ABSTRACT
All researchers in Australia, and in many other parts of the world, are formally bound by institutional research regulations, including ethical research in 'the Indigenous space'. But, despite what is usually referred to as 'consultation' with Aboriginal scholars and communities, formal ethics requirements developed by bureaucracies and in universities and elsewhere cannot escape the constitutive character of institutional outputs. This chapter supplements those formal requirements by bringing together four general principles on decolonising knowledge with methodological reflections based on research undertaken on Gamilaraay Gomeroi country. Four principles of decolonising knowledge systems are: place-based, the past co-exists with the present, Aboriginal law is not frozen in time, and Anglo-centrism and Euro-centrism produce inaccuracies. Perhaps the most likely site of understanding the pre-eminence of place is the Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country. All cultures have norms and practices around leaving one space and entering another. The English conception of trespass reflects the English culture of social organisation around exclusion.
