This chapter is written as a conversation (held in December 2016) between David Palmer (host), Ingrid Cumming, Jennie Buchanan (both Research Associates of the project) and Gideon Digby (President of Wikimedia Australia), who introduce themselves and go on to discuss their roles in the Noongarpedia adventure.

This chapter is written as a conversation (held in December 2016) between David Palmer (host), Ingrid Cumming, Jennie Buchanan (both Research Associates of the project) and Gideon Digby (President of Wikimedia Australia), who introduce themselves and go on to discuss their roles in the Noongarpedia adventure.

Another strategy adopted by the Noongapedia team was to experiment with combining Noongarpedia-posting with the learning activities in three university environments. The first of the groups involved in the Noongarpedia work was one that came to be called the ‘Noongarpedia hotshots’. These students were all Indigenous young people enrolled in a range of degree programs, based in the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. The second group were undergraduate students in a first-year course (Introduction to Community Development) designed for those keen on working with an approach noted for its commitment to ‘bottom-up’ and community driven involvement in social programs and solutions. These students were non-Indigenous young people. The third group were postgraduate students in the Masters of Heritage Studies undertaking a course on Debates in Contemporary Heritage Studies. These students included both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Progress has been slow in improving health disparities between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous) Australians and other Australians. While reasons for this are complex, delivering healthcare respectful of cultural differences is one approach to improving Indigenous health outcomes. This paper presents and evaluates an intercultural academic leadership programme developed to support tertiary educators teaching Indigenous health and culture prepare interdisciplinary students to work respectfully and appropriately as health professionals with Indigenous peoples. The programme acknowledges the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australians and draws on theories of the intercultural space to inform reflection and discussion on Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations and their impact on healthcare. Furthermore, the programme encourages establishing a community of practice as a resource for educators. Evaluation indicated participants’ confidence to teach Indigenous content increased following the programme. Participants felt more able to create intercultural, interdisciplinary and interactive learning spaces that were inclusive and safe for students from all cultures. Participants learned skills to effectively facilitate and encourage students to grapple with the complexity of the intercultural space, often tense, uncertain and risky, to enable new understandings and positions to emerge that could better prepare graduates to work in Indigenous health contexts.

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This is an impressionistic and informal essay written near the end of a novelist's Australia Research Council funded research project: Developing narratives from language and stories indigenous to the south coast of Western Australia', and informed by how that research project morphed into an emphasis on revitalization of Noongar language, and the attempt to restore connections between a particular Creation Story and landscape in an area regarded as massacre territory'. A sympathetic reader might think of the topic as The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project meets The Barren Ranges'.

Despite the history of settler colonisation and state control (Attwood, 1989), where Indigenous people and their knowledge has been ‘classified, excluded, objectified, individualised, disciplined, and normalised’ (Best and Kellner), it is important to recognise that this is not the complete story. Western science and knowledge systems have had a long history of interrelationship with Australian Indigenous cultural life and systems. As bell hooks (1992) put it when describing the influence of African-Americans on US culture (see also Todd Boyd, 1997), even in the worst circumstances of domination, blacks have an ability to manipulate, shape and open up exchanges with white knowledge systems.

A young man - scarcely more than a boy - stands on a rock beside the deep sea. A whale surfaces next to him, almost within reach. I can't say if the boy knows the whale, but he knows of the whale: all his life he's watched families of them travel along this coast. Recently, he learned the words of one such journey.

This chapter examines the nature of partnerships between mining companies and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in regional Western Australia from the perspective of Indigenous health, well-being and culture. Reference will be made to specific examples of such partnerships, and attention drawn to research indicating a correlation between the health and well-being of Indigenous people, and their connection to traditional culture along with ‘self-determination’. The impetus Native Title legislation has given to promoting dialogue, collaboration and negotiation between the mining industry and Indigenous communities will be considered, along with an apparent readiness by the mining industry to be more supportive generally of Indigenous culture and its place in mainstream Australia. The chapter will focus particularly on the participation of Indigenous individuals in the mining workforce and related business opportunities, the role and potential of cultural awareness training supplied by Indigenous communities to the mining industry and suggestions as to future directions.

Being described as 'the first Indigenous writer to win Miles Franklin Award twice', and 'the first (Australian) Indigenous writer to win a Commonwealth Writers' Prize' made me uncomfortable. Now, such a slyly boastful beginning might seem a way for me to brag of my talent or luck, or even to claim special privileges and insights in context of a discussion such as 'Indigenous Knowledge: Issues of Cultural Transfer and Transformation'.Or you even might be thinking that I am about to discuss my identitycrisis, since I carry something of privilege of whiteness1 and am consequently often required to justify identifying myself as an Australian Aboriginal person or, more specifically, a Nyungar (the people and culture Indigenous to south-west Australia). In fact, a popular Australian newspaper columnist included me in his list of people, under headline Hip to be Black, who were supposedly exploiting their Aboriginal ancestry to enhance career opportunities.2 But no, even this doesn't explain my discomfort when being praised.My discomfort - in terms of literary achievement and shared history of Australia - comes from sharing, at least in part, 'postcolonial angst' of those who, displaced linguistically if not geographically, write in colonizer's tongue, for an audience of which their own people are a tiny minority and thus for an audience that is effectively the conquerors of one's people.3 Eduardo Galeano's words are apt: Let us mistrust applause. At times we are congratulated by those who consider us innocuous.4It may be my own prickly defensiveness, but phrases like 'the first Indigenous writer to...' seem to imply a hierarchy, and a perhaps unconscious condescension, as if suggesting that one of 'them' has finally managed to reach 'our' level. Literary achievement is thus seen as a measure of assimilation, and of disconnection from an Indigenous heritage. In other words, of failure and defeat.By way of contrast, in this essay I want to show classical Nyungar culture's propensity for literature and suggest ways that a Nyungar heritage might inform contemporary literary work. I will also explore possibility of an Australian literature being 'grafted' onto strong, nurturing roots of one part of Aboriginal Australia's storytelling traditions. I believe that 'first' literary achievement referred to at opening of this essay should really have happened long ago. That it did not is a function of Australia's 'shared history'.For purposes of my argument, I will use definition of writing - that essential element of literature - espoused at 1983 inaugural National Aboriginal Writers Conference held in my home city of Perth, Western Australia. The anthology derived from that conference includes letters, graphics, oral testimony, songs, political addresses, and extracts from plays and musicals, and its foreword states:In a broader sense, writing is definable as any sort of meaningful inscription, and in case of Aboriginal Australia this would include sand paintings and drawings... body markings, paintings as well as engravings on bark or stone.5In fact, I will also use examples from an oral tradition embedded in a culture which, although not privileging reading and writing, nevertheless created propensity for great visual acuity and meaningful interpretation of tiny markings. I thus make activity of 'tracking' a metaphor for reading, if not writing. A nineteenth-century account by Bishop Salvado of an encounter with a group of young Nyungar people reveals aptness of metaphor. The Bishop drew letters of Spanish alphabet in sand, uttering each sound as he did so. His journal tells us that his new companions readily reproduced his markings and then, casually confirming their expertise, their mirror images.6Another example of literacy 'readiness' is a pen-and-ink drawing produced in 1833 - very first years of colonization of this part of world - by a Nyungar person, Galliput:Galliput was more than ready to adopt new technologies in interests of storytelling and communication. …