage Commission and the Victoria Archaeological Survey, and as coordinator of a heritage program at La Trobe University. In 2008 she concluded a long-term research project conducted in collaboration with the Indigenous community at Ebenezer Mission, north-western Victoria.
She is currently working with Lynette Russell on a four-year ARC-funded project titled Aboriginal Visual Histories. This will for the first time review photographs of Aboriginal people in key collections around Australia and in Europe, and will produce the first systematic history of photographing Aboriginal people from the Australian inception of the medium in 1841 to the present day. An integral aspect of this research will be collaboration with descendants to incorporate Indigenous perspectives.
She is available to supervise students in the following areas:
*historical archaeology, especially postcolonialism, missions, gender and urban archaeology
*heritage
*visual cultures of colonialism
Selected Publications
2009 Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. Altamira Press. http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/SingleBook.shtml?command=Search&db=^DB/CATALOG.db&eqSKUdata=0759111049&thepassedurl=[thepassedurl]
Forthcoming (co-edited) The Archaeology of Australasian Missions. Special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.
Forthcoming (co-edited) Handbook to Postcolonialism and Archaeology. World Archaeological Congress.
2005, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. Duke University Press. http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3572-7
2005 (co-editor), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australian Society. Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne.
1999, Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks 1890-1930, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne.
