Taking the Universities Australia report, National best practice framework for Indigenous cultural competency in Australian universities (2011) as the starting point for its discussion, this paper examines the applicability of cultural competence in the design and delivery of Australian Indigenous Studies. It argues that both the conceptual underpinnings and the operationalisation of cultural competence necessitate an over-reliance on essentialised notions of Indigeneity, cast in radical opposition to non-Indigeneity, which negate multiple and diverse expressions of Indigenous identity and lived experience. Thus, this approach perpetuates the very colonialist logics Indigenous Studies should endeavour to overcome. Secondly, it argues that cultural competency's emphasis on non-Indigenous self-reflexivity, broadly consistent as it is with both scholarship and praxis in Indigenous Studies, is represented in some of the literature as uncritical deference to an always-unified Indigeneity, thereby exacerbating the original essentialising impulse evident in the cultural competence paradigm. Therefore, this paper proposes that Indigenous Studies should explore the limits of self-reflexivity, with a view to establishing a genuinely anti-colonial/decolonising praxis that incorporates the capacity to negotiate Indigenous intracultural diversity along with other markers for identity.

We discuss the recent reworking of Murdoch University's Australian Indigenous Studies major. For the discipline to realise its charter of decolonising knowledges about Indigenous peoples, it is necessary to move Indigenous Studies beyond the standard reversalist and unsustainable tropes that valorise romanticised notions of Indigeneity and Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies over those of a demonised 'western' other. Drawing on Martin Nakata's contribution to scholarship on the future of Indigenous Studies, we argue that his problematisation of the cultural interface provides a discipline-based rationale for working beyond the Indigenous-western binary, and that his notion of standpoints encourages the ongoing production of diverse, historically and politically informed scholarship, while preparing students to enter the workforce with a contemporary, ethically sophisticated grasp of Indigenous and nonIndigenous relations, which is consistent with the decolonial goals of the discipline.

Monitoring required by regulators as part of environmental approvals in Australia has become increasingly complex and is sometimes viewed simply as the cost of developing projects, particularly in recent years. Monitoring programs, however, provide an important opportunity to learn about complex ecological systems and how they fare during large-scale disturbances, potentially with both project-specific and industry-wide benefits. During the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project’s major-capital dredging program, an unprecedented amount of information was collected about water quality and coral. Water quality was monitored continuously at 36 sites and the condition of nearly 1,600 individually labelled corals measured fortnightly during 18 months. While daily and fortnightly reports were provided for compliance purposes, a significant investment was also made by Chevron to a Predictive Links investigation, to re-analyse data to gain a better understanding between water quality and sedimentation with changes in coral condition. This additional investment resulted in a number of important research findings including revised water-quality thresholds for maintaining coral health that are based uniquely on field measurements during an actual dredging program. Subsequently, when environmental approvals were being sought for the nearby Wheatstone project, Chevron had a much better understanding of dredging and its potential effects on coral reefs in the region. The Wheatstone program now incorporates these data and ideas, and has allowed Chevron to have greater confidence in the dredging program being proposed, the likely impacts on coral assemblages, and how these should be managed and monitored.

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