photographer, carver and anthropologist, was born in the US on 18 May 1926. She studied Anthropology at Radcliffe College (BA 1948, MA 1951) and at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD 1959). Her involvement with the Tiwi of Melville Island began when, as assistant to Carleton S. Coon in the Department of General Ethnology at the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania and 'a graduate student in search of field work for a dissertation’, she was invited late in 1953 by Charles P. Mountford of the SA Museum to join him in an ethnographic study sponsored by the National Geographic Society. The Society provided her 'with a two-day crash course in photography’. On 16 April 1954, the National Geographic Expedition, consisting of five permanent members (and a few short-term participants), landed at Snake Bay Native Settlement on the north coast of the island to spend six months camping on Banjo Beach, about a mile from the main settlement. At Snake Bay there was a native population of about 200, a white superintendent (F.H. Grimster), his wife and four children, an assistant superintendent and a schoolteacher. Jane spent an extra four months on the island after the party left in September, living in the superintendent’s house and hunting and working with the Tiwi.
Goodale returned briefly to Melville Island in 1962 and again in 1980-81 (for fifteen months) and 1986-87 (eighteen months). She has written extensively about the people of Oceania, in particular visiting the Kaulong of New Britain, Papua New Guinea several times between 1962 and 1974. Her Australian texts are Tiwi Wives (1971: republished 1994), The Tiwi of Northern Australia (1959: 3rd edn 1988) and many articles and chapters in books. She was Professor of Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College in 1995 when Heritage was published.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
