Indigenous Australia (INDG10001)

Indigenous Australia introduces you to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through time. It seeks to expand your understandings of Indigenous society by focusing on the diverse knowledges, scholarship, experiences, stories, and concepts of the world’s longest continuous culture. With your peers, you will have the opportunity to explore the historical, cultural institutional and political relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, in the past and how these continue in the present.

The subject uses a relational approach and draws on diverse works to develop your critical thinking skills, and to articulate your personal standpoints as Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Harnessing your curiosity, topics for discovery include Indigenous resistance and activism, constitutional recognition, kinship, racism in sport, Indigenous astronomy, sovereignty, First Nations literature, and criminology and incarceration. Indigenous narrative, story and metaphor are some of the ways used to discover Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing in partnership with scholarly resources such as journal articles, book chapters and reports. At times websites, media, film, music, dance and literature will be used to develop your ability to acquire and articulate new knowledge.

Indigenous Australia is available as a Bachelor of Arts Discovery subject, supporting your introduction to university and fostering connections within your course. If you are taking this as your Discovery subject, you will need to concurrently complete the three compulsory Joining Melbourne modules.