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As the first adaptation of a complete Shakespearean work presented entirely in one Aboriginal language of Australia, Hecate is a landmark production in Australian theatre. The Noongar language of t...

Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dyna...

Noongar West Australian dramaturg Jack Davis’s plays present an Indigenous Australian perspective on rationing that identifies it as a punitive form of subjugation. Davis’s Kullark and No Sugar sho...

Background The Birthing on Noongar Boodjar project (NHMRC Partnership Project #GNT1076873) investigated Australian Aboriginal women and midwives’ views of culturally safe care during childbearing. This paper reports on midwifery knowledge of Aboriginal women's cultural needs, their perceptions of health systems issues, and their ability to provide equitable and culturally safe care. Method A qualitative study framed by an Indigenous methodology and methods which supported inductive, multilayered analyses and consensus‐driven interpretations for two clinical midwife data groups (n = 61) drawn from a larger project data set (n = 145) comprising Aboriginal women and midwives. Findings Midwives demonstrated limited knowledge of Aboriginal women's cultural childbearing requirements, reported inadequate access to cultural education, substituted references to women‐centered care in the absence of culturally relevant knowledge and consistently expressed racialized assumptions. Factors identified by midwives as likely to influence the midwifery workforce enabling them to provide culturally safe care for Aboriginal women included more professional development focused on improving understandings of cultural birth practices and health system changes which create safer maternal health care environments for Aboriginal women. Conclusions Individual, workforce, and health systems issues impact midwives’ capability to meet Aboriginal women's cultural needs. An imperative exists for effective cultural education and improved professional accountability regarding Aboriginal women's perinatal requirements and significant changes in health systems to embed culturally safe woman‐centered care models as a means of addressing racism in health care.

Self-determination for Aboriginal people in Australia has been a long sought after yet difficult objective to reach. The recently concluded Noongar Settlement in the state of Western Australia opens new opportunities and could potentially set a new benchmark for non-territorial autonomy and self-government for an Aboriginal community. The Noongar Settlement exceeds the more traditional settlements of a native title claim since it provides elaborate institutions for self-government albeit by way of private bodies corporate. The bodies corporate for the Noongar people would enable them to make and administer decisions; offer services; undertake management of public conservation areas; and advocate for the best interests of their community. This privatised form of self-government may not only provide new impetus to other land claim processes in Australia, it may also address the often-heard demands from Aboriginal people for a treaty to be entered into between themselves and the government of Australia.

Geophytes are a considerable component of Southwest Australian flora and thus, unsurprisingly, feature heavily in the diets and culture of Noongar First Nations people of this old, climatically buffered, infertile landscape-dominated global biodiversity hotspot. Of ~650 geophyte species recorded in south-western Australia, 90 are known traditional Noongar foods. Despite the significant role of geophytes in Noongar traditional lives, there is little published knowledge of the ecological effects of harvesting geophytes. We measured and observed soil and plant outcomes of tuber harvest for two Noongar staple species of Platysace Bunge to test whether it improved soil conditions for plant growth and/or aided tuber availability, as suggested for other Australian Aboriginal root crops. Harvesting of Platysace deflexa led to increases in some soil nutrient levels and, unexpectedly, to an increase in bulk density. Platysace deflexa stem abundance was restored to the pre-harvest level within 1 year post-harvest, whereas tuber weight and volume were less than pre-harvest levels after 2 years. A post-harvest increase in the proportion of small tubers in crops suggests that harvest has a renewing and homogenizing effect on tubers. Site-based differences in post-harvest P. deflexa and Platysace trachymenioides quantity of tubers were consistent with preferential harvest of some populations by present-day Noongar families and their ancestors.

Occurring across all southern hemisphere continents except Antarctica, old, climatically buffered, infertile landscapes (OCBILs) are centres of biological richness, often in biodiversity hotspots. Among a matrix of young, often disturbed, fertile landscapes (YODFELs), OCBILs are centres of endemism and diversity in the exceptionally rich flora of the south-west Australian global biodiversity hotspot, home to Noongar peoples for ≥ 48 000 years. We analysed contemporary traditional Noongar knowledge of adjacent OCBILs (e.g. granite outcrops) and YODFELs (e.g. creekline fringes) both at a single site and in two larger areas to test whether patterns of disturbance dictated by Noongar custom align with OCBIL theory. We found that Noongar traditional knowledge reflects a regime of concentrated YODFEL rather than OCBIL disturbance—a pattern which aligns with maximal biodiversity preservation. SIMPER testing found traditional Noongar OCBIL and YODFEL activities are 64–75% dissimilar, whereas Pearson’s chi-square tests revealed camping, burning, travelling through country and hunting as primarily YODFEL rather than OCBIL activities. We found that Noongar activities usually avoid OCBIL disturbance. This combined with high floristic diversity following enduring First Peoples’ presence, suggests that traditional Noongar knowledge is valuable and necessary for south-west Australian biodiversity conservation. Similar cultural investigations in other OCBIL-dominated global biodiversity hotspots may prove profitable.

In Australia, language and song are integral to maintaining Aboriginal knowledge systems. British colonisation and ensuing Australian government policies of assimilation have adversely impacted the...

This article explores connections between history, emotion and Aboriginal song in the south of Western Australia. Songs performed in the Noongar language in the 19th and early 20th centuries provid...

The Noongar people of the federal state of Western Australia have recently entered into what can be described as the most comprehensive settlement of a native title claim that spans an area of 200 000 square kilometres. The Settlement lays the foundation of a sui generis model for indigenous and minority self-determination in Australia and beyond. The Settlement sits between the spheres of public law and private law and provides for a form of non-territorial autonomy that is unique not only to Australia. The Noongar people are acknowledged as the traditional owners of the entire area, albeit that major other towns and cities are located in the area and the Noongar people only constitute very small minority. Whereas the topic of non-territorial self-government has been mainly explored in theory and in practice in the European domain, the Noongar Settlement shows how the principles that embody non-territorial autonomy may find root in other parts of the world. The potential relevance of the Noongar Settlement for non-territorial self-government of Aboriginal people or other minorities lies in four essential elements: firstly, creating for the Noongar people legal Corporations by statute for purposes of their self-government; secondly, decentralising powers and functions to the Corporations to enable them to perform the functions of a community government to its members; thirdly, to enable the elected Corporations to develop policies, make decisions and deliver pubic services on a personal rather than a geographical basis to the members of the community; and fourthly, to allow the Corporations to cooperate with and engage other levels of government within the system of intergovernmental relations in Australia. The Noongar Corporations, in effect, have the hallmarks of a fourth level government and represent a potential sui generis model for indigenous and minority non-territorial self-government.

Background Birth on Country is often assumed as relevant to Aboriginal women in rural/remote locations and not usually associated with urban environments. In Western Australia, one third of the Aboriginal population live in the greater metropolitan area. We wanted to know Aboriginal women’s experiences of on Country urban births. Methods Indigenous qualitative data collection and analysis methods were used to learn about Aboriginal women’s stories of contemporary and past experiences of maternity care and cultural practices associated with Birth on Country. Results Aboriginal Birthing, Senior and Elder women consistently reported ongoing cultural practices associated with childbirth including knowledge sharing across generations and family support, observance of extended family present at the time of or shortly after birth, and how their cultural security was improved when Aboriginal staff were present. Also noted, were the inflexibility of health systems to meet their needs and midwives lack of cultural awareness and understanding of the importance of Aboriginal kinship. Conclusion The Birthing on Noongar Boodjar project Aboriginal women’s data represents four generations of women’s stories, experiences and expressions of childbearing, which highlighted that maternity care changes across time have failed to acknowledge and support Aboriginal women’s cultural needs during childbearing. In terms of on Country urban birth, the women collectively expressed a strong desire to maintain cultural practices associated with childbirth, including birthing close to home (on Country); having family acknowledged and included throughout the perinatal period; and, having access to Aboriginal midwives, nurses, doctors, and other health care workers to support their cultural security.

Highlights Community psychology can contribute to healing and cultural renewal for indigenous communities.Storytelling through community arts practice is used to witness Elder stories.Narrative inquiry shows the ongoing effects of colonisation and coloniality.Narrative inquiry shows the various ways people resist and survive oppression.Decolonial approaches are vital to the goals of critical community psychology., Researchers and practitioners in community psychology have an important role to play in supporting decolonial work including promoting opportunities for reclamation, healing, and acknowledgment of history. In this article, we discuss research undertaken alongside a community arts and cultural development project that sought to support Aboriginal people in Western Australian to create an archive of their stories for current and future generations; stories that could serve as resources for healing, reclamation, and for examining a painful and unjust past. Narrative approaches have been promoted in community psychology to advance empowerment research and practice alongside marginalized, excluded, and minoritized groups. We report on findings from a critical narrative inquiry of the stories shared through the project and in conversational interviews with four Noongar Elders to explicate the history and ongoing legacy of racialized oppression in their lives as well as cultural continuity and survival evident in the stories. Community researchers and practitioners can play a role in amplifying those stories as part of the co‐intentional work of decolonization.

The Birthing on Noongar Boodjar project investigated the cultural birthing practices of Aboriginal women living on country (Noongar Boodjar) in an urbanised environment; and their experiences of interactions with maternal health care providers (especially midwives). The evidence from the five year study identified changes required in health systems to adequately support Aboriginal women and their families during the significant cultural and life event of childbearing. This paper sets out the methodological and theoretical considerations which framed how the Birthing on Noongar Boodjar project was conducted by the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal investigators. We provide a brief project background before describing the Indigenous research methodologies and practices crucial to exploring the research questions, collecting data in culturally secure ways and using cultural lenses to analyze and interpret the data. The study design and results are reported in other publications.

The Island of Rottnest is commonly known to Noongar people as Wadjemup, “place across the river” or from its colonial connections the “Isle of Spirits”. Rottnest is located approximately 18 km off the coast of Western Australia, near Fremantle, and is world-renowned as a tourism precinct. The island’s hidden history of Aboriginal incarceration, dispossession and death within the Panopticon-inspired Quod prison is less well known. Foucault is eminently known for his theories around panopticism, at least by any student of cultural and critical theory in the last few decades. Foucault’s based on the 18th-century social reformer (philosopher) Jeremy Bentham’s idea that prisoners could be controlled and reformed by creating the illusion that they were at all times under surveillance. This paper investigates the Panopticon’s influence on one of the oldest cultures in the world – Australian Aboriginals in the western state of the continent – who were, from 1864, incarcerated in a Panopticon-influenced building referred to as the Quod. The incarceration dehumanized, dispossessed and colonized proud people. L'île de Rottnest est connue des Noongar sous le nom de Wadjemup, «endroit de l'autre côté de la rivière» ou sous le nom de «l'île des esprits», en raison de son passé colonial. L’île de Rottnest est située à environ 18 km au large des côtes du Western Australia, près de Fremantle, et est une destination touristique prisée. L’histoire cachée de l’incarcération, de la dépossession et de la mort des populations indigènes dans cette prison, inspirée du Panoptique, est moins connue. Pour forger le concept de panoptisme, Foucault s’est basé sur l'idée du réformateur social et philosophe Jeremy Bentham, qui au XVIIIe siècle a expliqué que les prisonniers pouvaient être contrôlés et réformés en créant l'illusion qu'ils étaient à tout moment sous surveillance. Cet article examine l’influence du Panoptique sur l’une des plus anciennes cultures du monde - les Aborigènes du Western Australia - qui ont été, à partir de 1864, incarcérés dans un bâtiment appelé Quod. L’expérience de l’incarcération a déshumanisé, dépossédé et colonisé les populations fières et indépendantes.

It was challenging enough to find the two hundred or so cases in this book of male and female children, irrespective of their ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and ages, giving evidence in court. To locate cases involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, children as witnesses proved a far greater challenge. As recently as 2012, Noongar woman and legal scholar, Dr Hannah McGlade noted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s “experiences of courts have not been documented” but that they suffer the same risks of secondary trauma that all child witnesses do. This chapter examines features of the few cases uncovered where Indigenous children gave evidence, including Indigenous culture being used to undermine child witness testimony ranging from clothing worn by the complainant; assumptions about nomadic lifestyles, to gratuitous concurrence, silence and eye contact. Acknowledgement of these issues resulted in numerous inquiries and reports, but ultimately the system remained unchanged.

Fiction has the power to show the reality of people’s experiences and spark emotion in those who read it. Speculative fiction especially has been used to observe our political and cultural climate and project an image of what is possible, even probable, through speculating about worlds that are unlike our own reality. My shelf is filled with speculative dystopian novels; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring surveillance and censorship in an authoritarian State, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, studying conservative approaches that tyrannize women. Terra Nullius, written by Wirlomin Noongar woman, Claire Coleman, sits beside these classics in its own right, detailing the dystopia generated by colonialism in Australia.

This article explores Marjorie Caw’s (nee Hubbe) transition from her professional work and active citizenship as a young, single, kindergarten teacher in Adelaide to her multi-faceted married life on a farm near Kojonup, Western Australia during the interwar period. Besides engaging fully in domestic work, Caw taught her children at home and maintained her commitments to nation building by leading the Kojonup Country Women’s Association. Issues of gender, class and race relations mediated her domestic work and relationships with her husband and children, successive white maids and the Noongar people on the farm as well as her civic commitments in the interwar years.

This essay examines recent significant political events in the context of Australian native title triggered by a Federal Court case, McGlade v National Native Title Registrar (2017) 340 ALR...

This reviewer was privileged to have examined the thesis from which this book derives. Now in printed form, it is a wonderful work, not least because of the superb production by the University of W...

‘And I just think it’s important as a coach, if you’re coaching Indigenous girls or Indigenous people like that, to ensure that they give themselves some credit.’ Courtney Ugle is a Noongar woman who works and who plays AFL for Essendon Football Club. She played in the inaugural VFLW season. She is a level 1 AFL coach and has coached for the Woomeras and in the Kirby Bentley and Kick Start Carnivals. She has previously worked in the community sector as a support worker at Djirra, and a mentor and caseworker for SMYL.

In That Deadman Dance, Kim Scott draws on Noongar vocabulary and ontology to immerse readers in a world where rain cries and chuckles as it structures the land according to its own designs. This essay positions Scott’s novel as one manifestation of his ongoing commitment to the recovery of repressed Noongar knowledge, and it formulates a framework of ecospectrality to focus attention on the recovery of repressed knowledge of the nonhuman. It contends that Scott adapts the form of the novel to circulate this knowledge to local and global readers, offering it as a resource to shape the future rather than resolve the past.

Kim Scott was the first Aboriginal author to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2000 for Benang, an award he won again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance. Yet despite these national accolades, Scott interrogates the very categories of Australian and Indigenous literatures to which his work is subjected. His writing reimagines, incorporates and challenges colonial ways of thinking about people and place. This thesis reveals the provocative proposal running through Scott’s collected works and projects that contemporary Australian society (and literature) should be grafted onto regional Aboriginal languages and stories as a way to express a national sense of “who we are and what we might be”. Scott’s vision of a truly postcolonial Australia and literature is articulated through his collected writings which form a network of social, historical, political and personal narratives. This thesis traces how Scott’s writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project (Wirlomin Project) reconfigure colonial power relationships in the disputed territories of place, language, history, identity and the globalised world of literature. Ultimately, Scott intends to create an empowered Noongar position in cross-cultural exchange and does so by disrupting the fixed categories inherent in these territories; territories constructed during the colonising and nationalising of Australia. Due to the range of the disputed territories identified in this thesis, there is an engagement with a variety of theoretical frameworks including Val Plumwood’s ecopoetics, Bakhtinian dialogic, Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, David Damrosch’s world literature, Martin Nakata’s cultural interface and, importantly, Scott’s own writing on regional Noongar literature. Each of these approaches to Scott’s writing and the Wirlomin Project analyses how Scott begins a process of decolonisation, finding sites of Noongar empowerment, truth-telling and reciprocity in areas of cross-cultural dispute. Scott’s writing problematises the concept of a bound and unified nation in a constructive way. This thesis is broken into seven chapters that chronologically examine each of Scott’s texts within a particular disputed territory and critical framework. The first chapter performs an ecocritical reading of Scott’s short fiction and poetry (these works span the period from 1985 to 2015) and is followed by analyses of language and True Country, history and Benang, Noongar identity in Kayang and Me, the globalised world of literature and That Deadman Dance, Noongar empowerment through the Wirlomin Project, and a revisiting of these key areas in relation to Taboo. Increasingly, the Wirlomin Project becomes the nexus of Scott’s creative, personal and political trajectories and this thesis argues that, through the community-run project, Scott seeks to position an empowered Noongar heritage at the heart of a conflicted country and its stories.

The reviving of the presence, existence, and eugenics of the Aborigines become pivotal issue to be brought up in the literature. Since the coming of the settlers, the Aborigines have seemed to experience shifting identity; living as a nominal population over the settlers; and later on becoming the ones who are attached with the ‘exotic’ due to their uniqueness and scarcity in number compared to the majority. This condition, from being the natives who own the land into those who become the ‘rare’ in their own land, provokes crucial issues related to the Aboriginal identity, which is challenging to be further discussed. Through That Deadman Dance, Scott tries to resurrect the Aborigine’s identity, especially Noongar, in the midst of disappearing Aboriginal communities. This article is aimed at revealing the identity of Noongar people by selecting and grouping the textual data in the novel which portray the Aborigines cultural experience and their indigenity. Later on, the data were investigated based on Muecke’s concept of connectedness to approach the problem. Accordingly, the narrative presented by Scott indicates that he has offered an alternative to view Aborigine’s identity which is potentially unsettling; thus, this finding seems to challenge the prescribed identity of Noongar corresponded by the major society.

As of 2011, an estimated 669,900 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accounted for 3 per cent of Australia's total population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015). Of that population, over 30,000 people from a uniquely large urban/rural area in the southwest of Western Australia—including the author of this article—identify as Noongar (also spelled Nyungar). This makes Noongar one of the largest Aboriginal cultural groups in Australia (SWALSC 2009; see figure 1); and yet, the Noongar language is critically endangered, with just 369 speakers acknowledged in the 2011 Australian census (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015). Noongar language is not unique in this regard; the most recent National Indigenous Languages Survey indicates that only “around 120” of more than two hundred Aboriginal languages are still spoken and that “about 13 can be considered strong” (Marmion, Obata, and Troy 2014:xii). Music traditions, often strongly tied to language, are disappearing too: approximately 98 per cent of Aboriginal musical traditions have been lost since colonization (Corn 2012:240). As is the case with most of Aboriginal Australia, traditional Noongar music is primarily vocal, featuring lyrics in the Noongar language. This implies an inextricable link between Noongar language and Noongar song traditions, a co-dependency that is critical for the vitality of both.

Dyche, deals with analysing the psyche of the Dalit – “Dyche” - to redefine Dalit community and empower the victimised psyche of Dalit. The exploration of Dalit historiography and psychology through Dyche substantiates that there is cultural, spiritual and psychological uniformity among Dalits and other Indigenous people of the globe. Hence exploration through “Dyche” towards one’s culture, tradition and identity could edify the cause of psychical wounds and thus could facilitate deliverance to indigenous communities from their marginal predicament and bring back harmony. This paper attempts to apply some features of Dyche, the practical Dalit psyche theory, for studying Dalits, Sami people of Norway and Noongar people of Australian Aborigines and to explore their common life experiences, ethos and common self-assertion for liberation with reference to Indian Dalit writer M.C. Raj’s novel, Yoikana and Australian Aboriginal writer Kim Scott’s novel, That Deadman Dance. The paper also endeavours to differentiate between migrant psyche and indigenous psyche and discuss the compensatory mechanisms “Moralising” and “Open Rebellion” adopted by the Oppressor and the Oppressed respectively in their negotiation with the “other.” Keywords: Dyche; compensatory mechanism; migrant psyche; moralising; open rebellion DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2203-13

In 1988–1989 and again in 2012 Noongar Aboriginal groups occupied high profile riverside sites in close proximity to the centre of Perth, Western Australia. On both occasions they were claiming rights to land from which their ancestors had been removed in the early nineteenth century by British colonial settlers. During a relatively brief period of struggle and interaction between the Indigenous and settler groups following the proclamation of the Swan River Colony in 1829, the Noongar population of what is now the Perth Metropolitan Area were effectively dispossessed of their land. Indeed, from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century Aboriginal people were required to obtain written permits in order to enter the urban area of Perth. In spite of this, the local Noongar population has maintained an ongoing physical, emotional and spiritual connection to their traditional country and, in particular, to certain sites within it. Two of these sites, Goonininup/the Old Swan Brewery, in 1988–1989, and Matagarup/Heirisson Island, in 2012, have been occupied by Noongar groups asserting their rights to this land. This paper will describe and compare both sites of occupation with particular reference to the methods and motivations of the occupiers and the attitudes and responses of the wider metropolitan population to these events. It will also place them in the wider context of ongoing debates over the acknowledgement of Aboriginal claims to and rights over sites of Indigenous significance and of land occupations as a form of protest.