Congratulating Professor Barry Judd, Dr Juliana Prpic, Professor Marcia Langton AO and their research teams on receiving a highly competitive ARC grants for Australian Society, History and Culture

The Indigenous Knowledge Institute congratulates the University of Melbourne's Professor Barry Judd (Director, Australian Indigenous Studies, Faculty of Arts), Dr Juliana Prpic (Indigenous Engineering Education Specialist) and Professor Marcia Langton AO (Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies and Associate Provost) on receiving highly competitive ARC grants under the Special Research Initiative for Australian Society, History and Culture 2020 scheme. This is an extraordinary achievement that attests to the outstanding calibre of their research teams and Indigenous partners. Well done to everyone involved. Summaries of the projects funded follow.

Indigenous Australia: A History of Documents 1770–2000

Investigators: Associate Professor Katherine Ellinghaus; Professor Barry Judd; Emeritus Professor Richard Broome

This project aims to address the ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are mostly known to others through the eyes of non-Indigenous observers rather than actual human interactions. This project applies new methodologies to written historical sources that are based on reflexive approaches, and the privileging of Aboriginal wellbeing and Indigenous perspectives. By using these innovative decolonising methods to produce a four-volume documentary history of Indigenous Australia, this project aims to change the way documentary collections have shaped our past, thereby creating innovative insights into Australia’s history and new understandings of Indigenous peoples shaped partly by themselves.

Indigenous Engineering: Interpreting engineering foundations of Budj Bim

Investigators: Dr Martin Tomko; Dr Juliana Prpic; Dr Kourosh Khoshelham; Dr Agathe Lisé-Pronovost; Professor Marcia Langton

The Budj Bim World Heritage Cultural Landscape is internationally recognised for preserving the world’s oldest aquaculture system, which provided an economic and social base for the Gunditjmara people of South-western Victoria for more than six millennia. This project aims to elucidate the engineering processes that enabled the Gunditjmara to site, plan, construct, operate and maintain this aquaculture complex, to show how it may have evolved over time, and how it responded to changing social and environmental circumstances. This project will develop geospatial methods to uncover and document the technological foundations of the aquaculture complex, and contribute to the understanding of the Gunditjmara technological knowledge and history.