What's stopping us now? : envisioning a transformed Australia through critical reflection

A series of short vignettes drawn from personal experience will illuminate and explore the culturally and socially defined 'baggage' that often encumbers non-Indigenous relationships to this country and with its First Peoples. This 'baggage' involves questions of identity and belonging, assumptions and stereotypes, intolerance, complacency and representation. Applying critical reflection to her own life and to two strands of her work - as a social justice advocate and educator in the field of Indigenous public health - this article offers the author's initial understandings as to how structured reflective processes involving story telling might contribute to progressing Australia's nascent national dialogue and related reform of the Australian Constitution.