Community Education

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Awareness Training 

Duration: 3 hours, including breaks
Cost: $360
Numbers: Up to 30 people
Location: In-person or online (additional travel costs may apply)

Introduces participants to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, cultural protocols and ways of being. 

Covers the questions:

• Who is Aboriginal? Who is Torres Strait Islander?
• How do Indigenous people live?
• What is Indigenous disadvantage, and what causes it?
• What is systemic racism and how do I learn to recognise racism in myself, my church or my workplace?
• What cultural protocols or ways of doing things do we most need to be aware of if we are to form and sustain respectful relationships with Indigenous people?

Meet Victoria’s First Peoples

Duration: 6 hours, including breaks
Cost: $720
Numbers: Up to 30 people
Location: In-person or online (additional travel costs may apply)

Introduces participants to the history, cosmology and present way of life of the Aboriginal Nations of Victoria. Includes an account of the way in which changing government policies have impacted these nations between invasion and today. Concludes with an introduction to the current treaty processes and aspirations, including the work of the Uluru Constitutional Convention, the First People’s Assembly of Victoria and the The Yoo-rrook Justice Commission.

Introducting Indigenous Spirituality

Duration: 3 hours, including breaks
Cost: $360
Numbers: Up to 30 people
Location: In-person or online (additional travel costs may apply)

Introduces participants to the most important themes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spiritualities, cosmologies and ways of living. Includes a consideration of country, kin, dreamings, ancestor-creators, elders, moieties and totems. Concludes with a discussion of the myriad ways in which these ‘traditional’ realities have survived and thrived through the colonial period.

Introducing Indigenous Theology 

Duration: 12 hours, including breaks
Cost: $1480
Numbers: Up to 30 people
Location: In-person or online (additional travel costs may apply)

Introduces participants to the themes and major contributors to an Indigenous approach to doing Christian theology in this colony.

Themes considered include:

• A trinitarian approach to creator-ancestors
• Christology of country
• Indigenous ecclesiology
• Indigenous sacramentality and liturgical performance
• Indigenous storytelling and preaching
• An Indigenous approach to sacred texts: country and bible in conversation
• Dirt theology and the ethics of caring for creation
• The ‘dreaming’ and eschatology: an Indigenous approach to space, time, death and life

Theologians to be cited include Djiniyini Gondarra, Lee Miena Skye, Denise Champion, Anne Patel Gray, Victor Joseph, Glenn Loughrey and Garry Deverell.

Indigeneity, Jesus and the Arts

Duration: 3 hours, including breaks
Cost: $360
Numbers: Up to 30 people
Location: In-person or online (additional travel costs may apply)

Introduces participants to the work of some of this colony’s most prominent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, including Vernon Ah Kee, Maree Clarke, Glenn Loughrey, Julie Gough, Warwick Thornton, Michael Riley, Daniel Boyd.

Investigates the relationship between an Indigenous gaze and that of the colony, particularly through the artists’ various treatments of the figure of Jesus.