Indigenising a Law and Literature Course

In this paper, I recommend my recent efforts to Indigenise a Law and Literature subject at Western Sydney University on the counter-intuitive basis of my limited knowledge of decolonisation theory. The teacher and scholar must meet organisational imperatives (like Indigenising curricula and decolonising literary pedagogy) where they stand, which in my case was on non-specialist ground. My approach was not guided by the templates of standpoint and critical race theory but the hermeneutic principles and evaluative techniques that underwrite literary and legal studies, which I extended to a selection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary texts in a mostly post-Mabo setting. My approach worked with a model of transculturality rather than total decolonisation and aimed at thinking through the implications of Indigenizing course materials and the conflicts that emerged between the competing hierarchies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural, legal, and literary practices. I conclude by emphasising the importance of pursuing the implications of Indigenizing course materials across the customary separation of topics in discrete modules.