Evoking Country: towards a land-based performing arts praxis

Lily Shearer is a proud citizen of the Murrawarri Republic and Ngemba Nation (north-west NSW/south-east QLD) with 40+ years’ experience in First Peoples cultural arts and community development, arts management, and in theatre and performance making. Currently Lily is the Artistic Director of Moogahlin Performing Arts, and is also a freelance performing artist, a land-based storyteller and works as a cultural collaborator/consultant/educator.

In co-founding Moogahlin Performing Arts, a First Peoples company in Redfern, Sydney NSW, Lily’s vision was to put into practice the principle of ownership for First Peoples Australian communities by facilitating the handover of the final Gathering Ground project from Pact Youth Theatre to Moogahlin Performing Arts in 2010: a process outlined in Protocols of Engagement: Community Cultural Development Encounters an Urban Aboriginal Experience (2009). This process provided leadership opportunities for local First Peoples Australian theatre practitioners and provided new opportunities for emerging local First Peoples Australian theatre makers and practitioners. 

Professor of Indigenous Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sydney, Daniel Browning is Bundjalung and Kullilli writer, journalist and radio broadcaster. In a 30-year media career with Australia’s national broadcaster, Daniel read news for youth network triple j, presented and produced curated international award-winning programs on Indigenous art and culture every week for 15 years on Awaye! and established Word Up, a shortform podcast on the revival of Indigenous languages. The former Editor Indigenous Radio at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Daniel also hosted The Art Show from 2021 until 2025. In 2010 he was appointed guest editor of a specialist Indigenous issue of the contemporary art journal Artlink, and was invited back to edit four subsequent issues of what became the annual Artlink Indigenous. His first book, Close to the Subject: Selected Works, which catalogues his freelance writing on the arts, as well as poetry, memoir and his first play, won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. In the same year Daniel was also the recipient of the Indigenous Writing Prize, a category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. A finalist in the June Andrews Prize for Arts Journalism in 2024, he jointly won the Walkley Foundation’s inaugural Arts Journalism and Arts Criticism Prize in 2025 with ABC colleagues Rudi Bremer and Teresa Tan. His writing on contemporary Indigenous art has been published widely both nationally and internationally in ArtReview, Art Basel, Gradhiva, E-flux, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, Overland, The Guardian, The Age, Afrikadaa, Harper’s Bazaar, Conde Nast Traveler and the precursor of Blue Art Journal, Art Monthly. His critical essays have been published in magazines and exhibition catalogues for state and national galleries and in monographs including the latest, Tony Albert’s Not A Souvenir, published by Thames and Hudson.