Aboriginal ontologies have long been considered by many Australians as out of place within cities, and incompatible with Western notions of economic progress and growth, creating particular barriers for Aboriginal people who want to engage in entrepreneurship. Yet, many Aboriginal entrepreneurs living in the Perth metropolitan area are achieving business success while maintaining distinctive connections to kin, culture and Country. In this paper I present three cases to illustrate an alternative picture of the entrepreneurship-ontology dynamic. In the first case, female business owners are providing culturally appropriate and commercially relevant management consultant services through the use of a ‘cultural charter’ that defines how they engage with customers. In the second case, the entrepreneur’s success has been dependent on his ability to carefully negotiate cultural protocols relating to the sharing of knowledge and reciprocity. In the final case, the entrepreneur has created a community investment fund to invest a share of company profits in Aboriginal community projects, thereby allowing him to uphold and strengthen cultural obligations to Traditional Owners both within and outside of his Country. These cases show how ontology is a central determinant of these successful business people’s entrepreneurial practices and, conversely, how entrepreneurship can lead to ontological renewal.

In these troubled times, the wisdom of fostering pluralism is increasingly challenged by discourses of privilege, fear and violence. Inevitably, making geography count in nurturing generous and sustained coexistence in already-pluralist societies is made difficult by such circumstances. Ceremonial recognition of coexistence is often acknowledged by the dominant society through a brief, formal ‘Welcome to Country’ by Indigenous traditional owners. This is widely incorporated into government, educational and other meetings, but who has learned to really listen and respond? The welcome ceremony offers an opportunity to reconsider the foundations of sustainable coexistence in pluralist settings. This paper advocates listening methodologies as important in how dominant cultures respond to their dominance in pluralist societies. It particularly argues that the recipients of a welcome need to better understand what is involved in taking responsibility for being welcomed. Extending earlier work on Levinasian ethics, I argue that it includes taking responsibility to address the current legacies of past injustices and to bring all people in pluralist societies into relationships of shared and mutual recognition.

In this presentation, I will bring together two examples of fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) family support programs operating in Canada and Australia, and discuss the different spaces they provide for families to tell their stories about the challenges of participating in a FIFO lifestyle. The first case study I investigate is the Australian grassroots organization, Mining Family Matters, who runs an online discussion forum and publishes survival guides for mining families. I argue that the survival guides provide families with a template of sorts, which encourage an internalization of the stresses of the FIFO lifestyle and obscures collective visions of responsibility that would challenge the alienation associated with FIFO work practices. In my second case study, I engage with an Inuit (northern Indigenous) women’s sewing group based in Nunavut, Canada. Drawing on interviews I conducted with sewing group coordinators, FIFO spouses, and territorial government officials, I interrogate other forms of support beyond a model of ‘anonymous care’ (Stevenson 2014), where programs for FIFO families are not singular events, rather are dimensions of larger life projects embedded in collective forms of care as well as individual ones. Through attending to these stories, I explore competing visions of care circulating in contemporary mining economies.

Research in Indigenous spaces, and with Indigenous communities, continues to grow and expand in Australia. Yet an area that remains significantly under-examined is what constitutes an Indigenous community. This presentation will draw on the findings of two Indigenous focused research projects as I explore the notion of the ‘Indigenous community’ and pose the question - who has the right to speak with them?