Professor Megan Davis is an independent expert member of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
AAP/RICHARD WAINWRIGHT
Megan Davis on a First Nations Voice in the Constitution
The Conversation, CC BY31.4 MB(download)
Megan Davis says the idea of including an Indigenous Voice in the Constitution is being rejected on an understanding that "simply isn't true" but believes Australia has the "capacity to correct this".
The first people to walk along the shores of northern Australia arrived more than 50,000 years ago.
Corey Bradshaw
New research shows just how many first people were needed to create a viable population in what is now Australia.
Angurugu mission school children in the 1940s on Groote Eylandt, NT. Missions helped both erode and preserve Indigenous languages.
Groote Eylandt Linguistics
Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world but today, few people speak an Australian language.
Indigenous Australians must be involved in research around provenance and country. Here, representatives of the Willandra Aboriginal Elders visit the Griffith University ancient DNA laboratory.
Renee Chapman
Museums around the world hold remains of Aboriginal people that were often taken without permission and in the absence of accurate records. New DNA methods may help return these items to country.
Maningrida, a community on Australia’s remote north-central coast, is a language hotspot.
Jill Vaughan
At the Maningrida football Grand Final in 2015, commentary was recorded in nine languages. But elsewhere, the threat of language loss poses a serious risk to our nation’s cultural inheritance.
Sydney’s Government House, circa 1802, where Boorong was brought when she fell sick with smallpox in 1789.
Mitchell library, State Library of New South Wales
The 1991 Royal Commission into deaths in custody was preceded by an 1850 inquiry, which recommended that Aboriginal people be released should their health deteriorate in gaol.
Ammunition found at a mounted police camp at Eyre Creek.
Lynley Wallis
For 60 years, native police were deployed in Queensland to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal communities (a euphemism for systematic killing). Unearthing their camps is a key part of reckoning with the violence of those times.
Humans would have first seen Kata Tjuta very shortly after arriving in Australia 50,000 years ago.
Alan Cooper
Aboriginal Australians have effectively been on their country for as long as modern human populations have been outside of Africa. We have a limit as to how long ago that was: around 50,000 years.
Hobart’s Mount Wellington is now also known by its palawa kani name, kunanyi.
Shutterstock
Tasmania’s Aboriginal languages were decimated during the state’s colonial violence. But members of the original community have reconstructed a language, palawa kani, which is now being used more widely.
It is hoped that the Royal Commission will bring a renewed enthusiasm for suitable and properly adapted customer service provision that values Indigenous consumers and take their circumstances into account.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
With enough will and resourcing, many of the structural issues that make financial services a trial for many Indigenous consumers can be overcome. But we need more regulation to deter sharp practice.
It’s been 50 years since the find of burnt bones in ancient soil, eroded from deep in shoreline dune in NSW.
Jim Bowler
It’s been half a century since Jim Bowler discovered Mungo Lady, which changed the course of Australian history. But now he says the find has fallen off the national radar, leaving a legacy of shame.
A sculpture of William Ricketts looms over those of Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara men at the sanctuary in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges.
Chris Haych/flickr
A mossy sanctuary in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges houses 92 sculptures, mostly of Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara men, women and children. They are steeped in primitivism, yet the park is a popular tourist attraction.
In July 2017, new research was published that pushed the opening chapters of Australian history back to 65,000 years ago.
Marcella Cheng/The Conversation
When did Australia’s human history begin?
The Conversation, CC BY16.6 MB(download)
Today's episode of Essays On Air, the audio version of our Friday essay series, seeks to move beyond the view of ancient Australia as a timeless and traditional foundation story.
Lalin in Western Australia is ‘married turtle season’.
Brian Gratwicke/Flickr
On Wangkumarra land, in the corner-country near the borders of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, stands an ancient stone arrangement. It has been placed to the side of a huge complex, rivalling…
The ‘Closing the Gap’ initiative has existed since 2006, but the statistics show the gap is growing.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
To Close the Gap, Indigenous Australians are the experts. Indigenous organisations are more likely to achieve outcomes because they understand local issues and have ‘skin in the game’.
Heaven only knows what sort of excursion Wooredy and Truganini thought they had embarked upon on when G.A. Robinson took them to Recherche Bay in 1830 to make an overland trek to the Tasmanian west coast.
Cassandra Pybus
Wooredy and his second wife Truganini set off into the Tasmanian wilderness with settler George Robinson in 1830, on a “conciliatory” mission to find other original Tasmanians. Their stories bear witness to a psychological and cultural transition without parallel in modern colonialism.
Maggie Cywink, of Whitefish River First Nation, holds up a sign behind Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a summit in Ottawa in support of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
The Indigenous in New Zealand have fared better than First Nations in Canada in terms of self-determination. Why? It’s about a lot more than geography, land mass and language.
George Hamilton, Meeting natives on the Campaspi plains, Victoria, June 1836.
National Library of Australia
George Hamilton published An Appeal for the Horse in 1866, a defence of animal welfare well ahead of its time. However, his compassion for Aboriginal people was conspicuously lacking.
The Dove ad published on Facebook, which the company took down after many complaints of racial insensitivity.
NayTheMUA/Facebook
Beauty brand Dove caused controversy with an ad seemingly showing a black woman turning white after using its body lotion. While Dove removed the ad, it played into the racist history of skin whitening.
Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University
Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Node Leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures, Flinders University
