Relational Ordering: Reflective Motives Keynote Conversation with Aunty Mary Graham and Tristen Harwood
Description
FREE | 5-7pm | Thursday 12th of November | Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre, UQ St Lucia
‘The openness of relational logic extends beyond Oceania,’ so with this we are tide-taken, wind-swept, called upon by history, our ancestors, and answerable to kin, all while our lives are metered by clocks not of our making.[1] We are constituted through relations both destructive and nourishing, structured by colonialism, capitalism, Country, kinship. The very openness of relational ordering calls for critical attention. This is increasingly impressed upon us by the cumulative harm – the devastation of the environmental and cultural realm – endemic to dominant structures of social reproduction, especially as they reach their absolute limits. Such conditions ‘call for the rejuvenation and exercise of relational Aboriginal diplomacy with the coloniser and the wider world’.[2]
– Tristen Harwood
Over decades Dr Aunty Mary Graham has theorised and put forward a relational-ethical order adequate to this task. The relational logic developed in her political philosophy offers both a ground for imaginative possibility and everyday practices that recognise distinctiveness and autonomy as well as nourishing collective life-systems.
Reflective Motives presents Relational Ordering, an in-conversation keynote between Graham and Tristen Harwood, which considers what Graham’s political philosophy asks of us, the possibilities it opens, and forms of collective life it might yet enable.
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This is an inclusive, outdoors event at the Dr Mary Mahoney AO Amphitheatre, with live streaming available for those unable to attend in person. Please register to attend. If you are attending online, we will be in touch closer to the talk with instructions for accessing the livestream. Bring a picnic dinner. While the content of this conversation will be philosophical, art historical and political, children and families are welcome.
[1] Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg, “All Perspectives,” in Politics: Philosophical Ordering by Country (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson Australia, 2026), 164.
[2] Graham and Brigg, “The Centrality of Relating,” 124.
Image credit (left to right): Dr Aunty Mary Graham, Courtesy of the speaker. Tristen Harwood, Courtesy of the speaker.
Speakers
Honorary Professor Aunty Mary Graham
Honorary Professor Aunty Mary Graham is a Kombumerri person through her father’s people of the contemporary Gold Coast, and Waka Waka through her mother’s people. She has taught Aboriginal history, politics, and comparative philosophy at The University of Queensland and other universities. Mary has worked across government agencies and community organisations, including establishing Aboriginal and Islander childcare services during the 1970’s and serving on the boards and committees for many Aboriginal organisations. She served in a range of public positions, including as a regional counsellor for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and as a Member of the Ethics Council of the National Congress for Australia’s First Peoples.
Tristen Harwood
Tristen Harwood is a Boorloo-born writer of Aboriginal and European heritage who lives on unceded Wurundjeri Country in Naarm, where he lectures at the Victorian College of the Arts. He is a PhD candidate at RMIT, researching the entwined history of Indigenous art and the prison. Tristen is a contributing editor at MeMo and a board member of Gertrude Contemporary. His writing has been published in Memo, The Age, The Saturday Paper, The New York Times Style Magazine, ArtReview, Artlink, Overland Journal, un Magazine, Art Monthly Australasia, Art + Australia, and others.
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