Bruce Shaw holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Western Australia (1975), and a Ph.D. in English from Flinders University in South Australia (2003). His career has included primary research in the east Kimberley recording indigenous life stories in the 1970s, from which he co-authored several Aboriginal life histories; for example, Countrymen: The Life Histories of Four Aboriginal Men as told to Bruce Shaw (1986). During the 1970s, he was a lecturer at the Darwin Community College, teaching aspects of Aboriginal studies. He worked as a consultant for the then Department of Heritage and Planning, South Australia, doing heritage oriented oral history research in Oodnadatta and Marree, from which a small book was generated. He became involved in Native Title work, first as an expert witness in the initial Miriuwung Gajerrong trial under Justice Lee in 1997; and secondly as an in-house anthropologist with a Perth land council where he wrote connection reports and conducted heritage research. The seven years with the land council gave him a good working knowledge of the Noongar people of the South-West.
Shaw has written numerous articles for refereed journals and contributed chapters to various publications. He has also taught part-time courses in aspects of Aboriginal studies at the Curtin University of Technology (in the Centre for Aboriginal Studies) and Aboriginal history for one semester at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, and has been examiner of Ph.D. and M.A. theses for Curtin University and manuscript assessor for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Shaw is semi-retired, dividing his time between literary studies and, for the Australian Interaction Consultants (AIC), proofreading and editing, writing ethnographic profiles and doing oral history work. He is a member of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS), the Anthropological Society of Western Australia (ASWA), the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA), and is a corresponding member of the journal Aboriginal History. (Adapted from information supplied by the author).
