ECU Lead, Cultural Strategy and Development, Clothilde Bullen. Photo: Jamie James
Breaking new ground on old country
Acclaimed Wardandi and Badimaya curator, writer and advocate Clothilde Bullen is breaking new ground as the inaugural Lead, Cultural Strategy and Development for Edith Cowan University (ECU) as it builds its world-class ECU City campus in the heart of Perth's CBD.
ECU's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Students, Equity and Indigenous), Professor Braden Hill, said the creation of this new cultural strategy role was a bold initiative from ECU that reinforces the University's leadership role in the higher education sector.
Bullen's role will not only expand the University’s engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities but serve as a connection with the State's key cultural organisations that neighbour the new campus.
"We are at a new stage in the University's maturity in enacting best practice in the cultural space, and Clothilde’s appointment is an exceptionally exciting part of that - there is no one better in the nation at thinking about the ways we can talk about cutting-edge, immersive and meaningful First Nations' narratives, that inspire, educate and engage," said Professor Hill.
Walking the same paths
As Ms Bullen reflects on this year’s NAIDOC Week theme 'Keep the fire burning! Blak, loud and proud' she talks about the role and the importance of continuous representation for Aboriginal people in Perth.
"ECU City is rapidly taking shape in the centre of our State's central business district, and for me it is clear there are new opportunities for genuine leadership, engagement and activation which span education and cultural identity," says Bullen.
"When we think about what it means in Western Australia to belong, we think about our community; our families and those we choose to connect with. The architecture of spaces can be catalysts for this thinking around the issues of identity and connection, as does the very ground upon which our First Nations stories are embedded in."
"The new campus location actually marks the place where the first Aboriginal land grant was given in 1841 to Noongar man John Warrup. He married Noongar woman Mary Dwoyup that same year. ECU worked with the State Library of WA to find that although the land was granted to the new couple, when the groom met an untimely death not long after the marriage the land title wasn’t passed to his widow – because legally at the time women were not allowed to own land. The irony of Noongar culture being matriarchal and matrilineal in terms of leadership and inter-generational transmission of knowledge and custodianship, which still goes unrecognised in the western legal system, is not lost on me."
"Both Yooreel Fanny Balbuk – one of our greatest Noongar warriors and matriarchs, and Edith Dircksey Cowan, a seminal figure in the Swan River Colony and whom the University is named after, shared space and time in the mid-19th century. It is extraordinary to me to think about them both showing leadership in advocacy for women in their own ways at the same time."
