ABSTRACT
Every year, usually towards the end of the teaching year, students are shopping around for the most appropriate postgraduate course of study. In Australia there is considerable interest in the cultures of Australia’s indigenous peoples, and these can be studied in Anthropology, Literature, Fine Arts and so on. For Aboriginal people, who have complained about being the most intensely scrutinized people in the world, on a per capita basis, ‘interest’ in them gets factored out, not only in terms of academic disciplines, but also in terms of policy and politics. What does an interdisciplinary area like Cultural Studies have to offer, for instance in terms of political agendas being ‘wired in’ to its calculations? How do Aboriginal knowledges interact with non-Aboriginal ones in an institution like a university via the agency of the formative work of a postgrad? These are some of the things that I’m thinking about as someone knocks…
