Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Council has progressed broad community consideration of the practical application of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (VIC), its failures and successes. Through this process, Council has been forced to reassess the commitment of both the community and the government to self-determination.The time has come for Traditional Owners to do more than play a part, they must realise their rights to control their Cultural Heritage through the law that governs the protection and management of that Cultural Heritage. Council has made 24 recommendations to the Victorian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs for fundamentally necessary reforms of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 (VIC). It is essential that, as a society, we truly understand that Traditional Owners are the only comprehensive knowledge holders of their Cultural Heritage. Once we understand that one, fundamental truth, then the changes we now recommend for their management of that Cultural Heritage are clear and purposeful. Such understandings are in step with the international benchmark set by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If these reforms are affected, the positive change for protection, management and lived engagement with Cultural Heritage will be profound.

Heritage, Indigenous Doing and Wellbeing presents an Australian Aboriginal relational understanding of the world that offers a counter-narrative to the Western notion of heritage towards new insights into the potential for sustaining the complex systems that support all life. From an Indigenous Australian perspective, the Western concept of heritage is intentionally exclusionary and supports social, political, economic and environmental injustice. Aboriginal people engage with Australia’s lands, waters, and skies every day in entirely different ways, seeing their Country as a living ‘heritage’, but in a unique relationship that engages the individual with Place, Ancestors, Language, and wellbeing analogous to a familial relationship. However, Country is most often relegated by heritage proponents to ‘intangible heritage’ resulting in the concept having little legislative, legal or administrative weight. Drawing on a common understanding of Country as sacred, living and sentient, rather than as objectified property or resource, the contributors to this book explore a diversity of relationships with Country that demonstrate the richness and the practical utility of this relational understanding. Heritage, Indigenous Doing and Wellbeing foregrounds the voices of Australian Aboriginal Peoples who are involved in ‘Caring for Country’. The book offers an essential resource for those engaged in the study of Country, heritage, museums, Indigenous Peoples, First Nations Peoples, landscape architecture, environmental studies, planning, anthropology and archaeology. It will also be of great interest to heritage practitioners working around the globe.