We acknowledge the Palawa/Pakana people of Lutruwita upon whose lands the University of Tasmania stands.
Past featured events - watch now!
Japanangka errol West Lectures
This annual event honours the life and work of the late Japanangka errol West, an internationally recognised poet and scholar. Japanangka errol was a leading Tasmanian Aboriginal academic, known for his scholarship in the field of Indigenous methodologies and pedagogies. Japanangka errol West was a leader in what has become a global body of scholarship unashamedly framed from Indigenous perspectives. It is this legacy of alternative narratives and scholarship that this annual lecture seeks to represent. It also seeks to embody another characteristic of Japanangka errol: his unstinting intellectual generosity to all within his orbit.
2024 - The Power and Possibility of Black Knowing
Delivered by Professor Chelsea Watego, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. She is currently Professor of Indigenous Health, and Executive Director of QUT’s Carumba Institute.
Hosted by Associate Professor Sadie Heckenberg, Pro Vice-Chancellor Aboriginal Leadership, University of Tasmania
Professor Watego, in this talk, examines how acknowledging the expertise of Indigenous knowledges can lead to greater freedom and recognition for Indigenous peoples. She explores the idea of “Indigenous intellectual nullius,” a term created by Professor Lester Rigney to describe how Indigenous contributions to knowledge have often been ignored or erased. Learn about the power and potential of Indigenous scholarship, showing how it can support Indigenous sovereignty and humanity.
Chelsea is a prolific writer and public intellectual, having written for IndigenousX, NITV, The Guardian, and The Conversation. She is a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, and was one half of the Wild Black Women radio/podcast show, but most importantly, she is also a proud mum to five beautiful children. Her debut book Another Day in the Colony, published by UQ Press, was released in November 2021 and met with critical acclaim.
Delivered by Palawa man Professor Ian Anderson, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Tasmania.
For over thirty years this annual event’s namesake and other Indigenous scholars have built on global visions to transform the future of Indigenous education. One of their big ideas was the creation of an Indigenous University. Reflecting this, recent government figures indicate that the number of First Nations students commencing a bachelor's degree has more than doubled in Australia since 2008. Despite these positive figures, almost 45% of Australians in their twenties have a university degree, compared to 7.4% of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Clearly, there is still work to be done.
The Australian University’s Accord Panel recommends that “First Nations students, culture, knowledge, research and communities should be at the heart of the Australian system of higher education”. Can Australian universities do this and remain globally relevant? What do the proposed changes mean for the future transformation of higher education in Australia?
Presented by Professor Maggie Walter, Emerita Distinguished Professor of Sociology with the University of Tasmania and Commissioner of the Victorian Yoorook Justice Commission.
A Palawa woman has called upon Tasmania to come together and establish a framework for the advancement of treaty in the state.
Presented by Michael Mansell, Lawyer, author and Aboriginal Land Council chair.
This lecture comes at a critical time in Tasmania’s history. On 22 June 2021, Her Excellency The Honourable Barbara Baker AC Governor of Tasmania, announced that the 50th Parliament of Tasmania will receive a report on ‘the views of Tasmanian Aboriginal people on a Truth Telling process and on what a pathway to a Treaty would consist of.’
For the first time, the government has publicly committed to a process that may lead to a Treaty with the Aboriginal people of lutruwita/Tasmania. Michael outlines his views on what a Treaty might involve.
Presented by Associate Professor Sana Nakata, University of Melbourne for NAIDOC Week.
When John Bleakley described the condition of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders as the ‘tragedy of inarticulate’ in 1961 he reinscribed a dangerous effect paradigms of Western knowledge have had on Indigenous peoples here and around the world: that we do not know.
In this talk, Sana Nakata reflects on the difficult entanglements between the construction of Indigenous peoples as a not-knowing people and the academy’s sustained desire to know Indigenous peoples. In the contemporary moment, as debates about indigenisation and decolonisation of Universities flourish here and abroad, Sana shares her own experience of what it has meant to be a Torres Strait Islander that wants to know and not be known in an academy that often struggles to understand the difference.
Presented by Dr Chad S Hamill, Vice President, Office of Native American Initiatives, Northern Arizona University
For millennia, the waterways of the Columbia Plateau, in the US Northwest interior, have shaped the lifeways of its people, providing sustenance and an ecological framework for social engagement and cohesion. Not long after the 1804-06 Lewis and Clark expedition, the first by Europeans to make its way through the Plateau, that framework was methodically disassembled. The treaties of the mid-19th century severely limited the movement of Plateau tribes, leading to fixed and stagnant communities. The dams curtailed the natural movement of the rivers, obstructing salmon and poisoning the lifeblood of the People.
With a blend of music, visual imagery, storytelling, and scholarship, this presentation/performance utilises Coyote stories about the Columbia River and its tributaries as a springboard for examining the current state of river health. In addition, it explores the ways in which the Spokane Tribe and other Native nations in the region have exercised resilience and resistance in maintaining their relationship with our ancestral homelands. Emphasising traditions not dissimilar from those in other Indigenous communities, the objective will be to illuminate perspectives that take on added urgency in the era of climate change. The hope is that by reflecting on practices rooted in balance and reciprocity, we can begin to alter our current state of collective imbalance and avoid a global catastrophe in the making.
More events
Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History Lecture
Presented by: 2020 Award Winners, Professors Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman.
Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman's book The National Picture: the art of Tasmania's Black War is the first major publication to interrogate frontier conflict with Aboriginal people in Tasmania through the lens of art history. Colonial representations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people were drawn together for a major touring exhibition of the same name. Among these are some of the most remarkable and contentious expressions of Australian colonial art. The National Picture sheds new light on the under-examined figures in this difficult narrative: colonial artist Benjamin Duterrau, the controversial George Augustus Robinson and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people whose land the British invaded.
In this lecture, the authors reflect on the impact of their work and discuss how being awarded the State’s most significant literary prize, The Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History, has shaped their future works.
Greg and Tim are joined in conversation by Ron Radford AM, who as Director of the National Gallery of Australia from 2004-2014, laid the groundwork for this extraordinary project.
About the Lecture
The Dick and Joan Green Family Award has been set up for the establishment of perpetual awards to promote and celebrate Tasmanian history and cultural heritage, and its contribution to the Australian cultural and intellectual life. The first initiative has been to establish the Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History - which includes a public lecture by the recipient - in conjunction with the University of Tasmania.
Annual Fay Gale Lecture of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia
Presented by Distinguished Professor Maggie Walter, University of Tasmania
Professor Maggie Walter FASSA is a Palawa woman from Lutruwita, Tasmania. She is a founding member of the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty Collective and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. She is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and was the inaugural Pro Vice-Chancellor of Aboriginal Research and Leadership at the University of Tasmania 2015-2020. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Her lecture focuses on Indigenous Data Sovereignty which refers to the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands, and resources. Its enactment mechanism Indigenous data governance is built around two central premises: the rights of Indigenous nations over data about them, regardless of where it is held and by whom; and the right to the data Indigenous peoples require to support nation rebuilding. The lecture discusses the rationale for the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement, globally and in Australia, as well as the development of data governance tools including Traditional Knowledge Labels, Biocultural Labels and the CARE principles.