Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute, will launch Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining on Wednesday 26 August. This latest CAEPR Research Monograph is edited by Professor Jon Altman and Dr David Martin, and is published by ANU E Press.

The two speakers presenting this public lecture will challenge some of the common beliefs that surround Indigenous Australians and the history of grog, by discussing the findings of the newly released publication First Taste: How Indigenous Australians Learned About Grog by Dr Maggie Brady (published by the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation). This publication will be released the morning before the lecture and is a series of six books.

The Living Murray Initiative recognises that the aspirations, interests and contributions of Indigenous people are an integral component of contemporary natural resource management and aims to take into account the social, economic and spiritual objectives of Indigenous communities for each of the Murray’s icon sites. In order to do this, The Living Murray’s Indigenous Partnerships Project is developing and implementing a consultation process that will enable Indigenous communities to effectively participate in the discussion about cultural and environmental flows.

In Australia Indigenous cultural tourism is presented as a treasure trove for economic, social, and cultural opportunities, praised as it is in policy documents, advertising campaigns, travel brochures, and, for instance, in the hospitable invitation of an Aboriginal tourism enterprise in north Australia to 'come share our culture'. The question I will especially address in this paper is: to whom does 'our' refer?