Our Speakers
Kylie Captain is a proud Gamilaroi woman, best-selling author, and highly respected educator with over two decades of experience in education, leadership, and community services. She is the President of the Aboriginal Studies Association and the Founder of Dream Big Education Wellbeing & Consulting, where she leads transformative initiatives that promote cultural respect, leadership, mindset growth, and Aboriginal educational excellence.
Kylie is a teacher and has leader in Aboriginal Education who works holistically with schools, communities, and organisations. She delivers professional learning for teachers and leadership teams, supports students from Kindergarten to Year 12, and provides facilitator training and cultural capability workshops for corporate and government organisations. Her work is grounded in lived experience and cultural integrity, and she remains deeply connected to community, ensuring that every program she delivers is meaningful and responsive.
She is passionate about embedding truth-telling, strength-based approaches, and culturally responsive teaching across the curriculum. Her leadership is fuelled by her personal journey of overcoming adversity, combined with professional expertise, making her a powerful advocate for equity, and systemic change.
A 2024 finalist for the NSW Aboriginal Woman of the Year Award, Kylie recently launched her third book, a motivational title for teens co-written with her son Tyrell at the iconic Sydney Opera House. Her mission is simple yet powerful: to uplift and empower one student, one teacher, and one organisation at a time. She encourages educators to lead with passion and purpose, honouring the old ways of learning to create a culturally safe, inclusive, and thriving future for all students.
Professor Simone Ulalka Tur is the from the Yankunytjatjara community, north-west South Australia and is the Pro-Vice Chancellor Indigenous at Flinders University. A particular focus of her leadership role involves integrating Indigenous Australian perspectives within university topics and promoting a greater understanding between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian peoples and the broader Australian community.
Her work also explores new spaces where all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples can re-engage and transform their understandings of Australia and what it means to be Australian from an Indigenous perspective. Simone is also part of The Unbound Collective – a collective of four Aboriginal women academics/artists, who enact critical creative responses to colonial archives.
Faye Rosas Blanch is a Murri woman from the Atherton Tablelands, of Yidniji/Mbarbarm descent. She holds a Master’s degree from Flinders University, where she completed her thesis in 2009 titled ‘Nunga Rappin, Talkin the Talk n Walkin the Walk: Young Nunga Males and Education’.
She also earned a PhD from Flinders University with her dissertation ‘What is this Sovereignty Thing? Intimate Connection to Country’. Blanch is deeply committed to Indigenous education and to decolonizing, collaborative research methodologies. In addition to her academic work, she is a rapper and a member of the Unbound Collective.
Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga) is a poet and Research Fellow with the Indigenous Studies team at Flinders University, who began her career in the Indigenous higher education sector in 1996.
Her research centres on Aboriginal women's domestic service and labour history and Indigenous Living-Legacy / Memory Story archiving innovations for our time. She is committed to archival justice and is a member of South Australia's inaugural State Records/State Library of SA's Aboriginal Reference Group, and the national First Nations Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Her words have been installed and projected in mixed-media exhibitions, including a decade long creative-arts research collaboration with the Unbound Collective. She is widely published, and her manuscripts include Dirty Words (Cordite Books, 2015), Archival-poetics (Vagabond Press, 2019), and APRON-SORROW / SOVEREIGN-TEA (Wakefield Press, 2025).
Irene Scriven is a proud descendant of the Boandik and Gunditjmara Aboriginal nations. She has worked as a teacher and school principal in South Australian public schools for 21 years. More recently Irene worked for the SA Department for Education in the Aboriginal Workforce Initiative team. Irene has a Bachelor of Education (R-7), Grad Cert. (Inquiry Learning), Master of Education (Educational Leadership) and is now a PhD candidate with the University of South Australia. Her PhD is titled “An investigation into Indigenous Educational Leadership within SA schools”.
Irene’s research seeks to work in ways that privilege Aboriginal voices, employing approaches within qualitative research methodology that are specific to Aboriginal ways of knowing. Her research is designed to challenge the dominant western discourse that has influenced current education policy and practice and reframe what is the norm in constructs of educational leadership by proposing alternative understandings.
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