Associate Professor Heather Roberts, Kristy Bloomfield and Tanya Turner
Recipient, Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Indigenous Education
College of Law, Governance and Policy
Synopsis
Legal Education for True Justice: Indigenous Perspectives and Deep Listening on Country (LAWS4307/6307) is an Indigenous-led law course, not simply a course teaching about Indigenous content. Since 2022, Arrernte educators and Traditional Owners Kristy Bloomfield and Tanya Turner, who together bring over two decades’ experience in Aboriginal legal services and community legal education, have taken ANU law students onto Arrernte Country for an eight-day immersion through their organisation Oonchiumpa Consultancy and Services. Associate Professor Heather Roberts, with over a decade of award-winning ANU legal education experience, joined the course in 2023 and designs the Canberra-based seminars that prepare students, then steps back so Bloomfield and Turner lead.
The course rests on a premise Bloomfield and Turner bring from their own work: lawyers are the first pillar of a legal system not built with Aboriginal people in mind. Accordingly, educating future lawyers in Aboriginal ways of being and doing is what makes systemic change possible. Legal education is therefore most powerful when it moves beyond another class, another statute, another textbook, and asks students to sit with Aboriginal people, listen deeply, and understand law through Country, kinship, history and lived experience. Each year Bloomfield and Turner reshape the itinerary to ensure different Aboriginal communities across Central Australia can share their own stories. Assessment in this course follows the same logic, allowing creative work alongside written research, since narrative and creativity are themselves Aboriginal ways of sharing knowledge.
Students consistently describe the course as transformative. Its influence reaches further still: in 2026, the ANU-model informed an on-Country program for Australian judicial officers, designed and delivered by Bloomfield and Turner through the National Judicial College of Australia. This nomination recognises a genuine partnership between Oonchiumpa Consultancy and Services and the ANU Law School, built on Aboriginal leadership.