Selling Yarns

Australian Indigenous textiles and good business in the 21st century

 

Speakers

Lindy Allen: Biography

Senior Curator, Indigenous Cultures Department, Museum Victoria

Lindy Allen is Senior Curator for Northern Australian Collections at Museum Victoria, including the important historical ethnographic, manuscript and image collections of Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thomson. Allen's career in museums spans 30 years and Aboriginal fibre has been a focus of her research over that time. Allen has written and curated exhibitions on the topic - the most recent project being the exhibition and catalogue Woven forms: Contemporary basket making in Australia.

Allen has produced and curated over thirty major exhibitions since 1978, including Belonging to Country, a major component of the exhibitions in Bunjilaka, the Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum that opened in 2001. Belonging to Country also included an international award-winning film, Talking, singing and dancing the land, which Allen co-scripted and co-produced.

Allen has contributed to, produced and edited a number of articles and books about Aboriginal women and fibre practice including Women's Work: Aboriginal women's artefacts in the Museum of Victoria (Museum Victoria, 1995) and Daughters of a Dreaming (Museum Victoria, 1990). In Twined Together: Kunmadj Njalehnjaleken (Injalak Arts 2005), Allen wrote about the history of collecting baskets in western Arnhem Land in the early 20th century; and co-wrote a chapter on the introduction of the coiling technique into Arnhem Land in the 1920s.

Lindy Allen is currently Partner Investigator (Industry) on two ARC Linkage Projects: Anthropological and Aboriginal perspectives on the Donald Thomson Collection: material culture, collecting and identity with The Australian National University, and Oral tradition, memory and social change: Indigenous participation in the curation and use of museum collections with the University of Queensland and Deakin University.

See also: Abstract of Lindy Allen's paper:
Patterns of practice - Indigenous fibre art and museums