Fantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to 'civilize' the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing, and the consumption of material goods. After the mission closed in 1904, white observers saw the camp settlements that formed nearby as evidence of Aboriginal incapacity and immorality, rather than as symptoms of exclusion and poverty. Conceptions of transformation as acculturation survived in assimilation policies that envisioned Aboriginal people becoming the same as whites through living in European housing. These ideas persist in archaeological analysis that insists on Aboriginality as otherness and difference, and equates objects with identity. However Wergaia tradition was place-based, and, often invisibly, Indigenous people maintained traditional relationships to kin and country, resisting white authority through strategies of evasion and mobility. This study examines the complex role of material culture and spatial politics in shaping colonial identities and offers a critique of essentialism in archaeological interpretation.

"This is indeed a 'fantastic' book, full of the sort of rich 'hidden' histories that connect the past with the present. It represents the sort of richly longitudinal study which we need in Australasian archaeology, and I congratulate AltaMira Press and the World of Archaeology Series Editors on commissioning this important book....This rich and deeply nuanced anaysis of the role of material culture and spatial politics in shaping colonial identities and archaeology's potential in illuminating hidden colonial pasts in a postcolonial present deserves a place on the bookshelves of all Australians, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in how the past matters in the present." - Australasian Historical Archaeology

"Jane Lydon has written a very important book, which accentuates the importance of modern Aboriginal cultural heritage….Lydon's Fantastic Dreaming stands as a remarkable book on the cultural transformations and continuity surrounding missions. I warmly recommend this book as a fantastic and stirring story which sets a necessary standard for future research in humanities." - Archaeology In Oceania

"Fantastic Dreaming is well-written and provides a comprehensive and rich spatial history of the Ebenezer mission. It presents many historical photographs and reproduces important sketch maps. Lydon successfully interrogates the marginal status of the Wergaia in regional Victorian towns, such as Antwerp and Dimboola, in the twentieth century and reveals how disparaging comments from non-Aboriginal houses were blind to the long term, if intangible, attachment of Aboriginal people to their places….With the publication of Lydon's book, the Ebenezer mission has become one of the most researched former Aboriginal mission sites in Victoria." - Aboriginal History

"Jane Lydon's Fantastic Dreaming is a scholarly work that bears the hallmarks of this researcher as someone engaged with theory, and skilled in the interpretation of multiple sources….And not least of all it provides a detailed insight into the history of Victorian missions." - Australian Archaeology, June 2011

"Lydon’s own tale is skillfully narrated, rich in historical detail and replete with the social actors from both ‘sides’ of the frontier who shaped the material and spatial worlds of encounter. In South Africa, where mission archeology remains relatively under-developed, Lydon’s book offers a compelling benchmark." - South African Archaeological Bulletin

"Lydon’s work is a significant contribution to historical and anthropological understanding of the continuing impact of the missionising process on Aboriginal Australians. Importantly, it shows both the fluidity and survival of a culture that was for a long time denied, and that material culture studies can be used to highlight this fluidity." - Journal of Australian Studies

"Some of the first physical traces left in the Victorian landscape by European settlers were those of Major Thomas Mitchell’s dray as it passed through the soft earth and left tracks that remained visible for years. As a slowly fading image of the passing of people and animals through country it is a powerful one that remains in the imagination of the reader throughout this book. Soft footed wallabies and bare footed humans had never before left permanent tracks in the sandy soil such as these. ... There are many fascinating insights into the mission as a place of exchange of culture provided by this book. This is set within a wider context of both secular and religious thought and writings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Fantastic Dreaming sets out to explore many things and it does so in a scholarly fashion. The endnotes to each chapter are extensive and illuminating, and the range of sources are extensive, representing a wide range of views. The strength of the book comes from Lydon’s own intimate knowledge of the place through archeological surveys and through talking to Aboriginal people descended from those who lived at Ebenezer." - Historic Environment