17th August 5:30 for 6 pm
Put on your beanies, your warmest coat, bring a blanket, and join us for our monthly meeting, this time with special guest speaker Fiona McGill, chair of the Sunshine Coast Reconciliation Group and Anthropologist and Archaeologist.
Archaeology has given us a measure of the resilience of Indigenous culture & industry on this continent. On this huge continent, mostly separated from the rest of the world, we find great industry, extraordinary art, complex ritual, religious & philosophical understandings, over 10s of 1,000s of years, through extremes of climate – a cultural tradition that rivals all that we think we know from the ‘old world’.F
Fiona provides this years’ Australia Day talk at the MVA. She studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the Australian National University at the time when ‘Mungo Man’ & Mungo Woman’ had recently been found. She was fortunate to be involved in several archaeological field work expeditions to Mungo and the south coast of NSW, and to study anthropology with some of the world’s leading anthropological researchers in Australia. Her respect and admiration for Indigenous culture stems from these studies.
Fiona was inspired by the idea that the things we take for granted as social norms are not necessarily so – as all cultures have different ways of thinking about the meaning of people’s lives.
Fiona is not an Indigenous person and does not claim to speak for any Indigenous group. Her hope is that a better understanding of the importance of Indigenous history and culture in Australia will lead us to better respect and value Australia’s First Nations people. She is currently the Chair of the Sunshine Coast Reconciliation Group and hopes this material is received in the spirit of reconciliation.