Creative Equity Toolkit

Watch now: Using First Nations Protocols for Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts

Lucy Byrne with Patricia Adjei, Dr Paula Abood, Travis De Vries and Jake Smithers as they discuss the First Nations Protocols. Together they highlight the importance of everyone understanding these Protocols to ensure care of First Nations Intellectual Property through appropriate permissions, acknowledgement and consent. This discussion illustrates how everyone can be an ally in holding these Protocols up to accomplish safe consultation and consent when using First Nation stories & knowledge.

Whitewashed: why does Australian TV have such a problem with race?

Discussion of representation in Australian TV, from the awful stereotypes of the 90s, like Neighbours' first non-white family, the Lims, being accused of eating a dog, to shows that got it right, such as Gary Foley on A Country Practice.

'Crucially, Foley says, he was allowed to write his character himself. “[Creator] Jim Davern rung me up and asked me if I was interested,” Foley told Guardian Australia. “I said I was only interested if I could write my own character and my own dialogue.”'

Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation

Hari Kunzru, Kamila Shamsie, Aminatta Forna and others on writing outside their experience.

Ask 'Did I find it easier to write about this because I filtered it through a white gaze and thus made it palatable for a largely white publishing industry? And most of all, and this bears repeating, don’t get defensive. Because you may be making a larger conversation about marginalised communities, and their ability to tell their own stories in their own voices, all about yourself.' ~ Nikesh Shukla

Why is this racist, sexist show getting an encore?

Critical review of the Opera Australia production of Miss Saigon.

'Today, most people in Vietnam are under 35 and don’t remember the war. For many in the West, Vietnam equals the Vietnam War. The plot of this musical perpetuates many stereotypes: America is the dreamland and Asian women are sexualised objects that need rescuing.'