Indigenous Knowledges and Perspectives

The intent of this book focuses on Australia's First Nations truth, voice, recognition, diversity, and respect. Hope O'Chin explains that knowledge about Australian First Nations culture and learning can be seen through new conceptual lens, which she refers to as an Ontology of Dreaming Hope for Australians. The book proposes to move from ontological propositions embedded in pedagogies and methodologies that centre on the relevance of Indigenous epistemes and ways of doing. O'Chin offers a conceptual framing for engaging with Indigenous peoples, and forming communities of belongingness and relationality. She offers suggestions for ways in which art and education can act as 'healing' and a way forward towards a more inclusive civil society, recognising Indigenous strengths and what Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing can offer, and how one might go about honouring and working in this way respectfully.

In this groundbreaking work of Indigenous scholarship, nationally renowned visual artist Fiona Foley addresses the inherent silences, errors and injustices from the perspective of her people, the Badtjala of K'gari (Fraser Island). She shines a critical light on the little-known colonial-era practice of paying Indigenous workers in opium and the 'solution' of then displacing them to K'gari. Biting the Clouds - a euphemism for being stoned on opium - combines historical, personal and cultural imagery to reclaim the Badtjala story from the colonisation narrative.

The pieces in this seminal collection represent almost four decades of writing by historian and activist Jackie Huggins. These essays, speeches and interviews combine both the public and the personal in a bold trajectory tracing one Murri woman's journey towards self-discovery and human understanding. As a widely respected cultural educator and analyst, Huggins offers an Aboriginal view of the history, values and struggles of Indigenous people. Jackie Huggins' words, then and now, offer wisdom, urgency and hope.

The stories in Born Into This throw light on a world of unique cultural practice and perspective, from Indigenous rangers trying to instil some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania to those scraping by on the margins of white society railroaded into complex and compromised decisions. The characters confront racism, untimely funerals, classroom politics and, overhanging all like a discomforting, burgeoning awareness for both white and black Australia, the inexorable damage and disappearance of the remnant natural world.