Monday morning live with Natasa Denman featuring one of her amazing authors, Davina Woods.Davina Woods was born and raised in Brisbane. Although she always knew she was Aboriginal, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that she discovered her Kuku-Djungan ancestry. She attended local schools and achieved a Diploma of Teaching in 1979 from the North Brisbane College of Advanced Education. In 1984, Davina became one of the first five First Nations teachers to join the inaugural Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Unit of the Queensland Education Department (QED).
As a writer, Davina's first article, "Why Aboriginal Studies," was published in QED’s professional journal, QUEST. In 2000, she contributed her first chapter to the book Aboriginal Women by Degrees: Their Stories of the Journey Towards Academic Achievement, edited by Professor Mary Ann Bin-Sallik. This was the first of several book chapters Davina has written and published. In 2006, her poem "Urban Songlines" won the Victorian Indigenous Art Cultural Heritage Award.
Over the years, Davina has completed a Bachelor of Education, a Graduate Certificate in Aboriginal Studies, and a Master of Arts, all while working and raising her children. She left QED in 1990 to become the Federal Aboriginal Education Officer of the Australian Education Union, which required moving to Melbourne. In the late 1990s, she worked at a Melbourne university, completed a Graduate Diploma in Tertiary Education, and earned a PhD.
The prestigious literary journal Meanjin published her essay “Being Educated,” which recounts her early experiences of racism and the moment she realized her duty to educate non-Indigenous people about the First Peoples of Australia. Following her realization and receiving the Most Outstanding Research Student award for her PhD, she knew she had to fulfill her promise to her family to document their mutual grandfather’s story and their legacy of Aboriginality. She has since published a book with the assistance of Ultimate 48 Hour Books, telling the story of her maternal grandfather who, as a child, survived a massacre in 1881. He was then taken in by an Irish couple, for whom he worked until the man died in 1908.
Learn more about Davina and her book here: www.davinabwoodsphd.com
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