About Associate Professor Liz Cameron
Liz Cameron is a member of the Dharug nation in north-west Sydney, Australia. Liz is an artist, spatial designer, academic, and researcher. Her artistic endeavours involve a diverse range of mediums that actively incorporate Aboriginal practices, relationships, and knowledges. Drawing upon her extensive experience in the visual arts and Indigenous knowledge systems, Liz’s research primarily revolves around practice-led research within artistic domains, by utilising decolonial theories and embodied visual communications.
Liz implements Country-guided practices that authentically reflect the essence of cultural place. Her interests delve into exploring various subjects such as identity, belonging, and the global impact of design. Within the realm of the built environment, Liz’s research specifically focuses on cultural representation, examining the connection between Indigenous cultures and national identity.
Liz continues to build on her PhD studies in how creative making plays an important role in health and healing.
Publications
Cameron, A. E. (2018). Communication partner training delivered face-to-face and via telepractice with health professionals, health professional students and people with aphasia. . Aeipt.225667. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/aeipt.225667
Cameron, E. (1979). Flying catchers (Some birds of southeastern Australia). IELAPA, 298–303. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.800219960
Cameron, E., Cogger, H., & Heatwole, H. (1978). A natural laboratory (Torres Strait island fauna). IELAPA, 190–197. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.790412001
Cameron, G. E. (2011). Can conflict resolution education help young refugee students cope in the classroom? . Aeipt.200407. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/aeipt.200407
Cameron, L. (2010a). Supporting Indigenous Nursing Students. The Australian Nursing Journal: ANJ, 18(6), 39. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.580213073623110
Cameron, L. (2010b). Supporting Indigenous Nursing Students. The Australian Nursing Journal: ANJ, 18(6), 39. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.580213073623110
Cameron-Traub, E. (1990). Nursing, education, practice and health care for women. IELAPA, 73–77. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.910708021
Dalman, E. C., & Trouton, L. D. (2004). Interculturalism and dance-theatre: interview [by Lycia Danielle Trouton] with Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, (OAM) choreographer-dancer. Bungendore, A. C. T., Australia, January 18, 2004. IELAPA, 168–186. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.200504307
Gruppetta, M., Southgate, E., Ober, R., Cameron, L., Fischetti, J., Thunig, A., Heath, T., Burns, K., & Clifton, S. (2018). Yarning the way : the role of Indigenous education paraprofessionals in guiding the post-school transitions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. . Aeipt.220480. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/aeipt.220480
Mason, P. H., & Dalman, E. C. (2009a). Brain, dance and culture 2: evolutionary characteristics in the collaborative choreographic process of Elizabeth Cameron Dalman. Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance, (31), 19–26. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.201003880
Mason, P. H., & Dalman, E. C. (2009b). Brain, Dance and Culture 2: Evolutionary Characteristics in the Collaborative Choreographic Process of Elizabeth Cameron Dalman. Brolga: An Australian Journal about Dance, (31), 19–26. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.250446748295487
Video Transcript
How would you like to introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Liz Cameron, I’m of Dharug descent and I work at the University of Newcastle in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment.
Can you tell us about the varied fields in which you have studied, worked and researched?
So probably starting from school, I didn’t enjoy school that much. I wasn’t very good at it and was told I was a bit of a dreamer. So I decided to get into nursing because that was at that time, that was the job that you got paid for. So I thought money was pretty important at that time. So I took up nursing. I lasted there about three years and then I went into the creative arts. From there I went into some post-grad studies at Macquarie University which was on Indigenous social health and then working in the university setting led me to start my Masters which I transferred up to a PhD in Indigenous Knowledges from a creative standpoint.
Can you tell us more about the focus and your experience of doing your PhD?
Yeah, so I never thought I was a writer. I remember that clearly and I was really challenged to think that I could ever complete. I think the artworks by doing the arts practice really helped me and built my confidence at that time. I spent a lot of time with some community, particularly some artists, around traditional knowledges, particularly from a creative standpoint. I started to build more knowledge as I went on, which led to different avenues to look at what was important about traditional knowledge. I guess my main mission was to restore and revive some of the traditional knowledges, particularly around creativity.
Do you want to tell us about a research project you are currently or recently involved in?
I’m involved in two research projects at the moment. One is at an Indigenous school in Cairns where we’re looking at working with community in co-designing a school that’s suitable for the students, for the staff and the greater community. This involves flying up, being with community, being with staff and hearing their voices. One of the things that we did, which was really successful, was to work with the students in a more arts-based inquiry. So we got them to do a great big map of the school and then they were filling in things that they would like to see at their school. I was quite amazed. I thought there would be some really interesting, innovative ideas, but there are also many practical ideas that came out of that. One was they wanted some swings at children’s parkland for the younger children and they wanted a lot more shade because up there it’s terribly hot and also gets terribly wet. So they were talking about they want shades on the pathways, they wanted shaded areas to sit for lunch. Those were the things that were really important to them. The other projects that I’m going to be working on next year is with some colleagues and community groups about looking at edible and medicinal plants from my country around the Hawkesbury River or Dyarubbin River as it’s called. And we’re investigating whether what plants are still around, what value they can still have and how do we preserve them and educate local community about their value. So one of those is the yams. We’re going to be looking at not the little daisy, but trying to find the larger size yam and looking at some of the health benefits from some of the traditional plants, natives.
What have been some of your experiences of leadership within academia?
So leadership can be a tough call. I can remember I came with great passion, great ideas, and I wanted to solve the problems of the world. But when I actually went down to a university in Victoria, it was more about listening to the students, listening to the staff and the local community and working out ways we can build together to improve the educational outcomes for Indigenous students. So some of the things you need to … in a leadership role is to really navigate some of the data that’s available to you through universities or libraries or different research areas just to determine what are some of the gaps in service delivery, what are some of the improvements that you can make and what does the general community think is needed in an Indigenous centre.
What was that role?
I was the director of the Institute of Koorie Education, now called the NIKERI Centre. It’s an Indigenous specific centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It also has accommodation where students actually fly in and fly out from their own community and come to intensive learning sessions at Deakin. The program’s really successful for both young students and also mature-age. It was a very successful and well-needed program. One of the targets that was really important to me in leading Indigenous education was to fill some of the gaps, particularly in the sciences area and environmental space. I think we need a lot more people thinking about caring for Country techniques, also managing Country better than we’re doing at the moment and protecting Country is really important.
Can you please talk about Dharug understandings of the human senses, that you have written about?
So looking at the seven Dharug senses and how that relates to connecting with Country, that’s about understanding that, like a lot of other Indigenous nations, we have a different understanding about how our body connects to place and how that experience can build a sense of belonging and also can help us to identify changes within the environment and just be a little bit more aware of what’s going on in this natural world. So we have the five Western senses, you know, the sights, smell, etc, but we don’t categorise them. So from a Western perspective, there’s a high, you know, sight is the most important sense and we tend to rely on that and use that in prioritising all decision making and understanding a sense of place as well. But you know, one of the strongest senses is actually smell. They’re the things we remember. So when we place it in a hierarchy system, it doesn’t work. We forget, you know, our other senses. So the sense of smell, for example, we remember the smell about walking into our grandmother’s room or the scent of perfume or the scent of the bush or the coming rain, all those sorts of things. And they are far more thought provoking than sight alone. But from the Dharug standpoint, we also have two other senses, which we call the internal senses, and they’re about Oolgna, which is your gut feeling. So Oolgna or Oolgna, it might be called as well. That’s your gut reaction. And that is the most important, that’s far more important than, you know, the head brain, this belly brain is your determines your instinctive behaviour. We all have it, many of us ignore it. And we all justify not experiencing it, experiencing it, experiencing it because of our logic. And our logical mind can interfere with really connecting with country. The other one is Ngara, which means to be imaginative. This means like attuning ourselves to our dreams, attuning ourselves to our ancestral thoughts. An example of that might be when I’m actually, you know, painting, and I might be painting right into the late at night time. And then I’ll realise, oh, no, I’ve made this awful mistake, and I’ll stop work. And I’ll actually go to bed and fall asleep. And I’ll wish for a dream. And I often have these dreams where I believe ancestors, my ancestors guide me into making the right decision. So it’s about problem solving too. And so I’m known to rush down at three o’clock in the morning and have the solution to the problem, finish the painting, and it’s done. And I feel really confident about it. So those two internal senses are really important and should not be overlooked when we look at connecting with Country, building our sense of awareness of place, and really feeling that these internal senses are just as important as our external senses. How do these senses relate to individual and collective wellbeing? How do the senses relate to the well-being? For example, our stomach area actually contains the most high levels of serotonin, which is your natural, happy drug. I think many Westerners tend to focus on the mental health rather than the gut health. I think if we change some of these perceptions and start to care for our gut, including what we eat, what we drink, what we consume, and listen to those little ripples or rhythms that we have within the gut, we would probably be a lot healthier and more connected to Country and ourselves. So when we know that serotonin is actually manufactured in the gut, it says a lot about maybe we should start looking at the gut and some of the preservatives and things like that we are actually eating and start living a bit more healthily.
Can you talk about your contributions to Indigenous health and wellbeing research and teaching?
So one of the philosophies a lot of Indigenous nations have is ‘healthy Country, healthy people’, where Western society may think they’re different, the other way around. Healthy Country guarantees healthy people and I think when we start to look at caring for Country and caring for our landscape including all living and non-living things, we’ll be able to understand not only ourselves but the health that surrounds ourselves within country and I think this is often a neglected area because people tend to prioritise their own health over others. They tend to prioritise their own landscape or geographical area over others. They tend to have a lack of disconnection, like they feel disconnected with place because they might be new migrants to Australia or they might have been living here but don’t have that long ancestral lineage and so it’s really important that we start to look at the social emotional health of both people, place and that includes you know animals and plants. We can no longer start neglecting country because when we neglect country we will neglect ourselves.
How are you finding your recent shift to the field/department of Architecture and the Built Environment?
I work at the University of Newcastle in the School of Architecture and Built Environment. One of my roles here is to work with a small Indigenous team, there are five colleagues all up, and our role is to embed Indigenous knowledges within curriculum to transform Indigenous ideas into place keeping and place holding, to increase the number of Indigenous students as there are so very few Indigenous architects in Australia. When I first applied for the position, I thought, is this the right job for me? Because we always, for Indigenous people, we think architecture in the built environment is destructive, and so we tend to perhaps not enter into that discipline. Yet, this is, from working here for the last 12 months, it’s really changed my positioning because I feel extremely passionate about working in the built environment. I can see that we can make, as Indigenous people, make radical changes to the colonial infrastructure that’s just soaked up these lands. I think we can make a real difference in showcasing how architecture can work within Country and how buildings can start fitting into Country rather than fighting against it. I think there’s lots of opportunities to do some amazing things in the future that reflect the uniqueness of this place. So when we think of architecture now, we see fabulous buildings such as the Opera House perhaps or some skyrise or it might be a building, a house, a residential house, for example. But generally, it’s really colonial or Western influenced. We need to be seen as responding to Country in a far better way. We need to start thinking about the ways we design and does that fit into our seasonal calendars, particularly our Indigenous seasonal calendars, which are far more accurate than the four Western seasons, and how we can relate these buildings that actually just sit within the environment rather than really stick out. So that’s the work we do at the moment.
What changes have you witnessed in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ and researchers’ experiences of universities over the last decade or so?
Yeah, so when I first went into university, either as a student or a staff member, I experienced the lack of Indigenous presence. So lack of students, lack of staff, both professional staff as well as academic staff and researchers. In each discipline there would be some Indigenous knowledge that they were taught by, often by non-Indigenous academics, and now I’ve seen that dramatically change. Where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are now committed in higher education and actually making a vast difference to not only the students but the staff and colleagues that they work with. I find the School of Architecture absolutely fantastic to work in. It’s not an Indigenous centre and it’s not just dedicated to Indigenous staff. It’s many staff from multiple cultures and we all work together with the same passions. It’s been a very interesting journey for once because now Indigenous knowledge is starting to be raised as important, particularly to addressing things like climate change, overpopulation, etc, etc. And so Indigenous knowledges are becoming very vital to addressing some of these key issues and I’m finding now that non-Aboriginal academics are now embracing Indigenous knowledges and really keen to learn about it. So that’s been the hugest shift, that equality particularly in teaching and learning.
What barriers do you still see to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement in academia?
When I look at the equity within higher education, there are still some challenges. There are challenges within funding, there are challenges within relocation of staff and students. So I’m talking about when someone may be living in a rural or a remote area wants to go to university and they choose a Sydney based university, it’s often challenging to relocate. They mightn’t know kin or friends. They might find that transformation from very different landscapes quite confronting. They may be what’s called longing for home or longing for community, so they might experience homesickness as well. I think the really important things that over the years that we have done is acknowledge these challenges really impact on each student and staff that relocate as well. And I think that there’s been a lot of people working very hard to create safe cultural spaces for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Beyond your own work, what is some of the most urgent research currently being undertaken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars? Yeah, I think a lot of work still needs to be done, particularly in the environmental learning space. And I note that many universities still to this day do not have an Indigenous Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander academic researcher on board so that students are immersed in Indigenous knowledges. I think there’s still some non-Indigenous people playing that role or taking that role and need to really step aside and make some spaces for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professionals. I think there’s also needs to be a lot of recognition about qualifications. I put Indigenous knowledges on par with any Masters, PhD or degree. I don’t think that you can say just because you don’t have that Western white paper, you’re not qualified to work in higher education. I think the value of particularly when you look at firestick farming or cultural burning, whatever you call that, that those knowledges are so vital for this country. We’ve just looked at, you know, two hundred and so years of complete neglect of our environment. And so without back burning or firestick farming, we’re heading into some really terrible future if we don’t start doing something. And it’s not about… bushfires are not about the burning down of trees and perhaps some buildings. It’s about the destruction they do to our native animals as well as the danger they are to people. The amount of, you know, on the koala population, for example, is just extraordinary in decline. And along with the 2021 environmental report in New South Wales that states New South Wales is leading in the decline of all marsupials. And it’s time we started to take responsibility for that and have an sense of obligation to place and caring for place. Living here means nurturing our natural world as well. I think having Indigenous knowledges within higher education in environmental courses should be just mandatory.
What would you like to say to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are interested to undertake university-based study?
So in closing, I guess my last words would be around inspiring others to come to university and get a degree. I think we are all capable of getting that little bit of white paper, and we’re all capable of installing Indigenous knowledges within every discipline of universities. I don’t want people to think that they’re not good enough, they’re not capable of learning. I came from a very basic learning background. I believe it wasn’t my capacity to learn, it was more about my commitment. And when you have a very strong personal commitment, you will achieve a great deal. And look at that big blue tongue. [laughs] Yes, dinner!