Suzanne Lazaroo
9 July 2026: As the 糖心原创vlog celebrates NAIDOC’s 50 Years of Deadly, two of its academics have been recognised for a piece of work that furthers their long-term collaboration in Indigenising the law curriculum.
Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous Professor Annette Gainsford and Professor Alison Gerard from the Faculty of Business, Government and Law contributed a chapter (with Associate Professor Emma Colvin from Charles Sturt University) to Legal Education Through an Indigenous Lens: Decolonising the Law School (edited by Nicole Watson and Heather Douglas), which this week received the Council of Australian Law Deans (CALD) Academic Award for Excellence in Indigenous Legal Research.
The CALD Legal Research Awards celebrate excellence across law schools nationally.
As a team, Professor Gainsford, a proud Wiradjuri woman, and Professor Gerard are representative of the power of collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal academics – they have worked together in the space of Indigenising and embedding Indigenous cultural competency in legal curricula for well over a decade.
“We met through the CSU Bachelor of Laws program, when Alison was the Director for the Centre for Law and Justice, and we worked closely on the development of the first Australian law degree – the second in the world – to include Indigenous cultural competency as a key professional capability,” Professor Gainsford said.
“The prize is wonderful news to receive this week, as we celebrate five decades of NAIDOC Week recognising and celebrating the rich histories, enduring cultures, remarkable achievements and invaluable contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across Australia.”
Legal Education Through an Indigenous Lens: Decolonising the Law School is divided into three sections. The first highlights the ongoing contemporary realities that Indigenous peoples face in law schools and universities, including the ongoing impact of colonisation, intergenerational trauma, institutional racism and exclusion.
The second explores Indigenous ways of reading and thinking about settler law, and how it's understood and interpreted.
The third section of the book concerns how traditional law school subjects can be taught through an Indigenous lens, including torts, public law, criminal law and sentencing.
“The book reinforces the importance of offering practical advice in teaching law, in a way that includes a critical Indigenous perspective,” Professor Gainsford said.
“There are very few Indigenous academics in legal education across Australia but there is a small collective of Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal academics who work closely, and the book brought many of us together. The award leverages and privileges Indigenous voices, and supports us in our work.”
Professors Gainsford and Gerard’s chapter in the book focused on challenges and strategies for incorporating Indigenous laws and histories across legal education curriculum, offering practical approaches to navigate the former and drive the latter.
“Institutional policy and professional standards can help develop greater cultural safety within law schools and the broader legal system, and in our chapter, we examine different institutional policies and strategies, analysing how different law schools have gone about decolonising their curricula,” Professor Gainsford said.
They also discussed how professional and accreditation standards, and admission requirements, influence legal curricula.
“We believed that there are a number of disciplines that are doing better in this – health, for instance, where many industry standards are legislated and universities are accountable to them,” said Professor Gainsford.
“Legal professional standards could be similarly accredited. We examined ways in which we believed that there could be influences that would bring legal curricula into some form of consistent approach to Indigenise or build cultural competency in curricula.
“I’m looking forward to working towards embedding the Indigenous graduate attribute here at UC – it will be refreshed this year and furthered in our curriculum, so that law programs, and all our degrees, can be recognised as national best practice models.”