Dr Cameo Dalley

Cameo is a sociocultural and economic anthropologist whose work focuses on the politics of belonging, indigeneity, and land. Much of her work examines interculturality and issues at the interface between Aboriginal and settler descendant (non-Aboriginal) identities in Northern Australia. She has long term research relationships in the Wellesley Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria and the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. She has published on these topics in a range of academic and public-facing outlets including Meanjin (2018), and was co-editor of a special edition of The Australian Journal of Anthropology titled ‘Dichotomous Identities? Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people in Australia’ (2015). Prior to joining Deakin, she was the McArthur Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

Her current research project is based in the East Kimberley, and has taken place in two phases. The first is based predominately in the town of Wyndham and is focused on Aboriginal and kardiya (non-Aboriginal) forms of belonging in declining pastoral economies. This project has included considerations of contemporary pastoralism and corporate agribusiness, land ownership and access and historical periods of shared labour. This has included, for example, an oral history project with abattoir workers at a local meatworks and contestations between Aboriginal people at a contemporary pastoral station. The second phase of research examines Aboriginal people’s experiences of land justice and recognition. Currently she is exploring economic sovereignty for Ngarinyin Aboriginal people in the wake of a successful native title claim in the Central Kimberley in 2004. Her research is funded through an ARC Discovery Indigenous Project ‘Beyond Recognition: Postcolonial Relationality Across Difference’. The research has applications to current Treaty negotiations in Victoria and to forms of constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians.

Past research was focused on contemporary indigeneity and Aboriginal people's relational ontologies; the construction of families and relatedness, alcohol and violence, mobile and digital technologies and connections to country. This research involved extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the remote Aboriginal community of Mornington Island in Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria. Her doctoral thesis was nominated for the Australian Anthropological Society Best PhD Thesis Prize 2012.

Cameo has extensive industry experience and networks in native title and cultural heritage. From 2012 to 2015 she ran the Centre for Native Title Anthropology at the Australian National University, through funding awarded by the Australian Government Attorney-General's Department. Working variously for Aboriginal corporations, the Queensland State Government and developers, she has undertaken consultancy work in south-east Queensland, Central Queensland, Cape York and the Northern Territory.