Before lunch (9.15 - 12.00)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island perspectives

Preparation

TO BEGIN THE DAY; I would like you to bring at least two indigenous language terms or usages which you found interesting/challenging/dumbfounding/etc. These do not necessarily have to be in language but can be examples of indigenized English (or other languages).

IN ADDITION, please prepare and consider the following:

1. Which part/parts of Banks’ talk to you find most interesting and why?

2. Is there a scientific basis for using ‘65,000 years’ in the title?

3. Bring to class one other example of indigenous science (it need not be contemporary, and it need not be Australian/Torres Strait Islander).

4. Mununggurr. Williams’ text I Run is presented performatively and written (in Fire Front, pp 150-151). How do you react to each of these forms?

5. Which of the references in I Run need further contextualisation? For example, why ‘brown-skin babies? And what are ‘fun runs’, a ‘black tracker’, ‘ancient Aboriginal antiquity’, etc.?

6. Read Fuller’s “Myth This” in This All Come Back Now (pp. 73-92). What are we being asked to understand about ‘this thing/the creature – this being” (pp. 85-86)? Consider the elements of this text and decide whether (or how well) this text fits into the genre ‘Indigenous Gothic’.

7. Which other of the texts in This All Come Back Now engaged you, and why?

Reading

Banks K. 65,000 Years: The Great History of Australian Aboriginal Astronomy.
Mununggurr-Williams M. I Run.
Saunders M. This All Come Back Now: An Anthology of First Nations Speculative Fiction. University of Queensland Press; 2022.
Whittaker A. Fire Front: First Nations Poetry and Power Today. University of Queensland Press; 2020.

Presentation

Australian and Torres Strait Islander

After lunch (13.15 - 16.00)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island perspectives

Preparation

Watch the performances of Midnight Oil and Yothy Yindi from the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games. (You find them in this clip from 1 hour and 51 minutes to 2 hours and 3 minutes).

Sydney 2000 - Closing Ceremony | Sydney 2000 Replays (youtube.com)

Reflect on the following:

How can songs in general, and song lyrics specifically, help us raise awareness of indigenous issues?
Are there songs that you find particularly suitable for teaching and learning about indigenous cultures?

Listening

Midnight Oil. The Makarrata Project. Sony; 2020.
The Makarrata Project - Lyrics
Yothu Yindi. Treaty. Mushroom; 1991.

Presentation

Midnight Oil: Song Lyrics and Indigenous Perspectives

Optional reading

Knut Øystein Høvik. (2023). From Burning Beds to Rising Seas: Environmental Issues in the Song Lyrics of Midnight Oil