Performer list:

• Our MC was Jenna Locke-Jelenic, the highest achieving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student in Creative Industries 2024
• Lulu Houdini is a Gamilaroi poet and midwife. Lulu’s work explores invisibility, memory, resistance, and liminality. Her poetry has been published by Meanjin, Overland, Red Room Poetry and Wakefield Press, with her debut poetry collection winning the 2024 black&write! Fellowship. Lulu currently creates and lives with Jerrinja, Wandi Wandandian Country.
• UniSC student in Creative Industries, Adam Brannigan. Adam writes across genres, favouring the surreal, the dystopian, the dis/rupted. He has had his work published in international and Australian anthologies and journals and is the recipient of awards for his short stories, flash fiction and poetry. Adam is of Baadi descent, but has other bloodlines that whisper their agonies and ecstasies to him.
• Adjunct Professor Dr Aunty Judith Wickes (LTU) is a proud Kalkadoon and Wakka Wakka woman. She is a highly respected Elder. Aunty Judi is a historian, social worker, researcher, educator, mentor, author and much more. She has published widely and was short-listed for the Patricia Grimshaw Prize for writing. Also, she is an ARC grant recipient for research into Aboriginal exemption. Aunty Judi states: “Writing expresses one-self through its words, meanings, feelings and emotions. It is reflexive of life’s journey. Therefore, it is important to pass on its wisdom, truth-telling, resilience and survival to those around.”
• Alister Bartholomew has ancestral matrilineal connections to the Oomai augud, (dog totem) on Saibai Island, Torres Strait, as well as English and Scottish heritage on his father’s side. Alister’s art reflects the living, breathing walking of these ancestral connections with a particular reverence for land and sea. Alister shares both original and covers music to decolonise and ultimately unify audiences wherever he performs, with the chief aim of being fully present. Alister currently resides on Gubbi Gubbi / Kabi Kabi sovereign country not yet ceded.
• Dr Aunty Hope O’ Chin is a Kabi Kabi/Wakka Wakka/Koa/GuguYalanji educator and artist, who has worked in education from the 1980’s and as a professional artist from 1991. She has developed and presented artworks through her studio art practice for over 40 exhibitions across local, national and international venues and forums. Born into the dormitory systems on the Aboriginal Settlement of Cherbourg, her dedication to education and art, and all of its forms, evolved out of the intensities of attitudes and values that prevailed in the historic treatment of Cherbourg residents, and other Indigenous Australians. During her career as a senior executive in Queensland education, Dr O'Chin has been responsible for curriculum, staffing and resourcing to 250 state schools in the Peninsular region, and was a consultant to the Director-General, Education Queensland, and Minister for Education.