Brooke Scelza

Postgraduate Award

Media Profile

“The Mardu people left the desert between the 1940’s and 1960’s. Some left voluntarily, and others were moved by force. The Mardu settled in Aboriginal communities, as well as in larger towns throughout the region. Government and missionary plans for ‘integration’ of Aborigines into mainstream Australian society resulted in wide scale changes to the traditional Mardu way of life. My research will examine the cultural changes affecting the community at Parnngurr. ”

Brooke is a doctoral student of the University of Washington specialising in Biocultural Anthropology. Brooke is also a graduate of Harvard University, the Boston University School for Field Studies, and the University of Michigan. Brooke is one of twenty Americans to win the Fulbright Postgraduate Award which will take her to the Parnngurr Aboriginal Outstation. There Brooke will investigate the decision-making behaviour of Mardu people aged between 15 to 40 years, the first group of Mardu people born in at the outstation.

Brooke aims to document the sources of cultural change that are affecting the community at Parnngurr, particularly those most pertinent to her 15 to 40 year old target group. Born away from their traditional camps, the young generation of 15 to 40 year old Mardu face an increasingly complex set of influences as they merge their traditional culture and practices with nation state and market. Brooke intends to investigate the process by which these Mardu make choices in their new environment. The types of skills they choose to acquire, how far they want to progress in initiation rites and other ceremonial traditions, who to marry, how many children to have and when, and how their children will be raised.

“I hope this project will hold great significance to the Mardu community that I will be working with, to my own advancement as a scholar, and to the larger academic community,” Brooke explains. It is critical to the future of the outstation movement that Mardu and other Aboriginal cultures learn to successfully integrate their traditional cultural and land use practices with aspects of the modern Australian state in order to preserve their culture and ensure their survival.

Through her investigation, Brooke intends to illuminate the range of strategies the Mardu are currently enacting in an attempt to reconcile the contrasting world view and life ways of the Mardu culture and the larger Australian community. Brooke’s findings will aid in Mardu efforts to preserve their cultural heritage, and will hopefully be applicable to the efforts of other cultural minorities.