Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous Scheme Award

Congratulations to Professor Alexis Wright and Distinguished Professor Anthony Uhlmann from the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and the Writing and Society Research Centre, who have been awarded $801,081 in funding through the Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous Scheme. Their project ‘Like the Thunder’: Seeing Stories in the Gulf Country, investigates the nature of relationships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It will generate imaginative understandings of how new relations might have been built through the historical marriage of a Waanyi woman and Chinese man in the late gold rush era. This project will show how storytelling helps reveal the essential nature of human relations, and how the capacity to remake relations is essential to intercultural reconciliation.

This was one of only nine projects selected for funding in the 2024 ARC Discovery Indigenous Scheme. Western achieved a 50% success rate in this round against the 26% national success rate.