Natalie Harkin

Flinders University

Natalie Harkin is a Narungga woman, a member of the Chester family from Point Pearce in South Australia.

She has worked in the Aboriginal higher education sector in South Australia since the mid-1990s, and is now a Lecturer and Academic Advisor with the Yunggorendi Student Engagement team. Her current PhD research is an archival-poetic interrogation of the State’s Aboriginal archives: a poetic response to her family’s records, informed by blood-memory and haunting, and also the works of other Indigenous writers, poets and artists who engage with archives to offer new narratives of history, for the record. This research weaves a love of storytelling, activism and resistance-poetics through art and literature.

She has been an active member of the local South Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Storytellers and Writers Group, and a member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN), reading at many state and national events, including a workshop with the 2014 International Writers Festival, Ottawa. Her words have also been projected in several exhibitions comprising text-object-video projection, including a basket woven from her grandmother and great-grandmother’s letters from the archives. Her first collection of poetry, Dirty Words, was published by Cordite Books in 2015.