Dictionary of Sydney Board 2012

Dr Lisa Murray BA (Hons) PhD (Syd)

Chair, Dictionary of Sydney
Lisa Murray is Chair of the Board of the Dictionary of Sydney and was appointed City Historian at the Council of the City of Sydney in 2010. She has 15 years’ experience as professional historian and is an awarding-winning author. Her many public history publications include Musical Chairs: The Quest for a City Recital Hall and The Capitol Theatre Restoration.

Professor Paul Ashton BA (Hons) DipEd (Macq) PhD (Macq) MPHA
Paul Ashton is Professor of Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has worked in the fields of heritage, urban, oral and community history and undertaken commissioned histories. Paul is Co-Director of the Australian Centre for Public History and co-editor of the journal Public History Review. He is a past President of the Professional Historians Association of NSW.

Lisa Asquith
Lisa Asquith is a project manager focused on information and communications technology within government. Using her considerable commercial experience to drive the government sector to become more dynamic and customer focused, she has delivered the projects that underpin the strategy for a single service organisation. Previously she managed the NSW Government’s Digital Television Trial and was CEO of a company that developed into the world’s first built for broadband youth portal funded by Macquarie Bank. She has also worked with global entertainment companies to create digital content for their biggest artists.

Andrew Bateman
Andy Bateman is the current Global CEO of the Leading Edge, a leading international market research company residing in Sydney. He was previously CEO of brand consultancy Interbrand in the US and has also served as worldwide account director at McCann WorldGroup and worldwide account director for Publicis in New York and London.
Clients he has worked with include Intel, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, UBS, Dell, Xerox, Barclays and Mars.

Councillor Phillip Black BSc (UNSW) DipEd
Phillip Black is a Surry Hills businessman in the tourism industry. He is a councillor of the Council of the City of Sydney. Chair of the Sydney Town Hall Curatorial Committee, the Harold Park Trams Working Party, Deputy Chair the Sydney Town Hall Advisory Group, and Deputy Lord Mayor 2009-2010. He represents the Lord Mayor on the Anzac Memorial Trust, the Australia Day Regatta Committee, the Sydney Community Foundation and the Sydney Festival Board. He was former Curator at the Geological and Mining Museum and secondary school teacher. He is founding member and past President of the South Sydney Heritage Society, and former Trustee on Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust.

Dr Alex Byrne
Dr Alex Byrne is a professional librarian, researcher and writer with deep interest in the roles of memory institutions, the complexity of issues relating to Indigenous peoples and transmission of knowledge, and emerging modes of scholarly discourse.
He is the State Librarian and Chief Executive of the State Library of New South Wales. Personal interests include the sense of place especially as it relates to Sydney, theatre, history and literature, and printmaking.

Professor Stephen Garton BA (Syd) PhD (UNSW)
Professor Stephen Garton is the Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney. He was Challis Professor of History and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 2001-2009. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Royal Australian Historical Society.
He has been a chief investigator on three ARC Discovery grants and eight ARC Linkage grants over the last decade. He has authored books, numerous articles and chapters in the history of incarceration, crime, insanity, psychiatry, poverty, eugenics, shell shock, returned soldiers and sexuality.

Dr Ian Johnson BA Hons (Cambridge) DES (Bordeaux) PhD (ANU)
Dr Ian Johnson is a Senior Research Fellow in Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory at the University of Sydney. He has worked as Aboriginal Sites Registrar at the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and for the Arkansas Archaeological Survey.
His work focuses on the use of Geographic Information Systems in archaeology and on the delivery of historical information through time-based interactive web maps, map animations and online databases. He is on the Executive of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative and the International Advisory Board of Internet Archaeology.

Professor Grace Karskens BA MA PhD (Syd)
Grace Karskens is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, where she teaches Australian history and public history. A recipient of two ARC Research Fellowships (1995-2000) and a Discovery Grant (2003-2007), her research focuses on social, cultural, urban and environmental history and urban archaeology.
Grace’s books include Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood, the prize-winning The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney, and most recently The Colony: a History of Early Sydney, which won the 2010 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Grace is a Trustee of the New South Wales Historic Houses Trust.

Dr Mark Valentine St Leon BEc (Syd), GCertTQM (CSU), MB (ECU), MAHons (Macq), PhD (Syd), CA, Freelance university lecturer & tutor.
Sydney-born, Mark joined the Board in 2011. He is the author of the Dictionary’s online entry for ‘Circus’. After graduating in economics and qualifying as a Chartered Accountant, Mark spent two years (1978-80) in Switzerland with accounting firm Price Waterhouse. Recognising the need for Australia to express its identity on the world stage, he spent 11 years (1983-94) with the Australia Council raising financial and funding standards throughout the arts industry. Out of hours, he served as a founding director of the Swiss-Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (1986-92). In 2007, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Sydney for his thesis on the history of circus in Australia. This was adapted for general readership and published as Circus: The Australian Story (Melbourne Books, 2011).