Digging up a Past
Digging up a Past
The Blurb
Known as an historian, archaeologist, conservationist, leading public intellectual and, most famously, the ‘Father of Australian archaeology’, John Mulvaney is renowned for uncovering the depth of Australian human prehistory, dating the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation to previously unthought-of tens of thousands of years. This insightful and illuminating memoir traces Mulvaney’s life from childhood in rural Victoria and his academic training, to his revelatory excavations in central and northern Queensland and his securing of Australia’s first World Heritage listings, all the while providing personal details of his struggles to have his work recognised, and stories of the inspirational people he met.
Mini Review
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Mulvaney is a much celebrated Australian scholar. His early upbringing in Australia, vividly described here, lead to what would now be an unusual route to antipodean archaeology, through history. A higher degree at Cambridge lead to the first job offer through Grahame Clark - of a lectureship at Auckland which he declined - it was taken up by Golson. He returned rather to Melbourne and later moved to ANU. Pioneer excavations followed, opening the time depth of human presence in Australia. Opportunities for scholarship and professional development followed that will never re-occur and Mulvaney made the most of them. Importantly he retained his historian's interests and particularly in the later part of his life published extensively on a diversity of his interests in Australian history. Some names appear here known best to an older generation of New Zealand archaeologists but it is not worth reading just for that. Rather it is a detailed coverage of the achievements and controversies in Australian archaeology and particularly in heritage protection and the proper inclusion of the indigenous people that are the study of archaeology, together with some frank comments on contemporaries. Autobiographies of the academic good and great may not be an antipodean tradition, but one worth building on if this is the standard.
