Jane Lydon
Biographic Data
| ID | 431338 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Lydon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane |
| FAMILY NAME | Lydon |
| SIGNATURE | LYDON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Western Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3083-4084 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 197 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 67 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
A Valuable Man” and “One of the Wisest and Best of Mankind”: Jeremy Bentham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and Systematic Colonization
This article reexamines the relationship between Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield through the lens of one of Bentham’s last projects, “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831), and his support for Wakefield’s scheme of “systematic colonization.” Their intellectual encounter explains how key Benthamite principles were integrated into Wakefield’s influential vision, with lasting effects. While famous for opposing the penal colony in New Sout…
Forced Free Labour’: Connecting the Abolition of Slavery and Settler Colonisation in the Thought of Henry George Grey
The Idea of Italy: Photography and the British Imagination, 1840–1900 ed. by Maria Antonella Pelizzari and Scott Wilcox (review)
Engaging the everyday: The Concept and Practice of 'Everyday Heritage
In this paper, we explore what it means to link heritage to the everyday, how this has been framed in the field of heritage studies to date and how engagement with the everyday might generate future opportunities for heritage practice. We highlight distinctive aspects of everyday heritage, including its post-representative nature, the importance of urban activism, digital and historical forms of cultural participation, as well as its aesthetic re…
"Jane Lydon. Review of "Projecting Citizenship: "Photography and Belonging in the British Empire" by Gabrielle Moser
Elizabeth & John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm, written by Atkinson, Alan
One People? A Visual Language of Australian Citizenship
After World War II the legal category of Australian citizenship was created through the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, but continued to overlap with British status. A ‘new language’ of photography actively constituted ideas about Australian citizenship through three interlocking discourses centring on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a new assimilationist policy for Australia’s Indigenous people, and a migration program whic…
Picturing Political Community: From Subjects to Citizens
This themed issue aims to investigate the role of visual culture in defining, contesting and advancing ideas of Australian citizenship and its attendant rights, from white settlement to the present.Footnote1 Acknowledging, but looking beyond, the legal status of citizenship, these articles seek to explore the broader processes through which this cultural category is constituted and deployed. This question is timely in an era when global networks …
Unfree Workers: Insubordination and Resistance in Convict Australia, 1788-1860 and Convict: A Global History
Racial Punishment from Slavery to Settler Colonialism: John Picton Beete in Demerara and Swan River
The career of Captain John Picton Beete (1799–1886, later John Picton Picton), an officer of the 21st Regiment of Foot (North British Fusiliers), maps some of the continuities between slavery and settler colonization. While military punishment was practiced across a wide imperial field, by focusing on the links between slavery and the new settler colonies we see how black bodies remained vulnerable to violent techniques well after they had been a…
From Demerara to Swan River: Charles Dawson Ridley and James Walcott in Western Australia
This article aims to explore links between the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the colonisation of Western Australia by tracing the lives of some of the first settlers to arrive in 1830. Starting with the Legacies of British Slavery (LBS) database of slave-owner compensation claims, I examine the movement of Charles Dawson Ridley and James Walcott and their families from Demerara, now Guyana, to Swan River, now Perth, Western Austr…
The Legacies of British Slavery in Australia's Labour History
In this essay I explore how we might write slavery back into Australian labour history. The paper draws from the research project, Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery. My research locates the labour history of that colony in the context of British abolitionism and my paper argues for a recognition of the continuities of slavery in the coerced labour of Australia’s colonial history
Public History in Western Australia
Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land
Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical …
Indigenous Uses of Photographic Digital Heritage in Postcolonizing Australia
The process of “postcolonizing” continues in the former settler colony of Australia, entailing intense struggles over national identity and culture. Digital heritage plays a key role in these conflicts, in the form of historical and newer archives that have become increasingly important within Indigenous advocacy for recognition. Constructed from more traditional museum, library and private collections, these have become digital assets that now c…
Reorienting Australian Studies? Remaking Australia from the West
Western Australia has continued to be seen from without as both necessary and as supplemental: its distinctive place within the national economy, history and psyche has continued to drive a specific and contested set of relations with the state that provides a useful lens upon “Australia” and Australian studies in its larger sense. The status of Australian studies has fluctuated over the last decade but continues to thrive, especially internation…
Mr Wakefield's Speaking Trumpets: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically
This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of 'systematic colonisation' within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain's ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive…
A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh: The Decline of British Slavery and the Making of the Settler Colonies
Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement's humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and its leaders' simultaneous implication in the r…
Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire
Popularizing Anthropology: Elsie Masson and Baldwin Spencer
Feeling for the deep past: Archaeological Analogy and Historical Empathy
Debates about how to narrate the 'deep past' have rarely drawn archaeologists and historians together despite their shared concerns. This article examines one such mutual concern, the interpretive role of what in archaeology is termed analogy, and in history, historical empathy: crudely put, the way that human-centred narratives may project present-day or universal behaviours and activities into the past. I explore debates about analogy in archae…
Photography and Critical Heritage
Historical photographs of Australian Aboriginal people were amassed during the colonial period for a range of purposes, yet rarely to further an Indigenous agenda. Today, however, such images have been recontextualized, used to reconstruct family history, document culture, and express connections to place. They have become a significant heritage resource for relatives and descendants. Images stand in for relatives lost through processes of offici…
Colonial “Blind Spots”: Images of Australian Frontier Conflict
Visual representations of colonial violence constitute an overlooked source of evidence that, although shaped by contemporary visual and cultural conventions, allow us to engage with this troubling history in significant ways. The “history wars” of the turn of the millennium have been accused of focusing on disciplinary protocols with the effect of obscuring the moral implications of colonial invasion and dispossession. By contrast, images evoke …
Visions of Disaster in the Unlucky Voyage of the Ship Batavia, 1647
This article examines the illustrated pamphlet Ongeluckige voyagie, van’t schip Batavia (Unlucky voyage of the ship Batavia ) and its representation of a 1629 shipwreck off the coast of western Australia, followed by mutiny and the massacre of many survivors. The pamphlet was published in Amsterdam in 1647, and included fifteen (six full-page) fine copper engravings. It was very popular, helping to shape a new genre of shipwreck narrative and exp…
Noble horses and ‘black monsters’: The politics of colonial compassion
Cosmopolitan Archaeologies
An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be pr…
Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology
This essential handbook explores the relationship between the postcolonial critique and the field of archaeology, a discipline that developed historically in conjunction with European colonialism and imperialism. In aiding the movement to decolonize the profession, the contributors to this volume-themselves from six continents and many representing indigenous and minority communities and disadvantaged countries-suggest strategies to strip archaeo…
The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction
Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory
This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances – especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultur…
Our Sense of Beauty: Visuality, Space and Gender on Victoria's Aboriginal Reserves, South-Eastern Australia
European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creat…
Feeling for the deep past: Archaeological Analogy and Historical Empathy
Debates about how to narrate the 'deep past' have rarely drawn archaeologists and historians together despite their shared concerns. This article examines one such mutual concern, the interpretive role of what in archaeology is termed analogy, and in history, historical empathy: crudely put, the way that human-centred narratives may project present-day or universal behaviours and activities into the past. I explore debates about analogy in archae…
Imagining the Moravian Mission: Space and Surveillance at the Former Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Southeastern Australia
Engaging the everyday: The Concept and Practice of 'Everyday Heritage
In this paper, we explore what it means to link heritage to the everyday, how this has been framed in the field of heritage studies to date and how engagement with the everyday might generate future opportunities for heritage practice. We highlight distinctive aspects of everyday heritage, including its post-representative nature, the importance of urban activism, digital and historical forms of cultural participation, as well as its aesthetic re…
From Moorundie to Buckingham Palace: Images of “King” Tenberry and his son Warrulan, 1845–55
This paper explores the representation of Tenberry, a Ngaiwong man from Moorundie on the Murray River in South Australia, and his significant place in the colonial discourse of European settlement and race relations over the first decades of settlement. From around 1845, when he made his first public appearance in the engraved frontispiece to Edward John Eyre's journals of exploration, his image was circulated through explorer's narratives, pione…
Mr Wakefield's Speaking Trumpets: Abolishing Slavery and Colonising Systematically
This essay examines the significance of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of 'systematic colonisation' within the transition from Caribbean slavery to settler colonisation to reveal the sequential relationship of these two imperial systems. In the context of industrialisation and social unrest, the anti-slavery movement performed an important purpose for Britain's ruling classes by simultaneously accruing moral authority and sanctioning oppressive…
Colonial “Blind Spots”: Images of Australian Frontier Conflict
Visual representations of colonial violence constitute an overlooked source of evidence that, although shaped by contemporary visual and cultural conventions, allow us to engage with this troubling history in significant ways. The “history wars” of the turn of the millennium have been accused of focusing on disciplinary protocols with the effect of obscuring the moral implications of colonial invasion and dispossession. By contrast, images evoke …
H. G. Wells and a shared humanity: Photography, humanitarianism, empire
This article explores the role of the 1904 report of the Roth inquiry into Aboriginal administration in Western Australia in defining metropolitan-colonial relations and in shaping debates about imperial humanitarianism. The debates prompted by the Report invoked not only a contrast between imperial shame and colonial independence on questions of the ‘new slaveries’ of imperial labour but also competing notions of humanity. Aesthetic experience w…
Memories of the Past, Visions of the Future: Changing Views of Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Australia
Indigenous Uses of Photographic Digital Heritage in Postcolonizing Australia
The process of “postcolonizing” continues in the former settler colony of Australia, entailing intense struggles over national identity and culture. Digital heritage plays a key role in these conflicts, in the form of historical and newer archives that have become increasingly important within Indigenous advocacy for recognition. Constructed from more traditional museum, library and private collections, these have become digital assets that now c…
A Secret Longing for a Trade in Human Flesh: The Decline of British Slavery and the Making of the Settler Colonies
Focusing upon the achievement of the abolition of British slavery in 1833 has obscured significant continuities between slavery, apprenticeship, and the post-emancipation period, particularly in the new Anglophone settler colonies. During the decade leading up to abolition, domestic unrest intensified the tension between the elite abolitionist movement's humanitarian concern for Caribbean slaves, and its leaders' simultaneous implication in the r…
Transmuting Australian Aboriginal photographs
Photographs of Australian Aboriginal people are powerful objects. Produced from the 1840s, when the camera first arrived in the continent’s nascent white settlements, such images are now invested with new meanings, becoming a rich resource for Indigenous families, history-telling and culture. The intersection of imperialism, science and popular curiosity generated a vast body of imagery of Indigenous peoples now held within the archive. This arti…
Australia and Anti-Slavery
Driving by: Visiting Australian colonial monuments
The tempo of the long-distance car journey and the locales constituted by road-side monuments define the itinerary of this article, which visits four widely-scattered examples of (post)-colonial Australian placemaking: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument near Mt Isa in Queensland's redneck 'deep north'; Victoria's Grampians/Gariwerd National Park; the site of the Blacktown Native Institution in western suburban Sydney; the Coniston Massacre Memorial…
A Strange Time Machine: The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence
Historical films have become an important way of representing the past, and three films released in 2002 (The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence) express our current preoccupation with how the colonial past has shaped present Australian identity. These films use a range of cinematic techniques to construct particular relationships between past and present, Aboriginal and white. Distancing strategies of colonialism‐as‐violence absolv…
Picturing Political Community: From Subjects to Citizens
This themed issue aims to investigate the role of visual culture in defining, contesting and advancing ideas of Australian citizenship and its attendant rights, from white settlement to the present.Footnote1 Acknowledging, but looking beyond, the legal status of citizenship, these articles seek to explore the broader processes through which this cultural category is constituted and deployed. This question is timely in an era when global networks …
The Legacies of British Slavery in Australia's Labour History
In this essay I explore how we might write slavery back into Australian labour history. The paper draws from the research project, Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery. My research locates the labour history of that colony in the context of British abolitionism and my paper argues for a recognition of the continuities of slavery in the coerced labour of Australia’s colonial history
Photography and Critical Heritage
Historical photographs of Australian Aboriginal people were amassed during the colonial period for a range of purposes, yet rarely to further an Indigenous agenda. Today, however, such images have been recontextualized, used to reconstruct family history, document culture, and express connections to place. They have become a significant heritage resource for relatives and descendants. Images stand in for relatives lost through processes of offici…
Rethinking Materiality, Memory and Identity
This introductory article considers and questions exactly how materials and people constitute social worlds and relationships which sustain identity and memory and, in turn, the social and political structures or norms that these attachments invest in, stabilise and maintain
Photographing “the Nucleus of the Native Church” at Poonindie Mission, South Australia
The Anglican Church in Australia actively commissioned photographic portraits of its indigenous congregation as part of a program of documenting and promoting its work. Poonindie mission, the Anglican Church's “Christian village,” established in 1850 on the Spencer Gulf in South Australia, represented an idealistic experiment. Its first few years were seemingly crowned with success when eleven young indigenous residents were baptized by Bishop Sh…
The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia
This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australi…
Many Inventions: The Chinese in the Rocks 1890-1930
A Strange Time Machine: The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence
Historical films have become an important way of representing the past, and three films released in 2002 (The Tracker, Black and White, and Rabbit‐Proof Fence) express our current preoccupation with how the colonial past has shaped present Australian identity. These films use a range of cinematic techniques to construct particular relationships between past and present, Aboriginal and white. Distancing strategies of colonialism‐as‐violence absolv…
Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians
Driving by: Visiting Australian colonial monuments
The tempo of the long-distance car journey and the locales constituted by road-side monuments define the itinerary of this article, which visits four widely-scattered examples of (post)-colonial Australian placemaking: The Kalkadoon/Mitakoodi Monument near Mt Isa in Queensland's redneck 'deep north'; Victoria's Grampians/Gariwerd National Park; the site of the Blacktown Native Institution in western suburban Sydney; the Coniston Massacre Memorial…
Our Sense of Beauty: Visuality, Space and Gender on Victoria's Aboriginal Reserves, South-Eastern Australia
European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creat…
Pictures bring us messages
Books
Taking Assimilation to Heart Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937. By Katherine Ellinghaus. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 276. $US49.95 cloth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. By Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 285. $41.95 paper. A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia. …
Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission
Fantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to "civilize" the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing,…
Young and Free: The Australian Past in a Global Future
Fantastic Dreaming: The Archaeology of an Aboriginal Mission
"Fantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to "civilize" the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing…
Photography and Australia (review)
Reviewed by: Photography and Australia Jane Lydon Photography and Australia. By Helen Ennis. (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). This is an excellent survey of the major developments, practitioners and icons of Australian photography, providing a wide-ranging, inclusive overview much like the block-buster exhibitions the author has curated for more than twenty years in Canberra’s national cultural institutions. Generously illustrated with eighty imag…
Imagining the Moravian Mission: Space and Surveillance at the Former Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Southeastern Australia
Cosmopolitan Archaeologies
An important collection, Cosmopolitan Archaeologies delves into the politics of contemporary archaeology in an increasingly complex international environment. The contributors explore the implications of applying the cosmopolitan ideals of obligation to others and respect for cultural difference to archaeological practice, showing that those ethics increasingly demand the rethinking of research agendas. While cosmopolitan archaeologies must be pr…
‘Fantastic Dreaming’: Ebenezer Mission as Moravian Utopia and Wotjobaluk Responses
In 1836 the explorer-surveyor Thomas Mitchell penetrated into the region later named ‘Victoria’ and was delighted by what he saw: crossing the Wimmera River as it flowed strongly past the mountains of Gariwerd he observed that ‘Every day we passed over land which for natural fertility and beauty could scarcely be surpassed; over streams of unfailing abundance and plains covered with the richest pasturage. Stately trees and majestic mountains ador…
Behold the Tears’: Photography as Colonial Witness
Photographs were a powerful means of communicating ideas about Indigenous peoples, despite their sometimes diffuse and ambivalent meanings. Only recently, however, has visual evidence begun to play a part in Australian debates about colonial violence and oppression. During the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, which in Britain marked a transition from an evangelical tradition of anti-slavery to a new discourse about human rights,…
Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory
This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photographic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances – especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultur…
Memories of the Past, Visions of the Future: Changing Views of Ebenezer Mission, Victoria, Australia
The Archaeology of Missions in Australasia: Introduction
‘No Moral Doubt…’: Aboriginal evidence and the Kangaroo Creek poisoning, 1847–1849
no m oral d o u b t...' : A boriginal evidence and the K angaroo C reek poisoning, 1 8
Double take: Reappraising the colonial archive
Conventional use of the colonial visual archive as evidence and historical illustration is undergoing a significant shift, giving way to creative interventions by Indigenous Australians. The ferment surrounding the “history wars” has led artists and scholars to rethink the colonial archive as a contested site productive of dynamic and archaic revisions. Departing from the memory ruts that have become entrenched in the national imaginary, these di…
The experimental 1860s: Charles Walter’s images of Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria A. Dirk Moses
This is the first meeting like this I have ever seen. I am very glad this night. When I was camping about in every place I never got any meeting like this. Mr Green spoke to me a
From Moorundie to Buckingham Palace: Images of “King” Tenberry and his son Warrulan, 1845–55
This paper explores the representation of Tenberry, a Ngaiwong man from Moorundie on the Murray River in South Australia, and his significant place in the colonial discourse of European settlement and race relations over the first decades of settlement. From around 1845, when he made his first public appearance in the engraved frontispiece to Edward John Eyre's journals of exploration, his image was circulated through explorer's narratives, pione…
Bullets, Teeth and Photographs: Recognising Indigenous Australians between the Wars
In 1927, an inquiry into what has come to be known as the Forrest River massacre sent shockwaves across Australia and overseas, playing an important part in the shift toward better treatment of Aboriginal people. The evidence tendered to the inquiry was narrowly forensic, focused upon dates, places and human remains, alongside three photographs of the outback crime scenes: how were these grainy, scratched, inscrutable images seen at the time? How…
Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow
Photography and the Recognition of Indigenous Australians: Framing Aboriginal Prisoners
This article explores the role of photography in the recognition of the oppression of Indigenous Australians in the interwar years. Today, photographs of conflict and suffering are crucial evidence that make these phenomena real to us, but the interpretive frameworks that determine photographic meaning offer profound challenges to historians attempting to understand past visual cultures. During the 1920s and 1930s, images of Indigenous ill-treatm…
History (49 works) · Art (37 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Political science (35 works) · History (32 works) · Law (32 works) · Archaeology (26 works) · Indigenous (25 works) · Australian History and Society (24 works) · Law (24 works)