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eventually succeed McMahon in November of the same year.[7] While in office, Whitlam would implement significant improvements to Aboriginal people in the areas of health, land rights and the arts which was bolstered by the creation of an Aboriginal Board within the formation of the Australia council for the Arts to promote the visibility of Aboriginal arts and artists within the mainstream arts sector. The Contemporary Australian Indigenous Lexicon-‐ my work and that of my peers Fast forward twenty-‐three years, sitting alone in track 8 at Carriageworks in the inner Sydney city suburb of Eveleigh, amidst forty interconnected grey jigsaw mats, equipped with a piece of chalk, a stanley knife and a small mound of boxes of cheap playing cards, I constructed a river. Each card was representative of a dot, designed to make the eyes dance as they would a dazzling desert painting, in the attempt to elevate its significance from decorative set piece to sacred artefact. The completed river resembled and represented a cartographer’s map of my Grandmother’s country of Euabalong and the Lachlan river when viewed from above. All of the choreography occurred on either side of its artificial banks. In one section, the dancers travelled its length over and over and in the dance’s final vignette they systematically flattened its raised contours, marking the end of the dreaming narrative for which it was created. This elaborate set piece was dismantled and resurrected in several theatres on national tour. Briwyant, the work it belonged to, was indicative of my intention to transpose the theatre into my Grandmother’s ancestral homelands as an example of the memory practices, which first occurred as people were forced off their lands onto group settlements. Kuku Yalanji artist Marilyn Millers choreography Quinkin (Critical Path 2003), based on a Queensland Dreaming narrative containing two inter related spirits[10], utilised western artistic convention to ensure the perpetuation of her homeland culture. Similarly, Francis Rings demonstrated her connection to her cultural homelands in her choreographic piece X300 (2007) which acted as a contemporary Dreaming construct charting the Maralinga atomic bomb testing conducted in 1956-‐57. The precedence for contemporary themed narratives to be added to the Australian Indigenous performance lexicon includes the Tiwi Islander chronicling of the bombing of Darwin[11] and the Borroloola Aeroplane Dance whose song and dance documents the downfall of an American WWII bomber. Lastly, many of Artistic Director Stephen Page’s Bangarra choreographies transform major international venues into satellite Yolgnu territories through danced and voiced vocabularies originally reserved for ceremony, including the signature work Ochres (1994), which utilises gestures charting Macassin trading predating British settlement. For many contemporary Australian Indigenous artists, we see ourselves as heritage makers, creating works demonstrating the vitality of Australian Indigenous culture as a living ontology, which is continually being augmented and reinvigorated through contemporary artistic demonstrations. Those early