‘Taking back our stories’: Talking about Indigenous Women’s Family History Research

The panel explores opportunities and barriers for Indigenous women to ‘take back’ their stories, and seeks to foster ongoing conversations, and spark new discussions, about Indigenous women’s family history research.

The Research Centre for Deep History’s Indigenous Family History Research Residency has been developed to create ways to overcome some of the barriers to such research. These include limited time, limited archival access exacerbated by geographic distance, and limits caused by the complexity of institutional catalogues, processes and protocols.

This discussion will be led by Aunty Dr Judi Wickes and Dr Kath Apma Penangke Travis, with contributions from program convenor Dr Beth Marsden, collaborator Professor Kat Ellinghaus and participants in the RCHD’s Indigenous Family History Research Residency. It will consider issues of archival access; barriers to Indigenous family history; the limits of academic history practices and the importance of programming to support Indigenous family history for individuals, families, communities and nation-building. It will ask how or if it is possible to reframe history/her-story. The forum will highlight the importance of building connections, sharing knowledge, and talking about family history in programs aiming to support Indigenous women’s research journeys.

This event will be followed by light refreshments in the RSSS Foyer. Attendance is free but registration is essential.

About the speakers: 
Aunty Judi Wickes (Kalkadoon/Wakka Wakka) is a respected community Elder, social worker and educator who writes and presents nationally and internationally on the topics of Stolen Generation and the certificate of exemption and its impacts on generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. She currently co-leads the ARC-funded project ‘Aboriginal Exemption: Truth-telling, history and healing,’ and has published extensively on the history of exemption, and its impacts on generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including a chapter in Indigenous Biography and Autobiography, ‘“Never Really Heard of It”: The Certificate of Exemption and Lost Identity.’ 

Dr Kath Apma Penangke Travis is a post-doctoral research fellow at Moodani Balluk,  Victoria University, working in the field of history, critical archival studies and Indigenous studies.  She has published in Australian Feminist Studies (2019), self-published her biography, Minnie, Mum and Me: The Black Headed Snake (2018), and has a chapter in the forthcoming Reframing Indigenous Biography (2024).

Professor Kat Ellinghaus teaches Australian history at Latrobe University on un-ceded Wurundjeri Country. She is of German, Irish, English, and Scottish descent and is the author of Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937 (2006), Blood Will Tell (2017) and (with Professor Barry Judd) Enlightened Aboriginal Futures (2023). Kat is currently co-leading two new large research projects. Ngura Ninti is large team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars creating a four volume collection of documents of Australian history chosen in consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; Aboriginal Exemption: Truth-telling, History and Healing, which is co-led by Aunty Judi Wickes and Aunty Kella Robinson: a project aimed at raising awareness and telling culturally safe stories about twentieth-century assimilation policies that caused family dislocation and fractured identities.

Dr Beth Marsden is a non-Indigenous post-doctoral research fellow in the Research Centre for Deep History in the School of History at ANU. She is the convenor of the Indigenous Family History Research Residency, and a historian working on a national history of schooling for First Nations people.  

This event was first published on the ANU Gender Institute website - for enquires or more information contact: admin.genderinstitute@anu.edu.au