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Despite the prevalence of First Australian deaths by suicide there is a lack of services developed and delivered by First Australians and limited evidence for the effectiveness of mainstream programs. This dissertation is focused on developing a better understanding of First Australian suicidal ideation and suicide-related behaviours in order to inform effective responses to suicide in our communities. As a First Australian researcher I subscribed to a research model based on an Indigenist paradigm. The Indigenist paradigm entails a cultural alliance with the First Australian community and participants in this research. My enculturation as a First Australian obliges me to work with the First Australian community to pursue emancipation by challenging structures and societal issues that oppress First Australians. My established professional, family and personal relationships within the First Australian community in the regional city of Mackay (Queensland, Australia) facilitated my engagement with the community in this research. My engagement with this research began at the time of a cluster of deaths by suicide of First Australian youth within Mackay’s First Australian community. I participated in an initial investigation of this suicide cluster to strengthen the community’s knowledge about deaths by suicide. My work has been overseen by an Indigenous Critical Reference Group consisting of highly respected community representatives. Given deaths by suicide continued to affect Mackay’s First Australian community, the Indigenous Critical Reference Group requested a deeper understanding of the issues that needed to be addressed and proposed my involvement in continued research. Their request led to this thesis, ensuring that this dissertation represents true community-driven research. To respond to the request of the Indigenous Critical Reference Group, I revisited the initial investigation. During the initial interviews, some participants shared their own personal experiences of suicide-related behaviours and suicidal ideation. It was envisaged further investigation of these interviews would provide valuable insight into antecedents and precursors beyond what was available in coroners’ reports. The 14 interviews included in this research are comprised of three (M=0, F=3) participants who shared their own experiences of suicide-related behaviour and eleven (M=3, F=8) participants who shared their own experiences of suicidal ideation. These participants’ interview transcripts were reviewed and the portions of the transcripts directly relating to their suicide-related behaviour and suicidal ideation were re-analysed. The findings of this analysis were discussed with key informants and Critical Reference Group members to build an explanatory model, which is described in this thesis. In subscribing to an Indigenist research paradigm, my cultural identity and experiences as a First Australian informed the entire research project, making me a participant-observer. My partnership with Mackay’s First Australian community, especially in my relationships with the Indigenous Critical Reference Group members and the research participants, featured collective ownership of the research process to produce research outcomes that initiate change. I conducted qualitative interviews with research participants who had engaged in suicide-related behaviours or experienced suicidal ideation. To deepen the analysis of the qualitative data, I developed a data analysis matrix defined by the intersection between five health domains (drawn from a First Australian perspective on holistic health) and the three dimensions of experience (time, space and distance). The latter dimensions allowed me to establish a broader context of participants’ life experiences. The data analysis matrix enabled analysis from multiple perspectives to provide a more comprehensive understanding of participants suicide-related behaviours and suicidal ideation. To broaden my understanding even further, I approached the interviews and analysis from the perspective of a multi-layered Ecological Theory incorporating the micro, meso, exo, macro and chrono-systems (see Chapter 1). This Ecological Theory ensured that I examined the data and my interpretation from a complex rather than simplistic perspective. Data analysis was conducted in three phases. The first phase involved analysing participants’ experiences to develop an understanding of the Social, Intellectual, Physical, Emotional and Spiritual (SIPES) domains of health. In the second phase, participants’ SIPES experiences were analysed across the dimensions of time, space and distance. The third and final phase comprised meetings with Indigenous Critical Reference Group members, alongside ongoing engagement with the data, to develop an explanatory model, namely the Empowerment to Prevent Suicidality (EPS) Model, that depicts First Australian experiences of suicidal ideation and suicide-related behaviours. The EPS Model emphasises the social and spatial nature of suicidality, located in the interpersonal environment and the places that have most meaning to people. Rather than being a personal and emotional experience, suicidal ideation and suicide-related behaviour begins in a social spatial context of powerlessness where it escalates until it reaches an emotional threshold. Once the emotional threshold has been breached, the energy created is driven by a sense of urgency that is steeped in history, judgements about the future, physical and emotional distancing and spatial/social influences or reactions. This distress-filled period often continues until such time as there is an intellectual realisation, usually triggered and supported by a social ally. The role of the ally is as a social guide who can prompt a shift into an empowerment cycle where people can again take control over their time, space and connections in a more positive way. Allies, unlike many other social connections that dominated the chaotic environment, refused to be complicit in defining a space that trapped participants and instead created a space that allowed participants to move to safety. Many traditional medical responses to deaths by suicide rely on interventions delivered by authorities. These authorities are steeped in the historical, social/spatial and interpersonal challenges that contributed to cycles of chaos and powerlessness in the first place. Consequently, these interventions often contribute to further powerlessness. Rather than contributing to powerlessness, interventions for First Australians must focus on strategies for facilitating empowerment at crucial points in time, addressing the powerlessness cycle and preventing threshold breaches. Interventions for First Australians must focus on development and mobilising social allies and building safe empowering spaces, but also allowing the time to support people back to a place of empowerment. Most importantly, interventions must recognise and respect the social/spatial nature of First Australian suicidality rather than focusing on individual mental health conditions. The First Australian experience of suicidality identified in my research has been investigated through a culturally informed method of acquiring and interpreting information that has revealed a new way of thinking about suicidality. This research highlights features of First Australian experiences of suicidality that can be integrated into interventions, particularly in the case of clusters of youth deaths by suicide. Findings suggest a more effective approach to address First Australian suicidality can be developed using a social/spatial orientation, that is mindful of history and the impact of time on First Australian people. Additionally, it is important to examine the connections and disconnections that have occurred in First Australian people’s lives to understand ways in which the social environment facilitates suicide-related behaviours and triggers shifts into both powerlessness and empowerment.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander souvenir art sector with its wide range of products has a long and significant history and is economically important within the industry. However, the full scope of this significance has not been adequately recognised in the academic literature. While the sector’s substantial economic contribution is acknowledged in some policy documents, these considerations are generally brief, with little analysis of any value the sector might generate in the social and cultural spheres. This neglect of souvenir art is driven by two key factors: its low status in the social hierarchy of the arts (Bourdieu, 1984), and the difficulty of finding analytical tools capable of assessing the complexities of the sector without falling into assumptions about the cultural value and ‘authenticity’ of souvenir art. In an attempt to redress this, the thesis develops both a theoretical framework that aims to adequately capture the social, cultural and economic significance of the sector, and analytical tools that cover the broad set of discourses that comprise the subject. As such, I have adapted the insights of modern and critical political economy theories to analyse the distribution of economic capital, and broadened these theories to encompass Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) concepts of social and cultural capital. This combination of theories forms a broad-ranging theoretical framework that accommodates economic capital and the qualitative discursive constructions that inform amounts of social and cultural capital within the same system. I use this framework to illustrate the social, cultural and economic value of the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander souvenir art sector and its products. These values are traced through an analysis of seven examples of organisations active in the sector. The thesis undertakes a close analysis of aspects of the souvenir art sector that have not been adequately represented in the literature, including the diversity of organisations and broad spectrum of products. The thesis makes an argument for the legitimacy of the sector while addressing the limitations of discourses of authenticity and inauthenticity. I analyse the political economy of the sector to reveal the interaction between state policies and funding statements and the example organisations, illustrating the substantial social, cultural and economic capital that the sector generates.

This thesis examines the relationship between art and place, and challenges conventional readings of the paintings of the late Aboriginal Anmatyerr elder Emily Kame Kngwarray of Australia and Canadian/American modernist artist Agnes Martin. In the case of Kngwarray, connections between body, ground and canvas are extensively explored through stories told to the author by Emily's countrywomen at Utopia in the Northern Territory. In the case of Agnes Martin, these relationships are explored through personal interview with the artist in Taos, New Mexico, and by phenomenological readings of her paintings. The methodology is based on analysis of narrative, interview material, existing critical literature and the artists' paintings. The haptic and embodiment emerge as strong themes, but the artists' use of repetition provides fertile ground to question wholly aesthetic or cultural readings of their paintings. The thesis demonstrates the significance of historical and psychological denial and erasure, as well as transgenerational legacies in the artists’ work. A close examination is made of the artists' use of surface shimmer in their paintings and the effects of it on the beholder. The implications of being mesmerized by shimmer, especially in the case of Aboriginal paintings, bring up ethical questions about cultural difference and the shadow side of art in its capacity for complicity, denial, appropriation and commodification. This thesis challenges the ocularcentric tradition of seeing the land and art, and examines what occurs when a painting is viewed on the walls of a gallery. It addresses Eurocentric readings of Aboriginal art and looks at the power of the aesthetic gaze that eliminates cultural difference. Differences between space and place are explored through an investigation of the phenomenology of perception, the haptic, embodiment and ‘present-ness’. Place affiliation and the effects of displacement are examined to discover what is often taken for granted: the ground beneath our feet. Art can express belonging and relationship with far-reaching cultural, political, psychological and environmental implications, but only if denial and loss of place are acknowledged.

The thesis is an exploration of how indigenous knowledge has emerged as a subject within Australian intellectual property law. It uses the context of copyright law to illustrate this development. The work presents an analysis of the political, social and cultural intersections that influence legal possibilities and effect practical expectations of the law in this area. The dilemma of protecting indigenous knowledge resonates with tensions that characterise intellectual property as a whole. The metaphysical dimensions of intellectual property have always been insecure but these difficulties come to the fore with the identification of boundaries and markers that establish property in indigenous subject matter. While intellectual property law is always managing difference, the politics of law are more transparent when managing indigenous concerns. Rather than assume the naturalness of the category of indigenous knowledge within law, this work interrogates the politics of its construction precisely as a ‘special’ category. Employing a multidisciplinary methodology, engaging theories of governmental rationality that draws upon the scholarship of Michel Foucault to appreciate strategies of managing and directing knowledge, the thesis considers how the politics of law is infused by cultural, political, bureaucratic and individual factors. Key elements in Australia that have pushed the law to consider expressions of indigenous knowledge in intellectual property can be located in changing political environments, governmental intervention through strategic reports, cultural sensitivity articulated in case law and innovative instances of individual agency. The intersection of these elements reveals a dynamic that exerts influence in the shape the law takes.