In partnership with UQ School for the Environment, the Indigenous Futures Seminar Series is excited to welcome Professor Jackie Huggins & Uncle Fred to present May’s seminar.
Kooramindanjie, known to many today as Carnarvon Gorge, is part of a world-renowned National Park most often encountered through frames of tourism and heritage management. The biocultural aspects of the park are presented through marked trails and interpretive signs largely as a window onto an Aboriginal past, less so an Aboriginal present or futures. In this seminar, Professor Jackie Huggins and Uncle Fred Conway reflect on Kooramindanjie as ancestral Country and as a public National Park, asking what it means to walk Country as a family member, and what it asks of those who come as visitors. Drawing on Uncle Fred’s decades of work caring for the Gorge, and on Jackie’s historical research and community work, including the Marking Country / Walking Deep History project, they explore how history is carried in Country and how it is shaped and constrained by dominant ways of engaging with Kooramindanjie. This seminar considers visiting Aboriginal lands with storied histories, the responsibilities that come with access, and how universities, parks, and visitors might relate to Country otherwise.
Register to attend here.
