Cultural explorations of time and space: Indigenous Australian artists-in residence, conventional narratives and children's text creation

This paper details a project, funded by the University of Ballarat in Victoria, which addresses a local problem of schools' lack of acknowledgement of their being positioned on traditional owners' land. In addressing this issue, I am using two texts, My Place (Wheatley and Rawlins 1987) and Who am I? The Diary of Mary Talence (Heiss 2004) to engage the participants in discussions to make visible what has been invisible; that is, the issue of traditional Indigenous Australian ownership of the land on which the school is placed. Taking up notions of deconstruction from poststructuralist theory, I have looked to these texts as ways of disrupting the taken-for-granted occupation of public space, that is, I examine the language used to position the readers and 'yield up the ideologies that inform them' (Bradford 2001, p.9).C