Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 07 June
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Why should Indigenous Australians be constitutionally recognised, what form should recognition take – and how will it affect Australian society?
As a referendum on the issue becomes increasingly likely, those fundamental questions remain unresolved (and sometimes, hotly contested) – leaving Australia as one of the last liberal democracies still to settle its colonial beginnings.
In a new collection of essays, It’s Our Country, editors Marcia Langton and Megan Davis bring together diverse ideas from leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander thinkers and leaders including Dawn Casey, Noel Pearson, Patrick Dodson, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Mick Mansell. Each offers a perspective on what constitutional reforms could – and should – achieve for Indigenous Australians.
Fifth Estate host Sally Warhaft will be joined by Langton and Davis for a conversation exploring the political and philosophical intricacies of recognition, and the real-world implications for the lives of Australia’s first peoples.
Featuring
Sally Warhaft
Sally Warhaft is a Melbourne broadcaster, anthropologist and writer. She is the host of The Fifth Estate, the Wheeler Centre’s live series focusing on journalism, politics, media, and international relations, and The Leap Year ...
Marcia Langton
Professor Marcia Langton AM holds the Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Her doctoral fieldwork was conducted in eastern Cape York Peninsula during the 1990s, and her experience of the statutory land claim and native title system in this region was informed by a decade of administration and fieldwork in the Northern Territory. She was awarded a PhD from Macquarie University in 2005. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Chair of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.
She is the editor of a new book: Community Futures, Legal Architecture: Foundations for Indigenous Peoples in the Global Mining Boom, published by Routledge. This book brings together in one volume the critical research and thinking from academic and practitioner colleagues over the last five years.
Megan Davis
Megan Davis is a Cobble Cobble woman from south-west Queensland. She is the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law, Director of the Indigenous Law Centre at UNSW Law and Pro Vice Chancellor at UNSW. She designed the regional dialogue method that led to the consensus at Uluru on 26 May 2017 and read the Uluru Statement from the Heart to the national convention and then the Australian public for the first time. She is the leading constitutional lawyer on Indigenous constitutional recognition and advises the Australian government as a member of its Indigenous Referendum Working Group and as a member of its Constitutional Expert Group. She is a United Nations expert based in the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva and formerly UN New York.
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