ABSTRACT
In Australia, normal reconciliation seeks to improve the lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and is stated as the country’s unfinished business. Reconciliation as a practice has been rightfully constructed as a social norm – to recognize and give value to First Peoples, to understand the meaning of our cultures and to foster stronger relationships between mainstream and indigenous Australia. Reconciliation Australia’s ambition is to eliminate the glaring gap in life expectancy between indigenous and other Australian children. ‘Normal’ reconciliation tends to be enacted within policy, in organizations, in gatherings of humans, outside parliaments, around meeting tables, in schoolrooms, on streets and in legislation and in protests and poems. The shift to post-normal science or other methods for dealing with uncertainty and complexity is a necessity. Indigenous philosophies show that it is possible to learn to be in the world in reciprocal relationships with all things, through cooperation and constraint, interdependent thinking, morality and action.
