Indigenous Knowledge

How are we to live well with others? How can we sustain abundant environments and nourishing cultures? How might connections to place and generations past strengthen our cultural, political and economic futures?

Indigenous knowledge traditions have been fundamental to human life in Australia for countless generations. They carry understandings of ancestral histories, and exemplify beneficial behaviours for living well on country, managing environmental resources and maintaining social cohesion.

Australia has developed collaborative approaches to Indigenous Knowledge research that are unique in the global context. These approaches centre the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge-holders across interdisciplinary fields of enquiry as diverse as medicine, health and wellbeing, social and economic development, environmental management, agriculture and horticulture, history, law and the creative arts.

Indigenous Knowledge: Australian Perspectives reveals how Indigenous ways of being and knowing are intricately tied to place, expressed through beauty, and resound with wisdom. It argues that the world’s contemporary challenges can be addressed, and socio-environmental diversity sustained, through conversations with both our ancestral pasts and the ancestral futures that we leave behind.