Dr Jane Lydon

Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Monash Indigenous Centre (MIC)

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.  Between 2003-8 she worked in collaboration with the Indigenous community at Ebenezer Mission, north-western Victoria on an inter-disciplinary archaeological investigation (funded by the Australian Research Council, DP0346645).

Current Research Projects

She is working (with Lynette Russell) on a four-year ARC-funded project titled Aboriginal Visual Histories (2008-11, DP0878567). This will for the first time review photographs of Aboriginal people in key collections around Australia and in Europe, and will produce a 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.

Between 2011-15 her research project Globalization, Photography, and Race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe (DP110100278) will explore two very different ways of seeing Indigenous Australians:  that is, as objects of science, and as citizens with rights. In the digital age, it has become an urgent matter to understand the significance of photographs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. This project will explore the global circulation of photographs of Australian Aboriginal people that began in the 1840s, and their central role within the emergence of modern views regarding race and history, working with four major European museums (the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden). Second, it will chart the countervailing use of the medium on behalf of Aboriginal people to protest injustice and campaign for human rights, tracing the ways in which Indigenous Australians began to be constituted visually as an object of intervention and protection. Through international collaboration it will return photographs currently housed in key European collections, providing a major Indigenous heritage resource, and will explore the significance of colonial photography to descendants.

She is available to supervise students in the following areas:

• visual cultures of colonialism
• heritage
• historical archaeology, especially postcolonialism, missions, gender and urban archaeology
  

Selected Publications

2011 (co-editor with Liz Conor) Double Take: Visual Culture and Colonial Australia. Special issue of Journal of Australian Studies, 35(2), June.

2010 (co-edited with Jeremy Ash) The Archaeology of Australasian Missions. Special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology.

2010 (co-edited with Uzma Z. Rizvi) Handbook to Postcolonialism and Archaeology. World Archaeological Congress.

2009 Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission. Altamira Press.
(Awarded the Australian Archaeological Association’s 2010 John Mulvaney Book Award)

2005 Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians. Duke University Press.

2005 (co-editor with Tracy Ireland), 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.

Former Research Projects

‘Colonial encounters: Archaeology at Ebenezer Mission, north-western Victoria’ Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2003-2007.

Archaeological investigation of Ebenezer Mission, one of the most significant Aboriginal sites in south-eastern Australia, aimed to explore everyday life on the mission, the role of gender organisation within the colonial process, and how Aboriginal cultural identity was shaped by missionisation. The project represents one of the few substantial archaeological studies of the process of Aboriginal-European interaction, and addresses our ignorance of Indigenous responses to the mission environment. It reassesses the relationship between material culture and ethnicity through a critique of notions of traditional Aboriginal culture as static and essential, and of essentialism in archaeological analysis. The project harnesses historical archaeology’s potential to bring converging lines of evidence to bear on questions about social organisation and cultural identity. It draws upon a wide range of evidence in an historicised, ethnographic approach that explores the roles of social categories of age, gender, and cultural orientation in creating, transforming and maintaining identity over time.

Entering the ‘Contact Zone’: an IT gateway to the colonial past

Visualisation and simulation IT technologies are an increasingly important means of providing access to archaeological data: this project interpreted research at the former Ebenezer Mission in north-western Victoria by allowing viewers to experience the cultural landscape of the European settlement created from 1859 onwards. This project was designed to be a cultural heritage resource for the Aboriginal community, and extends Lydon's research regarding cross-cultural exchange between Wotjobaluk people and Moravian missionaries through actualisation.