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In 2006-07, the author was involved in redesigning a database storing traditional knowledge of Australian Aboriginal clans. The project raised issues relating to the design of repositories for indigenous knowledge, including theoretical approaches taken to ontology (knowledge structures, classification systems) and metadata creation. This paper describes the design process undertaken, in which user-centred design principles accommodated an emergent contrast between traditional knowledge customs and "good" database design principles. Theoretical approaches taken to ontology are presented, and the format of the restructured database is discussed in general terms. Assembling evidence from usability testing and qualitative research, the paper concludes that a flexible ontological system was needed to provide the customisability required by indigenous users - a system whose iterations and applications may usefully represent widely differing aboriginal cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yolŋu Aboriginal people's knowledge about water ("gapu") and its governance has strong cultural significance and meaning in East Arnhem Land Aboriginal worlds in northern Australia. This study used transdisciplinary research methods to explore the ways in which Yolŋu Aboriginal gapu and Western science hydrological knowledge can work together and contribute towards water management on Milingimbi Island, a small, resource-constrained, bedrock island. Transcending disciplinary boundaries is distinctly different to an interdisciplinary, socio-hydrological perspective, which can pose a risk to hybridizing Aboriginal knowledge and Western science. Community engagement activities and workshops were conducted as part of a three-year research project to bring together the incommensurable knowledge communities. A participatory three-dimensional mapping exercise created a shared space, facilitating an open-dialogue exchange of insight and knowledge among Aboriginal knowledge authorities, hydrologists, public servants, and academic researchers. This paper prompts readers to reconsider the ways water can be perceived and conserved in a decolonizing way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been the longstanding targets of racism and discrimination in Australia. This paper presents the findings of a systematic literature review designed to identify and synthesise the available evidence exploring these intergroup attitudes, and the factors that correlate with them. Searches were conducted in Medline, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, ProQuest Psychology Database and PsycINFO databases. Eligible studies were required to measure attitudes of non-Indigenous Australians towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Twenty studies met the eligibility criteria (n = 2,958). The results outlined: (a) the prevalence of negative attitudes, (b) attitudes were most commonly conceptualised as modern racism, and (c) that there are a range of factors that are associated with negativity towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The review outlined the relationship between attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and demographic, ideological, individual differences, and intergroup factors. This review highlights the need for continued research in this domain to inform appropriate prejudice reduction strategies. KEY POINTS What is already known about this topic: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples face continued adversity, prejudice, and discrimination on their own land. This heightened propensity to be targeted for prejudice is a known social determinant of poorer health and wellbeing. Understanding racial attitudes towards this group is an imperative step in understanding and combating this health disparity. What this topic adds: There is a paucity of academic research exploring negativity towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples The limited quantity of evidence does establish a range of correlates with negative attitudes that can be clustered into four themes – demographic factors, ideological variables, individual differences factors, and intergroup factors. More research is warranted in this domain to further establish a body of evidence on intergroup attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, with a renewed focus needed on prejudice reduction techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outside the Antipodes, Australian archaeology is best known as an archaeology of the distant Palaeolithic past. However, where communities have been closely involved in developing and undertaking archaeological research programs, the focus of archaeological research has been radically different, often dealing with the archaeology of the recent, remembered past and crossing disciplinary boundaries between Aboriginal and historical archaeology. Distinguishing between 'community-based archaeology' and reactive or 'consent-based' community involvement in archaeology,this paper reviews the state of archaeology and its engagement with communities in Australia. Through several case studies in both indigenous and post-contact archaeology, it demonstrates the way in which community-based research and practise is changing what it is we think of as 'archaeology' in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Aboriginal) young people seek information and access health services for their sexual health needs. This study examined Aboriginal young people's perspectives on sexual health services and sex education in Australia. Overall, 51 Aboriginal people aged 16–26 years were interviewed by peer researchers in Sydney, Australia in 2019–2020. The findings suggest that the internet was used to assess information quickly and confidentially, but Aboriginal young people questioned its reliability and accuracy. Family, Elders and peers were seen as sources of advice because they had real-life experience and highlighted intergenerational learning that occurs in Aboriginal communities. School-based sex education programmes had mixed reviews, with a preference for programmes delivered by external specialists providing anonymity, clear and accurate information about sex and relationships and positive approaches to sex education, including how to gain consent before sex. There was a need identified for school-based programmes to better consider the needs of Aboriginal young people, including those who identified as LGBTQI +. Aboriginal Medical Services were highly valued for providing culturally safe access to services, while sexual health clinics were valued for providing specialised confidential clinical services with low levels of judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early European records of indigenous Australian mythology describe the activities of Ancestral Creators and spirits. British colonisation was intense in the southern temperate regions, which became "settled Australia." Here, Aboriginal mythology has undergone significant transformations in response to major social and cultural changes. Knowledge of Creation myths has declined, although contemporary Aboriginal people have maintained and developed a rich folklore centred on spirits and ghosts. While the Australian anthropological literature acknowledges the important religious dimensions of Creation myths, studies of the secularised folklore of indigenous communities living in rural and urban areas have been largely neglected. This paper investigates the roles of Australian Aboriginal mythology in recent indigenous and non-indigenous cultures within temperate Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the conflict between Great Britain and Australia over tests conducted by the former in the outback during the 1950s and 1960s. Issue of who will pay to clean up plutonium buried in nuclear graveyards; Cost of rendering the ground for the Aborigines; History of the British atom project; Secrecy of the British tests.

The practice of historical archaeology is often interdisciplinary, but the relationships between archaeology and other disciplines are not often explicitly analysed. A characteristic national strand of archaeology, which crosses the boundaries between historical and Aboriginal archaeology, is developing in Australia. So it is timely to consider specific ideas for relating Indigenous oral history and historical archaeology. In our research partnership with Yarrawarra Aboriginal Corporation, which was aimed at understanding Aboriginal place knowledges, we develop the concept of conversation for analysing the research process between archaeology and oral history. We define co-opting conversations as the most usual conversations engaged in between disciplines, research paradigms and between scientific and Indigenous knowledges. We then identify several more productive kinds of conversation that occurred between oral history and archaeology in our research: intersecting, parallel, complementary and contradictory. We found contradictory conversations, usually regarded as failures by other researchers, yielded the most productive analytic understandings. As a result of these different types of conversations we were able to produce a richer understanding of placeness ( sensu Mayne and Lawrence 1998). The richest understandings of place at Yarrawarra develop only through such interdisciplinary conversations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the issue of developing protocols strategy for the library and information sector for indigenous Australians. The 1995 Protocols were a key outcome of both indigenous and professional concern about the state of indigenous relationships with libraries, archives and information services. In Australia, these relationships became a point of professional focus throughout the 1990s. The concerns of indigenous people had been on the record for some time and they were amplified in the 1990s as the profession accelerated its activity in response. In brief, indigenous concerns included issues such as: historical exclusion from libraries; the offensive nature of much of the material about indigenous people in library collections and archives; subject headings that described indigenous peoples and cultures in ways that had little to do with how indigenous peoples described themselves, and which demeaned indigenous peoples and cultures; access issues for indigenous peoples and materials; and general indigenous service issues.

Anthropological research reveals that the scale and complexity of Australian indigenous seascapes correlate with the scale and complexity of spiritual engagements with the sea and use of its resources. Marine specialists see and represent themselves as Saltwater People - an identification spiritually embedded within seascapes rich in cosmological meaning. For Aboriginal people, this embeddedness is underwritten by a Dreaming cosmology that formalizes seascapes as spiritscapes engaged through ritual performance. Such maritime rituals occur on the water, on tidal flats or on dry land. Rituals are the social mechanism by which Saltwater Peoples (Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders) spiritually manage and control their seas and ultimately orchestrate their seascapes. As such, an archaeology of seascapes is more than an archaeology of marine subsistence and procurement technology; it must also be an archaeology of spiritscapes and rituals that mediate human spiritual relationships with the sea. Because ritual sites often have a material expression, it is possible to investigate such sites archaeologically. This scope opens the possibility of investigating long-term developments in people's spiritual attachments to the sea and how seascapes were cosmologically constructed in a broad range of cultural settings. A new hypothesis associating spiritual control of extreme tidal regimes with previously enigmatic marine stone arrangements from central Queensland illustrates the potential value of the spiritscape approach to seascapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the education of Aborigines in Australia. With the attainment of nationhood in 1901, Australia's colonial history ended, for most Australians. However, for a significant minority of inhabitants, Australia's indigenous population, colonialism remained a political reality. Colonialism has now existed for almost 20 years. The article argues that theories of internal colonialism provide an important framework of analysis that can be used to explain policies and practices in Aboriginal education. One of the main features of colonialism is a deep belief in the racial-cultural superiority of the colonizing civilization and people. One form of ideology which legitimated nineteenth century racism in Australia was Christianity. The assumption of the superiority of White British Christian civilization allowed little respect for Aboriginal culture. In the case of Australian Aborigines, economic imperatives legitimated a definition of the oppressed as a race of savages. This in turn defined the limits of schooling and the curriculum. Missionaries used schools as instruments for the inculcation of civilization. English language was the dominant medium of instruction.