ABSTRACT
It's easy convincing yourself that you're different. In deciding to pursue a PhD research project that investigated the highly contested relationship between Indigenous people and environmental planners in Victoria, Australia, I'd underpinned my whole research approach with a very seductive myth. It went like this: 'I am going to do research with (not on) Indigenous peoples, I will be ethically sensitive and culturally aware, I will make a significant contribution to the people who are involved, and I will certainly not pursue research patterns of the not-too-distant past where knowledge and artefacts were routinely stolen from Indigenous people in the name of scientific interest and the personal gains of academic researchers. No, I'll be quite different from that kind of researcher.' Myths repeated become pretty convincing. It took me a long time to see that I, too, have 'imperial eyes' (Smith 1999, 42).
