11 Dear Jackie

Dear Jackie

I recently looked through the Fryer Library’s Indigenous collection for this edited book, Storying the Archive, and I came across a newspaper clipping about you. It was entitled ‘Uni job for historian’ and was published in 1997 when you started work at the University of Queensland, the same year I started at UQ as an undergraduate student.

My interactions with you and your work had a great impact that continues today.

My earliest memory is a guest lecture you gave when I was a young undergraduate student studying music and literature. The course was Black Australian Literature coordinated by the late Sam Watson. You came to the class and discussed your seminal work Sister Girl (1998) and your book with your mum Aunty Rita (1994). I am also fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with you in 2008 and 2009 as an early career researcher in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Unit.

I have long admired and enjoyed your writing. I often think of particular phrases and passages in your work which have made me think deeply about my own positioning as a non-Indigenous person and my roles, responsibilities and relationships with Indigenous people. In Sister Girl you wrote about the role of the white-feminist movement in the oppression of Aboriginal women and this made me think about my complicity in colonialism as a white woman, and engagements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women. I also often think of the line in Sister Girl, on page 84, where you wrote that non-Indigenous people should not expect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to welcome them into their lives because ‘there is a long history of violence, mistrust, guilt and fear that cannot be erased overnight’. There have certainly been deep traumas and shadows cast by researchers with unethical practices and I must always be aware of this and the need to consider the benefits of research for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. More recently I have enjoyed the new edition of Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation (2022) and your discussion about collaboration between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and non-Indigenous people.

Your writing continues to make me think critically about my own positioning and more broadly about relationships between  and non-Indigenous people. Thank you for your powerful political and personal writing, and I hope to get the opportunity to catch up with you sometime soon.

Kind regards

Katelyn

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Biography

Associate Professor Katelyn Barney is a non-Indigenous academic in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit and is affiliated with the School of Music at The University of Queensland. She has worked in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit for the past 17 years and her research focuses on improving pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into and through higher education and advancing understanding about the role of collaborative research and music making between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people. She has published across these areas and her latest edited book is Musical Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous People in Australia: Exchanges in the Third Space (Routledge). She is also Managing Editor of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education.

She was a recent Equity Fellow with the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE). Her fellowship explored effective evaluation of university outreach with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander secondary school students. Katelyn has co-hosted two podcasts with her colleague Professor Tracey Bunda entitled Indigenous Success: Doing it, Thinking it, Being it and Indigenising Curriculum in Practice.