Jane Lydon is the inaugural Wesfarmers Chair in Australian History and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2010–15) at The University of Western Australia. Since 1997 her research has addressed the history and meanings of photographs of Indigenous Australians. Her books include Eye contact: photographing Indigenous Australians (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2005), and The flash of recognition: photography and the emergence of Indigenous rights (NewSouth Books, Sydney, 2012), which won the Queensland Literary Awards’ University of Southern Queensland History Book Award.
Michael Aird has worked full time in the area of Aboriginal cultural heritage since 1985, graduating in 1990 with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Queensland. His main interest is urban Aboriginal photographic history, curating several exhibitions, as well as being author of several books and articles. In 1996 he established Keeaira Press, an independent publishing house. For five years Michael was the Curator of Aboriginal Studies at the Queensland Museum and continues to work as a freelance curator and anthropologist.
Lawrence Bamblett is an Education Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and an Adjunct Research Fellow for the Australian National University (at the National Centre for Indigenous Studies). He grew up at Erambie Mission, Cowra, a Wiradjuri community, and worked for various community development programs there before enrolling at university. His doctoral thesis explored cultural continuity through storytelling within his Wiradjuri community. He is Chairperson of Erambie Advancement, a community corporation that develops and administers community education, health and employment programs at Erambie. He was lucky to have been taught by some very talented Koori storytellers and his work today reflects their teaching. Photographs have been a significant part of his learning, teaching and research, as well as his community development work. His academic career has been an extension of his interest in the use of photographs in community storytelling.
Laurie Baymarrwangga is a nonagenarian Yan-nhangu speaker and Aboriginal Traditional Owner of Murrungga, Galiwin’ku, and Bural-Bural Islands, and the seas of Ganatjirri Maramba. Born c. 1920 on Murrungga Island, largest of the outer Crocodile Islands, Baymarrwangga speaks six different languages fluently and understands a further three. Having survived the Japanese bombing of her islands and the missionisation of her kin, she continues to pass on the intimate local knowledge of the islands and to resist neo-colonial settler pressures for normalisation. Striving to save her language and local culture requires a continuing struggle for equitable rights in local natural resources. Baymarrwangga continues to care for her homelands as a base for sustainable livelihood activities on her sea country and a real future for her grandchildren’s children. She was winner of the 2011 Northern Territory Innovation and Research Lifetime Achiever Award and Senior Australian of the Year for 2012, and her continuing courage, intelligence and persistence against assimilation policies is a lesson for all.
Shauna Bostock-Smith is a Bundjalung woman whose family descends from northern New South Wales. She has worked as a primary school teacher since graduating from the Australian Catholic University with a Bachelor of Education in 2006. Shauna resigned from full-time teaching to research and write about her family history. She completed her BA (Honours) at Griffith University (2013) and was recently offered a place at the Australian National University (Canberra) to begin a PhD in Indigenous History in 2014.
Sari Braithwaite graduated from the Australian National University with Honours in History in 2007. She has worked as a research assistant on the Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project Aboriginal Visual Histories since 2007, conducting research in the archives, making three short films and Conversations with Michael Aird (http://arts.monash.edu.au/mic/research/visual-histories/conversations.php), and writing on a range of key themes. She was the Program Manager of the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival from 2011 to 2013 and is currently working on a range of documentary film projects.
Julie Gough is an artist, curator and writer who lives in Hobart. Her research and art practice involves uncovering and re-presenting often conflicting and subsumed histories, many referring to her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people. An Honorary Associate, University of Tasmania, and Adjunct Principal Research Fellow, James Cook University, Townsville, she holds a PhD and BA (Honours) in Visual Arts at the University of Tasmania, a Master’s degree (Goldsmiths College, University of London), a BA (Visual Arts; Curtin University) and a BA (Prehistory/ English Literature; The University of Western Australia).
Karen Hughes is a Lecturer in Indigenous Studies at Swinburne University of Technology. She has formerly taught at Monash University and the University of South Australia, and in 2011 was a Visiting Fellow at University Paris 13. She is finishing a book, titled My grandmother on the other side of the lake, based on her doctoral research, which weaves a cross-cultural history of intimate and domestic spaces around Lake Alexandrina, from the perspectives of Ngarrindjeri and settler-descended women’s stories and lived experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Bentley James is a Social and Cultural Anthropologist, Linguist and Educator who has lived on the Crocodile Islands in North East Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, for twenty years. He continues recording language, ritual, social organisation, local knowledges and recent archaeological prehistory of the people of the islands. Since 1993 he has worked in close collaboration with Yan-nhangu elders, including Baymarrwangga, on the Yan-nhangu dictionary and more recently on the Yan-nhangu atlas, an illustrated dictionary of the Crocodile Islands. In 2003 he published the first Yan-nhangu dictionary and has since published on language revitalisation, ethnobiology and local maritime knowledge of the Yan-nhangu. With local collaborators he is leading a multi-disciplinary team recording the ‘Intergenerational Transmission of Indigenous Ecological Knowledges’ with Charles Darwin University and the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance. He continues to research how practical local projects like the Yan-nhangu language team’s Language Nests project, Crocodile Islands Rangers program, Crocodile Islands Initiative and turtle conservation project can deliver equity in resource governance and a culture-based economy. His doctoral thesis, ‘Time and tide in the Crocodile Islands: change and continuity in Yan-nhangu marine identity’, explores in detail the hitherto unrecorded ethnography and languages of the Yan-nhangu of Mooroongga (Murrungga) and the Crocodile Islands.
Donna Oxenham is a Yamatji woman and a descendant of the Malgana people of Shark Bay in the north-west of Western Australia. She also has extensive links into the Nyungar community through her grandfather, who was a Wardandi man from the Busselton area in the south-west of Western Australia. In 2006 Donna was a visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. In 2008 she was employed as a researcher involved with the Stolen Wages Project facilitated by the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Donna has worked with Indigenous people, groups and organisations throughout Western Australia and the broader Australian Indigenous community, particularly within the field of arts, history, cultural heritage and native title. In 2002–03 Donna was the Cultural Heritage Officer at the Yamatji Marlpa Barna Baba Maaja Aboriginal Corporation, and in 2004 a Policy Officer with the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council. Of particular significance, Donna was employed by the Berndt Museum of Anthropology from 2000–02 to facilitate the digitisation, restoration and repatriation of Indigenous photographic collections. Through her positions, tertiary studies and her research fellowship, Donna has gained considerable experience in undertaking a range of research and related tasks on Indigenous children, families and communities.
Ellen Trevorrow is a Ngarrindjeri weaver and educator who has exhibited widely throughout Australia. She regards herself as a ‘cultural weaver’ and is dedicated to sharing her knowledge of the practice, and Ngarrindjeri culture and ecology. She was born at Point McLeay (Raukkan) in 1955 and raised near Tailem Bend, a small town in the Murraylands region of South Australia. She spent her childhood in fringe dwellers’ camps just outside the town with her grandmother, Ellen Brown, from whom she gets her name. She attended primary school in Tailem Bend, and moved South to Bonney Reserve near Meningie when she was eleven, and went on to complete high school. She met her husband to be, Tom Trevorrow, when she was fourteen. They were married in 1976 and had seven children. They have remained in or near Meningie ever since. She and her husband have been foundation members of Camp Coorong Race Relations Cultural Education Centre since 1985. Camp Coorong is located close to Meningie, adjacent to the site of Bonney Reserve. It is situated within the Coorong, a coastal ecosystem of estuaries, lakes and lagoons where the Murray River meets the sea. Trevorrow has a deep sense of attachment to the Murray River, which constitutes part of her Ngarrindjeri Clan Group’s Traditional Country.