Bonnie Chew is a proud Wadawurrung (Wathaurung) woman with many years’ experience in Aboriginal Cultural Heritage and Education.

Bonnie regularly gives lectures promoting cultural heritage management and has sound knowledge of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006. In April 2012, she had the opportunity to be a representative for Ballarat at the World Historical Cities Conference in Vietnam, where she was able to share her knowledge and network with people of many other nations on a range of heritage issues.

Recently, Bonnie held the role of Cultural Heritage Coordinator for a Registered Aboriginal Party (Wathaurung Aboriginal Corporation). In that role, Bonnie worked closely with the community, archaeologists, developers, anthropologists, ecologists and government authorities, on approximately 126 projects to achieve the best outcomes regarding the preservation of cultural heritage on her traditional Country.

Richard Broome is one of Australia’s leading historians. While he has written on a wide range of subjects, ‘it is his work on Indigenous history with its emphasis on Aboriginal agency and capacity for negotiation and self-empowerment that has been most influential. His book Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788, first published in 1982, is now in its 5th fully revised edition and has sold over 60,000 copies in that time. It is the most widely read work in this field. He has also written Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800, published in 2005 and the most comprehensive account available of Aboriginal history since white settlement in this state.

His history of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, Fighting Hard, was published in 2015 to document the fight against policies of assimilation and the struggle for civil rights. In the clarity and accessibility of his writing, his great capacity for story-telling and his meticulous research, Richard has opened up the history of Aboriginal Australians to a much wider public readership than academic historians.’