Shannyn Palmer - Deep listening in a time of truth-telling on Angas Downs Station

Angas Downs is a pastoral station in Central Australia, but pastoralism is only a fraction of the story of this place. Like all places, it has accrued people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Listening to Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, two Anangu with deep and abiding connections to the station, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have shaped understandings of the past in Australia. Drawing on the experiences and perspectives shared by Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong in Unmaking Angas Downs: myth and history on a Central Australian pastoral station, this talk will explore the transformative power of deep listening for historical research and writing in a settler colonial nation.

Shannyn Palmer is a community-engaged practitioner, facilitator and award-winning writer living and working on the Ancestral lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. She works with cultural institutions and communities to facilitate ethical community engaged practice and enable meaningful intercultural collaborations. She is particularly interested in community engaged practice as a methodology for disrupting settler colonial systems and knowledge. She has a PhD in History from the Australian National University and her first book, Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, won the 2023 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History and the 2023 Northern Territory Chief Minister’s History Book Award.