| DP0344070 |
Western Torres Strait Cultural History Project |
This Project provides the first archaeological study on long-term human presence in Torres Strait. Objectives are to research 1), the antiquity of earliest occupation, and 2), the subsequent emergence of ethnographically documented cultural practices through excavation of key village, rockshelter and ceremonial sites in Western Torres Strait. Current evidence suggests the complex maritime lifeways of Islanders developed <2600 years BP. We will excavate sites on remnant landforms along the ancient landbridge and colonisation pathway between mainland Australia and New Guinea. Results will provide internationally significant insights into Australia's place in an interconnected world during prehistory. International publications will be produced. |
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The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0346498 |
UNDER WATER: a comparative ethnographic analysis of water use and resource management in Queensland and Western Australia |
Via ethnographic fieldwork in four watershed catchment areas, this comparative study examines how interest groups use and manage water resources. Working with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups, pastoralists, miners, farmers and fishers, it will provide comprehensive in-depth analysis of the ways in which people conceptualise, use and evaluate water. The study will investigate different perspectives on water resource management and environmental issues, such as salinity. Its major objectives are to further understanding of human-environmental relations in contrasting settings. By elucidating various practices, needs and values, we will show how conflicts might be resolved and effective management of water resources ensured. |
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The University of Western Australia |
2007 |
| DP0346546 |
Water Dreams, Earthen Histories :The Penrith Lakes Scheme and the Remaking of Old Castlereagh, NSW |
The project explores the history, archaeology and environment of Castlereagh and the Penrith Lakes Scheme in Sydney's west. Conceived in the 1960s, this Scheme aims to rehabilitate gravel quarries by creating huge lakes, but is destroying a rich palimpsest of earlier landscapes. Using a multidisciplinary, holistic approach, the project will assess the Scheme's history, impact and management, and will develop a new kind of environmental history: one which integrates science and engineering with history and heritage, and explores the meanings of the place (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) and the consequences of its loss and remaking. |
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The University of New South Wales |
2007 |
| DP0450131 |
Preserving Australia's endangered heritages: Murrinhpatha song at Wadeye |
This project will produce authoritative, thorough and archivally sound musicological and linguistic documentation of one of Australia's most vibrant indigenous song traditions, the public dance songs of Murrinhpatha people at Wadeye, NT. We will work with traditional owners to document three song genres (Dhanba, Wurlthirri, and Malkarrin) in the light of their historical and contemporary interrelationships with other local genres. More broadly, we will assess the song corpus as endangered cultural heritage of national and international significance, and will develop and apply appropriate electronic media interfaces to ensure longterm conservation and accessibility of the research within the community and outside. |
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The University of Sydney |
2008 |
| DP0450227 |
Indigenous Teachers: Understanding their Professional Pathways and Career Experiences |
There is an urgent need to understand the nature of the professional experience of Indigenous teachers in Australian schools. This project will produce significant new knowledge about the career experiences of former and current Indigenous educators, about the prior life experience of Indigenous teachers beginning their careers in NSW and Victorian schools, and in-depth case studies of their first three years as teachers. It will provide vital information for state and federal education and teacher education policy formation, contribute to social theory with regard to institutional racism, 'whiteness' and Australian education and advance methodologies for research about Indigenous issues. |
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Deakin University |
2007 |
| DP0451001 |
When the Waters Will Be One: Indigenous Performance Traditions at the New Frontier of Inter-Cultural Discourse in Arnhem Land |
This project will examine the emerging roles of Indigenous performance traditions from Arnhem Land as fulcra for the strategic development of new discourses between peoples of the region and the international community. The adaptation of music and dance traditions to new media and performance contexts will be considered as will the hereditary intellectual paradigms that underpin these processes. This project will also investigate historical antecedents to these new developments within the past 50 years, and explore their centrality to current attempts by Indigenous communities in Arnhem Land to achieve cultural and economic sustainability amid a continuing period of radical social change. |
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The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0451114 |
Blackfella Historians: An Historical Study of Aboriginal History-Making in South-eastern Australia |
Aboriginal people had not only to endure colonisation, but to make sense of it. This innovative study examines their deployment of history, focusing on south-eastern Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will explore the importance of history in the efforts made by Aborigines to explain their plight to non-Aborigines and to make sense of it for themselves. The project will offer major new insights into the role of history in shaping relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines and will also enrich our understanding of history's political and cultural uses and its significance as a medium for cross-cultural communication. |
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Monash University |
2007 |
| DP0452390 |
Cape Keerweer 1606-2006: an ethnographic history of the Wik region, Queensland |
In this research with Wik Aboriginal people I investigate how key facets of the peoples' lives have changed since the first Dutch visit 400 years ago. I seek a credible empirical explanation for their descent into crisis, especially post-1978, something with wider implications for the national interest. I examine historical causes through shifts in demography, land tenure, occupations, power relations, violence, language use, and art production. From the intensely local, the past individuals and cultural landscapes of Cape Keerweer, I move outward in space and onward in time tracing gradual Wik engagement in regional, state, national and global relationships 1606-2006. |
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The University of Adelaide |
2008 |
| DP0556111 |
Playing for Life: A Case Study in Childhood, Culture and Transition |
Based in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia's Western Desert, this ethnographic project explores how the difficult cultural transformation of a society and its self-image is manifested in children's symbolic play. Field observation will focus on a traditional sand storytelling game played by girls. Aboriginal children's social imagination has not been investigated previously, and the proposed research within a framework of psychoanalytic anthropology and phenomenology will advance the understanding of how childhood and cultural transformation intersect. Furthermore, the findings of this study will support the development of positive strategies for Aboriginal equality. |
This study will advance Australian research on identity formation in postcolonial societies; develop child-focused research in academic anthropology; align Australian Aboriginal Studies with recent international progress in the field of children's social imagination; innovate the analysis of transforming Indigenous worldviews; create a perspective for in-depth psychological research with Aboriginal Australians; build a rich resource for comparative research and for teaching. It also offers distinct social benefits: fostering the understanding of Aboriginal children's social and mental needs in processes of cultural transformation; enhancing equality by identifying the positive potentials in children and Aboriginal society. |
Macquarie University |
2007 |
| DP0556350 |
Verbs and coverbs: a cross-linguistic re-analysis of part-of-speech categories |
This ground-breaking project challenges the adequacy of the category 'verb', which has been central to theories of language since Aristotle. Categories like 'verb' and 'noun' are based chiefly on data from European languages. Using new data from Australian and African languages, we will show that significant revisions are required to the classification of words into parts-of-speech. This project will significantly enhance Australia's reputation for major new developments in linguistic theory, based on detailed linguistic fieldwork. It will centrally involve detailed documentation of three endangered Australian languages. |
This project will make a significant contribution to the maintenance of Australia's Aboriginal cultural heritage. Aboriginal people consistently identify the maintenance of traditional languages as one of their primary concerns. The project will result in detailed documentation of three endangered Australian languages. The material produced by the project will be an invaluable resource both to linguists internationally and to Aboriginal communities, to whom materials will be returned in accessible formats to support language maintenance activities. The project will maintain Australia's momentum at the forefront of digital archiving technology for language documentation. |
The University of Newcastle |
2007 |
| DP0556686 |
The Indigenous Histories of Settler Societies |
This project deals with history writing and the uses of history. It also deals with national identity in settler societies and with ongoing processes of indigenous reconciliation. This comparative case study will address the changes in received notions of historical progression in a variety of settler contexts and investigate their impact on public discourse and agendas. Analysing different processes of historical revision - including Australia's - and contextualising these transformations in their political, legal and institutional background will favor a better understanding of developing processes of indigenous reconciliation and national redefinition. |
Until recently, Australia was officially engaged in Aboriginal Reconciliation. Yet the position of Aboriginal Australians in the wider society has not improved significantly. In this context, history and the way history is discussed are very important issues. The Australian community will benefit from an increased awareness of global trends regarding some inclusion of indigenous understandings in representations of national identity. The Australian community will benefit as well from a comparative analysis of the ways in which indigenous histories are produced and received. This project will provide an inclusive analysis of comparable debates and an assessment of the degree of recognition being acquired by indigenous communities elsewhere. |
The Australian National University |
2007 |
| DP0557139 |
Whiteness: A Genealogical Study |
Most members of the stolen generations had white fathers or grandfathers. Who were these men and why do we know so little about them? My project analyses the stories of white fathers of Indigenous children from the 1900s to today. For the first time, it tracks these white fathers through government records, anthropology, white women's activism, in literary texts and in their own words. I relate the histories of the ?white father? to discourses of whiteness within Australian cultural history and demonstrate that the two are inextricably linked. |
We know so little about the white fathers of indigenous children and yet they remain a crucial part of stolen generations history. Bringing to the fore material about white fathers may further research on the possibilities of reconciling different historical accounts of Australian social life. As such, this research promises both intellectual innovation and practical societal benefits. |
The University of Sydney |
2007 |
| DP0557272 |
Confronting Representations: Performing Indigenous Protests |
This project examines self-representations of Aboriginality by Indigenous Australians through public political protests across the twentieth century. As a form of direct engagement with the non-Indigenous community, political protests are an important communicative encounter. This work is significant because it reconceptualizes protests as intended staged political/theatrical events in which Indigenous activists actively and consciously perform Aboriginality. The aim is to discover how contradictions between the self-representations of Aboriginality in the protests and accepted constructions of Aboriginality are/were negotiated and then incorporated into social memory and discourses. The major outcome will be a monograph. |
By using performance studies approaches to analyse public political events this work will provide the practical benefit of increasing our understanding of how different cultures interpret and misinterpret each other in public encounters. Examining the dynamics that have and continue to operate between people and social discourses increases our understanding of ourselves as Australians and our ability to interpret ourselves. A further benefit is that the project develops an innovative methodology for interdisciplinary research drawing from the fields of performance studies, media studies and cultural studies. |
The University of Queensland |
2007 |
| DP0557439 |
Predicting the Past: Time, Landscape and Indigenous Australian History |
Conventionally archaeologists discover sites through survey and excavation. Both are problematic in the arid 70% of Australia where many sites lack boundaries and rest on the surface. To solve these problems we re-conceptualise archaeological site surveys by providing an integrated methodology based on archaeology, Quaternary geochronology and geomorphology that emphasises the landscape setting as a means for evaluating when archaeological materials were deposited, how they have been modified through time, and where they have been eroded. The result will be a clear statement of when and where we may expect the archaeological record to be preserved enabling a more detailed account of Indigenous Australian place use history. |
Three major benefits accrue from our study of the distribution of Australian Aboriginal archaeology. Because we emphasise changes in the nature of this record through time and across space, we allow for the development of a richer Aboriginal history. Our concern with studying not only why the record is preserved in some places but also why it is absent from others allows for an improved assessment of archaeological significance and hence better management of Aboriginal material culture. Finally, we emphasise the dynamic nature of human-environment interactions demonstrating that in the past as in the present neither culture nor nature can be seen as predominant. |
Macquarie University |
2007 |
| DP0557501 |
Beyond the pale: Sovereignty, Law and Indigenous peoples |
Sovereignty has a history. This interdisciplinary project explains the law's relation to Indigenous peoples in terms of that history. It examines the legal recourse to the 'exception', which cast Indigenous peoples outside the law's protection. From its original application within international law to render natives non-sovereigns and prey to force, the notion was extended to law's domestic operations to secure sovereignty internally. This innovative comparative project brings international and domestic law within the one analytical field to shed new light on inequality in law and practice. It redefines the colonial dimensions of sovereignty, radically re-evaluating frontier practices in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa |
The project contributes to understanding inequality in law and practice. It expands knowledge of the colonial dimensions of sovereignty, demonstrating how excluding Indigenous peoples from the ordinary operations of both international and domestic law helped constitute and transform sovereignty and produce racialised identities in settler societies. The research provides a new, more comprehensive conceptual framework for analysing frontier practices, ameliorating the polarising effects of recent debates surrounding this historiography. As the war on terrorism has again seen the suspension of the law in certain circumstances, investigations into the strengths and limits of the rule of law are opportune and timely. |
The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0557540 |
An instrumental investigation of consonant sequences in a northern Australian language |
The proposal investigates the consonant sounds of a northern Australian language: Bininj Gun-wok, by measuring both the acoustic speech signal and various physiological parameters, using electropalatography and aerometry. The project contributes to our knowledge of the phonetic structure of Australian indigenous languages as well as contributing to the phonetic characteristics and organisation of the sounds in the world's languages. The outcomes are publications that address how consonant sequences spanning syllable and morpheme boundaries influence each other and change in different linguistic and prosodic environments, as well as the provision of an extensive acoustic and physiological database of the language under investigation. |
Australian indigenous languages are of great interest, due in part to their unique phonetic structure relative to many other languages of the world. Most advances in speech science and phonetic theory are based on studies of English, or other European languages, yet an important goal of phonetic science is to account for speaking and listening processes that are deemed to be universal. Our proposal seeks to address key aspects of current phonetic theory and models of speech sound production, by providing data from an indigenous Australian language. |
The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0557783 |
The Humanities beyond Humanism: Race, Nature and the Human in Australia from Enlightenment to Federation |
This Project critiques the humanist and colonial myths that Australia's Aboriginals existed ?closer to nature? and to human origins. Perceived as living between the realms of culture and nature, Aboriginal people and livelihoods challenged the modern European idea of the human as a fundamentally nature-altering being. Using historical texts portraying a range of New World people, and evolutionary accounts of Australia's ?early man?, the Project recasts the rise of racial determinism as an anxious response to colonial encounters with this liminal figure. In so doing, the Project rethinks the concepts of race and culture beyond humanism. |
This Project injects much needed specificity into the emotive and circular logic of racism that characterises accounts of settler/indigenous history in Australia. In so far as Australia's Aboriginal people defied enlightenment/colonial ideas about humans as separate from nature, they shook the very foundations of western humanism. In crediting Aboriginal people with this impact on European knowledge and self-regard, the Project carries forward the critique of Australia's settlement from a fresh perspective. It challenges the persistent tendency of Australians to write Aborigines into nature, and forces a novel revision in thought about what it means to be ?properly human?. |
University of Western Sydney |
2007 |
| DP0557873 |
Interpreting spoken Aboriginal English: the communicative role of intonation |
Numerous studies acknowledge the key communicative role played by intonation (meaningful variations in the pitch of a speaker's voice) in mainstream varieties of English. This project will be the first study to examine the communicative uses of intonation in varieties of Australian Aboriginal English. An important focus of the study will be the intonation used when expressing opinions, asking and answering questions, and negotiating changes in topic and speaker. These three speech functions are highly important in intercultural communication, and the knowledge gained in this study will improve our understanding of the linguistic sources of miscommunication between speakers of Aboriginal English varieties and speakers of mainstream English. |
This project will produce new knowledge about the ways Aboriginal English speakers use intonation (speech melody) to communicate meanings. This knowledge will improve our understanding of potential linguistic sources of miscommunication between speakers of Aboriginal English varieties and speakers of mainstream English. It will also contribute to an increased appreciation in Australia and abroad of the unique linguistic structures of Aboriginal English, which are reflective of the continuity and maintenance of the distinct cultural perspectives of Aboriginal Australians. |
The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0557907 |
Religion and Imperialism in Australia from Colony to Nation |
This project aims to generate an innovative religious history of Australia which takes into account new themes in imperial history and charts the ways in which religion shaped the formation of Australian identity from colony to nation within the global embrace of the British Empire. It will examine the ways in which Australia's place in a wider empire is reflected in the establishment of settler religions, missions to Aboriginal peoples, and throughout the wider secular society. Making deep use of archives from the age of British imperialism, it will lead to new understandings of the religious landscape of Australian colonial history. |
In international contexts, imperialism and religion have been recognised as two of the most powerful forces for social cohesion, identity, transformation and conflict. The preliminary work undertaken for this project indicates that Australia has not been immune from these significant historical forces. This project will be of national benefit in providing insight into the historical pattern of imperialism on the formation of religious and cultural values. By contributing to the education of the scholarly and general public on religious issues, this project seeks to contribute to the quality of public debate and policy analysis in this key emerging field of national and international significance. |
The University of Newcastle |
2007 |
| DP0557958 |
Land of the Black Stump: a history of Australia's Inland Corridor, 1815-2005 |
This project provides a model for integrating the complex history of inland Australia into our national history, and uses this model to explain the problems confronting rural and regional Australia today. The model of the Inland Corridor will be used to trace social and environmental change since the start of large-scale European inland settlement. The Corridor became the heartland for Australia's pastoral, mining, and agricultural industries. Visions of it are embedded in Australian culture. These overlay but do not erase the social and cultural landscapes of Aboriginal peoples. This project seeks to help reconcile Aboriginal and European encounters in Australia. |
This project explains the origins of key areas of current interest and concern about rural and regional Australia. It provides historical lessons that address four National Research Priority areas (sustainable water and land management, sustainable communities, technological innovation, Australia in regional and global context). The project highlights the historical importance to Australia of inland regions, industries, and communities which today are undergoing fundamental economic, technological, and social readjustments. The project identifies the relationships that bind urban and rural Australia yet problematise racial reconciliation. It brings together a national network of researchers and provides vocational training for students. |
The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0558298 |
A demographic and socio-medical history of the Aboriginal People of Victoria 1800-2000: reconstitutions and epidemiological analysis |
This project builds on the innovative genealogical database of its predecessor which has found a previously ?hidden? Aboriginal population in Victoria. It will use demographic, epidemiological and historical analysis to quantify and evaluate the impact of colonisation, dispossession and introduced diseases on the indigenous population in South-Eastern Australia, and to understand the indigenous health transition in the context of a poor white control population. It will accession, index and digitise the previously closed papers (in eighty archive boxes) of the late Dr Diane Barwick in the process of consulting them to complete this historically inflected database. |
We have produced a world-first historical demographic and epidemiological database that will be of continuing cultural and professional value to the Indigenous and research communities, and which can be copied to capture elusive mobile populations that are better identified genealogically than via conventional census methods. We will index and digitise the papers of the late Dr Diane Barwick. Through this innovative study of past life courses we seek to understand the unique experience of ?fourth world? people in the health transition, and the deep historical forces structuring the persistent health problems of Indigenous Australians. |
The University of Melbourne |
2007 |
| DP0558842 |
Feminist theory meets indigenous art |
In the work of some contemporary women Central Desert artists, there is a move away from iconic representations in their painting, toward the portrayal of a more generic ?dreaming?. This is evidenced, for example,in the work of Kathleen Petyarre, Emily Kngwarreye and Dorothy Napangardi. Their work strikes the European eye as ?abstract?. However, the artists still affirm this work as the painting of their ancestral dreamings. This project will explore the character of this art and its reception, arguing it raises central questions about the difference between ?art? and ?politics?, between ethnographic authority and art theory, and between feminine embodiment and a possible aesthetics. |
Aboriginal reconciliation is high on the social and cultural agenda in Australian life. The place of art in this political moment has been critical - the culture of Australian indigenous people has come to international attention, and won recognition, largely through art works. This reflects in many cases a political strategy on the part of indigenous communities to use art to depict their traditional Dreamings, of which the world was ignorant. But underlying this, is the assumption made in Aboriginal philosophies that the art is the knowledge it portrays, which in turn evokes title to land through the law of Dreaming, of belonging to ?country?. To better understand this negotiation advances debate on issues surrounding reconciliation. |
University of Tasmania |
2007 |
| DP0559166 |
Autobiography of a People: Aboriginal Writing in Queensland, 1890s-1930s |
This research makes audible the lost voices of Queensland's early Aboriginal writers. It focuses on the written correspondence between Aboriginal people in Queensland and their Protectors from the 1890s to the 1930s. These historical government records will be examined as fragmentary autobiographical writings in which Aboriginal men, women, and children (and white male government officials) were performing various kinds of self-hood on paper. The project will extend and deepen knowledge of Indigenous literary history, generate innovative explanations of how writing works as an inter-cultural, socio-political practice, and highlight the ways these early Indigenous authors saw themselves as writers. |
As the recent ?history wars? confirm, Australians today care deeply about the colonial past, because its legacies are ?all around us and within? (as Oodgeroo noted). This project advances knowledge and conceptual understanding in the key areas of colonial race relations, Indigenous self-representation, and Indigenous literacy. Aboriginal autobiography is an especially effective tool for stimulating the empathetic imagination, and bridging social, temporal and geographical distances between people. This research will strengthen the nation's social fabric by promoting inter-racial understanding, and by adding historical depth to present thinking about contemporary Aboriginal attitudes to literacy. |
The University of Sydney |
2007 |
| DP0559204 |
Survival mixture modelling with random effects in public health |
In many public health studies, survival analysis has been routinely used to estimate the survival rate and to evaluate the effectiveness of evidence-based interventions. This project aims to develop a unified and flexible approach of modelling non-standard survival data by a finite mixture of survival distributions incorporating random effects. The mixture methodology developed will enable practitioners to focus on substantive issues and to draw accurate and valid conclusions inferred from health outcomes. Linkage to specific stroke mortality, Aboriginal morbidity and post-operative cancer survival studies will be examined. The benefits to public health of this interdisciplinary research will accrue both nationally and internationally. |
This interdisciplinary research aims to develop innovative methods and deliver effective tools for analysing non-standard survival data. Significance of the work lies in its novelty and the breadth of its practical applications. Evaluation of health outcomes has important implications in cancer prevention and control, hospital strategic planning, and post-stroke care management. The unique opportunity to examine long-term predictors of morbidity and mortality in a well-documented Aboriginal population will enhance the understanding of existing inequities in Aboriginal health. Demographic and lifestyle information related to the outcomes is pertinent to the development of policy and health promotion appropriate to Aboriginal communities. |
Curtin University of Technology |
2007 |
| DP0559371 |
Local Noise: Indigenising Hip hop in Australasia |
This project investigates Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) ?indigenisations? of hip hop culture, the ways in which indigenous and migrant young people have used hip hop culture to construct their identities, express their world views and challenge mainstream assumptions about indigenous and non-Anglo youth. By looking at cultural, linguistic and pedagogical dimensions of indigenisation, the project creates new insights into processes of indigenisation within globalisation; ways in which local and regional cultures and traditions are combined with imported cultural forms; modes by which languages are mixed and melded in popular cultural expression; and possibilities for new forms of articulating identity within Australasia. |
The research will lead to an increase in public understanding of the cultural, linguistic, social and pedagogical importance of hip hop culture in general, and particularly among youth of indigenous, Pacific and non-Anglo background in Australasia. Particular emphasis will be placed on the empowering aspects of hip hop as a means of asserting confidence among youth from indigenous and migrant backgrounds, and the educational applications of hip hop, providing new material for multicultural and indigenous programs in schools, along with fostering the employment of hip hop artists in schools and community centres to teach, disadvantaged young people. |
University of Technology, Sydney |
2007 |
| DP0662856 |
The Construction of Race and Racial Identity at the Antipodes of Empire, 1788-1840 |
At the core of the heated debate on Australian colonial history is an untested assumption that race was operative at the start, with white settlers confronting black Aborigines. That binary trope is fixed despite influential international research that race was a contingent and malleable construct, not firmly fixed till the 1850s. In this groundbreaking project, an international team of historians and literary scholars will interrogate discourses about and empirical evidence of racial interaction in the early antipodean colonies to create a multifaceted interpretation of the construction of race that will re-align the discussion of race in Australia and provide a corrective to the Atlantic bias in the international scholarship. |
The view that Australia was always a racially based society, pursuing racial policies to the detriment of indigenous Australians and our Asian neighbours, is subject to rancorous national debate. Polemical assertion by high profile journalists that race was never a driving force in Australian history is not conducive to understanding complex history, nor are derogatory attacks on historians helpful in explaining the past to our neighbours. Whether colonial Australia was a race-based society remains to be established. With indigenous uncertainty over the demise of ATSIC and rising antagonism among our Islamic neighbours, there is need, as never before, for dispassionate scholarship to provide a complex interpretation of Australia's past. |
University of Tasmania |
2008 |
| DP0662865 |
Securing the future: Optimising the success of remote Indigenous students at post-secondary education. A cross-cultural study |
Underachievement of remote Indigenous students at post secondary education severely limits their personal life chances and contributions to their communities and Nation. Focusing on the pivotal role played by future goals and psychological variables, this cross-cultural study will provide essential information for educators to develop innovative programs to enhance the recruitment and completion of remote post-secondary Indigenous students. State of the art research methods and synergies between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from Australia and USA will provide solutions to the apparently intractable issue of underachievement of Indigenous students and a framework that will serve much future Indigenous educational research. |
Supporting remote Indigenous students to complete post-secondary education is a national and international imperative. Remote Indigenous student success in VET and University education is a key to the success of Indigenous families, communities and the nation as a whole. Post-secondary education provides students with 'capstone' skills, abilities and understandings that enable them to function at a high-level both socially and economically. Effective Indigenous participation in post-secondary education enhances economic and social self-sufficiency, reduces the likelihood of dependency on welfare, and provides powerful role-models for younger Indigenous students to be successful at school, and beyond compulsory school education |
University of Western Sydney |
2008 |
| DP0663047 |
Isolation, Insularity and Change in Island Populations - an Interdisciplinary Study of Aboriginal Cultural Patterns in the Gulf of Carpentaria |
Our interdisciplinary study tests pivotal hypotheses concerning insularity, isolation and cultural change in Aboriginal Australia. It examines two now-divergent island populations residing in similar physical environments and with shared ancestral language and a common mainland source group. The project examines how these groups contended with cultural change over a 10,000-year time scale, sometimes acculturating exogenous traits whilst at others exploiting insularity and isolation to promote distinctiveness through local invention in such a way that two different cultures emerged. The findings will contribute to international debates on island colonisation and how cultural reproduction continues in the face of globalising influences. |
The project's national benefits centre on its contribution to safeguarding Australia and to an environmentally sustainable Australia. The participation of northern Indigenous people is critical to border protection policies and procedures. This project will help revitalise the Carpentaria Land Council's Aboriginal Rangers scheme, which has a potential role in safeguarding the nation's northern approaches, including combating feral plant and animal importation, Coastwatch surveillance and marine habitat protection. The geological research on sea level and climatic history in the Gulf of Carpentaria and associated coastal geomorphological impacts will contribute to predictive models on global warming and its consequences (sea-level rise). |
The University of Queensland |
2010 |
| DP0663575 |
Social Relations Among Urban Aborigines in Sydney's Western Suburbs. |
The nation's anxiety about disorder in Indigenous communities co-exists with ignorance of the social conditions responsible. This study in western Sydney will explore the forgotten backyard of a rich city where competing ethnic identities vie for recognition and respect in a world that refuses them both. Building on earlier work in remote and rural communities, I will document the meanings and passions which energise this urban environment, and analyse the identity politics that both exacerbate and ameliorate difficult social conditions of Aboriginal people. A major ethnography, a more popular history of the region's residents, as well as a monograph on regimes of childhood as generators of difference will be published. |
The forces that generate the horrific health and welfare problems in Indigenous communities will be elucidated and tools will be offered to enhance the work of policy makers and improve communications between Aborigines and providers of services. My research will rely on Indigenous people to expose the normalised and internalised forms of racial inequality they experience and to offer strategies to combat them. Intellectual outcomes will include new directions for social science's engagement with Indigenous issues, a more innovative contemporary anthropology and better informed practices in organisations. It will contribute to capacity building by enhancing the skills and experience of participants and improving self-esteem. |
University of Technology, Sydney |
2010 |
| DP0663825 |
The effects of sentence structure on consonant and vowel articulations |
The articulation of individual consonants and vowels is affected by their position in the sentence. This study aims to determine whether such effects are primarily due to the grammatical structure of the sentence, or whether the (left-to-right) order in which the consonant or vowel appears also has an effect. An important focus of the study is on any differences that may exist between languages, including Australian Aboriginal languages. Results from this work have implications for grammatical theories; for human-machine communication; and for the treatment of acquired speech disorders. |
Whilst machine-generated speech is generally of good quality at the level of the single word, it is noticeably less natural-sounding at the level of the sentence. This project examines an important aspect of the naturalness of human speech, namely, the effect that sentence structure has on individual consonants and vowels. A break-down of this naturalness is seen in some speakers who have suffered traumatic brain injury: such speakers perform well when asked to utter a short word, but struggle when asked to produce a longer string of sounds. A better understanding of the interaction between speech sounds and sentence structure will lead to improvements in the treatment of speech disorders, and in the quality of human-machine communication. |
La Trobe University |
2008 |
| DP0664448 |
From Race to the Genome: the Tasmanian Aboriginal People in the Scientific Imagination |
The Tasmanian Aborigines are among the most scientifically studied people in the world. Their material culture, skeletal remains and racial and genetic origins have inspired large collections the world over, and also shaped some of the most significant ideas in the history of the human sciences. This project will trace this scientific interest, with particular focus on the early 20th to 21st centuries. This period includes some of the most exciting developments in the history of the human sciences - the dismantling of the notion of race and the discovery of the genome. Exploring these developments, and how they influence legal definitions of an Aboriginal person, makes this project timely and of major international importance. |
This project addresses the nationally significant issue of contested Aboriginality in Tasmania. It offers a broader understanding of complex scientific ideas and deeper insights into the 'History Wars' debate that goes to the heart of shaping Australian national identity. It provides a comprehensive historical and legal context to the current national definition of an Aboriginal, of direct relevance to the collection of national census data, the allocation of welfare funding and the Government's current restructuring of ATSIC. It will place Tasmania and Australia within an international context and make accessible new sources of Tasmanian culture and history to scholarly, indigenous and regional communities. |
The University of Melbourne |
2008 |
| DP0664451 |
Australia's Black Past: the shared history of transatlantic slave trading and convict transportation to Africa and Australia |
This innovative project will explore the influences that the transatlantic slave trade, and its subsequent abolition, had on British convict transportation to West Africa and Australia. An understanding of the perceived similarities and differences in the two forms of coerced migration will shed new light on the nature of racial categorisation and racism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It will examine the ways in which changing attitudes towards 'blacks'-those of African descent-were altered by the Australian settlement and relations with Aborigines. It will show how the prevailing linking of freedom with white skin was challenged by the penal settlement in New South Wales. |
Every nation needs an understanding of its past-the significance of this project is that it examines a part of Australia's history that is very little understood. European settlement of the continent was implemented at a time that ideas of race, and the relationship of skin colour to freedom, were altering significantly. These changes had a fundamental effect on the convict colony and the relationship of the early colonists with the aboriginal people. Only by gaining knowledge of how early racial interpretations were influenced by global events can Australia interpret her ever controversial racial history. |
Monash University |
2009 |
| DP0665034 |
Producing Biodiversity: A History of Science in Australia's Desert Lands |
This is the first longitudinal study of the emergence of biodiversity as a socially-valued land use in Australia and the scientific management practices associated with it. Producing Biodiversity examines Australia's semi-arid rangelands historically, considering six major properties with different pastoral histories and ecologies. We document economic, ecological and social methods that assist critical long term transformation from livestock production to biodiversity production. We reflect on the prominent place of ecological science in conservation, community consultation and Indigenous/settler collaboration, and how these dialogues in turn shape scientific understanding. |
Biodiversity conservation is regarded by most people as desirable, but its historical and cultural aspects are poorly understood. It is not just about scientific understanding of animals and plants, but also a matter of practice and negotiation. People and places are changed through conservation and these changes in turn shape the ways nature is imagined and managed. Producing Biodiversity documents historical and contemporary initiatives in biodiversity management on six very different pastoral properties on the margins of the Australian desert. We provide a long-term perspective on national and local conservation imperatives in different eras, and explore how they affect pastoral, Aboriginal and scientific communities. |
The Australian National University |
2009 |
| DP0665550 |
Working Together: Indigenous and Non-indigenous Collaboration in Australian Film and Literature |
Questions of inequality, appropriation, ownership and cultural rights recur about Australian films and literature made by Indigenous and non-indigenous collaborators despite ethics protocols. Through comparative and contextual study of cross-cultural films and literature, this project evaluates collaboration in relation to Indigenous practices of production, custodianship and customary ownership, and non-indigenous concepts such as the author and intellectual property. This project rises to the challenge of providing a foundational study of collaboration in Australian films and literature relevant to cultural policy. The major outcomes will be an expert workshop and a book. |
As the first, comprehensive study of Indigenous and non-indigenous collaboration in film and literature this project will make an important contribution to Australian cultural history. It will provide filmmakers, educators and publishers with expanded theoretical findings about the nature of collaboration. In the most general sense, this critical analysis of one of the ways in which Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians have and continue to 'work together' will contribute to the national project of Reconciliation. |
The University of Newcastle |
2008 |
| DP0665563 |
Domestic Subversions: maternalism and cross-cultural histories |
This project constitutes an in-depth analysis of the female historical cross-cultural experience through the study of the predominant relationship throughout that history: domestic service. It will identify and investigate the archival records of Aboriginal domestic service relationships in Australia, and cultural representations of the same. The outcome, a published book aimed at a wide international readership in the fields of Indigenous, cross-cultural and race relations studies, women's histories and labour histories (as well as incidental conference papers and journal articles), will be a major contribution to Australian and international historical scholarship. |
This project will assist in the processes of reconciliation, by fostering a sense of a shared history, and increasing public awareness of the complexity of race relations histories in Australia. It will redress a significant gap in Australian knowledge and literature. Very little is known about the history of Aboriginal domestic workers and their relationships with their white employers in Australia, despite growing awareness of the significance of domestic service in Aboriginal child removal policies. The project will also assist in establishing Australian historical scholarship at the forefront of leading international research initiatives in gender, race and colonialism studies. |
The Flinders University of South Australia |
2008 |
| DP0665866 |
The politics of Indigenous enumeration in Australia, Canada and New Zealand - a history |
By highlighting the formation of the colonists' quantitative knowledge, we will rewrite the history of efforts by European colonists in Australia, Canada and New Zealand to define and to manage Indigenous peoples since the 1830s. Colonial authorities have acted, in part, according to their understanding (whether accurate or not) of the size and dynamics of the Indigenous population. How did they acquire that population knowledge? What did the colonists seek to know, and how did that knowledge affect what they did? In what ways did practises of government change that knowledge? How has knowledge about the Indigenous population informed continuing debate about social justice? |
The recent 'History Wars' demonstrated that how we tell our national story is more than an 'academic' issue. Settler-colonial nations, whether they enjoy it or not, are bound to ponder and to debate the histories of the relationships between colonisers and colonised. By being comparative, the project will enable Australians to consider what is common and what is unique in the Australian story. By highlighting social science and social policy, the project will give interested Australians a context for their recent discussions about what policy (if any) should succeed 'self-determination'. |
The Australian National University |
2008 |
| DP0666376 |
Bubbles on the surface: a place pedagogy of the Narran Lakes |
An alternative pedagogy of place will be developed based on a case study of The Narran Lakes, an icon site for water stories of connection across the Murray-Darling Basin. A project team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers will record and map alternative local place stories of water connections across the area. The project will develop local community products and educational resources from these alternative stories and maps in an iterative process of data collection and analysis. It will identify the elements of an alternative place pedagogy to incorporate into educational settings and inform problem-solving of ecological issues in the area. |
The project will provide Aboriginal, ecological humanities, and pedagogical input into the problem of environmental sustainability in the Murray-Darling Basin, complementing current physical science initiatives. It will have immediate national benefit in the production of educational resources based on alternative and previously invisible stories of water in the Narran Lakes area, an icon site in the Murray-Darling Basin. The findings will have longer term national benefit by identifying the elements of a general pedagogy of place, drawn from the specific local case study of the Narran Lakes, which will be applied in adult and community education. |
The University of New England |
2008 |
| DP0666662 |
An Integrated Analysis of the Social Context of Indigenous Poverty |
Standard measures of poverty do not accurately capture the circumstances of Indigenous Australians. This project builds on the poverty measurement literature and develops an integrated analysis of the social context of Indigenous poverty. Several 'equivalence scales' will be estimated to demonstrate whether the processes underlying Indigenous and other Australian poverty are different. The historical nature of Indigenous disadvantage will be modelled using the concepts of social exclusion and social capital-especially how the 'excluded' fail to build productive social networks. The theoretical models developed will be tested using recent surveys, censuses, and in-depth interviews of Indigenous people collected specifically for this project |
The project will identify the processes that improve Indigenous participation in social and economic life of the nation-an important pre-condition for a lasting reconciliation between indigenous and other Australians. The new poverty benchmarks developed will provide evidence about the adequacy of income support payments with associated implications for child welfare. Given that Indigenous people are a substantial and increasing proportion of remote Australia, improvements in their income and welfare would have significant multipliers for regional economies. Also, the national debate on these issues will be augmented by scholarly articles and a readable book providing an integrated analysis of the social context of Indigenous poverty. |
The Australian National University |
2008 |
| DP0667104 |
Below replacement fertility among Indigenous Australians: Course, Causes and Regional Variations |
The shift to below-replacement fertility has become a major concern for Australia. Recent research suggests that Indigenous fertility is moving in the same direction, but questions remain regarding precise levels, regional variations and underlying causes. Using quantitative and qualitative techniques, this project will provide reliable estimates of fertility, establish their underlying causes, and consider their implications for Indigenous social and economic futures. The research outcome will benefit Australia by improving Indigenous population projection and injecting the experience of Indigenous people into current debates about the social and economic consequences of low fertility and ageing. |
This research will enhance the knowledge base on Indigenous Australian fertility and provide a timely contribution to current debate about the social and economic consequences of low fertility and ageing. By engaging an early career researcher and an Indigenous research student, it will expand Australia's research capability on current and future Indigenous population dynamics in what has become a neglected area of research. It will ensure that full use is made of public expenditure on the collection of Indigenous social and demographic data. By extending linkages with researchers internationally, it will place Australia at the forefront of global efforts to understand Indigenous demographic transition. |
The Australian National University |
2008 |
| DP0770259 |
Evolution of technology and tool use in 10,000 years of Aboriginal History |
This project will employ residue/wear studies, technological studies and examination of the patterns of archaeological site occupation to understand the prehistoric production and use of backed artefacts in the Sydney Basin over the last 10,000 years. Backed artefacts are a type of ancient tool and an archaeological signature of cultural change in ancient Aboriginal society. The results will describe the evolutionary interrelationships between technology and tool use, leading to more sophisticated models of cultural change and the emergence of the Aboriginal social systems that were observed in the historical period. |
Results will substantially enhance the power of explanations for the Australian backed artefact proliferation, a key archaeological signature of cultural change in ancient Aboriginal society. A solution to the puzzle of why those artefacts were frequently made during one period in the past will be of interest to all researchers concerned with the historical development of Aboriginal societies, and to Aboriginal people. Furthermore, a detailed study of the evolution of a technology and its use over a period of 10,000 years, defining the entanglement of production and use systems, is rare in archaeology and the project will enable development of new insights into theories concerning the reasons technologies are adopted and changed. |
The Australian National University |
2009 |
| DP0770332 |
Indigenous peoples, the British Empire, and self-government for the Australian colonies. |
This project investigates the process and consequences of Britain's granting self-government to the Australian colonies, in so far as Indigenous peoples and policies were concerned. Against conventional wisdom, it explores the hypothesis that the Indigenous question is crucial to the concession and operations of self-government. It investigates why, in light of concerns over the treatment of Indigenous peoples, Britain granted self-government to the Australian colonies when it did, and analyses the continuities and discontinuities between imperial and colonial rule. By combining political and Indigenous history, it develops new insights into the interactions between settlers, Indigenous peoples, missionaries, and imperial authorities. |
This study enhances our understanding of the foundations and representative functions of Australian democratic institutions, especially as they concern Indigenous-settler-missionary-imperial relationships. In drawing out the connections between two major questions for Australian history and modern society - democracy and Indigenous dispossession - the project will contribute deeper historical knowledge to current public debate about Indigenous policy past and present. It will also illuminate the importance of understanding Australian history in broad transcolonial and transnational contexts and enhance the contribution of Australian historians to imperial, missionary, and comparative settler-society histories. |
The Australian National University |
2011 |
| DP0770446 |
The African origins of Asian and Australian lithic technologies: Exploring modern human origins and dispersals using new techniques of core analysis |
This project uses 3D analysis of cores to investigate two globally significant issues: the evolution of modern human diversity in Africa and the nature of human dispersals from Africa to Australia. The project addresses two key questions: 1. did the emergence of diversity in Africa result in regional stone tool industries? and 2. are cores found along potential dispersal routes similar enough to African industries to support the hypothesis of a rapid migration to Australia? Sites dating between 30-80kya will be analysed at museums on several continents to address these key questions. The study will help test theories relating to human evolution, Aboriginal origins, and the effects of long distance migration on Palaeolithic technologies. |
This project will demonstrate that Australia is committed to understanding the origins of modern humans and solving research problems within and beyond our geographic region. The history of modern human evolution in Africa has significant implications for the origins of the first Australians, Indians and Asians and will contribute to an understanding of our shared and recent common ancestry and the emergence of human diversity. Australian archaeological innovations, especially when applied to global issues such as human evolution, will continue to showcase Australian scientific expertise and achievements. The study of problem-solving and technological innovation will help understand the sophisticated nature of early Australian peoples. |
The University of Queensland |
2009 |
| DP0770835 |
The relationship between speech production and perception in Australian language speakers: implications for speech development and learning in Aboriginal children |
This project will study the potential effects of hearing loss and instruction in a foreign language (English) on the development of speech and literacy in children who speak an Australian Aboriginal language. We will measure the hearing of these children, measure the acoustic characteristics of their language, and assess the adults' perception of Aboriginal and English sound structures. These data will be compared with similar measures for non-Aboriginal people. The outcomes will be an indication whether, on purely acoustic or linguistic grounds, Aboriginal languages are a more appropriate medium of communication for Aboriginal children with hearing loss. Results will have implications for groups such as teachers and health professionals. |
Chronic ear infection blights the life of at least 50% of Aboriginal Australians. In a vicious cycle that extends from generation to generation, it leads to hearing loss, educational disadvantage, socio-economic disadvantage and environmental depredation, which once again leads to ear (and many other) infections. This is a unique attempt by researchers across academic disciplines to study the role of language in educational disadvantage and whether this disadvantage might be made worse for Aboriginal children by the early use of English at school. We ask whether, on purely acoustic or linguistic grounds, communicating in an Aboriginal language might offer improved educational and health outcomes for Aboriginal children in the early years. |
The Flinders University of South Australia |
2009 |
| DP0771492 |
Understanding forms of violence and their regulation in Australian history |
Violent crime, violence in everyday life, and the violence of institutional practices seen as forms of abuse preoccupy the public culture of modern Australia. This project undertakes a set of related investigations into the history of Australian responses to violence and its associated impacts. What have been the achievements in controlling violence as a social behaviour and limiting its use as an instrument of power? Planned research outputs will include two monographs and related articles on the history of the government of violence in Australia. |
In contemporary Australia inter-personal violence (such as domestic violence, the abuse of children, Aboriginal deaths in custody, the Cronulla riots) occupies intense media and public interest. Governmental responses to violence (through policing or the courts) themselves rest on the exercise of authorised and regulated control which itself may be considered a form of violence. In examining the historical changes in violence, its social impact and media resonances, and the public policy responses to it, this research seeks to contribute to contemporary understanding of these important questions on the basis of a greater appreciation of the specifically Australian history of these phenomena. |
Griffith University |
2011 |
| DP0771505 |
The impact of Aboriginal art on contemporary urban Australian art |
The project will provide an historical analysis of the impact of Aboriginal art on contemporary Australian art, including the rejuvenation of abstract painting that had waned in the 1970s, the new postmodern and postcolonial expressions of the 1980s and 90s, and the emergence of an Indigenous contemporary art movement across Australia and in its urban centres. The project incorporates a two-tired methodology: a first-order curatorial investigation that typically establishes the project's initial agenda and undertakes a broad survey of the material, and the second-order art historical investigation that transforms this initial reception into a more focused, in-depth and critical account. |
With art people picture and shape their sense of self and national identity. In a time of increasing fragmentation of these identities it is imperative to better understand the shifting politics of representation in today's world. Australia's relationship with its indigenous populations has been the source of major divisions in the Australian community. By showing the positive impact of Aboriginal art on contemporary art, this project will contribute to a more cohesive national identity. The publication of three books, a national touring exhibition and a web-based database will contribute significantly to the intellectual life of the country and bring this important achievement of Australian cultural life to the wider public. |
The University of Western Australia |
2009 |
| DP0771953 |
A study of Indigenous art in settled Australia |
This project fills a critical gap in the knowledge base of Indigenous arts research. It will assemble the first comprehensive quantitative and qualitative data on artists who operate outside the areas of Central and Northern Australia generally regarded as the heartlands of Indigenous art. Its findings may have implications for Indigenous arts funding policies, but the project's concerns are primarily cultural and conceptual, as a component of the larger scholarly task of mapping the artistic landscape of the nation. Its aim is the re-positioning of Indigenous artists from 'settled' Australia as part of both Indigenous art and Australian contemporary art. |
This project will assemble the first comprehensive data on Indigenous artists who operate outside the areas of Central and Northern Australia generally regarded as the heartlands of Indigenous arts. Its findings may have implications for Indigenous arts funding policies but will be primarily concerned with the task of mapping the artistic landscape of the nation. Apart from the benefits for the participants, for Indigenous and Australian art scholarship, and for more soundly based Indigenous arts industry research, the project will help dismantle entrenched attitudes in non-Indigenous Australia against Indigenous people in 'non-remote' Australian society. |
The University of New South Wales |
2009 |
| DP0771959 |
A study of the rise of Islam and community survival in Indigenous Australia |
Indigenous Australians are increasingly identifying with Islam. This project will be the first national study of this recent phenomenon and its historical antecedents. It will recover a religious, cultural and social experience that has survived historical marginalisation to emerge with a new, transformed identity. Drawing on contemporary oral testimonies, the evidence of recent films and painting, as well as extensive archival research, it will identify the key concepts - including 'cultural convergence' and 'reversion' (not conversion) - that characterise Indigenous Muslim discourse. A major book, symposium and published proceedings will provide the benchmark for future studies in this field. |
The recovery of the history of Islam in Indigenous Australia makes available new information about the sources of national identity. It provides compelling arguments to dismantle community stereotypes that have prevented the recognition of an exemplary hybrid community tradition as integral to our collective sense of self. Linked to the contemporary phenomenon of Indigenous Islamicisation, this study makes possible a new and timely dialogue between Australian Muslims, Indigenous communities and Australian society generally. Identifying new sources and resources of community-making at a local, national and international level, this study significantly enriches Australia's capacity to negotiate its place in the world. |
The University of Queensland |
2009 |
| DP0772382 |
Indigenous Australians and alcohol control: The impact of hotel ownership on harm reduction and social and economic development |
This research investigates Indigenous social entrepreneurship: market-based ventures with social aims. Indigenous groups have purchased licensed hotels as well as vineyards, as strategies for economic and social empowerment, to exert control over alcohol availability, and to use profits for the community good. However, alcohol abuse is the cause of significant health and social problems in their communities. The research questions how Indigenous community organisations manage the tension between two apparently incompatible policy goals - those of commercial viability and social good - in the context of enterprises based on the sale of alcohol. |
This project investigates Indigenous social enterprise that intersects with the alcohol industry. Findings will benefit the Indigenous governing bodies of licensed premises and their communities, health and liquor regulation authorities and the country as a whole. The research addresses policy uncertainty surrounding Indigenous ownership of licensed premises and whether this achieves anticipated economic and social goals and reduces alcohol-related problems. Harm minimisation is an object of liquor licensing acts in most jurisdictions in Australia. Indigenous-owned licensed premises are well-placed to implement responsible alcohol service and promote harm minimisation in keeping with Australian best practice. |
The Australian National University |
2011 |
| DP0772827 |
Spiritual and cross-cultural elements in contemporary Australian art |
This project will explore the work of seven contemporary Australian artists, tracing the creative development, sources and the conceptual framework of their art. In particular it will analyse a select body of work with reference to art and its relationship to spirituality. Each artist is inspired by crossculturalism and each have investigated their own spiritual traditions, particularly within the contexts of Aboriginal Australia and Asia. This project will advance our understanding of cross-culturalism and spirituality in the visual arts. Its findings will be communicated in a book and conference papers. |
This project will benefit the Australian community through new research on Australian art as an arena for the expression of spirituality. Its exploration of the spiritual and cross-cultural aspects of seven outstanding contemporary Australian artists, especially in relation to Aboriginal Art and Asian Art, will provide a strong basis for further comparative research on the history of the relationship between art and spirituality in contemporary Australian art. The resulting book and conference papers will make the fruits of this research widely known in the community. |
The University of Melbourne |
2010 |
| DP0877085 |
Digital Technologies, Mediated Futures: Envisioning Culture in Arnhem Land |
Digital technologies provide a unique means of developing the distinctive linguistic structures and visual aesthetics of Aboriginal cultures, while powerfully redressing the failure of mainstream media to adequately convey contemporary Yolngu culture and concerns. This research investigates visual technologies as a source of innovation and cultural maintenance in a remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia. Combining hands-on, participatory media-making with close ethnographic observation and analysis, the project will show how Yolngu use new digital media forms and techniques to strengthen their connections with kin and country and, in the process, work to envision a culturally viable future. |
This research offers an exciting new way to understand how Aboriginal people are envisioning, and working towards, a culturally viable future for themselves and their children. Digital media technologies allow Yolngu elders to connect with current and future generations in new, but nevertheless, culturally appropriate ways. They allow them to work innovatively to strengthen the social fabric of communities in crisis. For mainstream Australian society, this project represents an important opportunity for to learn directly from, and about, indigenous cultures. It offers a significant opportunity to take up the ethical and imaginative challenges of seeing the world from indigenous perspectives. |
Macquarie University |
2010 |
| DP0877157 |
New possibilities for Indigenous representation: the opportunities and constraints of conflict among leaders |
Indigenous leaders and activists are working to develop models of national representation after ATSIC. This project applies social movement theories to the facilitation of Indigenous representation. With focused empirical enquiry the project investigates ways in which key tensions are negotiated by leaders and activists. It considers opportunities and constraints in these tensions for movement cohesion, communication across regional and other differences, and effective policy advocacy-crucial issues for strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric. Through qualitative, empirical analysis this project contributes to social movement theory through further investigation of the role of conflict in movement collective identity. |
A voice in national policy debates is important for Indigenous communities around Australia. Understanding the tensions that provide opportunities and constraints for national representation will contribute to strengthening the social and economic fabric of Indigenous communities, creating new possibilities for improving health and well being outcomes. In providing evidence on dynamics of contemporary Indigenous activism and illustrating the complex challenges facing Indigenous leaders, this study will both facilitate further dialogue among Indigenous leaders and activists themselves and generate deeper, empirically-focused, understanding of this work among non-Indigenous Australians. |
The University of New South Wales |
2010 |
| DP0877161 |
Towards Novel Biomimetic Building Materials: Evaluating Aboriginal and Western Scientific Knowledge of Spinifex Grasses |
Biomimetic theory advocates drawing from nature to find new technical solutions. This project will apply and advance biomimetic theory and produce practical outcomes in the context of Aboriginal traditional knowledge and new materials. Spinifex grasses have been largely ignored as a sustainable resource, despite their widespread distribution throughout Australia, and unique biology that has evolved within harsh environments. This project examines material properties and sustainable applications for spinifex using innovative methodology. Aboriginal traditional knowledge combines with Western science to evaluate spinifex properties in the context of traditional Aboriginal uses, ecology, sustainable harvesting, and novel biomimetic materials. |
The project contributes to an environmentally sustainable Australia by examining the potential value of a hitherto ignored natural resource and assessing its usage with sustainable harvesting. Aboriginal knowledge and Western science will be combined to identify potential technological applications for a widespread but uniquely Australian resource. The project promotes the well-being and health of Aboriginal people through seeking out a new economic enterprise for remote area groups. This project examines the material properties of spinifex, specifically for new building industry applications, both in its natural state and replicated as a synthesized biomimetic material. |
The University of Queensland |
2012 |
| DP0877310 |
Aboriginal-English speaking students' (mis)understanding of school literacy materials in Australian English |
The project will explore the failure of the education system in Australia to improve literacy outcomes for the vast majority of Aboriginal-English speaking students, a national issue of highest priority. It will in particular focus on the degree to which this failure is due to the differences that exists between the cultural-conceptual basis of the dialect that many Aboriginal children speak (ie, Aboriginal English) and the one that is reflected in school literacy materials (ie, Australian English). The project will employ an innovative multi-faceted approach to examine the ways in which Aboriginal children understand or misunderstand school literacy materials. |
Aboriginal students have a right to quality education that gives them skills for full participation in Australian society. However, in the past the education system in Australia has largely failed to improve educational outcomes for Aboriginal students and has to a large extent failed to equip teachers of Aboriginal children with the relevant professional development that they need. This project will directly focus on this issue of highest national priority and will make an attempt to explore Aboriginal-English speaking students' understanding of school materials. The results will be used in Aboriginal teacher education. |
Monash University |
2010 |
| DP0877463 |
Picturing change: 21st Century perspectives on recent Australian rock art, especially that from the European contact period. |
This project focuses on Australia-wide contact period rock art, with fieldwork in Arnhem Land (NT), Wollemi National Park (NSW), the Pilbara (WA) and central Australia (NT). Contact sites and imagery will be examined from archaeological, archival, ethnographic, historical and material culture points of view. Method and theory derived from emerging sub-disciplines of contact archaeology and rock art research is fundamental. Working closely with Aboriginal colleagues, indigenous knowledge for recent rock art sites will be synthesised while still possible. The project has national scope, something rare in Australian rock art field studies. We commence now due to varied threats to sites in each field area. |
Australia, long known for its prehistoric rock art of world heritage value, will now also be known for its unique and diverse body of contact rock art. This project will benefit tourism in remote regions, many of which are or are near World Heritage Areas (eg. Kakadu, Uluru, Blue Mountains). Contemporary indigenous knowledge about important cross-cultural landscapes will be synthesised along with other new knowledge to assist with the protection of sites, the development of new management plans and applications to place particular groups of sites on a new UNESCO World Heritage rock art list. Aboriginal participants will receive research skills training and both individuals and communities will reconnect to significant remote places. |
Griffith University |
2011 |
| DP0877549 |
Hybrid economic futures for remote Indigenous Australia: Linking poverty reduction and natural resource management |
Featuring a new Indigenous hybrid economy model that recognises a distinctive customary sector alongside market and state sectors, this project will promulgate a path-breaking means to address entrenched Indigenous Australian under-development and dependence in remote Australia. Focusing on the 20 per cent of the Australian continent that is under Indigenous ownership, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches and international collaborations will investigate how enhanced engagements in the hybrid economy can improve the livelihoods of Indigenous people. Such engagement will generate national biodiversity, social and financial benefits. This new approach will interest encapsulated Indigenous minorities elsewhere in the world. |
In the 21st century the Indigenous population of sparsely-settled Australia will increase rapidly. This population has historically experienced extremely low socioeconomic status. With land rights and native title, a significant ecologically intact estate, now over 20 percent of Australia, is under Indigenous ownership. This research will explore how enhanced Indigenous involvement in customary (non market) activities, natural and cultural resource management, and new industries can generate economic and social benefits for remote Indigenous communities that lack access to the market. National benefits will be generated from enhanced biodiversity conservation, and from cost savings associated with improved socio-economic status. |
The Australian National University |
2012 |
| DP0877618 |
The Concept of Innocence and the Political Community: Australian identity and social health |
The project analyses the pivotal role of 'innocence' in shaping the Australian community's perceptions of its own identity, and potential threats to the health of its social fabric. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, the project argues that the community manages anxiety regarding its core values through 'the innocent' (typically women and children), understood as a site for the negotiation of the community's hopes and fears. The project makes an original contribution to discussions of the Australian community's relation to its colonial past, and its indigenous and migrant populations, and recent reappraisals of Australian identity flowing from these considerations. |
In recent years, dispute, and even violence, has erupted in Australia between cultural groups and interests. By analysing the import of 'innocence' in Western social thought, and the cultural values corresponding to it, the project promotes a rethinking of the assumptions that underpin (and often undermine) relations between different cultures that make up the Australian community. In so doing, the project addresses urgent questions posed by contemporary philosophy, and implicitly within Australian society, regarding the negotiation of differences between citizens and communities. The project thereby contributes to Australia's reputation in the field of social philosophy, particularly concerning cultural difference. |
The University of New South Wales |
2010 |
| DP0877762 |
A longitudinal study of the interaction of home and school language in three Aboriginal communities |
Indigenous children have low success rates at school, low levels of literacy and consequent low employment rates. Mastery of the language of school (Standard Australian English) is essential for doing well at school. One factor in the children's experience at school is the difference between Standard Australian English and the children's home languages. We intend to determine the significance of this factor by carefully comparing the languages the children come to school with, and their language development (production and comprehension) over four years at school. The results will provide a sound linguistic basis for developing programs to improve the literacy and school participation of Indigenous children. |
The importance of language skills cannot be underestimated, and contribute to 'a healthy start to life'. In multilingual Indigenous communities, children must negotiate the complexities of different languages used for different purposes. This project will provide detailed insights into how children manage differences between home and school language, the kinds of problems they encounter when they enter the school system, and how their languages develop over the first four crucial years of school which provide the foundation for the children's future education. Their ability to manage the language of school underpins their ability to lead successful and engaged lives as adults. |
The University of Melbourne |
2012 |
| DP0877901 |
Indigenous mental health in remote communities: Applying a contextual model of community research and intervention |
Discussions about remote indigenous community mental health have been abstract and lacking the contextual detail for creating interventions which can be transferred to other communities and to other issues. This project will systematically document views on mental health and well-being, detailed experiences of the mental health services, and the context of successful interventions, from both remote indigenous communities and service providers. This will give more diverse and complex information about how loss of land, family and community changes, loss of traditions, and spirituality actually interact with mental health and well-being, and how successful community interventions actually work. |
This project will make an international advance in understanding indigenous mental health that will be of interest to many groups around the world. The main specifically national benefit will flow from contextual knowledge on how to improve mental health for remote indigenous communities that also allows strengthening of communities and their economic and social enterprises. We will also build capacity in the communities for research skills, documentation skills, and writing skills. The types of contextual information collected will provide recommendations to mental health service providers about how to incorporate local forms of knowledge when dealing with issues of well-being. |
University of South Australia |
2010 |
| DP0878177 |
Understanding the impact of global environmental change on Australian forests and woodlands using rainforest boundaries and Callitris growth as bio-indicators |
Over the last 50 years rainforests have expanded while populations of a fire sensitive conifer (Callitris) have collapsed throughout the Australian monsoon tropics. This contradictory pattern may be an ecological symptom of global environmental change. To resolve this we will study sites from north Queensland to Tasmania determining (a) variation in the rate and magnitude of rainforest expansion and (b) changes in Callitris populations analysing tree growth. These findings will (i) quantify the dynamics of landscape change (ii) evaluate the importance of fire and climate in controlling tree growth (iii) resolve uncertainty about past impact of Aboriginal burning and (iv) improve understanding CO2 enrichment on the global carbon cycle. |
Human-caused climate change is a fact but the ecological responses are uncertain. These could include accelerated tree growth, expansion of rainforest, and thickening of woodlands, although cessation of Aboriginal firing may be equally important. We will provide a historical context to understand how and why Australian forests have changed. Our results will inform management and policy debates about (i) rainforest conservation (ii) the role of fire in forest management (iii) the likely impact of increased CO2 ('fertiliser effect') of forest productivity (iv) national carbon accounting and (v) the consequences of climate change on forest ecosystems, particularly the respective wetting and drying trends in the north and south of Australia. |
University of Tasmania |
2010 |
| DP0878192 |
The role of epigenetics in the early gestational programming of adult phenotype by ethanol |
The human foetal origins hypothesis proposes that environmental events during pregnancy can permanently alter the physiology of the developing foetus, leading to adult disease. The true extent of this phenomenon remains unresolved. In one clear example, maternal alcohol abuse during pregnancy is associated with foetal alcohol syndrome. We will develop models of maternal ethanol consumption in the mouse, where genetic background and environment can be strictly controlled, to test the hypothesis that early gestational programming of phenotype by ethanol has an epigenetic basis. We will also determine whether the induced phenotypic changes are inherited by the next generation. |
The concept of foetal programming is changing the way we think about the aetiology of complex disease in adults. Our studies would emphasise that adverse events during pregnancy can have long-term health implications, with concomitant social and economic consequences. In America, the prevalence of foetal alcohol syndrome is comparable with rates for Down syndrome. The Aboriginal community in Australia has been identified as a high-risk group. The knowledge gained from this project could aid in the development of screening strategies to predict the likelihood of disease developing later in life, providing an opportunity for presymptomatic healthcare. |
Griffith University |
2010 |
| DP0878476 |
Safeguarding Rural Australia: Addressing violence in rural settings |
Rates of violence involving men as victims and/or perpetrators are significantly higher in rural than urban Australia. The same is true of closely associated behaviour such as self harm and other preventable injury. Rates are higher still for Indigenous men in rural Australia. The project will explore the reasons for this, focusing in particular on the factors shaping, challenging and recasting rural masculinities in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural settings. The project will yield results of benefit to rural communities through the discovery of more effective models to prevent and control violence in Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural settings. |
The project will produce outcomes that address the national priority of safeguarding Australia and are of benefit to srengthtening the social fabric of rural communities experiencing high rates of violence. Little is known about why men in rural communities have higher rates of preventable injury, morbidity and mortality associated with violence compared to men from urban areas. Even less is known about the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous men. The project will shed new light on these problems and develop new models for the prevention and control of violence in rural settings of benefit to a wide range of end users in government and community agencies. |
The University of New England |
2010 |
| DP0878556 |
Tracing change in family and social organisation in Indigenous Australia, using evidence from language |
Indigenous society has been founded on kinship systems quite different from those of the Europeans and on social categories unique to Australia, like sections and subsections, binding distant people together in family-like relationships. The project will reconstruct Australian indigenous social organization over the last several millennia using comparative linguistics and anthropology. It builds on an ethnographic sample across Australia, together with a large database of family and social vocabulary from Indigenous languages, which will be automated to provide rapid data entry, analysis and mapping. It will show how these social systems have changed, and the impact on indigenous people's lives. |
This project provides new approaches to knowing the ancient heritage of Australia and its first people through the distinctive ways in which they managed and talked about their family and social relationships. These relationships are the key to how they have survived, winning a livelihood from a difficult environment. The project has practical application in Native Title and land management, and in understanding the changes in Indigenous family structures which impact on their health and well-being. For the mainstream population too, confronted by influences destabilising the family, this study will also help us understand how and why family organization changes. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |
| DP0878567 |
Aboriginal Visual Histories: Photographing Indigenous Australians |
This project will for the first time 1. review photographs of Aboriginal people in key collections around Australia and in Europe, 2. produce the first systematic and comprehensive history of photographing Aboriginal people from the Australian inception of the medium in 1841 to the present day, and will place this genre within a global visual economy, and 3., collaborate with descendants to incorporate Indigenous perspectives. It will provide a new and valuable resource for Australian history, will make Aboriginal heritage available to descendant communities, and will produce a range of scholarly and popular histories and a major exhibition. |
This project will strengthen our understanding of Australia's place in the world and enhance our capacity to interpret ourselves by showing how we have been perceived internationally through visual imagery - and specifically what is unique about Australia and its indigenous people through international eyes. It will explore how we have represented ourselves and the place of Aboriginal people, both historically and in the present. It will help us to engage with our neighbours and the wider global community. Collaboration with Aboriginal descendant communities will address their current aspirations regarding this important aspect of their heritage. |
Monash University |
2011 |
| DP0878735 |
Impacts of Catastrophic Marine Inundation Events (CMIEs) on the Prehistoric Archaeological Record of the Australian Coastline |
This project will evaluate the magnitudes and frequencies of Catastrophic Marine Inundation Events (CMIEs) from a range of prehistoric occupation sites as well as putative CMIE deposits and natural sedimentary deposits on selected 'at risk' WA shorelines. Quantifying recurrence intervals for CMIEs is essential for managing future risk to coastal populations and infrastructure. It is also essential for interpreting coastal landscape evolution and Aboriginal landscape use over the past 6000 years. |
This project will enhance Australia's ability to respond to future Catastrophic Marine Inundation Events (CMIEs) from tsunamis and cyclonic storm surges. CMIEs represent a major natural hazard endangering Australian coastal populations and infrastructure. Disaster risk assessments and management strategies for coastal communities need data with time-depth. This project will produce high-resolution dating and stratigraphic evidence on the effects of CMIEs on the North West Shelf WA coastline over 100 to 1000 year timescales. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |
| DP0878812 |
Developing Aboriginal Social Capital for participants not spectators in the Australian economy |
Three focus groups each of approx 50 people in the Goulburn Valley will be given a set program of self-help financial information then monitored and mentored in an semi-structured format to allow the individuals and groups to develop financial skills and expertise independently. The longitudinal 2 year program will provide intensive support assisting the individual participants to develop financial skills in a supportive environment of peers and mentors conducive to the development of their social capital. How they learn will be recorded to develop a universal education program in teaching financial management to similar Aboriginal groups. |
If a sector of Indigenous Australians can be taught to understand financial management, resource budgeting and financial planning (personal attributes that Western society values, yet often takes for granted); it is anticipated that they will in turn seek to improve their social position and look at wealth creation to reduce their dependence in a welfare culture. These people can be educated and encouraged to be active participants within the wider Australian economy, the national and community benefit will be the development of independent citizens and the creation of social capital that is financial knowledge. |
Swinburne University of Technology |
2009 |
| DP0879397 |
Contexts of Collection- a dialogic approach to understanding the making of the material record of Yolngu cultures. |
The project aims to discover the motivations of the makers of the material record of Yolngu society from the beginning of missionisation to the present, and those of the Yolngu themselves, in contributing to collections and taking part in filming. The project is radical in treating the material record (film, photography, and material culture) as a whole and in investigating the agency of the Indigenous people involved. The project will result in a number of publications and a web-based resource that will be of great utility to researchers and Yolngu alike and can provide a model for collections based research. |
The research project will make people aware of the collaborative nature of the material record of Yolngu societies that has been made over time by the participation of researchers, collectors, filmmakers and Yolngu people themselves. It will demonstrate the ways in which digital technology can be used as an integral part of a research process to produce outcomes that can be made accessible to a wide range of different users. It will help people understand the complex historical processes that have resulted in the present museum and archival record and facilitate their use. |
The Australian National University |
2011 |
| DP0879445 |
Rural women, cross-racial collaboration and life writing in the Country Women's Association of New South Wales, 1956-1996. |
Aboriginal matriarch Ella Simon believed that 'the sympathy of bitter experience' could bridge race divisions in rural Australia. This project examines six Indigenous branches of the Country Women's Association in NSW from 1956-1996, where rural white women shared this transformative sympathy with Indigenous women including Ella Simon. The recipe of their successful collaboration, needed now more than ever in country towns, will be uncovered by an innovative interdisciplinary combination of oral history, archival research and textual analysis of published and unpublished life writing that members produced. A social and literary history monograph, audio archive and re-edited Indigenous life story will result. |
In an era when race relations in Australia are usually characterised by misunderstanding and conflict, this project brings to light a story of co-operation and hope. Investigating six Indigenous branches of the Country Women's Association in NSW from the 1950s uncovers collaborations between rural Aboriginal and white women that transgressed social barriers and launched two significant Aboriginal matriarchs and authors into their public lives. This timely social and literary history project revalues conservative rural women's writing and activism, contributing to the reconciliation process and to the social health of Australia. |
The University of Melbourne |
2010 |
| DP0879571 |
Psychoanalysis, Anthropology and the Australian Aborigine: the revaluing of myth in the twentieth-century |
This project will provide an original re-evaluation of the relationship between Australian colonial experience and the development of major Western ideas. My hypothesis is that the importance given to myth by psychoanalysis -and via psychoanalysis into the broader Western culture- combined a Romanticist 'longing for myth' with an evolutionary anthropology that had as its major subject Australia and that this anthropological knowledge fundamentally influenced the nature of the revaluing of myth through-out the twentieth-century. The outcome of this research will be a greater understanding of the roots of the increasing interest in myth and its relationship to colonial experience. |
This project will uncover the role Western experience of Aboriginal Australian cultures has played in the revaluing of myths in the twentieth century particularly via the influence of psychoanalysis. It will show that European experience of Aboriginal Australia raised questions, and the attempted answers to those questions changed European thinking. Revealing this will add significantly to Australia's self understanding. It will add significantly to the understanding of the importance myth has gained over the last century. It will be an important Australian contribution to international scholarship of the histories of Anthropology, Science, and Psychoanalysis, and to Religious and Indigenous Studies |
La Trobe University |
2010 |
| DP0879909 |
Dispossession, history and restorative justice: a comparative study of three settler societies |
As a comparative study, this project will: deepen and broaden our knowledge of how British peoples actually possessed the land and dispossessed aboriginal people in three settler societies; elucidate how this process was understood and registered through the creation of narratives, both then and later; demonstrate how the legacy of history, in the sense of both the past and narrative, has burdened Australia, New Zealand and Canada; explain how and why they have tackled the vital work of restorative justice in distinctive ways, and suggest how this might be performed better, at least in the case of Australia. |
By comparing how the property rights and sovereignty of aboriginal people were treated in British colonies of settlement in Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the nineteenth century, how this process was understood and registered in stories narrated by contemporaries and their descendants, and how the settler societies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have tried to deal with the consequences of their histories in the last thirty or so years, this project will shed new light on Australian history and contribute to ongoing debate about this country might best tackle the work of restorative justice. |
Monash University |
2010 |
| DP0880570 |
Food, Traditional Aboriginal Knowledge and the Expansion of the Settler Economy |
Aboriginal people have lived on the Australian continent for tens of thousands of years during which time they developed deep and sophisticated ecological knowledge. Some of this knowledge, particularly as it applies to food procurement was passed onto settler Australians who were often uncertain how to obtain food or grow crops in the harsh Australian environment. This project examines the ways that Aboriginal knowledge was transferred to the newcomers and how it was used over 175 years (1788-1963). Today as we face significant environmental challenges this project asks what lessons can we learn from Australia's deep traditional Aboriginal food knowledge. |
This project will strengthen our understanding of Australian Indigenous-settler history by focusing on the role of food and traditional Aboriginal food knowledge. It will also represent a timely engagement with worldwide debates about the role of Indigenous knowledge in a modern world.
As well as producing scholarly outcomes including books the project will establish and maintain a data-base of this knowledge which will be accessible to Indigenous communities, scholars, land users and managers. A further benefit will be the repatriation of knowledge and information located in archives and other repositories to descendant Aboriginal communities in culturally sensitive, socially and historically contextualised Community Reports. |
Monash University |
2010 |
| DP0880606 |
The Sustainable Use of Australia's Biodiversity: Transfer of Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property |
Australia's capacity to gain benefits from its biological resources depends on the design of the patent system and various groups trusting that system. The proposal aims to (a) see if ways can be found to encourage Australia's indigenous groups to share their knowledge of Australia's biodiversity, especially in ways that promote long term trust in the process of knowledge diffusion; (b) examine the impact of the international patent system upon Australia's ability to exploit its native and natural biological materials and resources; and (c) analyze the policy agenda of the biologically diverse rich countries and relate this to Australia's interests. |
Australia has a diverse and unique resource in its native and natural biology. Its indigenous peoples have learned to harness this resource and have accumulated knowledge of its usefulness to humans in the treatment of illnesses and ailments. It is in the national interest that this knowledge be exploited and that the benefits be shared equitably with them, but importantly that its potential in pharmaceuticals and treatments be maximised by Australian researchers and industry. This project looks at how patent regulation can be improved to meet these national interests. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |
| DP0880637 |
A mortality profile of Victoria's Aboriginal (and non-Aboriginal) children 1998-2008 using an innovative method and research process |
Death information is one of the most important ways of measuring community health. Good quality data describing births and deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander are needed to accurately determine rate and cause of death particularly in infants, children and young people. This project will address this critical issue using an innovative method and research process that includes linkage of birth and death records, rigorous review of cause of death information, a unique classification of death code, and effective knowledge transfer for sustained reform of the quality of Aboriginal data in health information systems. |
The development of a population mortality profile of Victoria's children that includes accurate Indigenous identification will provide robust information to assess the effectiveness of programs interventions and policies aimed at reducing preventable deaths in children. This research will contribute to state, national and international imperative to improve the collection of Aboriginal death information in order to allow meaningful comparisons between Australian jurisdictions and Aboriginal people globally. The consistent imput of the Aboriginal community and relevant experts in all phases of the project will enable and strengthen links with those who can influence government and policy makers to effect change. |
The University of Melbourne |
2012 |
| DP0880772 |
The reinvention of Indigenous media: Innovation, expansion and social development |
The introduction of broadband and mobile telephony to remote communities and the establishment of a nationally-available Indigenous Television service indicate that the reinvention of Indigenous media is just around the corner. This project will examine the activities of Remote Indigenous Media Organisations in order to identify how community-based media are assisting with communications uptake and use at the local level, as well as Indigenous content development. Combining ethnographic research with content analysis, the project will advance community media research beyond issues of 'access and participation' to an understanding of how local media contributes to both national narratives and communications innovation. |
Detailed examination of Remote Indigenous Media Organisations will provide much-needed evidence of the role that community media organisations play in communications uptake and use in remote communities. The success of RIMOs further suggests that investigation at the organisational level may yield lessons for social development more broadly. Content analysis will identify gaps and achievements in Indigenous media production, providing a deeper understanding of how local media interacts with and informs national textual systems. The project will also analyse communications innovations occurring in remote communities and assess the possibilities for Indigenous industry development. |
Swinburne University of Technology |
2010 |
| DP0881067 |
Reproductive Frontiers: The Twentieth-Century Sciences of Human Hybridity |
This historical study reveals a trans-national and trans-colonial network of research on race mixing in the twentieth century - a global scientific debate on human segregation, assimilation, and absorption, involving human biologists and physical anthropologists. Between 1910 and 1940 there were more than twenty major scientific investigations of the effects of miscegenation, primarily in Australasia and the Pacific. Bringing Australasia and the Pacific into focus in the history of twentieth-century race science will advance knowledge of the scientific investigation of human diversity. It will add significantly to our understanding of the causes of the decline of race in science and adjust the conventional periodization of this decline. |
The proposed historical research will enrich our knowledge of scientific debates about biological absorption and population management, placing Australian ideas and experiences into their appropriate international context. It promotes awareness of how past scientific concepts continue to inform controversies about the quality of the Australian population. In particular, this project will enhance our understanding of scientific attitudes toward Aboriginal people, especially their reproduction and health. |
The University of Sydney |
2010 |
| LP0455191 |
The Visual Mediation of a Complex Narrative: TGH Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend |
TGH Strehlow's biographical memoir, Journey to Horseshoe Bend, is a vivid ethno-historiographic account of Aboriginal, settler and Lutheran communities of Central Australia in the 1920's. This project intends to construct an extensive digital hub elaborating key textual thematics of Aboriginal identity and sense of ?place?, supplemented with oral histories. Consistent with the Strehlow Research Centre's mission in the management and preservation of the Strehlow Collection's vast archival materials, the project will provide access to and foster engagement with Strehlow's works. The project will employ innovative visual methodologies in the production and mediation of Indigenous knowledge related to the text. |
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University of Western Sydney |
2007 |
| LP0455242 |
Learning from the development and implementation of Australia's National Indigenous Forestry Strategy |
The project will undertake a multi-disciplinary study of the National Indigenous Forest Strategy (NIFS) in the native title era. A team comprising three academics from the ANU and key industry partners will collaborate with a very experienced APAI on the project. There has been considerable public policy concern and debate about the development problems facing Indigenous communities, particularly in regional and remote Australia. Forestry offers one option for economic initiative, especially on the significant Indigenous estate. This project will inform and monitor the evolving NIFS and canvass options for policy-realistic and culturally-acceptable ways that forestry can ameliorate Indigenous socio-economic disadvantage. |
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The Australian National University |
2007 |
| LP0455500 |
New Solutions For Maximising Aboriginal Students' Potential: The roles of self-concept and motivation in making a real difference to desirable educational outcomes |
Aboriginal students remain the most educationally disadvantaged Australians. Enhancing students? self-concept and motivation are advocated by Aboriginal people as vital educational outcomes and critical mediating variables for other desired outcomes such as improved academic achievement, engagement, and participation. Considerable advances in self-concept and motivation research with non-Aboriginal students have not yet been extended to fully benefit Aboriginal students. The proposed investigation seeks to extend these advances to Aboriginal students and through this identify new solutions for enhancing their educational outcomes. Specifically, it seeks to elucidate the impacts of self-concept and motivation and identify strategies for enhancing Aboriginal students' educational outcomes. |
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University of Western Sydney |
2007 |
| LP0455562 |
Australian Indigenous Collectors and Collections |
'Indigenous Collectors and Collections' considers Indigenous people's contemporary roles in shaping private and public collections, and the influence of historical circumstances and ideas of communal ownership and responsibility. It therefore subverts the dominant emphasis upon Europeans as collectors and appropriators of indigenous objects. By considering Indigenous people as collectors, curators and presenters of beloved objects, this project will offer major new perspectives on Australian Indigenous history and museology. By exploring the power of material objects in cultural identity and historical consciousness, this project disrupts the stereotype of Indigenous people as purely 'museum victims'. |
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The Australian National University |
2007 |
| LP0455636 |
Mining and transformation in Jawoyn country, southern Arnhem Land |
This project integrates archaeological, documentary and oral evidence about the Maranboy and Yeuralba mines' role in the transformation of Aboriginal people living in southern Arnhem Land from a hunter-gatherer way of life to the community residence patterns of today. The collaborative project includes direct participation and direction by Indigenous custodians and will produce an Aboriginal perspective about the impact of the mines on their lives. The results will contribute to knowledge about the ways in which Aboriginal society changed and adapted to European settlement in this part of Australia and will produce a range of interpretative materials for the Jawoyn Association's nascent tourism enterprises. |
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The University of Western Australia |
2007 |
| LP0455718 |
Analysis and interpretation of the cultural and environmental landscape of the nationally significant Mt. Eccles lava flow: a GIS approach |
The project focuses on analysis and interpretation of Digital Terrain Models, using Geographical Information Systems, produced from high resolution aerial photography of the globally significant Mt Eccles lava flow, Southwest Victoria. Via predictive modelling, we will identify the extent and status of archaeologically significant Indigenous eel aquaculture systems and dwellings; investigate land modification through simulation of past water flows; design protective measures for ecological/cultural heritage; provide a database for eco/cultural tourism and educational interpretation and ongoing archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research. The resulting information will be incorporated into management plans forming the basis of sustainable land/wetland projects and World Heritage nomination.projects and World Heritage nomination. |
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Monash University |
2007 |
| LP0560406 |
Addressing Indigenous complex health, housing and social inclusion issues through critical systems approaches to build workforce capacity |
The multidisciplinary research comprises the researchers, Department of Human Services and Neporendi Aboriginal Forum Inc who address complex Indigenous social problems in partnership. The participatory design provides effective solutions, both in treatment and community settings through the development of a computer-modeling technique that articulates and informs partnership arrangements. The research offers a practical approach to address the communication and policy issues relating to Indigenous family violence, social inclusion, homelessness and drug misuse. It develops and pilots an integrated systems management tool that builds the capacity of the human services workforce to manage referrals across services to maximize user outcomes. |
Aboriginal health and social inclusion are intractable problems for government. This research will contribute to redressing social inclusion issues by designing, developing and testing a dynamic management tool together with Neporendi, an Aboriginal organization, Aboriginal researchers and the S.A. Department of Human Services. The research will enable an integration of services to maximize provider effectiveness and user outcomes and will achieve better solutions to complex social health problems, build the capacity of an Aboriginal PhD student and the international reputation of the West Churchman Research Network using critical and systemic approaches to design that spans researchers based at two universities. |
The Flinders University of South Australia |
2007 |
| LP0560550 |
Frontier Conflict in History and Memory: South and Central Australia from European settlement to the Present. |
The aims of this project are to map, as comprehensively as possible, the nature and extent of conflict between Aboriginal people and Europeans in South and Central Australia and to analyse the ways in which those events have survived in social memory. This is significant in light of recent contestations in Australian history about the degree and remembrance of conflict. No extensive regional study has been conducted for South and Central Australia. This project will contribute new research for academic and general social use. |
The recent and ongoing debate about the nature and extent of frontier conflict has highlighted the need for more empirical research to be done on the subject. This project addresses a gap in the literature by undertaking the first comprehensive survey of frontier conflict in South and Central Australia. The project goes beyond being merely a survey by also analysing how accounts of that conflict have survived in the social memory of Australian communities, and what this tells us about regional and national identity. |
The University of Adelaide |
2007 |
| LP0560567 |
Warlpiri songlines: anthropological, linguistic and Indigenous perspectives |
This partnership combines anthropologists, linguists, Indigenous knowledge holders and Indigenous bicultural linguists to record, document and analyse Warlpiri song series. Warlpiri songs link ancestral power, landscape, emotions and aesthetics and are central to religious life. Because the diversity of performance contexts in which these songs are learnt is rapidly reducing, this aspect of Warlpiri high culture is under threat. This project will create a cultural archive informed by Indigenous exegesis, that integrates it into the world of anthropological and lingusitic scholarship and provides materials for the school curriculum. |
This project is committed to assisting Warlpiri people safeguard their cultural heritage. Song, together with the associated ceremonies, make up Warlpiri high culture and are the pinnacle of their collective creative genius. If the knowledge holders die before their song knowledge is documented, their descendants, and the nation at large, will be left with a greatly impoverished view of Warlpiri cultural achievement. Documenting the songs will provide a rich educational resource for Warlpiri schools in particular. The project will also contribute to a deeper understanding and respect for Aboriginal culture and make an important contribution to transferring research skills to Indigenous collaborators. |
The Australian National University |
2007 |
| LP0560701 |
The impacts of commercial gambling on Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia |
The project will represent the first detailed exploration of the effects of commercial gambling on Aboriginal people in Northern Australia. It specifically aims to assess the impact of continued commercial gambling expansion, including the spread of electronic gaming machines (EGMs), on Aboriginal communities. The project will explore how Aboriginal cultures react to, and adopt, western gambling into existing cultural frameworks. The core task of the project will be to develop appropriate methodological tools for the assessment of gambling activity in Aboriginal communities. The result will have direct policy impacts in the context of regional well-being and identifying and protecting vulnerable communities. |
The research will advance our understanding of the implications for Aboriginal people of our enthusiastic embrace of gambling as a national institution. While there is considerable evidence from around the country and overseas to allow good practices to be developed for the population generally, there is virtually nothing for Aboriginal people living in the variety of settings that exist in the Northern Territory. Exploring the different ways different communities have come to terms with and appropriated gambling will enable us to develop more culturally appropriate frameworks for assessing the social impacts of commercial gambling, and to develop appropriate policy responses. |
Charles Darwin University |
2007 |
| LP0561140 |
Parklands, culture and communities: strategic research for building social, cultural and environmental capital in urban parklands |
Parklands, Culture and Communities is an innovative collaboration between park managers and academic researchers. It will result in deeper knowledge about how cultural and ethnic diversity affects the way communities use urban parks and how they interact with each other in those parks. The project focuses initially on four groups on the Georges River in suburban Sydney: the Indigenous, Anglo, Vietnamese and Arabic-speaking communities. A study of their use of parklands will then be the basis for developing best-practice research, planning and interpretation resources to assist park managers in other locations to collaborate more effectively with their changing local users, thus enhancing positive cross-cultural relations in urban parks. |
The Parklands, culture & communities project will result in:
- More culturally sensitive planning for parks by agencies in urban parklands
- Greater knowledge about how parklands function in ethnic, intercultural and social relations, with a focussed local study contributing to broader research
- Improved tools for National Park and local government agencies to use in educating their own park staff and the public about cultural diversity in parklands
- Better local and international communication between scholars, park managers and communities about cultural diversity and park management.
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University of Technology, Sydney |
2007 |
| LP0561651 |
Building the future for Indigenous students. The relationship of future vision, learning, and motivational profiles to school success. |
Indigenous students are the most severely disadvantaged group in Australia. Education as currently provided is failing them in the NT. Future Directions for Secondary Education in the NT states that 20% of secondary-aged Indigenous students are not enrolled in school, with only 6% completing the NTCE in 2002. Education is the corner stone of social justice because it is the basis of opportunity (Burney 03). This research will provide critical hard data on the relationship of Indigenous students' future vision and aspirations, motivation, self-concept and self-regulation, language and culture to school achievement in order to design and provide culturally relevant education to maximise Indigenous opportunities and futures. |
It is critical to maximise the opportunity for Indigenous students to succeed at school. Through education they not only share the knowledge and skills of the mainstream but also consolidate and preserve their own cultural capital and thereby build their futures. Without completing secondary education many Indigenous students are limited to a life in which their potential may be unrealised, and the fortunes of their families severely circumscribed. Little is known of what motivates or should motivate these young people in their cultural context. This research will fill an important gap in our knowledge and produce important guidelines for the successful education of indigenous youth. |
University of Western Sydney |
2008 |
| LP0561753 |
Linking Worlds: Strengthening the Leadership Capacity of Indigenous Educational Leaders in Remote Education Settings |
Advancing the social and economic position of Indigenous Australians is a national imperative and requires relevant, competent, and visionary leadership at a local level to achieve stability, none more so than in education. This project will be the first in-depth investigation of Indigenous educational leadership in remote settings and will aim to frame the unique 'worlds' within which Indigenous educational leaders operate, and to determine the skills, knowledge and attributes required to be an effective leader. We aim to produce a practice based leadership model for the professional development and learning of current and potential Indigenous educational leaders. |
The primary objective of Australia's national policy on Indigenous education is to bring about equity in education for Indigenous Australians. A major Indigenous education policy goal is to involve and develop the skills of Indigenous people in educational decision-making. This requires relevant, competent, and visionary leadership at a local level. This project will define the contexts and characteristics of Indigenous educational leadership in remote education settings and develop a practice-based model for professional development and learning of Indigenous educational leaders. The model will contribute to the preparation and continued development of Indigenous educational leaders in educational decision-making. |
Australian Catholic University |
2009 |
| LP0561857 |
The Implementation of Agreements and Treaties with Indigenous and Local Peoples in Postcolonial States. |
This project involves a comparative study by an interdisciplinary team of the implementation of agreements with Indigenous and local peoples across selected Australian and international jurisdictions. Agreement making is now a major policy tool for governments, industry and Indigenous peoples. Using case studies, this project will address the critical need for research on implementation of agreements and the factors promoting long-term sustainability. This will involve examination of legal, governance, economic development, land/heritage, and environmental management issues that arise in agreement implementation and investigation of the features of agreements that enhance social, cultural and economic outcomes for Indigenous communities. |
This project on agreement implementation and sustainable outcomes will provide substantial benefits to Australian Indigenous communities, stakeholders in rural and remote areas, as well as governments developing public policy addressing Indigenous disadvantage and the government and private sector institutions engaged in service delivery, land and resource management. The focus on agreement outcomes will assist Indigenous people for whom economic development and a healthy social fabric are issues of the highest priority. Enhancement of an agreements database will support this process through developing an important public institution to inform and assist Indigenous and local peoples, governments and industry in agreement implementation. |
The University of Melbourne |
2008 |
| LP0561944 |
The role of Queensland Museum collections in producing knowledge of Aboriginal people from Federation to the present day |
The project will investigate the production of knowledge about Aboriginal peoples by the Queensland Museum since the late nineteenth century. The focus will be on the changing role of material culture collections in the construal of Aboriginality. The APAI will analyse material culture collection in the context of nation building and will investigate both the changing meanings and the contemporary relevance of such collections to Aboriginal communities. The project will produce a body of research that can be used in the design of new exhibitions that will reveal the true complexity of cross-cultural interactions in the development of the Museum's collections. |
How have Australians perceived Aboriginal people? One way that the broad community has come to know about Aborigines is through museum collections of their tools and material goods. The Queensland Museum has some of the best of these collections, with full documentation of how and why the objects were collected and of their exhibition history. Yet the most significant of these have not been described or analysed and are disconnected from their communities of origin in rural and regional areas. This project will provide new tools for those communities to promote and strengthen their cultural heritage, and will advance broader public understandings of relationships between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal communities. |
The University of New England |
2008 |
| LP0562018 |
From colonisation to conciliation: A collaborative examination of social work practice with Indigenous populations |
The social work profession, along with many other human service professions, has a complex history of working with Indigenous populations. One of the significant factors in the maintenance of this problematic relationship is the marginalisation of Indigenous issues within mainstream social work practice. This project, in collaborating with Indigenous communities, social work practitioners and academics in Australia and the United States, will examine current practice needs and their interrelationship with current social work pedagogy. This analysis will identify the ways in which social work practice can enhance, rather than inhibit, Indigenous well-being, and how social work education can be reframed so as to engender such practice. |
This project makes a major contribution to the strengthening of Australia's social and economic fabric as by contributing to Indigenous well-being. It will bridge the gap between the needs and rights of Indigenous families and communities, and social work understandings of and practices in relation to these needs and rights. The practice framework will ensure that social workers practice in more culturally appropriate ways, thus redressing some of the fundamental difficulties between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. The project directly contributes, therefore, to the major national research priority of promoting and maintaining good health. |
The University of Melbourne |
2008 |
| LP0562060 |
Custom-based land and resource management and the educational and social re-engagement of Indigenous youth in the Northern Territory |
Social and educational disengagement has reached crisis levels among Indigenous youth in many remote communities; young people are leaving school and training programs because they perceive them to be irrelevant or meaningless. The social cost of this phenomenon is high. This project aims to identify ways to combine Indigenous customary and western science-based land and resource management knowledge and practice with locally and culturally meaningful education and training programs to re-engage young people with learning and their wider communities. The project will produce a series of scholarly outcomes in addition to a coordinated model for strategic policy and program development. |
This project has two significant national benefits. First, by combining Indigenous customary and western science-based knowledge and practice with education and training programs, this project addresses a critical problem-the social and educational disengagement of Indigenous youth in remote communities. Such programs would provide sustainable and meaningful employment opportunities-for young men and women- in communities remote from the mainstream labour market, thus strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric. The project also supports conservation and economic development and contributes to Australia's ability to manage and protect vast tracts of land in the north through sustainable land and resource management practices. |
The Australian National University |
2008 |
| LP0562352 |
Sustainable mathematics education capacity building: Empowering Indigenous teacher aides to enhance rural and remote Indigenous students' numeracy outcomes |
Rural/remote Indigenous students perform well below other students in statewide numeracy tests. Because teachers are generally non-Indigenous, inexperienced and stay for less than two years and Indigenous teacher aides have little training in teaching mathematics, schools do not the capacity to affect this outcome. This project will work with eight schools to improve and sustain Years 1-7 mathematics outcomes by enhancing aides' tutoring effectiveness through culturally appropriate mathematics and mathematics pedagogy knowledge. The aim is to develop principles for a professional learning program that can be used with Indigenous aides across Australia to improve Indigenous students' mathematics and therefore employment/life chances. |
This project has Community Benefit in that it aims to redress Years 1-7 Indigenous students' current negative situation with respect to mathematics learning to enhance their life, further study and employment opportunities through empowering Indigenous aides to be highly effective tutors of mathematics. The project will use collaborative empowering research methodologies (Smith, 1999) to study those factors that enhance and inhibit students' and aides' mathematics understanding, and the aide-student interactions that promote and sustain positive student outcomes. It is anticipated that the knowledge of mathematics learning co-produced by researchers, aides and students will flow on to the general communities involved. |
Queensland University of Technology |
2008 |
| LP0562599 |
Developing Indigenous Entrepreneurship Frameworks: An Exploration of Sustainable Indigenous Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Frameworks within the Noongar Community of Western Australia |
This study will investigate the effectiveness and sustainability of frameworks of indigenous enterprise and entrepreneurship within the Noongar Community of Western Australia with the primary aim of identifying appropriate models for adoption by the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC), and the Government of Western Australia. |
The study will seek to address the current economic and social disadvantage found among the indigenous Noongar community of Western Australia. By understanding and encouraging enterprise and entrepreneurship within the Noongar community this study will facilitate enhance wealth creation and self-determination. It will assist in building a suitable entrepreneurial architecture for the Noongar community as well as creating a foundation of knowledge that can be used by the Western Australian Government, the SWALSC and their communities for the guidance of future policy and practice in the design and development of new indigenous business ventures, business support networks and social enterprise structures. |
The University of Western Australia |
2008 |
| LP0562660 |
Synthesis and evaluation of anti-microbial porphyrin adducts for the targeted inhibition of Porphyromonas gingivalis. |
At present the effectiveness of therapy for inflammatory disease of the gum tissue (periodontitis) is limited by the lack of a selective anti-microbial agent. The investigators have discovered a novel mechanism of binding of the blood product porphyrin by a unique receptor of a key pathogen implicated in this disease. By exploiting this knowledge a modified porphyrin linked to an antibiotic was shown to have a selective effect on the target organism. Refinement of this complex has the potential to provide a clinically useful, selective agent. |
Chronic infection of the tissues that support the teeth (periodontitis) is a major disease of ageing. At present there are no powerful selective anti-microbial agents that can be used as adjuncts to treatment which currently involves multiple sessions of skilled physical therapy. A successful outcome from the proposed research will result in a locally effective agent that is powerful in suppressing or eliminating a key pathogen implicated in periodontitis. Early and effective control of the pathogen will enable cost-effective therapy to be extended to areas of workforce shortage including rural communities and to high risk populations such as Aboriginal communities. |
The University of Sydney |
2008 |
| LP0667418 |
Oral Tradition, Memory and Social Change: Indigenous Participation in the Curation and Use of Museum Collections |
This partnership investigates museums and their activities as intellectual and cultural resources beyond their public face. It focuses on how museums respond to indigenous community aspirations and how heritage collections contribute to the re-invigoration of indigenous people's identity. It offers a unique opportunity to combine museum practice, anthropological practice, indigenous community participation and film making to investigate processes of cultural renewal. It will investigate and create understandings of memory, emotion and traditions in lived experience. The project will address these issues through the unique combination of methodologies to explore the potential of museums as agents of social change. |
This project addresses concerns about how museums meet their charter in a diverse society. It will engage museums in a process of brokering and negotiation with indigenous Australians in relation to specific museum collections. There is little formal recognition of how such processes occur within museums and contribute to the creation of shared meanings about ourselves as a nation. It is part of the role of museums as places of learning to engage and fascinate, and this project brings together traditional knowledge and expertise in three fields of study to pass on our national heritage to future generations. |
The University of Queensland |
2008 |
| LP0667713 |
Pharmacological investigation of medicinal plant products from Kaanju Homelands, Wenlock and Pascoe Rivers, Cape York Peninsula |
This project has dual aims of investigating the novel pharmacological actions and chemical components of plant species used as traditional medicines from an area of high biodiversity, the Kaanju homelands, and facilitating the preservation and intergenerational transfer of cultural knowledge about these plants among Kaanju people. This project will be the first in-depth Western scientific evaluation of the pharmacology of plant medicines from this region and will provide information to assist sustainable development of products based on Kaanju medicinal plants. The project will also serve as a model for equitable partnerships between Indigenous and Western scientific researchers in the investigation of traditional medicinal plant knowledge. |
This research will examine the potential for products to be developed from plants on Kaanju homelands. Kaanju people have an immense ecological knowledge accumulated over generations, about the natural resources in an area recognised as being one of Australia's most biologically diverse. Preservation of this knowledge is critical not only to Kaanju people but to the heritage of the Nation as a whole. The research also addresses the National priority 'Promoting & maintaining good health' through the investigation of novel pharmacological activities in areas of cardiovascular health, diabetes and cancer. The collaborative research partnership will serve as a model to assist other Aboriginal organisations, particularly in rural & remote areas. |
University of South Australia |
2008 |
| LP0667848 |
Building community capital to support sustainable numeracy education in remote locations |
The project will investigate an alternative, community-based model of Indigenous teacher education aimed at building local capacity to support numeracy learning in the middle years. An innovative approach involving the use of probe tasks to identify starting points for teaching, collaborative planning, and peer observation and review within supported lesson study communities will be used for this purpose. Research outcomes include an evidence-based model of professional learning and new knowledge about the role of boundary objects at the interface of two communities of practice around which shared understandings of what is involved in learning school mathematics can be negotiated. |
Numeracy for all is a national policy priority. It enables students to make choices that lead to healthy, productive and fulfilling lives for themselves and their communities. Despite some improvements, the gap between Indigenous and non-indigenous achievement on territory-wide assessments of numeracy is growing. Indigenous elders believe their children and grandchildren have less literacy and numeracy skills than they do. As a consequence, new, more effective, and sustainable ways to improve Indigenous numeracy education are urgently needed. The proposed research will address this need by exploring a model for building community capital to support sustainable numeracy education in remote locations. |
RMIT University |
2008 |
| LP0668022 |
Bininj Gunwok Lexicography Project |
Bininj Gunwok is an Aboriginal language spoken in Kakadu National Park and Western Arnhem Land. Important as a regional lingua franca there is to date no available dictionary of the language. Linguists describe the grammar of Bininj Gunwok as being richly polysynthetic, which entails a great range of affix types on the verbal root as well as the incorporation of nouns into the verbal complex. This type of language structure poses particular problems for both lexicographers and dictionary users. In addition, there is the challenge of how to construct dictionaries which can take advantage of developments in information technology in order to make lexicographic resources more accessible for both the speech community and new learners. |
This project will make a contribution to Aboriginal language maintenance and documentation via lexicography. Only about 20 of the original 200 or so Aboriginal languages remain viable. Bininj Gunwok is one of these languages. Very few dictionaries exist for Australian languages and for those languages such as Bininj Gunwok which linguists class as 'non-Pama-Nyungan', only a handful of dictionaries are available. The resulting Bininj Gunwok dictionary and cultural encyclopaedia will have applications for education, Aboriginal health, community development, land management and environmental science in Kakadu National Park and western Arnhem Land as well as applications for cross-cultural communication. |
The University of Melbourne |
2008 |
| LP0668218 |
Let's Start Indigenous Preschool Evaluation Project: Links between behaviour and outcomes |
The Let's Start Indigenous Preschool Evaluation Project will evaluate the Let's Start Indigenous Preschool Program. The Let's Start Program is an early intervention program for preschool-aged Aboriginal children assessed as at risk. Groups of children and their parents attend a structured program of groupwork over one school term. It aims to assist children to successfully negotiate the transition from preschool to early primary school, to improve the social competences of children and the strategies and competences of parents. The evaluation project will measure program outcomes with a particular focus on factors leading to improved behaviour outcomes at school. |
Indigenous education and social outcomes lag far behind those of other Australians. The situation can be considered a social emergency. This research will provide evidence of the benefits of investment in preventive strategies to respond to difficulties faced by Aboriginal preschool children who struggle to negotiate the transition through preschool into early primary school. It provides immediate assistance to families and children in difficulty and direct support to the education industry by developing a program of supportive interventions to assist schools. It will provide national benefits by contributing to evidence on determinants of indigenous child development and school outcomes. |
Charles Darwin University |
2008 |
| LP0668432 |
The 2006 Census and Indigenous People in Remote Areas: Assessing the Quality of the Enumeration Process and Resulting Data |
Indigenous organisations, governments, and social scientists rely heavily on ABS census data for social and economic planning, policy evaluation, and research in relation to remote Indigenous communities. However, questions have been asked about the adequacy of population counts and the relevance of population characteristics data as collected in these communities by the census. This project seeks to enhance understanding of the issues underlying these concerns by analysing community responses to the special enumeration strategy devised by the ABS for the 2006 Census, and by assessing the impact on data quality of changes made to this strategy since the 2001 Census. |
Rigorous assessment of the quality of census data will benefit Indigenous communities, policy makers, and researchers in the area of Indigenous policy and service delivery. Of particular note is the direct benefit to the ABS in seeking to improve their methods for enumerating remote Indigenous populations. The research directly addresses the National Research Priorities relating to rural and remote areas and strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric because it will enhance assessment of the reliability of statistical information for social, economic and community planning in remote Indigenous communities. |
The Australian National University |
2008 |
| LP0669233 |
Aboriginal landscape transformations in south-west Australia |
This project takes a multi-disciplinary approach to the identification of Aboriginal land use and the impacts of their management techniques in south-west Australia, where environmental conditions enabled frequent use of fire. Cultural-ecological relationships before and after European colonisation will be assessed in representative sample areas across the region through archaeological survey and excavation and analysis of oral, historical, dendrochronological and palaeo-environmental records. Outcomes include improved understanding of Aboriginal landscape socialisation before and after European colonisation and the impacts of Aboriginal land-use practices on Australian eco-systems. |
This project will inform present day land management strategies by assessing the extent to which the landscape at the time of European colonisation was an artefact of management practices of Indigenous people, . The strong Indigenous input, including the detailed recording and analysis of local knowledge together with evidence from archaeological, palaeoenvironmental and historical sources, will reinvigorate Aboriginal connections to land and provide appropriate training for young Indigenous people. The results will also assist in achieving sustainable use of Australia's biodiversity. The importance of human impacts relative to environmental change caused by other factors will improve our national capacity to respond to climate change. |
The University of Western Australia |
2009 |
| LP0669281 |
Characteristics and causes of indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system: A Victorian case-study |
One of the most pressing problems facing Australian justice agencies is how to recognize and respond to the causes of Indigenous over-representation. This research will examine the criminological and social causes of indigenous over-representation and identify strategies for its amelioration. Stage 1 aims to develop reliable measures of the extent of Indigenous over-representation at key points in the criminal justice system in Victoria over the period 1995-2005. Stage 2 will apply risk-based statistical models to identify factors that drive over-representation. The research will provide a methodological framework that can guide researchers and policy analysts, and indicate where remedial interventions should be targeted to best effect. |
Addressing Indigenous disadvantage was identified as a national priority by the Council of Australian Governments in 2002. Our research builds on this initiative by examining important policy questions that are central to Indigenous disadvantage within the justice system. This research adds substantial value to the existing national investment in the collection of data on Indigenous involvement in justice processes, and will assist in the development and implementation of programs to address what has previously been an intractable problem. A key element in the project is establishing strong links with Indigenous community representatives so that the results of the research are made available to those most directly concerned with them. |
The University of Melbourne |
2008 |
| LP0669303 |
Ecological-epidemiological models of feral swamp buffalo control in northern Australia |
We will develop predictive models to determine the most-effective culling strategy for feral buffalo to control exotic diseases (e.g. tuberculosis and foot-and-mouth) to minimise negative impacts. Models will be based on rigorous sampling (random culls) of wild populations adjacent to Kakadu National Park to provide precise estimates of survival and fecundity. This will be combined with generational movement data derived from DNA analysis. We will involve Aboriginal land owners and rangers using an 'action research' paradigm such that we can evaluate the contribution of traditional people controlling a disease outbreak in these remote areas. We will explore stakeholders' perceptions and concerns about the costs of feral buffalo control. |
This research is locally, nationally and internationally significant because it 1) improves the capacity of the Northern Territory and its traditional aboriginal owners to manage together this prevalent species in an effort to minimise disturbance to native flora and fauna and to understand the long-term implications of continued proliferation, 2) provides a nationally relevant system to monitor and project the spread of disease through feral animal populations in Australia, and 3) combines quantitative data and robust analytical tools that can be used as a template for solving many broad-scale feral animal problems around the world. |
Charles Darwin University |
2009 |
| LP0669497 |
Analysis of legislation and policies affecting the development of Indigenous wildlife-based enterprises |
Wildlife-based enterprise development is subject to a range of regulatory constraints. This project seeks support for an APAI to analyse the legal and policy framework governing such enterprises, which are the only realistic potential source of income for many remote Indigenous communities. Northern Territory, Commonwealth and International law and policy will be reviewed broadly and then their implications tested in two case studies, one based on products derived from a protected animal, the estuarine crocodile, the other on an endemic plant, the Kakadu plum. Top-down and bottom-up analysis will be integrated into recommendations to governments on maximising legal consistency and streamlining such enterprise development. |
Entrepreneurial enterprise development by Indigenous people in remote regions is being encouraged as part of government policy to move people off welfare and into work. Indigenous knowledge of wildlife makes it a logical source of wealth generation but a range of legal and policy constraints add to substantial existing social and logistical problems. An understanding of the legal processes involved in establishing and maintaining sustainable and ongoing wildlife-based enterprises will improve their chances of success, and will also offer the opportunity to change regulatory frameworks to ensure consistency, remove contradictions and encourage workforce participation. The research will have national and international implications. |
Charles Darwin University |
2009 |
| LP0669519 |
Indigenous birth and family: Pathways, places and professionals |
The project will generate knowledge and explanation derived from social and behavioural sciences to inform systems, policy and institutional change and improve social, emotional and physical outcomes of antenatal care, birth and early parenting for Aboriginal families. Researchers will investigate the historical and contemporary experience of women their infants and families as they negotiate pathways to health services, the relationships they have with professionals and the role of place within this journey. We will also study the process of engaging Aboriginal families and communities along new shared pathways to promote maternal and infant health. |
The research complements the National Research Priority Goal A Healthy Start to Life and the National Agenda for Early Childhood. These emphasise pregnancy through to five years as critical for later social competence and physical wellbeing. Maternal and infant mortality and morbidity are significantly worse for Indigenous Australians, predisposing them to poorer health and social wellbeing as children and adults, reducing life potential and adding costs. This solution-focused research conducted with Aboriginal and health service partners, is theoretically innovative while pragmatic, as we seek to inform reform of services in urban and remote NT communities and learn lessons applicable nationally. |
Charles Darwin University |
2009 |
| LP0774918 |
Lifespan learning and literacy for young adults in remote Indigenous communities |
Early school leaving, low literacy levels, social disengagement and substance abuse among young people are crippling many remote Indigenous communities. Yet if such communities are to ameliorate their economic disadvantage and political marginalization they will require individuals who have the learning and literacy skills to shape their own futures. This project aims to produce new approaches and models to re-engage early school leavers and disaffected young adults with learning and literacy acquisition outside of school and throughout the lifespan. The outcomes will include a series of scholarly papers and a Lifespan Learning and Literacy Handbook for Indigenous communities across the country. |
Engagement with learning across the lifespan and increased literacy skills among early school leavers and other young adults will have direct benefits to remote Indigenous communities and to the nation. These include the increased ability of this next generation of Indigenous adults to develop the skills and confidence required to actively build stable and self-reliant institutions, improve social and economic circumstances and enhance the health of their families and communities. Additional benefits will flow from the enhanced capacity of individuals to participate effectively in the national economy and from more positive spending of public funds on evidence-based programs that work rather than ongoing problem alleviation. |
The Australian National University |
2009 |
| LP0775186 |
The Queensland Historical Atlas: Histories, Cultures, Landscapes |
The Historical Atlas will provide a new, interdisciplinary environmental and cultural history of Queensland produced through research collaboration between the University of Queensland and the Queensland Museum. It will be the first study of such scope taking Queensland as a major case study in the cultural landscapes of indigenous, settler and postcolonial societies, and will make innovative use of digital technologies for historical interpretation and environmental and cultural mapping. It will produce a large format print publication (the Historical Atlas) and contribute to the building of research infrastructure through a permanent analytical website; research training will be provided for three PhD students. |
An Historical Atlas of Queensland will provide a unique perspective on the interaction between environmental and cultural forces in the shaping of Queensland's history. By bringing together a wide range of existing but dispersed areas of expertise, and making innovative use of the latest digital technolgies, it will produce new knowledges of Queensland's geography, biodiversity, rural and urban development, communications and cultures. |
The University of Queensland |
2009 |
| LP0775230 |
The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature |
The Macquarie PEN Anthology aims to set a benchmark in the construction of a history of Australian literature. Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise, it will provide a creative, historical overview of the development of Australian literature, situating key texts in social, political and cultural contexts. Critical essays and introductions by outstanding scholars, the inclusion of new material and a stand-alone Indigenous volume will be notable features. Appreciation of Australia's literary heritage will be enhanced, Australia's profile will be heightened internationally and readers in Australia and internationally will have access to a fresh, new examination of Australian literary achievement. |
The anthology will be a major scholarly work. Its publication will stimulate scholarship in the Humanities. The project will also renew mainstream interest in the scope and sophistication of Australian literature. Many new works will be introduced to Australian readers, to education systems and to literary scholarship. The stand-alone anthology of Indigenous literature will enhance the public profile of Indigenous writers and will provide a vehicle for the representation of Indigenous culture and history to non-Indigenous Australians, who are often unable to access such knowledge and voices in print. New critical perspectives will ensure a valuable public resource, and understandings of Australian society will be enriched. |
Macquarie University |
2009 |
| LP0775242 |
Social and cultural factors in Indigenous enterprise management and governance |
This project will develop a model for sustainable Indigenous enterprises that includes social, cultural and governance dimensions for remote Indigenous communities in South Australia. By using an innovative multi-stakeholder approach, the research will lead to a better understanding of how unique cultural and social features of Indigenous communities can be deployed to create culturally appropriate sustainable enterprises that maximize both social and economic value. The project is important because it identifies employment opportunities for remote Indigenous communities and builds capacity for economic self-sufficiency. Outcomes include an enterprise management and governance framework and a social and cultural impact assessment tool. |
The project addresses Indigenous economic self-sufficiency by developing a model of Indigenous enterprise development and governance. By focusing on sustainability of Indigenous communities in remote areas, the project contributes to National Research Priority 3 (Promoting and maintaining good health: Strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric). The project addresses the National framework of principles for delivering services to Indigenous Australians developed by the Council of Australian Governments by seeking new ways to promote economic participation and development, supporting capacity at local and regional levels and building opportunities for indigenous families and individuals to become self-sufficient. |
University of South Australia |
2008 |
| LP0775283 |
Reclamation of Victorian Indigenous languages: Using ICT to enable effective exchange between academics, educators and the Indigenous community |
This project draws together groups engaged in Indigenous language study and reclamation in Victoria who have identified a critical need for accessible language resources.
The project aims to:
1. create an online resource to centralise linguistic resources related to the Indigenous languages of Victoria (using four exemplar languages),
2. conduct primary linguistic research to add to the academic knowledge base of Indigenous languages of Victoria for the four exemplar languages, and
3. provide contemporary online technology and services for linguists, educators and the Indigenous community to conduct language research, present new research and engage in language revival and reclamation. |
The project will exploit online technologies to provide centralised resources for the Indigenous languages of Victoria. The use of modern Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to present a non-threatening and personalised interface to the resources will connect people and materials, and breathe new life into these ancient languages of such contemporary, social and cultural significance. This 'living system' of language information and exchange, built on pure linguistic research will have wide value. It will be of crucial benefit in rural and regional areas. The project will also encourage intergenerational communication within Indigenous families and will improve awareness and appreciation of Indigenous languages. |
Monash University |
2008 |
| LP0775392 |
Indigenous participation in the Australian colonial economy: an anthropological and historical investigation. |
The aim of the project is to examine Indigenous involvement in the Australian colonial economy and the resulting 'hybrid economies', through new research on particular sectors and locations to enhance knowledge of the variety and character of that involvement, and a synthesis of existing and new research on Indigenous involvement in the colonial economy over time. The research will synthesise existing and new studies, and will involve a multidisciplinary perspective: a historically orientated anthropology, economic history, and the study of material culture. The main outcomes will include academic publications, a conference, the documentation of collections at the National Museum of Australia, and one or more exhibitions at the Museum. |
The main benefits of the research to the Nation and community lie in the new information generated by the project, and the enhancement of our understanding of past relations between Indigenous people and the wider community. The proposal has the potential to mediate the extreme positions in the 'history wars' by investigating the various types of accommodation and mutuality of interests which informed many early encounters on and beyond the frontier. It will also widen the focus of settler-Indigenous relationships from those between Indigenous people and Anglo-Celtic Australians to include relations with other ethnicities including Afghani settlers. |
The Australian National University |
2009 |
| LP0775506 |
Evaluating the impact of new interdisciplinary interventions to enhance dog health to benefit community health outcomes in remote Indigenous communities |
This project examines the relationships between culturally-appropriate education, dog health and welfare, and human health and welfare in Indigenous communities. The project will document the health and welfare of dogs, institute dog health programs and use this data in an educational intervention to improve the health and welfare outcomes of dogs in these communities. It aims to demonstrate that the improvement of the health and welfare of dogs through sustainable dog health programs is directly due to the specifically-designed educational intervention and the improvement of dog health and welfare will also impact on human health and welfare in Indigenous communities. |
Indigenous health and welfare is of major concern for Australians. This project, which focuses on the dog, also recognises that the dog harbours a number of diseases that can infect humans. To maintain sustainable dog health programs to reduce disease in dogs, and, as a corollary, have positive impact on human health and welfare, culturally-relevant, evidence-based education programs are critical. Dog health programs will indirectly improve the expectations, standards and self-worth of many Indigenous Australians. As a consequence, the national benefits include the development of environmentally sustainable Indigenous communities, and the strengthening of Australia's social and economic fabric especially in rural and remote areas. |
The University of Sydney |
2009 |
| LP0776294 |
Determinants of successful community transition for individuals with acquired brain injury and their families |
A central concern of the current Queensland Bilateral - Commonwealth-State/Territory Disability Agreement is issues in service provision for people with acquired brain injury (ABI). This study aims to develop a model of the factors that contribute to successful transitions back into the community for individuals with ABI and their families, by investigating reasons for sentinel events (eg. financial crisis, family breakdown, institutionalisation) during transition. Currently young adults with ABI lack services and support during this crucial phase. This study will inform service development to enhance short and long-term outcomes for this population and their families. |
Transition home following acquired brain injury (ABI) is a critical phase in which individuals and families are vulnerable. Unsuccessful transitions are characterised by events such as financial crisis, family breakdown, loss of work, social isolation, and institutionalisation. ABI does not discriminate, but there is a higher rate in Indigenous, rural and remote communities and amongst younger people. The societal impact of ABI includes loss of income and livelihood, health and welfare dependence, and long-term accommodation support. Research into the determinants of successful transition will alleviate the personal, social and economic burden of ABI and inform policy and program priorities for appropriate Australian Government bodies. |
The University of Queensland |
2010 |
| LP0776332 |
The recognition, interpretation and management of significant rock art and related dreaming (Jukurrpa) sites on the Canning Stock Route, Western Australia |
This project will assess the significance of rock art complexes and associated mythological sites (Jukurrpa) along the Canning Stock Route. This region was inhabited by the last groups of Indigenous people to come into contact with settler societies (1963-1976). The high degree of stylistic variability, age-depth and aesthetic value of the art, and an understanding of their meanings to Western Desert custodians, make this series of major art provinces nationally and internationally significant and worthy of strategic management. |
The Canning Stock Route is an iconic linear transect of profound importance to a variety of parties: the original inhabitants of the Western Desert, surveyors and drovers who used it in the 20th century and more recently tourists and outback adventurers. Systematic documentation, mapping and synthesis of Indigenous cultural values of the Canning Stock Route will provide a unique resource of benefit to traditional custodians as well as the wider community. Accurate information on sites, places and landscapes and their cultural and scientific values should underpin successful management, protection of sites and sustainable use of the Canning Stock Route into the future. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |
| LP0776515 |
Enhancing mathematical learning for Indigenous students in remote communities: A design research approach |
Equity outcomes for Indigenous students are decreasing. This project seeks to implement high quality, high demanding mathematics in a remote Indigenous community in the Kimberley. The project recognises that learning mathematics demands a cultural approach for students whose culture is not that of school mathematics. Using a design research approach, the project explores quality learning environments for students, teachers and Aboriginal Education Workers. The project aims to develop sustainable practices in hard-to-staff regions that support high quality mathematics learning. The project will provide guidelines for development of rigorous and culturally-appropriate practices in mathematics with application across all equity contexts. |
Students attending schools in remote community schools need to have quality learning practices that are sustainable in hard-to-staff regions. Indigenous students are not performing at acceptable levels in many measures of mathematical achievement so the project is of national significance in addressing this social phenomenon. The cultural-mathematical approach of the project is novel and offers new potential for learning. The project takes a holistic approach to this issue to include teachers, students and Aboriginal Education Workers in a partnership of learning mathematics. The principles developed through this project can be applied to learners and learning mathematics in other contexts. |
Griffith University |
2011 |
| LP0776798 |
Natural resource management and enterprise development: can they improve Indigenous livelihoods? |
This project investigates: a) the nature of dependence of people on natural resources, in two contrasting Indigenous situations (Northern Australia & Eastern Indonesia); b) the constraints to and opportunities for livelihood improvement from natural resource management and natural product enterprise development; c) strategies for improving livelihoods based on natural resources. The research will contribute fundamental knowledge on the economics and behaviour of people dependent on natural resources, and provide concrete strategies on how natural resources can contribute to poverty alleviation agendas. Improved understanding of poverty should ensure more effective development assistance, thereby reducing pressures on Australia's borders. |
High on the Australian agenda is the removal of disadvantage faced by Indigenous groups and the sustainable use of biodiversity on Indigenous land. In terms of Eastern Indonesia, the Australian agenda relates to poverty eradication, with fewer threats to Australian borders in terms of illegal fishing and migration. This project provides fundamental knowledge on household resource use patterns, and the constraints and opportunities for natural resource activities, as a step towards identifying ways in which natural resources can be mobilised to improve livelihoods. |
Charles Darwin University |
2010 |
| LP0776803 |
Conciliation Narratives and the Historical Imagination in British Pacific Rim Settler Societies |
This multidisciplinary and comparative project will historicise and explore the forms of conciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the British settler colonies of the Pacific Rim including Van Dieman's Land, Victoria, NSW, New Zealand and British Columbia. It unites new archival research on conciliation with highly significant cultural heritage collections,including those held in partner organisations. The research analyses how the legacies of British colonial negotiations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples have contributed to nation-building, legal interpretations, and the popular historical imagination both within and between these varied Pacific Rim locations over two centuries to the present. |
This project deepens Australian understandings of the negotiated forms of conciliation that occurred between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the colonial period to present. By comparing these with conciliation events in New Zealand and British Columbia, the Australian experience is positioned within the global context of the Pacific Rim. The project's innovative approach unites historical and legal research with material culture of extraordinary heritage significance held by three major national collecting institutions (partner organisations) and others. Among the outcomes are scholarly publications, international symposia, publicly assessable web-based and educational materials, a travelling exhibition, and professional training. |
The University of Melbourne |
2010 |
| LP0776958 |
An inter-disciplinary analysis of the dynamics of Aboriginal interactions with the criminal justice system |
This project will provide a dynamic analysis of Aboriginal interactions with the criminal justice system using the NSW Repeat Offenders Database and will focus on three questions: what is the sequence of penalties from first court appearance to imprisonment?; does the pattern of re-offending affect the probability of imprisonment?; and which socioeconomic factors are important in explaining the criminal histories of Indigenous youth? By identifying relevant factors and describing the pathways within the criminal justice system, we can alert policy-makers to the potential for intervention at crucial junctures of criminal careers and the expected impacts of particular policy initiatives. |
The over-representation of Indigenous Australians in prison continues to be a serious problem, more than a decade after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. There are few rigorous studies identifying the dynamic factors associated with Indigenous interaction with the criminal justice system. This project will identify the Indigenous pathways within the system, in order to alert policy-makers to potential interventions at crucial junctures of criminal careers. It will use dynamic statistical models to identify important socioeconomic and geographic factors. Qualitative data will facilitate a deeper understanding of processes underlying the high rates of Indigenous arrest and imprisonment. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |
| LP0776977 |
Seeding Success and Research-Based Intervention for Aboriginal Students: Impact of quality teaching, effective schools, and psycho-social drivers on educational outcomes |
Aboriginal students are educationally disadvantaged. Interventions have failed to penetrate the classroom door. Enhancing quality teaching, schooling, and psycho-social drivers of life potential are advocated by Aboriginal people as vital. Whilst considerable advances in research with non-Aboriginal students have identified salient domains of these constructs that influence educational outcomes, the impact and implications of these on Aboriginal students' educational outcomes remain unknown. Such information is critical to inform educational practice. The proposed investigation seeks to extend recent advances to Aboriginal students by identifying new research-based solutions that can be shown to seed success in educational outcomes. |
Aboriginal students are educationally disadvantaged. This research offers important educational & social benefits. Elucidating the impact of quality teaching, effective schooling, and drivers of life potential on educational outcomes not attained by generations of Aboriginal Australians will identify potent practical strategies that seed success. The outcomes of this research have the potential to 'break the cycle' of underachievement by generating new solutions to: strengthen schooling; shape a better future for Aboriginal students by enabling students to reach their full potential; build capacity at community, school, classroom, and individual levels; and providing educators with best available practice effective strategies for doing so. |
University of Western Sydney |
2010 |
| LP0882367 |
Does monitoring and evaluation improve joint management? The case of national parks in the Northern Territory |
This project will identify whether monitoring and evaluation with the participation of stakeholders, including Indigenous Traditional Owners, enhances the benefits of joint management of parks and reserves in Australia. It will determine the elements required to implement participatory monitoring and evaluation in a cost effective manner, even in situations where stakeholders differ in views and power. It will answer central questions facing natural resource managers, including: To what extent can synergies between conservation goals and development goals be an outcome of integrated conservation and development initiatives? Can participation in monitoring and evaluation empower stakeholders and improve outcomes? |
Joint Indigenous/government management is to be mainstreamed in 30 national parks and reserves in the Northern Territory over the next few years including some of Australia's iconic natural wonders. This project will identify how participatory monitoring and evaluation enhances the realisation of benefits from joint management, how it can be done cost effectively, and how it can be scaled up from six pilot areas to areas across the NT and Australia wide. The project will build capacity of Indigenous Traditional Owners to participate in monitoring and evaluation for improved management and livelihood outcomes for the benefit of not just the residents of these natural areas, but for all Australians. |
Charles Darwin University |
2010 |
| LP0882428 |
Exploring the myth of the single solution: an anthropological study of housing maintenance and infrastructure issues in Australia |
The proposed research will document the steps necessary to scale up a public utility intervention to improve Aboriginal housing function in Australia. The aim is a better understanding of the cultural characteristics of policy reform from an anthropological perspective. To achieve this the project will: (1) document the cultural and institutional factors associated with attempts to improve Aboriginal living conditions, focusing on the experiences of people associated with Housing for Health and Fixing Houses for Better Health programs; and (2) explore the barriers to and requisites for implementing evidence-based policy and program decisions in Indigenous environmental health, housing and infrastructure. |
Indigenous housing is a core challenge for improving Australia's social and economic fabric. Urgent issues of amenity, maintenance and responsibility remain unresolved. By documenting what is involved in taking a difficult yet successful intervention model for targeting small-scale repairs and maintenance to scale in Australia, the research will shed critical light on: the complexities of program replication and effect; the social and political context such programs operate within; the characteristics required for sustained reform. It will also add an Australian contribution to a growing international field: namely, the anthropology of policy, aid and development. |
Charles Darwin University |
2009 |
| LP0882597 |
Chemical Fingerprinting for Geological and Geographical Provenancing of Ochre Minerals used by Australian Aboriginals |
The use of naturally occurring ochre pigments is has been documented in many ancient cultures. Indeed, archaeological finds indicate that Australian Aboriginal people have used ochre for both aesthetic and ritual purposes for at least 50 000 years. The overall aim of this project is to develop a series of analytical methods that will unequivocally provenance ochre from an artefact, artwork or an archaeological site. This will allow ethnographic reconstruction of prehistoric trade networks and systems of inter-regional interaction. In addition, the analytical tool-kit could be used to authenticate Aboriginal artworks, thus protecting the economic basis of some remote communities. |
Aboriginal peoples have used ochre in their most meaningful cultural interactions. This usage is reflected in other cultures, but the richness and complexity of the Australian evidence is unique. This partnership of analytical and surface chemists with the museum curators and conservators provides an ideal opportunity to utilize a range of techniques for the unambiguous provenancing of ochre from an artefact, artwork or an archaeological site. The result will be a greatly enriched understanding of the way in which Aboriginal Australians interacted with one of this country's key resources and should yield fresh conclusions about this country's cultural past. |
The Flinders University of South Australia |
2010 |
| LP0882670 |
The invisible parents project - exploring the barriers to effective parental and community involvement in three Northern Territory Schools |
This project explores the views of the parents of students who are struggling with or showing signs of disengagement with schools in the Northern Territory of Australia. A three year ethnographic study will be undertaken drawing on the parent communities of three schools to examine the issues that foster and prevent successful parent and community involvement with their children's schools. The focus is the difficult to reach group of parents who may be marginalized from the education community and who may face significant barriers interacting with their children's school and whose children are at risk of underachieving academically. |
Education outcomes in the Northern Territory, particularly for Indigenous students, lag far behind those of other Australians, to the point that the situation can be considered a national emergency. This research program will explore ways to improve parental involvement. This will inform the Smith Family's efforts to undertake early intervention for children who are at risk of education failure. It will provide benefits to the rural and regional communities who feed schools in Darwin and Katherine and provide national benefits through making a significant contribution of anthropologically-informed knowledge on the determinants of successful school outcomes. |
Charles Darwin University |
2010 |
| LP0882806 |
Pathways to better practice: developing human resources in child protection services for Indigenous communities in Western Australia and Queensland. |
This study focuses on a shared problem of recruiting and retaining high quality professional staff to enable child protection service delivery in rural and remote communities with high proportions of Indigenous families and children. It aims to enable the development of breakthrough technologies and best practice models as well as deeper appreciations of the current complex community practice environments in support of future attraction and retention strategies. The study will establish a unique research partnership between State departments responsible for child protection services in W.A. & Qld. |
This study addresses the serious and escalating problem of providing child protection services to Indigenous children and their families in rural and remote areas. Service delivery to rural and remote environments in Australia is a high cost exercise and, to date, little research has been conducted to understanding the complex nature of professional (non-medical) interventions in communities with high proportions of Indigenous families and children. The study, conducted across two states, will contribute to national benefit in 3 key areas: the health and wellbeing of Indigenous children; skills shortage in rural areas and intergenerational change in professional disciplines. |
Curtin University of Technology |
2010 |
| LP0882877 |
Globalizing Indigeneity: Indigenous Cultural Festivals and Wellbeing in Australia and the Asia-Pacific |
This project redefines the significance of indigenous cultural festivals in Australia and the Asia-Pacific as central to indigenous community wellbeing, with profound implications for the sector and the agencies working to support indigenous communities. It is based on detailed case studies of festivals backed by rigorous historical and theoretical analysis of indigenous engagement in the festival arts industry. We hypothesize that questions of wellbeing and social sustainability exceed the limits of rights-based discourses, making culture the most significant space of effective community strengthening. |
Indigenous communities in Australia (and elsewhere) suffer from extreme disadvantage. Northern Australia and many other places in the region, face a demographic time-bomb of alienated, self-destructive and culturally-disoriented youth. This manifests as violence in places like Wadeye, Palm Island and Port Moresby. Cultural festivals are one of the few consistently positive spaces for indigenous communities to assert a more constructive view of themselves both intergenerationally, and as part of their struggle for respect as distinct cultures in the broader national community. Cultural festivals also provide a rare space for novel intercultural accommodations to be negotiated on indigenous terrain. |
RMIT University |
2010 |
| LP0882972 |
New Ways of Doing School: Mixing story and technology to generate innovative learning, social and cultural communities. |
In a collaboration of indigenous and mainstream educators, this project designs and develops innovative mixes of story arts with multimedia technologies to create a new sense of learning community for children in remote and urban regions, with a specific focus on, but not limited to, indigenous children. It will facilitate links between youth from diverse areas, (likely to include inner Sydney, Tiwi Islands, Pilbara, and the Larrakia Nation), expand multiliteracies, validate personal histories, and encourage interactive peer learning. The aim is to encourage positive, motivated and sustainable learning cultures. Rigorous tracking and critical inquiry will help shape mainstream educational practices. |
This project brings together academic, social and educational expertise and strong partnership networks of UTS, the Exodus Foundation, and the Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning. Indigenous and mainstream educators collaborate to develop new perceptions of school and learning through creative mixes of story arts and multimedia technologies. Too often, the imaginations of the disenfranchised young are recruited into antisocial causes. This project seeks to build positive learning and social communities across remote and targeted urban regions, with a specific focus on, but not limited to, Indigenous children. The broad aim is to improve the lived experience of all Australians. |
University of Technology, Sydney |
2010 |
| LP0882985 |
Bayini, Macassans, Balanda and Bininij: A Case Study of Indigenous Cultural Heritage Management and Tourism in West Arnhemland Northern Territory |
This project will advance our knowledge of early maritime contacts between South East Asians, Europeans and Australian Indigenous peoples. The results will contribute significantly to the European and Indigenous history of Australia. A major aim is to investigate unresolved issues regarding the timing and nature of contacts. The project will also research the changes and cultural transmissions consequent on contact. Culture contacts will be examined through an investigation of the rich and diverse archaeological deposits and rock art assemblages in north-western Arnhem Land. A community-based Indigenous cultural heritage research program will establish the basis for future sustainable cultural heritage management |
Contact between cultures is a defining theme in history and is especially relevant to contemporary Australia. The timing of contact between South East Asians and Europeans with Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land is of great historical significance to Australia. This knowledge will enhance the national heritage registration efforts for cultural heritage places in the region. Conservation efforts will be undertaken for the first time for these potentially world heritage significant Indigenous cultural heritage places. Indigenous communities will potentially make significant economic gains from developing sustainable land management and cultural tourism initiatives through the results and skills obtained from his project. |
The Australian National University |
2010 |