Jo McDonald

Biography

Jo McDonald is the Director of the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at UWA. She has held the Rio Tinto Chair in Rock Art Studies (2012-2023) funded by RioTinto’s Conservation Agreement with the Commonwealth for the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Listed Place. Jo completed an ARC Future Fellowship (2011-2016), comparing rock art, social and environmental change in two of the great deserts of the world: the Western Desert in Australia and the Great Basin in the USA. She has completed two ARC projects in the Dampier Archipelago – Murujuga: Dynamics of the Dreaming and Deep History of Sea Country, and is currently leading two more – Dating Murujuga’s Dreaming: a multidisciplinary project aimed at direct dating the engravings and stone features, refining models of climate change and chronology through a series of different techniques. The other Project is Desert to the Sea: Managing Rock Art, Country and Culture – a multidisciplinary two-way knowledge project working with three Aboriginal communities with huge heritage estates and three industry partners, working on intergenerational information transfer and Western: Indigenous knowledge exchanges. She is a CI on the new Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures CIEHF (commencing July 1 2024), and is co-designing research collaborations with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation to occur over the next 7 years.