This unit introduces students to the diversity of cultural practice and worldviews of Aboriginal societies across Australia. It will in particular explore critically how Aboriginal people and practices have been understood, debated and represented in the discipline of anthropology since colonisation.

Australian Aboriginal peoples have always engaged with the 'modern world' but Enlightenment ideas established a colonial context juxtaposing modernity with tradition. Indigenous difference was locked into past-oriented, static and small-scale traditions. The unit examines some key concepts of modernity, including progress, civility, change, tradition - and modernity itself - so as to shed light on Australian Indigenous people's experiences, past and present, as colonial subjects. The unit will explore Aboriginal engagement with, for instance, work, vehicles, the law, and the arts (painting, music etc) as practices through which Aboriginal people have sought 'alternative modernities'.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait art is the major Australian movement of the last 50 years. Surveying its development from Papunya Tula to the present, the unit focuses on critical issues like appropriation and copyright, art and native title, women artists, the market and curatorial practices.

This unit focuses on critical and theoretical issues affecting Indigenous art practice today. The parameters of cross-cultural understanding will be addressed. Key ideas derived from Indigenous cultures, language and identity will be debated.

Builds on students' knowledge of Australian politics to examine the background, context, conduct and implications of politics relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and policy affecting indigenous Australians. Explores aspects of inclusion and exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the formal political system; internal power relations within and between communities, social movements and representative bodies; compare Australian indigenous politics with those of other nations, and; look at a range of policy areas.

The myth of the frontier is a foundation stone of national identity in the United States, where it gave birth to a global film genre, the Western. In Australia, where 'history wars' are waged over the level of violence and the legality of colonial expansion, the very existence of a frontier is disputed rather than romanticised. This unit compares the significance of the frontier in each country's history and popular memory from the perspective of both settlers and indigenous peoples.

This unit introduces students to Indigenous Australia in a stimulating, in-depth study of traditional and contemporary forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural expression. Ranging from the Dreaming and ancient knowledges, ceremony and lore, to the lives and societies of Indigenous peoples today, students learn in areas such Aboriginal kinship, language, story and art, Indigenous agriculture, aquaculture and astronomy, and contemporary Indigenous cultures and cultural currents.

This unit of study focuses on the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since colonisation, exploring key social, political and legal events, issues and debates, and the people behind them. Students will learn about important historical events and social issues in areas such as civil and political rights, land rights, self-determination and reconciliation, developing an understanding of how these events and issues have shaped the shared history of Australia. The unit introduces a decolonising methodology that will underpin further work in the major.

The connection between land and culture underpins Indigenous Australian identity. With a focus on Aboriginal Sydney and its diverse Indigenous communities, we study 'Country' and Indigenous environmental philosophies and cosmologies, learning about the centrality of Indigenous relationships with the land to community well-being, the custodianship of country, and the maintenance of country and cultural heritage. Students will enjoy guided visits to significant sites.

Indigenous Art and Culture engages with traditional and contemporary art and cultural expression, offering students an opportunity to critically and creatively explore a variety of artistic and creative practices undertaken by Indigenous Australians. Students will study traditional cultural expression such as oral storytelling and song-cycles, ceremony and art, and contemporary cultural expression in the visual arts, literature, performance, theatre, film and music.

This unit examines the historical and contemporary social determinants of Indigenous health. Students have the opportunity to explore sociological and Indigenous health frameworks and identify a range of successful strategies that have worked to improve Aboriginal health and wellbeing. A highlight of this unit is the opportunity to hear from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are passionate about contributing to such improvements. Students also explore ways to collaborate with Aboriginal people and communities to facilitate self-determination in Aboriginal health.

Gamilaraay is an Indigenous Australian language from the mid-northwest of NSW that is currently undergoing revitalisation. This unit of study will provide students with a basic competence in speaking, understanding, reading and writing Gamilaraay sufficient to recognise and construct simple utterances in the language, and to understand its relationships with other languages. Classes will progressively develop each student's abilities in the language.

This unit explores theories of race and racism focussing on Indigenous Australian race relations. Opportunity is provided to understand the development of Racism as an impact on individuals - victim and perpetrator; and systemic systems at local, national and international levels. The unit explores what racism means in the social justice agenda through issues such as: equity and anti-racism; in particular the direct impact of racism as a tool in the creation of social and economic disadvantage in Australian Indigenous communities.

The representation of nature has been central to human expression for thousands of years. Contemporary transnational ecopoetics situates nature and culture amidst present-day ecological catastrophes and political environmentalisms. This unit examines a uniquely Australian contribution to this field -Country - which for Australian Indigenous peoples denotes special cosmological, filial and custodial relations to land. Surveying a range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous works of poetry, non-fiction and art, 'Writing Country' defines an Indigenous poetics of nature and explores its broader ecopoetical promise.

Australia holds an unenviable record for its loss of Indigenous languages and actively pursues a de facto policy of English monolingualism. This unit examines how Indigenous communities are resisting this trend and reviving so-called extinct languages through examining the roles of language policy and planning, community activism, language centres, education, technology and the linguistic processes involved. Lecture and seminar content is supplemented by a fieldwork excursion (at additional cost) to a regional language centre and associated school programs.

Formal schooling has been a critical frontier of engagement for Indigenous peoples in both colonial and postcolonial states and societies. This course examines in comparative and historical perspective both the school institution and Indigenous schooling experience across a variety of social and political contexts, including those in Australia and the Americas. Critical consideration is given to school curriculum and culture as well as Indigenous socio-cultural conceptions and practice, for identity, including Indigeneity, citizenship, power, resistance, agency, and contemporary circumstance.

This unit of study aims to give an overview of the languages of indigenous Australians. Of the 250 distinct Aboriginal languages spoken in 1788, most are dead or dying and just 20 languages are expected to survive another few generations. This unit of study will challenge this grim and oft-quoted statistic. We will see that new Aboriginal languages have emerged, apparently moribund languages have been gaining strength and distinctive Aboriginal ways of talking have survived. We consider why some languages have prospered while others have declined. We explore how Australian languages have responded to the challenges of non-Aboriginal settlement, in such arenas as education, land rights and health.

This course provides an introduction to Latin American politics through an interdisciplinary approach to studying indigenous movements, pivotal actors in the shaping of contemporary conceptions of democracy, citizenship and statecraft in the continent. Students will examine these social movements from anthropological, historical and political science perspectives. They will gain an insight into cultural diversity of Latin American societies and acquire analytical tools for studying and understanding a wide variety of topics associated with political structure and agency in the continent.