Laws in other countries recognise ‘rights of nature’. But even trees sacred to Indigenous Australian communities have no special protection.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Indigenous culture
Displaying 21 - 40 of 102 articles
There are memorial stones scattered along songlines throughout the Australian landscape, victims and transgressors transformed into rock following epic struggles to stand as cautionary tales.
Indigenous fashion design today is being shaped by First Nations people at every level.
The World Heritage Listing for Victoria’s Budj Bim fish traps was ground-breaking. Here are five other Australian Indigenous sites that also deserve greater attention.
Australian composers have long referenced Indigenous music and culture in their works. A new platform paper suggests a more collaborative way forward.
Romantic comedy meets road movie in Wayne Blair’s much anticipated new film.
A new 50 cent coin recognises the diversity of Australian Indigenous languages.
For the Barkandji people, the crisis on the Barwon-Darling represents the biggest threat to their continued survival on country since the sheep invaded.
Wanji-wanji’s lyrics have remained unchanged over thousands of kilometres and the past 150 years.
It’s time for a more reasonable, hybrid definition of civilisation that incorporates our Indigenous heritage.
Of 19 World Heritage sites across the country, only two, Kakadu and Uluru-Kata Tjuta, recognise the values of “living” Aboriginal culture. None of Australia’s three sites inscribed purely for cultural values recognises Aboriginal people.
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.
Petyarre, who won the Telstra prize for Indigenous art in 1996, has died in Alice Springs.
All monsters make their mark on the communities they haunt. Some are cheeky and mischievous, some are mysterious, others are downright evil.
In remote Northern Territory, most Aboriginal people have been buried in unmarked graves. Archaelogists are carrying out painstaking detective work to help communities find their loved ones’ remains.
From the Budj Bim acquaculture system to the Aboriginal flag, Australia has a long history of Indigenous design excellence. Here is our pick of 10 contemporary design classics.
Most book clubs are white and middle-class. Even today, books and reading can presume a divide between Indigenous oral story-telling and non-Indigenous literacy.
In the forests around the Murray River, Victoria’s Watti Watti people have trained trees to mark significant cultural locations in the landscape.
Like many Australian museums, collectors for the Queensland Museum played a role in the violent dispossession of First Nations people.
A new report unpacks the complex role social media play in the lives of Indigenous Australians.
Top contributors
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Honorary Senior Lecturer, Australian National University
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Professor and Inaugural Director, Indigenous Knowledge Institute, The University of Melbourne
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Associate Professor, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University
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Professor of Education, Charles Darwin University
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Emeritus professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance, ANU, Australian National University
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Professor of Linguistics, The University of Queensland
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Senior Curator of Australian and First Nations Art, National Gallery of Victoria, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer, School of Humanities, Griffith University
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Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne
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Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney
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Claire Smith is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Archaeology, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University
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Research Associate in Archaeology, Flinders University
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Adjunct Lecturer, Archaeology | Director, Land and Heritage Management, Flinders University
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Senior Lecturer in Screen and Design, Deakin University
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Professor, Indigenous Studies and Director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University
