Pip Deveson

Pip Deveson is a Research and Media Project Officer with the Digital Humanities Hub at The Australian National University Research School of Humanities. Over recent years, she has worked on a number of multi-media and film projects, most notably, the multi-media biography (on CD-ROM) of the renowned Yolngu artist, Narritjin Maymuru. She is currently working on two Australian Research Council funded projects: Contexts of Collection – a dialogic approach to understanding the making of the material record of Yolngu cultures; and Pintupi Dialogues – reconstructing memories of art, land and community through the visual record. Her involvement with both of these projects builds upon her work, over many years, with filmmaker Ian Dunlop.

Deveson began working with Dunlop after completing an anthropology degree at ANU. From 1981 to 1984 her role was that of research assistant on the Yirrkala Film Project, focussing on the effects of the NABALCO bauxite mine on the Yolngu Aboriginal community of northeast Arnhem Land. Following the birth of her three children, she returned to work with Dunlop in 1994, as editor/writer for the Yirrkala Video Project – an extension of the film project, funded by Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and Film Australia. In 1996, Deveson and Dunlop shared the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Prize for the film Conversations with Dundiwuy Wanambi. In 2007, she was awarded the National Archives Frederick Watson Fellowship to undertake further research on the Yirrkala Film collection. During that time she also worked on several educational websites featuring Yolngu cultural material: Ceremony – the Djungguwan of northeast Arnhem Land; and Living Knowledge – Indigenous knowledge in science education.