CREATIVE PRISON WRITING PROGRAM PROVIDES VOICE FOR INDIGENOUS MEN ARC Future Fellow and Law School academic at Griffith University, Professor Elena Marchetti, is evaluating a unique creative writing prison program at Junee Correction Centre in New South Wales, which is helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men strengthen their connection to culture. Conceived in 2010 by Aboriginal Elder, Aunty Barbara Nicholson, and established in 2011, the Dreaming Inside: Voices from the Junee Correctional Centre Prisoner Writing Program is the only prison creative writing program that specifically targets Indigenous inmates. The program has provided Indigenous men with an opportunity to use creative writing as a form of expression and exercise a form of agency by publishing their poems and stories in books, without censorship. Professor Marchetti also notes that the program enables the men to engage with Elders and other community members, fostering cultural connections. The work forms part of a larger ARC Future Fellowship project evaluating Indigenous-focused criminal justice programs in ways that acknowledge and privilege the position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. (Above): Dreaming Inside tutor and founder Aunty Barbara Nicholson reads poetry from the anthology of poems written by Junee Correctional Centre inmates at the Sydney Writers Festival. (Below): Dreaming Inside. Credit: Wollongong Art Gallery.
STUDYING ABORIGINAL STONE-WALLED FISH TRAPS IN THE GULF OF CARPENTARIA Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) have used high-resolution close-range drone photogrammetry and a suite of spatial information analytical techniques to investigate Kaiadilt Aboriginal stone-walled intertidal fishtraps on Sweers Island in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria. Stone-walled intertidal fishtraps were built to control the movements of marine animals. They are the largest structures built by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and surround the Australian coastline, with dense complexes around the South Wellesley Islands and some Torres Strait Islands. The fishtraps were designed to be most effective in enclosing water at mid-tide, which corresponds to the tradition of collecting fish from fishtraps at mid-tide among Kaiadilt Aboriginal people—the traditional owners of the South Wellesley Islands, and partners in the research. Results will feed into plans to protect this extraordinary cultural heritage and help our understanding of how people used these island environments in the past. The next phase of the project involves mapping all of the fishtraps around Kaiadilt sea country in all of the islands in the South Wellesley Archipelago.
The new fascinating aerial images document trap walls hundreds of meters long and up to a metre high.
Each year, the latest volume of Dreaming Inside is launched by the Wollongong Art Gallery as part of the Sydney Writers Festival and at the Junee Correctional Centre with men who are present at the workshop.
New aerial image documenting trap walls hundreds of meters long in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Credit: Anna Kreij and Sean Ulm.
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SUPPORTING INDIGENOUS RESEARCH
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