Associate Professor in leadership Michelle Evans has been awarded a $348,000 grant over three years for a project examining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians’ participation in major political parties. Ecologist Dale Nimmo’s $372,000 three-year award will look at the impact of Indigenous land management on mammal communities and its potential to restore degraded ecosystems.

Both researchers, who are part of Charles Sturt University, said they were pleased to be supported by the Australian Research Council.

Dr Nimmo’s project will take him to the remote western deserts of Western Australia where Indigenous communities known as Martu still carry out traditional land practices.

“Indigenous people often burned the land in order to promote species that they’d either hunt or gather,” he said.

“Some Martu were actually living in the western desert unaware that Europeans had colonised the continent until as late as the 1960s and some up to perhaps the 1980s.

“I expect that species like the bilby for example, will be more abundant around areas that are actively managed by Indigenous groups because they’ll be creating the types of habitats that bilbies prefer.”

Dr Evans and her co-investigater, Duncan McDonnell of Griffith University, will conduct 250 interviews and focus groups over the next three years.

They will talk to Indigenous politicians past and present as well as candidates from the mainstream political groups.

“To see what sort of influence and barriers and challenges and opportunities for voice that happens over time within the party structures,” Dr Evans said. 

The project will compare the Northern Territory with NSW, which has seen few Indigenous MPs.

“We think it’s a case of absence in the political system of Aboriginal voice and participation,” she said.