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Mediating an On Country Experience

Paper presented as part of "Community engagement and collaborative knowledge: Cultural mediation in the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand contexts" panel at AAANZ24.

What does it take to mediate an on-Country experience in a museum? Lizzie Muller, Bridget Wall and I gave a paper on this at AAANZ24, reflecting on our support for the Dingaal community who led the creative cultural festival, Mangal Bungal:Clever Hands. We talked about the way we used cultural mediation to bring together archaeologists and museum professionals, and their respective forms of embodied knowing, to care for audiences, Aboriginal artists, and for Country.


Paper Abstract:

Cultural mediation is a valuable, under-examined approach to Indigenous-led participatory programming in museums, affording care to both audiences and Indigenous artists. This paper examines an innovative approach to cultural mediation developed to support meaningful and respectful engagement with Country and culture, and between audiences and Indigenous artists at large scale.

 

Mangal Bungal: Clever Hands was 3-day festival at Queensland Museum Kurilpa led by the Dingaal Aboriginal community of Far North Queensland. 30 Dingaal artists took part, staging participatory creative activities throughout the museum to bring to life stories of Jiigurru (Lizard Island) that lay behind an exhibition presenting new archaeological evidence of trade and travel throughout the Coral Sea. 27000 people visited the museum during the festival, requiring a dynamic approach to supporting both the Dingaal artists and audiences.

 

We formed a team that brought together museum staff, including the Indigenous visitor experience officers, and archaeologists experienced in working on Country with the Dingaal community. Intensive joint prepration encouraged the team to share their different perspectives and expertise to build a collective understanding of how to support an “on-country” experience. This process of professional, personal development is vital to the practice of cultural mediation, which depends on the embodied knowledge and skilful actions of the mediators.

 

The team’s collective cross-cultural competence supported the coming together of different kinds of knowledges within the festival, including Indgenous knowledge, archaeological knowledge and the wealth of audiences lived experiences. Using feedback from the Dingaal community and audiences, we examine the transformative experiences this enabled, and the way in which it sensitively expanded a complex national conversation about Indigenous histories and futures. 

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