Indigenous Australia and Racism

Dr Mark McMillan is a Wiradjuri man from Trangie, NSW. He is a Professor and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Indigenous Education and Engagement) at RMIT University. In 2013 Mark was awarded the National NAIDOC Scholar of the Year award.

Mark has received his Bachelor of Laws from The Australian National University, a Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice from The Australian National University, a Master of Laws and a Doctor of Juridical Science from the University of Arizona, a Certificate II in Indigenous Leadership from the Australian Indigenous Leadership Centre and a Graduate Certificate in Wiradjuri Heritage, Language and Culture from Charles Sturt University.

Mark was admitted to the Roll of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory as a Legal Practitioner in 2001.

Mark is a current board member of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples and the Trangie Local Aboriginal Land Council. 

His research interests are in the area of human rights and, in particular, the expression and fulfilment of those rights for Indigenous Australians. He is currently working on an ARC grant relating to Indigenous governance and jurisdiction for native nations. He intends on expanding his research outcomes to include the application of ‘constitutionalism’ for Indigenous Australians, with a particular emphasis on the use of current constitutional law for the protections envisioned for Indigenous people in the constitutional referendum of 1967. 

Maryrose Casey is an Associate Professor with the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. She has published widely on Indigenous Australian theatre and performance. Her research focuses on the ways in which racism is embedded in the responses to the embodied presence of Indigenous Australians, both in the moment of performance and in the documentation of those performances from colonisation to the present.

Her major publications include the multi-award winning books Creating Frames; Contemporary Indigenous Theatre (2004), Telling Stories Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Performance (2012) and Transnational Whiteness Matters (2008), which she co-edited with Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Fiona Nicoll. She also edited the collection Embodying Transformation: Studies in Transnational Performance (2015).

Crystal McKinnon is a Yamatji woman and is currently working at RMIT as a Vice Chancellor's Indigenous Research Fellow, where she sits within the Social Change Enabling Capability Platform (ECP) and an Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous Project, Indigenous Leaders: Lawful Relations from Encounter to Treaty. The Discovery Indigenous project looks at lawful encounters between the State and Aboriginal communities of Victoria as historic sovereign practices that may inform current Treaty practices. 

Her work has looked at concepts of Indigenous sovereignty, and Indigenous resistance through the use of the creative arts, including music and literature. Crystal is the co-editor of History, Power and Text: Cultural Studies and Indigenous Studies (UTS ePress, 2014), and her work has been published in several books and journals, including Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Palgrave, 2010), the Alternative Law Journal, and Biography.