Cultural Explorations of Time and Space: Indigenous Australian Artists-in Residence, Conventional Narratives and Children’s Text Creation

Abstract

This paper details a project, funded by the University of Ballarat in Victoria, which addresses a local problem of schools' lack of acknowledgement of their being positioned on traditional owners' land. In addressing this issue, I am using two texts, 'My Place' (Wheatley and Rawlins 1987) and 'Who am I? The Diary of Mary Talence' (Heiss 2004) to engage the participants in discussions to make visible what has been invisible; that is, the issue of traditional Indigenous Australian ownership of the land on which the school is placed. Taking up notions of deconstruction from poststructuralist theory, I have looked to these texts as ways of disrupting the taken-for-granted occupation of public space, that is, I examine the language used to position the readers and 'yield up the ideologies that inform them' (Bradford 2001, p.9). I will then ask participants to use these understandings to look at their own situation in relation to the space their school occupies. What is examined in this project is the current state of affairs, where the land occupied by schools is owned by the state, and, notionally at least, by the school community of various stakeholders with no sense even of an Indigenous Australian perspective on ways in which relationships with the land may go well beyond concepts of ownership. The project referred to in this paper has not concluded, so I do not report here on any changes that may have occurred. Rather, I report on how I envisage the texts are to be used to make visible issues of land ownership and how and why these particular texts can contribute to this.