Archaeologist whose findings revealed Aborigines had been in Australia since Ice Age
Archaeologist whose findings revealed Aborigines had been in Australia since Ice Age
October 13 2016
Derek John Mulvaney, born October 26,1925, died September 21, 2016
Professor John Mulvaney, who has died aged 90, was the first university-trained archaeologist to work in Australia, where he became a scholar of prehistory and an eloquent campaigner on issues from water conservation to the preservation of ancient sites.
The eldest of five children, Derek John Mulvaney was born on October 26 1925 in Yarram, Victoria, where his Irish-born father was a schoolteacher. He was 18 when he joined the Royal Australian Air Force and in 1944 was posted to Britain where he became fascinated by the country's rich heritage of prehistoric sites. Returning home after the war, he took a degree in Roman history at the University of Melbourne.
At the time there were just three museum curators in Australia who had written about Australia's pre-colonial past, none of them archaeologists. The attitude, Mulvaney recalled, was that "Australia began in 1788... what happened on the mainland before 1788 was a thing nobody thought about".
Determined to redress the balance, he applied for and won an Australian National University travelling scholarship to take a second degree, in archaeology and anthropology, at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received a thorough training in the latest archaeological techniques.
In 1952 he was invited by the American-born archaeologist Charles McBurney to join him in excavations at Haua Fteah in Libya, where careful stratigraphy revealed multiple layers of human occupation going back many thousands of years. When he graduated, somewhat to his disappointment with a second-class degree, his supervisor, Professor Grahame Clark, observed: "Well, John, I suppose a second's good enough for Australia." And so it proved.
More:
http://www.watoday.com.au/comment/archaeologist-whose-findings-revealed-aborigines-had-been-in-australia-since-ice-age-20161012-gs14zm.html
