Heritage, Indigenous Doing, and Wellbeing

Heritage, Indigenous Doing and Wellbeing presents an Aboriginal Australian relational understanding of the world that offers a counter-narrative to the Western notion of heritage and new insights into the potential for sustaining the complex systems that support all life.

From an Indigenous Australian perspective, the Western concept of heritage is intentionally exclusionary and supports social, political, economic, and environmental injustice. Aboriginal People engage with landscape every day in entirely, different ways, seeing Country as a living ‘heritage’, but in a unique relationship form that engages the individual with place, ancestors, language, and wellbeing. However, Country is most often relegated by heritage proponents to ‘intangible heritage’, and this results in the concept having little legislative, legal, or administrative weight. Drawing on a common understanding of Country as sacred, living, and sentient, rather than as objectified property or resource, the contributors to this book explore a diversity of relationships with Country that demonstrate the richness and the practical utility of this relational understanding.

Heritage, Indigenous Doing, and Wellbeing foregrounds the voices of Australian Aboriginal People who are involved in ‘Caring for Country’. It will be an essential resource for those engaged in the study of Country, heritage, museums, Indigenous Peoples, landscape architecture, environmental studies, planning, and archaeology. It will also be of great interest to heritage practitioners working around the globe.

Professor Norm Sheehan is currently the Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland (UQ), Co-Chair of the Vice Chancellor’s UQ Reconciliation Action Plan Oversight Committee, a member of the UQ School of Education Advisory Council, and an expert advisor of Indigenous research to the UQ Human Research Ethics Committee.

Dr David S. Jones is Professor (Research) at Monash University, Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra, Adjunct Professor at Griffith University, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.

Josh Creighton has worked in Indigenous pedagogical design for over a decade and received the Southern Cross University Medal in 2020 after graduating with First Class Honours in Indigenous Knowledge from Gnibi College of Indigenous Australian Peoples.

Sheldon (SJ) Harrington is a young local Widjabul artist from the Bundjalung Nation on the Far North Coast of New South Wales.