What archaeological projects are you working on at the moment?
My job involves archaeology and heritage management work on a wide variety of government owned sites. Colonial forts, convict barracks and hospitals, large dams and water supply canals, 20th century mental institutions, historic gaols, courthouses and police stations, burial grounds, dockyards, railway workshops and stations, remote pastoral stations, schools, NSW Government House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge are just a few of the types of sites I’ve been lucky enough to work on. The work is a mix of assessment, conservation management planning, strategic policy and advice and the occasional excavation project. Very often it involves helping the architects in our office design new buildings and precincts around significant archaeological remains.

Tell us about one of your most interesting archaeological discoveries.
My best “discovery” was a beautiful linen plan of an early colonial site that had been catalogued incorrectly and had not seen the light of day for many years. Sometimes though, it is the ongoing mysteries that are the most interesting. I’ve recently been assessing some aircraft wreckage that the locals keep telling me is from a plane that went down in WWII and that it had an American pilot. It’s become a bit of an obsession with me, because despite hours in the archives and many nights going square-eyed in front of my computer searching Australian, US and British aircraft accident records (and finding out more about historic aircraft engineering than I ever needed to know) it refuses to give up its identity. So I suspect long after the job itself is over and the report is delivered to the client, it will keep bugging me and I will keep looking in the hope that one day I will work it out.

Tell us about a funny/disastrous/amazing experience that you have had while doing archaeology.
I was working on a project surveying long lost tracks in far western NSW by driving them with a GPS in a 4WD. After one particularly long and tedious day it became clear that perhaps the fieldwork had been going on for too long. We downloaded the data that night to discover one of the tracks suddenly diverting off – into the shape of a kangaroo. Needless to say that track was resurveyed a few days later and the kangaroo had mysteriously disappeared.

What’s your favourite part of being an archaeologist?
You get to go to places that the general public often don’t get access to, you are often the first person to see something since it was buried at some point in the distant past and there is always the promise of a new discovery about our history and who we are.

Follow up reading:
Unearthing Sydney’s Colonial Past - http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2008/national/fort-phillip-dig/index.html

Allen C, 2005, “Archaeology and Urban Planning: Using the Past in Design for the Future”,
Proceedings of ICOMOS 15th General Assembly and Scientific Symposium, World Publishing
Corporation, China, pp 516 - 523.