Cirrus@Austlit

Zeegers is concerned with a project funded by the University of Ballarat (Victoria) and the current state of affairs whereby 'the land occupied by the school is owned by the state and notionally by the school community' (138). For Zeegers, the school community often has '...no sense of how relationships with the land may go well beyond concepts of ownership' and she perceives problems with acknowledging traditional land ownership by certain schools in certain environments.(p.138). At the time of writing, the article refers to a specific project (yet to be concluded) and aims to contribute to the project by looking at two Indigenous texts, My Place (Wheatley) and Who am I ? The Diary of Mary Talence (Heiss) analysing what perspectives they offer child readers as a 'means of access to other discourses of history' (p.142). Zeegers contends that 'the project enables both Indigenous and Non-indigenous Australian children to engage with non print based texts derived from a cultural tradition that is different from the Euro cultural tradition' (143).