AustLit

Nakkiah Lui a playwright who grew up in Western Sydney and is the daughter of a Gamilaroi woman from Gunnedah and a Torres Strait Islander. As a playwright she had drawn from her own life and community in the Mount Druitt area, and wrote her first play whilst studying in Canada.

Nakkiah was the first recipient of both The Dreaming Award by The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Arts Board of the Australia Council; and the Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright award.

John Harding is a descendant of the KuKu Yalanji tribe and the Mer people. He was co-founder of the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op in Melbourne. The first play produced by the Co-op was Harding's Up The Road, which was subsequently performed at the Belvoir Street Theatre, and then toured nationally.

Harding has been an actor, and has worked in Aboriginal affairs and education. He has been writing poetry since the age of 14, and has written and directed drama for theatre, radio and television. He was assistant Director for the 1989 National Black Playwrights' Conference and Artistic Director of the 1996 Nambundah Festival. His television credits include Lift Off and Blackout, the Aboriginal sitcom The Masters and the SBS Indigenous current affairs program, ICAM. In 2006 Hardy was nominated for a DEADLY Award, Outstanding Achievement in Literature, for his book The Dirty Mile, a History of Indigenous Fitzroy (2006).

Professor Anita Heiss is a member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales and is one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors of Aboriginal literature. She has a PhD in Communication and Media which resulted in a history of Indigenous publishing titled Dhuuluu-Yala : To Talk Straight. Other published works include the historical novel Who Am I? : The Diary of Mary Talence : Sydney, 1937, the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, which she co-edited with Peter Minter.

In 2007 Anita released three titles: the novel Not Meeting Mr Right, the poetry collection I'm Not Racist, But... : A Collection of Social Observations, and the children's novel, Yirra and Her Deadly Dog, Demon. These were followed by Avoiding Mr Right and Manhattan Dreaming in 2008 and 2011 respectively. In 2011, Anita released Paris Dreaming and Demon Guards the School Yard, which was written with the students of La Perouse Public School in Sydney for the award-winning Yarning Strong series. Her novel Tiddas is set in Brisbane and was published in 2014. It was followed by Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms in 2016. Anita also edited the anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, which was released in 2018 by Black Inc.

In 2004 Anita was listed in the Bulletin magazine’s 'Smart 100'. Her memoir Am I Black Enough for You? was a finalist in the 2012 Human Rights Awards and she was a finalist in the 2013 Australian of the Year Awards (Local Hero). Anita has made guest appearances on many television programs including the Einstein Factor, Message Stick, Vulture, Critical Mass, A Difference of Opinion (all ABC), The Catch Up (Channel 9), Living Black (SBS), The Gathering (NITV), 9am with David and Kim and The Circle (both Channel 10).

Anita is a sought after public speaker and performer, delivering keynote addresses at universities and conferences across the USA, Canada, the UK, Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, Spain, Japan, Austria, Germany and New Zealand. She has also presented at Australian Embassies and Consulates in Vienna, Paris, New York, Atlanta and Shanghai. She is an Ambassador for the GO Foundation, Worawa Aboriginal College and the Sydney Swans, and a Lifetime Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Anita is a tireless advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing and has been involved in AustLit's BlackWords project since its inception in 2007.

In 2019, Anita was appointed a Professor of Communications at the University of QLD. She currently sits on the Board of the State Library of QLD.

'John Harvey is a Torres Strait Islander producer, director and writer.

He produced Spear directed by Stephen Page premiering Toronto International Film Festival & Adelaide Film Festival, following his collaboration with Stephen Page on Sand, a chapter of the feature film The Turning. John is a producer on The Warriors series for ABC TV.

He’s worked with a number of emerging Indigenous filmmakers producing 6 short dramas through Screen Australia’s Indigenous Short Drama Initiative. He’s directed 2 half hour documentaries for ABC and several short documentaries for NITV...

'John is a graduate of Producing and Screen Writing from AFTRS and was the recipient of the AFTRS AV Myer Award for Exceptional Indigenous Talent. In 2011 he received a Screen Australia Indigenous Producer Internship. ' (Source : http://browncabs.com/?page_id=114

Warwick Thornton is from the Katej people of Central Australia and grew up in Alice Springs. He began his career as a cinematographer in 1988 where he trained at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs. In 1994 Warwick moved to Sydney where he undertook a Bachelor of Arts specialising in Cinematography at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

Other Works:

2014 Words with Gods, (segment True Gods) first released at the 2014 Venice Film Festival.

2017 documentary We Don't Need a Map opened the 2017 Sydney Film Festival 7 June 2017

Leah Purcell is an award-winning actor, singer and writer. She was born to a black mother and a white father who did not publicly acknowledge her as his daughter. In Year 10 at Murgon High School she gained the role of Gloria, the secretary in Bye Bye Birdie. Performing saved her from the consequences of heavy drinking that started when she was seven. Her professional acting career began in 1992 and she came to prominence in 1993 with a role in Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Dae. Purcell subsequently appeared in film and television roles including a part in Lantana, the adaptation of Andrew Bovell's play, Speaking in Tongues. She also appeared in Nick Cave's The Proposition. and the award-winning film Jindabyne (2006). Purcell received a Matilda Award for theatre in 1994 for her performance in 'Low'.

In 1997, Purcell starred in her own highly acclaimed, one-woman play, Box the Pony. She performed in successful seasons around Australia and in London, Edinburgh and Broadway. Purcell won a number of awards both for the script and for her acting, including the Premier's Literary Award in New South Wales and Queensland. The script is on high-school syllabuses in four states and an audition monologue at NIDA. In 2004, Purcell was invited to the United States for the three-month Eisenhower Fellowship. She was the first indigenous person to be offered this opportunity. In 2005 Purcell played Condoleezza Rice in David Hare's play, 'Stuff Happens' and in 2006 Eve Ensler's acclaimed one-woman show about body image, 'The Good Body'. In 2007 Purcell was nominated in the Best Actress in a Lead Role category in the Sydney Theatre Awards for her performance in the play, 'The Story of the Miracles at Cookie's Table'.

In 2016, Purcell wrote an adaptation of The Drover's Wife, which won 11 awards, and has since been published as a novel, and adapted into film. Her children's television series Little J and Big Cuz won Most Outstanding Children's Program at the 2019 Logie Awards.

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Tracey Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art and graduated in 1982. The second eldest from a family of five, Tracey and three of her siblings were fostered by a non-Indigenous family in the mid-1960s, growing up in the working-class Brisbane suburb of Mt Gravatt. As a teenager Tracey often encouraged her younger brother and sisters to participate in her backyard neighbourhood make-believe plays, dressing them up in theatrical costume designs while pursuing an inner desire to capture those moments through photographic images.

Throughout working various jobs in and around Brisbane, Tracey was paying off her college tuition fees, as well as saving for her first overseas trip to Europe. During her holidays in England, Tracey was famously arrested while protesting the use of the Aboriginal flag for the re-enactment of the First Fleet arrival for the bicentenary celebrations in 1988. Television images of that arrest made international headlines both in the United Kingdom, Australia and beyond. Moffatt was an original member of The Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative which was formed in 1987 by a group of ten Sydney-based artists, including Bronwyn Bancroft, Euphemia Bostock, Brenda Croft, Fiona Foley, Fernanda Martins, Raymond Meeks, Avril Quail, Michael Riley and Jeffrey Samuels. By the early 1990s she back in Sydney, living and working there for a considerable number of years before relocating to Chelsea, New York.

Her first feature film, BeDevil, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993 and she has also made documentary films, written essays and directed music videos. Since her first exhibition in 1989, Moffatt has shown her photographically based art in numerous exhibitions in Australia and abroad. Her work is held in various international private and public collections that include Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Tokyo), National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney) and the Parliament House Collection (Canberra). Undoubtedly one of Australia's most high-profile individual artists, Moffatt is continuously in demand as a public speaker in reference to her own unique style of photographic imagery, but she seldom holds private or public interviews, preferring to leave her captive audience intrigued as to the genesis of her work.

In December, 2003 a crowd of more than 1000 people gathered to witness one of the most exciting events in visual arts being displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, it was the opening of 'Retrospective' which detailed 30 years spanning her career.  Tracey divides her time between New York City and Noosa Heads on Queensland's Sunshine Coast where she continues to produce her own unique brand of photographic artistry for collectors and consumers of art.

In 2017, she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Born into the Kheodal (Crocodile) and Samu (Emu) clans, Aaron's family originally came from Saibai Island in the Torres Strait in 1947. He grew up in Bamaga, in the Cape York Community. In 2005, Aaron's career had changed from health worker in Bamaga to actor and writer/director in the Australian film industry.

In 2023, he was one of five First Nations delegates to attend the Auckland Writers Festival as part of the Australia Council First Nations Literature Cultural Exchange delegation.

Academic, lawyer and writer, Larissa Behrendt graduated from Harvard Law School with a doctorate in 1998. Her thesis was later published as the book Achieving Social Justice : Indigenous Rights and Australia's Future (2003). She is admitted to the Supreme Court of NSW and the ACT as a barrister.

Since 2001 Behrendt has been Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology, Sydney and has published extensively on property law, Indigenous rights, dispute resolution and Aboriginal women's issues. Other works include Aboriginal Dispute Resolution (1995).

In 2003 she was awarded, with Marcia Langton, the Neville Bonner Indigenous University Teacher of the Year Award. Behrendt has been a director of Ngiya, National Institute of Indigenous Law, Policy and Practice, a council member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, a Judicial Member of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal, Equal Opportunity Division and the Alternate Chair of the Serious Offenders Review Board. She has also been a Board Member of the Museum of Contemporary Art and a Director of the Sydney Writers' Festival and the Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Behrendt is the daughter of Paul Behrendt. In 2004 she fictionalised the story of her father's search for his Indigenous heritage in her novel Home. 

In 2009 she was named NAIDOC person of the year and in March 2011 became the first Chair of Indigenous Research at the University of Technology, Sydney. Since April 2011, Larissa's column Pointed View is a regular in Tracker magazine.

Other Works:

First Australians. Edited with Cathy Hammer, Sydney Legal Information Access Centre, 2013.

Indigenous Australia for Dummies, Wiley, 2012. 

A writer, film maker and performance poet, Romaine Moreton is from the Goernpil people of Stradbroke Island and the Bundjulung people of northern New South Wales. Romaine came from a farming and seasonal working family that later settled in the country town of Bodalla, New South Wales.

It was while she was growing up in the country that Romaine developed a love of storytelling. Picking beans in a field, she'd make up stories about her surroundings. Throughout high school, her teachers encouraged her to become a writer, a suggestion she rejected at first and warmed to later. Romaine's work is a direct response to the environment and she uses language to explore identity and explode myths.

In August, 2002 Moreton toured Australia with an African American capella band, Sweet Honey in the Rock, performing her signature spoken words before a sell-out crowd at the Sydney Opera House. Romaine has written for film and two of her short films, including 'Cherish', were shown at the Cannes Film Festival 1999. Moreton was selected as part of a group in 2007 to participate in a project by the Australian Film Commission (AFC) designed to nurture and assist the talents of upcoming Indigenous filmakers. The project was designed to give the chosen individuals the opportunity to develop their first feature film with the assistance of respected directors and producers such as Phillip Noyce, Zachary Skiar and Ray Lawrence.

Dancer, writer, comedian, film and theatre director and actor, Wayne Blair graduated from university in 1997. Since graduating, Blair has worked with several theatres (including Bangarra Dance Theatre), film and television productions. Blair portrayed Othello for the Bell Shakespeare Company. He directed short films: Black Talk (2002), and The Djarn Djarns (2005). Blair starred in Shifting Sands - Grace (1998) and Mullet (2001). In 2008, Blair was appointed the Artistic Associate of Belvoir St Theatre.

In 2012, Blair was nominated for an AACTA Award, Best Direction, for The Sapphires.

Screenwriter, director, cinematographer.

An Indigenous Australian filmmaker who grew up in the New South Wales country towns of Tamworth and Inverell, Ivan Sen is a descendant of the Gamilaroi and Bigambal language groups of northwest New South Wales and southern Queensland. He also is of Hungarian, German and Croatian descent. In the early 1990s he studied photography at the Queensland College of Art and worked as a camera operator and sound recordist. He also graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School in 1997 with a BA in directing.

Throughout the late 1990s Sen worked on numerous short films, before making his feature film debut Beneath Clouds in 2002. For this project he drew on his own background as the child of an Aboriginal mother and an absent white father. Both written and directed by Sen, Beneath Clouds drew much critical acclaim, and was subsequently nominated for numerous national and international awards. Among these were wins for Best Directing (2002 AFI Awards and 2002 IF Awards).

Since 2002 Sen has worked predominantly on documentaries. In 2005 his film Yellow Fella was chosen to screen at the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival, the first Indigenous Australian documentary to do so.

As the daughter of Charles Perkins, Rachel Perkins grew up in a politically active family. She regularly took part in demonstrations and dicussions on Aboriginal affairs. Perkins began her media career in Alice Springs working for the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA). In 1991 she moved to Sydney to work for SBS Television where she produced a number of documentaries including the award-winning Blood Brothers.

In 1995, Perkins was awarded the first Indigenous scholarship to study producing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). She has subsequently worked for the Australian Film Commission and as a film director.

In 2011, Perkins was awarded the Australian International Documentary Conference Stanley Hawes Award in recognition of her contribution to documentary filmmaking in Australia.

Richard Frankland is one of Australia's most experienced Indigenous singer/songwriters and filmmakers. Born on the coast in South-West Victoria, Richard worked as a soldier, fisherman, and also as a Field Officer during the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. His work on the Royal Commission led to his appearance as a presenter in the award winning Australian documentary, Who Killed Malcolm Smith.

Frankland has written, directed, and produced a wide range of video, documentary, and film projects including the award winning No Way to Forget, After Mabo, Harry's War and The Convincing Ground documentary. Richard is also a musician whose music features on soundtracks to many of his films and some of his songs have been recorded by acclaimed Indigenous singer/songwriter Archie Roach.

He was also selected as part of a group in 2007 to participate in a project by the Australian Film Commission (AFC) that was designed to nurture and assist the talents of upcoming Indigenous filmmakers. The project was designed to give the chosen individuals the opportunity to develop their first feature film with the assistance of respected directors and producers such as Phillip Noyce, Zachary Skiar and Ray Lawrence.

Australian Writing and Rock Music affiliation: vocals, miscellaneous instruments (saxophone).

Bob Maza was born on Palm Island, a Murri Reserve in Queensland. His father was from Murray Island in the Torres Strait and his mother from the coastal Yidinjdji people. He completed his schooling in Cairns, spent some years as a manual labourer and then worked as a store clerk in Darwin. Maza began acting in Melbourne in 1969 with little formal training. He was a founding member of the National Black Theatre in Sydney in 1972. In 1970 Maza was a delegate to the 25th United Nations Assembly in New York to highlight the Third World status of Indigenous Australians. In that year he was also involved in the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, where he often used theatre as a means of showcasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues. In 1981 he was an official delegate to the World Indigenous Festival held in Canada.

Maza directed his first play, the premiere of Richard J. Merritt's The Cakeman, at the National Black Theatre in 1975. After that he worked as an actor, director, playwright and a consultant in theatre, radio, film and television. Maza's pioneering role in the ABC program Bellbird, which saw him playing a barrister, was vital in changing the way Indigenous people were portrayed in the media. His eminent acting career included countless roles on television, in theatre and feature films such as The Fringe Dwellers, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and Reckless Kelly. In 1993, in recognition of his work in the Arts and for his people, Maza was awarded an Order of Australia (AM). During his years as an AFC commissioner (1995-98) he made a significant contribution not only to the development of Indigenous filmmakers in Australia but to the Australian filmmaking community generally. Maza is the father of Lisa Maza and actor and director, Rachel Maza Long (qq.v).

Mitch Torres began an extensive career in the performing arts in 1986 as a theatre and film actor, researcher, writer, film director, film producer, radio broadcaster, television presenter and locations manager. Mitch has also been a children's author and a media consultant. Mitch Torres has been active in Film and TV as a Director/Writer working on a number of important documentaries detailing Indigenous histories and people.

Deborah Mailman grew up in Mount Isa. She spent many of her childhood years around the rodeo because her father was a rodeo champion.

Mailman gained interest in acting during high school when she chose to study Drama to avoid doing Business Principles. She found that acting allowed her to express her creative side. When the school started the production of Wizard of Oz, Mailman auditioned for the Wicked Witch of the West but instead she was given the role of Dorothy.

From high school, Mailman travelled to Brisbane to study drama at the university. She found her first year of study difficult because she was constantly changing accommodation but she found support from friends and family, which helped her continue her studies. She graduated from Queensland University of Technology Academy of the Arts in 1992. Since graduating, she has worked in numerous theatre productions as an actor, co-director or co-writer. Mailman has also appeared on television as a presenter on ABC's Playschool and Message Stick, and as an actress in the series The Secret Life of Us. Her film credits include The Monkey's Mask, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, Radiance and Dear Claudia, The Third Note.

In 2012 Mailman won Female Actor of the Year at the Deadly Awards.

Steve McGregor is an Indigenous writer and Director from the Northern Territory. He was a graduate from the Australian Film Television and Radio School.

Elizabeth Wymarra has worked as a performing artist, comedian, playwright and freelance writer. Her father was a Gudang man and her mother, a Wakaidt woman from Badu Island in the Western region of the Torres Straits. Wymarra studied visual and performing arts at New South Wales TAFE in Sydney, and has completed a degree in Creative Writing. She is the mother of Wandihnu Wymarra .

She studied for her Batchelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing and Language/Linguistics at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Studies, Northern Territory.

Philip McLaren was born in Redfern, although his family comes from the Warrumbungle Mountain area, New South Wales and he is a descendant of the Kamilaroi people.

McLaren has worked as a television producer, a director, designer, illustrator, architect, sculptor, lifeguard and copywriter. He has been a creative director in television, advertising and film production companies both in Australia and overseas.

His filmography includes, as art director, The Mavis Bramston Show (1964), The Mike Walsh Show (1973), Grand Old Country (known in the USA as The Ronnie Prophet Show) (1975), and It's a Knockout (1985) and, as production designer, The Beachcombers (1972), Country Joy (1979), and the 1983 film Hostage.

After this varied career, McLaren focused on writing and was among the first Aboriginal writers to write a thriller. His first novel, Sweet Water -- Stolen Land, won the David Unaipon Award in 1992. He subsequently published a number of other novels, including crime thrillers Scream Black Murder, Lightning Mine, and Murder in Utopia: the latter won the 2010 Prix Litteraire des Recits de l'ailleurs, a French award for international literature.

McLaren holds a Doctor of Creative Arts and has worked as a lecturer at Southern Cross University.

Rhoda Roberts is a Bundjalung woman of the Wiyebal clan. Her totem is the lizard. Roberts' childhood was spent in Lismore and Sydney.

After leaving school she trained to be a Nurse's Aide and eventually graduated as a registered nurse in 1979. With her nursing qualifications, Roberts travelled overseas to work. When she returned, she became involved in acting, training for three years before getting a job with a theatre company.

Roberts has worked as the Current Affairs Presenter of Vox Populi (SBS-TV), Radio Announcer on various radio programs, Reporter for First in Line, Presenter for Qantas in-flight videos, Artistic Director for the Awakening Ceremony for the Festival of the Dreaming (1997), and Indigenous Cultural Advisor for the Olympic Games in Sydney (2000).

In 2012, Roberts was named Artistic Director of Indigenous progamming at the Sydney Opera House.

Murrungun (Numbulwar) man Tom Lewis was the son of an Aboriginal mother and a Welsh father; he was a talented actor, musician, filmmaker and a teller of great stories. He grew up in the Roper River community. Lewis has acted in films such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, A Town Like Alice, The Proposition, Crocodile Dreaming, Double Trouble, William, and September. Tom Lewis' documentary Yellow Fella was featured in the 2005 Cannes Film Festival. Tom has been awarded the Bob Maza Fellowship.

Co-artistic Director of Port Youth Theatre Workshop (2002), 'Diat Alferink ... grew up in the remote outback town of Lyndhurst...[Her] mother, Daisy, was born on Badu Island in the Torres Strait, an island woman who ended up living in the middle of the desert. Diat's father is a talc stone sculptor and philosopher, known universally as 'Talc Alf'. Her extraordinary childhood was full of laughter and adventure.' (Vitalstatistix 2005 programme).

Tony Briggs is a playwright and actor who has appeared on stage in many productions such as Stolen and Yanagai! Yanagai!, Corrugation Road' and 'Jandamarra' as well as on film in Australian Rules and Joey.

Briggs is the son of Laurel Robinson, a member of the singing group 'The Sapphires' on whom Briggs based his stage show The Sapphires.

Kirstie Parker is a Yuwallarai woman. She has worked as a journalist in print, radio and corporate television. Parker has also been media advisor to Robert Tickner when he was Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, director of public affairs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and communications manager at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

Since July 2006, she has been the Editor of the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander newspaper, the Koori Mail. In 2010, Parker was appointed to the Board of Directors of Reconciliation Australia.

In 2017, Parker became the first Aboriginal person to be appointed to the Australian Press Council.

In 2018, she won the David Unaipon Award for her manuscript The Making of Ruby Champion.

Darlene Johnson, a filmmaker from the Dunghutti people of the east coast of New South Wales graduated with a BA (Hons), specialising in Indigenous and post-colonial cinema from the University of Technology, Sydney.

In 2000 Johnson wrote and directed Stolen Generations, her first hour-long television documentary. The film was nominated for an International Emmy (2000) and for Best Documentary at the 2000 AFI awards. It screened at the 2000 Margaret Mead Film Festival and was a finalist in the Hollywood Black Film Festival. Stolen Generations won the journalist award for Best Documentary at Film De Femmes International Women's Film Festival in France and the Golden Gate Award in the History section of the 2001 San Francisco Film Festival.

Darlene Johnson has directed a documentary about the making of Phillip Noyce's feature, Rabbit Proof Fence and in 2017 wrote her first feature film, Obelia. 

In March 2019, she was awarded the inaugural Australian International Screen Forum scholarship; the scholarship included a three-month attachment on a film shooting in New York later in 2019.

Jon Bell is a film and television producer. He grew up in Casino. His mother was Bundjalung and his father Wiradjuri. Bell made the short film And Justice For One before being commissioned to make another for SBS called Two Big Boys. He has also worked as a family case worker for the New South Wales Department of Children's Services.

Among his significant works for television are The Gods of Wheat Street, Cleverman, and The Warriors.

'Brian Syron was a human rights advocate, teacher, actor, writer, stage director and director of the unreleased and contentious feature film, Jindalee Lady (1992). Born in 1934 in Eora country (Balmain) NSW, Brian was a child of a bi-cultural marriage.

His artistic career began in 1960 at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli. He studied acting in New York and London and worked in theatre until 1970 when he returned to Australia. Syron was the first Indigenous Australian to work as a director in the Australian theatre industry whilst teaching and working in television productions. Over the years, he published several papers and books and was an advocate for Indigenous people in the arts. Source: www.nfsa.gov.au/ (Sighted 05/03/2009).

Ryan Griffen is an Australian scriptwriter and filmmaker. In 2015, Griffen wrote and directed a short film which was aired at the Cannes Film Festival.

Robert Bropho's childhood years were spent in the 'fringedweller' camp in Swanbourne. He continued this lifestyle into adulthood. Bropho moved his family into Allawah Grove, and when he sought to occupy an empty house, he was denied access by the 'Native Department'. Bropho moved his family just outside Allawah Grove, where he and his wife made a shelter out of sheets of tin. Eventually Allawah Grove was shut down and the Native Welfare department relocated Bropho's family several times until they moved into his sister's house. Due to the cramped quarters, with nineteen people in his sister's four bedroom house, he applied to live somewhere else, and the Native Department sent the family to live on the York reserve.

While living at the York Reserve, Bropho and his wife were sent to court for neglecting their children and their seven children were taken away to New Norcia Mission for two years. Bropho and his wife moved back to Bropho's sister's house to wait out the two years their children would be gone.

In 1977, Bropho led a convoy of thirty-five people, including women and children, from Lockridge campsite in Western Australia to Canberra. Their intention was to protest against their living standards and the treatment the indigenous community received from the Australian Government. Three members of the convoy and Bropho had a meeting with the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ian Viner, and were thus given the opportunity to put forward their situation and request change. Bropho was disappointed in what he felt was a lack of understanding and compassion by non-indigenous people.

After the convoy returned from Canberra, Bropho and the Lockridge community received two visits from the Minister for Community Welfare, Ray Young, who was assessing their situation. Frustrated by the government's inaction, Bropho and his 'fringedwelling' community moved to the grounds of an Anglican Church in Guildford before relocating to Heirisson Island on the Swan River. The lack of water and toilet facilities on the island meant that they had to walk for many miles to use the amenities or get a drink. After Heirisson Island, Bropho spent time travelling to other indigenous communities, that he felt needed support for issues such as better living conditions, protection of sacred sites, or self-empowerment. Robert Bropho became instrumental in establishing Swan Valley, a Nyungah camp situated in Perth, Western Australia, one of the oldest Aboriginal settlements in Perth.

In the late 1980s, Bropho was chosen by his community to be their spokesperson against development on the Waugul, the Rainbow Serpent, sacred sites in the Swan Valley area. He helped write letters to Peter Dowding (Western Australian Premier from 1988-1990), and made petitions protesting the development. The Waugul struggle went before the courts until June 1990 when the High Court of Australia decided in favour of Bropho against the Western Australian Government.

In 2000 an inquiry was set up to investigate sexual and drug abuse in indigenous communities in Western Australia, and amidst public controversy the Swan Valley camp was closed in 2003. Bropho's daughter, Bella, continued the campaign against the Western Australian government's 2003 closure of Swan Valley.

Catriona McKenzie was born in Sydney, though her people are the Kurnai of East Gippsland, Victoria. McKenzie completed a Diploma in Writing at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She studied at the New York University's Dramatic Writing and Film School in 1996.

Writer film-maker and educator of Wiradjuri and European heritage. After a period travelling across America, Asia, Europe, and Australia working in education and facilitating Indigenous ways of knowing, she settled in Sydney (on the sovereign lands of the Eora Nation).

In 2023, she was one of five First Nations delegates to attend the Auckland Writers Festival as part of the Australia Council First Nations Literature Cultural Exchange delegation.

Source include Nakata Brophy Prize (2018).

Dylan Coleman is the daughter of Mercy Glastonbury (q.v.) and with her family, shares strong connections to country, culture and tradition. She is a member of the Kokatha Mula Nation and grew up in Thevenard on the far west coast of South Australia.

She holds a BA from the University of South Australia and Northern Arizona University (USA), and both a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her novel Mazin Grace was the creative component of her PhD.

A lecturer in Yaitya Purruna, the Indigenous Health Unit at the University of Adelaide, Coleman works in community engagement within various Indigenous communities throughout Australia and in the area of public health in South Australia specifically, with a focus on substance misuse and building community capacity and resilience through community-controlled approaches to health.

A second novel, Clear Water White Death, was shortlisted for the David Unaipon Award in 2011 and won a Black & Write Writing Fellowship in 2016, but has not been published as of 2017.

Jenny Fraser works at the nexus of art, film-making and new technologies as a new media artist. Her work is exhibited both nationally and internationally, including 'cultural copy' at the Fowler Museum in San Francisco and Interactiva01 and Interactive03: biennales at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico.

Fraser founded and curates cyberTribe, an Indigenous online Gallery that aims to encourage the production and exhibition of Indigenous Art with a focus on the digital. She was the first Aboriginal curator to present a Triennial exhibition in Australia and has also been artist-in-residence in diverse places, including remote communities in the Northern Territory, the Rocky Mountains in Banff and Brisbane, Queensland.

Journalist and multi-award winning documentary director Rhonda Hagan is a Ma Mu woman from Innisfail and has been a columnist with the National Indigenous Times.  

After graduating from the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia, Kodie Bedford moved to Sydney to work as a journalist. She worked for SBS's Living Black before joining the ABC's Message Stick. When Message Stick was cancelled, she moved to the ABC Indigenous Department. After deciding she wanted to break into script-writing, she joined MediaRING, a volunteer association of industry and screen organisations with a focus on creating opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working in the media.

Her first film script, Yarrabah, was funded by Screen Australia in 2017. She also served as script and story editor on Grace Beside Me.

Sources:

'Showcase on Indigenous talent – Kodie Bedford'. MediaRING, 4 May 2016. http://www.mediaring.com.au/news/showcase-on-indigenous-talent-kodie-bedford/