GURINDJI WAYS OF BEING with Josie Crawshaw, Brenda L Croft, Leah Leaman & Felicity Meakins
The second program in our 2022 series, Ways of Being, convened by Stephen Gilchrist. Image: Mr R Wavehill Jangala with karu (children), Malyalyimalyalyi/Lipanangku (1st Wave Hill Station), Wave Hill, NT, July 2015. Photograph © Brenda L Croft, with permission from Mr Wavehill’s family
People
Josephine Crawshaw
Josephine Crawshaw is a Gurindji elder and descendent of the Stolen Generation and a long-term advocate and activist for the recognition of the sovereign rights of First Nations Peoples.
Josie has been a founding member of national and international political organisations such as the Aboriginal Provisional Government, Top End Aboriginal Coalition and National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations. Her decades of activism include organising a 1000-person convoy from the NT to Sydney to protest during the Bicentenary celebrations in 1988.
Her professional career has seen her appointed as the Top End Commissioner and ATSIC Commissioner; NT State Manager of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations; and Foundation CEO of the Peak Body for Aboriginal Children, Youth and Families in the Northern Territory, known as SAF,T.
A sabbatical took her across the USA and Canada to study Treaties and Self Determination for First Nations Peoples and, over two decades, she helped draft the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. More recently, she was the Top End Coordinator, Delegate and National Co-Chair of the Statement from the Heart Working Group.
Her current activism is as a founding member of the ‘Close Don Dale Now’ movement to shut down Darwin’s infamous youth prison and implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory.
Brenda L Croft
Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been involved in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner – artist, arts administrator, consultant, curator, educator and researcher – since the mid-1980s. Brenda is privileged to live and work on Ngambri/ Ngunawal / Ngunnawal country in Canberra where she is Associate Professor, Indigenous Art History and Curatorship at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, School of Art and Design, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University.
