Reinstating indigenous landscape planning curatorship : the Lake Condah restoration project

While contemporary Western planning traditions in Australia talk of the last 200 years of innovation and transposition of European and North American planning traditions upon the Australian landscape, they neglect to mention some 40-50,000 years of Indigenous landscape planning initiatives and practice. The ancestral country of the Gunditjmara people is in the Western District of Victoria focused upon the Lake Condah and Mount Eccles localities. The Gunditjmara had, and continue to have a strong social, cultural and land management and planning presence in the region, in particular linked to environmental engineering initiatives and aquaculture curatorship of eel and fish resources. Archaeological evidence confirms that some 10,000 years of pre-European contact landscape planning practice has been applied by the Gunditjmara to construct resources management infrastructure to service a regional food need as well as a community need. Within contemporary reconciliation discourses, the Gunditjmara have activity sought over the last 25 years the rehabilitation of Lake Condah, which is now coming into fruition, and the restoration of their traditional landscape planning and management responsibilities. This paper reviews the restoration of Indigenous landscape planning and management theory and practice by the Gunditjmara, pointing to significant policy and practice success as well as the need to better appreciate this culturally-attuned and ecologically-responsive approach to landscape planning borne out of generations of knowledge.

Festivals, artists and entrepreneurialism : the role of the Adelaide Fringe Festival

This paper addresses the role of the Adelaide Fringe Festival in facilitating entrepreneurialism amongst participating artists. Tracing the discursive development of the notion of the entrepreneur, the paper identifies how entrepreneurialism has been taken up by the discourses of the creative industries. While we note that entrepreneurialism is a key strategy within the creative industries framework, it would appear for artists the concept does not necessarily connote the achievement of commercial outcomes. The paper argues that these cultural entrepreneurs are defined by self-reliance, the focus on the development of their craft, and the cultural value of their work.

Indigenous place-making in the city : dispossessions, occupations and implications for cultural architecture

This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.

Raising the volume : Indigenous voices in news media and policy

This article explores Indigenous contributions to shaping public and policy agendas through their use of the news media. It reports on research conducted for the Australian News Media and Indigenous Policy-making 1988–2008 project that is investigating relationships between the representation of Indigenous peoples in public media and the development of Indigenous affairs policies. Interviews with Indigenous policy advocates, journalists and public servants identified the strategies that have been used by individuals and Indigenous organisations to penetrate policy debates and influence public policy. The article concludes that in the face of a neo-liberal policy agenda amplified through mainstream media, particular Indigenous voices nevertheless have had a significant impact, keeping alive debate about issues such as the importance of bilingual education programs and community involvement in the delivery of primary health care.

Promoting fit bodies, healthy eating and physical activity among Indigenous Australian men : a study protocol

Background: Overall the physical health of Indigenous men is among the worst in Australia. Research has indicated that modifiable lifestyle factors, such as poor nutrition and physical inactivity, appear to contribute strongly to these poor health conditions. To effectively develop and implement strategies to improve the health of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, a greater understanding is needed of how Indigenous men perceive health, and how they view and care for their bodies. Further, a more systematic understanding of how sociocultural factors affect their health attitudes and behaviours is needed. This article presents the study protocol of a communitybased investigation into the factors surrounding the health and body image of Indigenous Australian men.
Methods and design: The study will be conducted in a collaborative manner with Indigenous Australian men using a participatory action research framework. Men will be recruited from three locations around Australia (metropolitan, regional, and rural) and interviewed to understand their experiences and perspectives on a number of issues related to health and health behaviour. The information that is collected will be analysed using modified grounded theory and thematic analysis. The results will then be used to develop and implement community events in each location to provide feedback on the findings to the community, promote health enhancing strategies, and determine future action and collaboration.
Discussion: This study will explore both risk and protective factors that affect the health of Indigenous Australian men. This knowledge will be disseminated to the wider Indigenous community and can be used to inform future health promotion strategies. The expected outcome of this study is therefore an increased understanding of health and health change in Indigenous Australian men, the development of strategies that promote healthy eating and positive patterns of physical activity and, in the longer term, more effective and culturally-appropriate interventions to improve health.

So much more than just the music : Australian pre-service music teacher education students’ attitudes to artists-in-schools

Contemporary Australia is a country of ongoing migration and increasing cultural diversity which is reflected in its arts practices. This article considers the views held by Australian pre-service music education student teachers and their tertiary music educators about their perceptions concerning artists-in-schools programs in school music. This discussion reports on data collected for a study undertaken in Melbourne, Victoria, Intercultural Understandings of Pre-Service Music Education Students (2005–2009). Fifty-three interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The findings provide insight into teachers’ recognition of the need for artists-in-schools programs. In particular the ways in which teachers can link theory to practice, fill in omissions in their own knowledge, skills and understandings, and heighten student understandings of multicultural musics. The promotion and provision of multicultural music education is essential at all levels of education. This can be achieved by the inclusion of diverse culture bearers, artists-in-schools, and community engagement to work with both teachers and their students.

Enraged Aborigines at the Embassy Ball : media representations of indigenous Australia

Analyses current media representations of Indigenous Australia, including the Aboriginal Tent Embassy "riot", the  high profile columnist Andrew Bolt's breaching of the Anti-Discrimination Act, and the Liam Jurrah case, while historicising the way Aboriginal Australians have been portrayed in the media and relating this to ethics.

Using mobile phones as placed resources for literacy learning in a remote Indigenous community in Australia

Despite massive funding from the Australian government, the literacy achievement of Australian Indigenous children remains significantly lower than for non-Indigenous. With the aim of identifying innovative ways to improve Indigenous children's literacy achievement, this study explored the social practices surrounding everyday mobile phone use by Indigenous people in a remote Australian community. Informed by the notion of ‘placed resources’, which highlights the understanding that digital literacies are best considered as resources situated by social practices that have local effect, the study surveyed 95 people living in a remote Indigenous community about their mobile phone practices. The study also examined a video of a literacy event between a mother and her child around the use of a mobile phone. The findings revealed the strong relational aspects of phone use in remote communities. Integral to the concept of placed resources is a respect for the practices communities find important as they adopt artefacts for their everyday communication.

Creating an Indigenous Christian leadership in Papua

In eastern Papua, Christian missionaries found a social structure unparalleled in most areas of religious expansion in the world: it apparently lacked chiefs and any identifiable leadership. Nearly all the Massim societies of eastern Papua were matrilineal, and land was passed through females. Here, women enjoyed a higher status than elsewhere in what is now Papua New Guinea. By drawing on the records of missionary agents, both European and Polynesian, this paper shows how the Methodist, Anglican and Kwato (London Missionary Society) missions in eastern Papua all encountered difficulty in fostering a cadre of male leaders, but — as became evident after World War II — they experienced greater success in fostering women's leadership.

Strong population genetic structure and its management implications in the mud carp Cirrhinus molitorella, an indigenous freshwater species subject to an aquaculture and culture-based fishery

This study investigated population genetic structure and diversity of mud carp Cirrhinus molitorella, a species widely used in aquaculture and culture-based fisheries in China and Mekong River riparian countries. Seven newly developed and one published microsatellite DNA markers were used to analyse samples from six wild locations, four hatchery broodstocks and one farmed site from the Mekong, Red and Pearl Rivers. Significant genetic structure was detected in C. molitorella, with isolation-by-distance being a strong force in the Mekong. Pair-wise F_ST, Fisher's exact tests for population differentiation, permutation tests and individual-based structure analysis all support the recognition of a sample originating from Toul Krasaing Lake (Cambodia) and one between Kratie and Stung Treng (Cambodia) as distinct from the remainder of the sampled range. Samples from the main upper Mekong and the Nam Khan River were significantly differentiated, but on a time scale inferred to be short (i.e. by genetic drift, not sufficient for evolution of new microsatellite alleles). The Mekong stock of C. molitorella was strongly differentiated from those from the Red and Pearl Rivers, inferred to be on an evolutionary time scale. Finer-scale sampling is warranted to further improve the understanding of genetic interactions among fish from the Mekong and its tributaries. Detailed studies on the ecology of C. molitorella (e.g. migration pathways and preferred spawning habitats) would provide useful information to explain the patterns of genetic structure detected here, and deepen insights about evolutionary distinctiveness of the population units.

Bowerbirds, art and aesthetics : are bowerbirds artists and do they have an aesthetic sense?

Male bowerbirds create and decorate a structure called a bower which serves only to attract females for mating, and females visit and choose one among many bower owners before deciding which male to mate with. Is what they do art, and do they have an aesthetic sense? I propose operational definitions of art, judgement, and an aesthetic sense which depend upon communication theory which allow one to get explicit answers to this question. By these definitions Great Bowerbirds are artists, judge art, and therefore have an aesthetic sense.

Understanding coastal urban and peri‐urban indigenous people’s vulnerability and adaptive capacity to climate change

This brief presentation will commence to address a number of emerging questions that are underpinned by the current NCCARF research project: Understanding Urban and Peri‐urban Indigenous People’s vulnerability and adaptive capacity to Climate Change. In terms of climate change adaptation barriers, options and priorities, what are the major considerations for indigenous communities residing in coastal peri-urban and urban places that may differ from those of their non-indigenous counterparts and possibly from Indigenous communities living away from the coasts? It will speculate on whether these considerations can be addressed through existing planning and management frameworks.