It was once thought the Aboriginal names for the Hawkesbury had been lost forever. But after a remarkable find in the Mitchell Library, almost 100 place names will be restored to Dyarubbin Country.
A travel guide to some of our most beautiful Country highlights the complexity of Aboriginal cultures and white Australia's historic ambivalence towards them.
Cahokia’s mound-building culture flourished a millennium ago near modern-day St. Louis.
JByard/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Five centuries before Columbus arrived, migrants were spreading across North America, carrying their culture with them and mixing with those they encountered in new places.
A Maliwawa macropod found in the Namunidjbuk clan estate of the Wellington Range.
P. Taçon
Two dramatic narratives arc through this documentary that marks 20 years since Cathy Freeman's Olympic triumph: her reflections as an elite athlete, and our experience as a nation of spectators.
Delegates from 34 Native tribes at the Creek Council House in Indian Territory, now called Oklahoma, 1880.
National Archives
The Supreme Court's July 9 ruling that half of Oklahoma belongs to the Muscogee Nation confirms what Indigenous people already knew: North America is 'Indian Country.'
Indigenous activists have long called on teams to change names and mascots that perpetuate negative stereotypes and fail to respect painful histories.
(flickr/Joe Glorioso)
Modern dating techniques are providing new time frames for indigenous settlements in Northeast North America, free from the Eurocentric bias that previously led to incorrect assumptions.
Punta Ventana, a popular tourist attraction near Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, before and after the Jan. 6 earthquake.
AFP/Getty/Wikipedia
Puerto Rico was once home to about 110,000 Taínos, an indigenous people decimated by the Spanish conquest. Their ancient homeland was located in the area hit hard by recent earthquakes.
Some of the key points in the Uluru Statement mirror demands first made in the 1920s, including genuine Aboriginal self-determination and an Aboriginal board to sit under the Commonwealth government.
James Ross/AAP
The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, founded in 1924, made several demands to protect Indigenous rights, including installing an Aboriginal board to sit beneath the federal government.
Berry, and other tourist towns, are out of step with modern museum curation which is trying to include Aboriginal communities and their stories.
Shutterstock
Away from the state capitals, small museums are out of step with big city curators - presenting tourists with stories that give a blinkered view of local history.
Adam Goodes in The Australian Dream: in the film he talks of finding an identity in football and with The Sydney Swans.
Melbourne International Film Festival
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Nina Maile Gordon, The Conversation
Mukurtu: an online dilly bag for keeping Indigenous digital archives safe.
The Conversation71.5 MB(download)
Mukurtu - Warumungu word meaning 'dilly bag' or a safe keeping place for sacred materials - is an online system helping Indigenous people conserve photos, songs and other digital archives.
Nicholas Chevalier, Mallee scrub, Murray River, NSW, watercolour, 1871.
National Library of Australia
Captain Cook's 1770 voyage is well known. But at this time, Indigenous Australians also travelled great distances - let's recognise this in the 2020 commemorations.
An undated portrait thought to depict Bennelong, signed “W.W.” now in the Dixson Galleries of the State Library of New South Wales.
Wikimedia Commons
History has typically depicted Bennelong as a tragic figure lost between two worlds - but sailors' journals suggest he still held authority after his return from the UK.
It may be that the fortnight or so surrounding Australia Day is evolving into an annual season in which some of the deepest paradoxes of Australian identity play out in public.
AAP/Glenn Campbell
One of the 'first white women' to travel in the Northern Territory, Elsie Masson's attitudes to the Aboriginal people she met expressed the contradictions of racial thought at this time.
An image of the landscape around Bairnsdale in the late-18th century. D. R Long (Daniel Rutter), between 1856 and 1883.
State Library of Victoria
Aboriginal songs found in the notebooks of a Victorian anthropologist shed light on the mystery of a 'captive white woman' that has been debated for generations.
“New Hollanders” depicted in a 1698 edition of the explorer William Dampier’s journal.
Courtesy of the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai'i-Mānoa
The image, depicting a group of Indigenous people resisting their enslavement, predates the next oldest image by 75 years.
An engraving of Dirimera and Conaci by Giuseppe Mochetti taken from a daguerreotype of April 5 1852. Acc no 77930P .
With acknowledgements to the Archives of the Benedictine Community of New Norcia.
Aboriginal children are rarely named in the colonial archive. But the remarkable story of Dirimera and Conaci reveals two boys who, while removed from their land, had a keen sense of sovereignty.
Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies, School of Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology