Derek John Mulvaney AO CMG FAHA (26 October 1925 – 21 September 2016), known as John Mulvaney and D. J. Mulvaney, was an Australian archaeologist. He was the first qualified archaeologist to focus his work on Australia.

Life

Mulvaney was born in Yarram, Victoria, on 26 October 1925.^[1]

He began his academic career at the University of Melbourne in Roman history, writing an MA thesis on State and Society in Britain at the time of Roman conquest. In consciously preparing himself to begin the field of Australian archaeology, he entered Clare College, Cambridge as an undergraduate, studying British, Irish, German and Danish prehistoric archaeology.^[1] He obtained his PhD from Cambridge in 1970.^[1]

His first excavation in Australia was at Fromm's Landing (Tungawa)^[2] on the Murray River in South Australia, from 1956 to 1960.^[3]

During his academic career, he co-authored and/or edited 17 books.^[4] He was for many years a Commissioner of the Australian Heritage Commission. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1969, the year of its foundation, serving on its Council from 1972 to 1974 and again, this time as Honorary Secretary, from 1989 to 1996.

Mulvaney died in Canberra at the age of 90 on 21 September 2016.^[5][6]

Legacy

Known as the "father of Australian archaeology",^[7][8] Mulvaney was the "first university-trained archaeologist to make Australia his field of study".^[9]

In March 2019 the Australian Academy of the Humanities launched the John Mulvaney Fellowship for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early career researchers working in the humanities.^[10]

The John Mulvaney Book Award was established by the Australian Archaeological Association in 2004 in honour of Mulvaney, "to acknowledge the significant contribution of individual or coauthored publications to Australian archaeology, either as general knowledge or as specialist publications".^[11] In 2018, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia by Billy Griffiths (which describes some of Mulvaney's work and applauds the way he "[built] bridges between the disciplines of history and archaeology"^[12]) won the award, and in 2019, Alice Gorman's Dr Space Junk vs the Universe: Archaeology and the Future won the award.^[13]

Awards

• Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1969^[14]
• Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), 1982^[15]
• Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), 1991^[16]
• Grahame Clark Medal of the British Academy, 1999
• Centenary Medal, 2001^[17]
• Rhys Jones Medal, 2004

Works

• Mulvaney, D. J. (1967). Cricket Walkabout: The Australian Aboriginal Cricketers on Tour, 1867-8. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
• Mulvaney, D. J. (1969). The Prehistory of Australia. London: Thames and Hudson.
• Byrne, Patrick Michael; Morphy, Howard; Mulvaney, D. J.; Petch, Alison; Brissenden collection (2000), From the frontier : outback letters to Baldwin Spencer, Allen & Unwin, ISBN 978-1-86508-317-9