Fact or Folklore? An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Framework to Cataloguing Indigenous Knowledge

ABSTRACT

This research-in-practice paper examines how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are catalogued within Australian libraries. This paper will outline why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are not folktales and will argue against the use of the Library of Congress Subject Heading Folklore. This paper will explore the ways in which the University of Queensland Library have developed a culturally nuanced and holistic approach to cataloguing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges that engages Indigenous ways of organising, accessing and using information. This paper highlights the need for more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cataloguers and urges libraries to examine their own practices to build more accurate representations of the communities they serve.

KEYWORDS:

• Cataloguing
• critical librarianship
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
• Library of Congress Subject Headings

Introduction

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is a popular controlled vocabulary employed by libraries around the globe. It is also recognised as a flawed vocabulary that prioritises white, Euro-centric male perspectives and then positions those perspectives as neutral and objective (Berman, 1993; Chiu et al., 2021; Olson, 2001a, 2001b). This allows the cultures and traditions of marginalised groups to be defined by exclusionary and racist systems and, therefore, allows those systems to continue perpetuating ‘othering’ and racist stereotypes (Howard & Knowlton, 2018, p. 77; Inefuku, 2021). As a result, marginalised peoples – including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – are unable to find or access information relating to our own communities or cultures (McKemmish et al., 2011; Thorpe & Galassi, 2014). The Library of Congress is aware of the issues users have with the LCSH vocabulary, but embedding inclusive and diverse perspectives into this system will take time (Pettitt & Elzi, 2023, p. 5). That is why it is important that libraries engage with and adopt the knowledge organisation and access practices of marginalised communities to provide meaningful and inclusive library services.

Historically, the University of Queensland (UQ) Library has followed these long-standing, colonial library practices when cataloguing Indigenous knowledge. At UQ, Indigenous or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge is understood as ‘the practices, skills, innovations, and know-how of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ (Bunda et al., 2023, p. 23). This knowledge is all-encompassing, multi-dimensional, context-specific, and generates meaning from the land and natural world (Brayboy & McCarty, 2010, p. 186; Bunda et al., 2023, p. 23; Watson, 2014, p. 512). Indigenous knowledge or ‘traditional knowledge’ is often defined as an oral practice that prioritises learning through lived experience, and this definition is used to distinguish it from ‘Western knowledge’ (Brayboy & McCarty, 2010, p. 189; Russell, 2005, p. 162). While this is not incorrect, this definition has contributed to non-Indigenous people ignoring Indigenous culture and practices as continuing (Nakata et al., 2005, p. 192). When it comes to cataloguing, this colonial perception has contributed to libraries classifying Indigenous knowledge as folklore or mythology, thus relegating our knowledges as historical or mystical concepts. With the conception of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services and Collections (ATSISC) team – a dedicated all-Indigenous team who work collaboratively across library services to engage collections containing Indigenous knowledge – UQ Library has begun to recognise and rectify its colonial practices when it comes to cataloguing Indigenous knowledge.

In this paper, I will explore the way that Indigenous knowledge is catalogued within UQ Library’s general collection. ‘General collection’ refers specifically to published UQ Library-controlled material and excludes UQ Library’s unpublished special collections, material housed in the UQ eSpace repository, and material managed by external publishers and vendors. This limited scope relates directly to the General Collection Audit, which will be used as a case study in this paper. This paper will first provide background on the General Collection Audit and the work UQ Library are doing to Indigenise our cataloguing practices. This paper will then discuss the nuanced and holistic ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples approach cataloguing and descriptive practice, and how this approach helped the ATSISC team develop our audit methodology. The challenges that arose from the General Collection Audit and how those challenges paved way for opportunities for future work will then be examined. I will use the terms ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ and ‘Indigenous’ interchangeably within this paper. ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander’ is widely used to indicate the two distinct Indigenous groups within Australia. The use of ‘Indigenous’ can be seen as grouping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples together as one monolithic culture. It can also be seen as linking Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to a global Indigenous community. It is important to note that some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples may identify in other ways due to personal preference, cultural protocol, or within different social or professional contexts (Roy, 2016). Further, the use of the capital I for ‘Indigenous’ is used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, while Indigenous peoples outside Australia might prefer the lowercase i. Keeping with the practice I was brought up with, I will only use the former in this paper. I have also approached this paper from an Aboriginal lens where learning through storytelling is prioritised. As such, this may not read as a traditional research-in-practice paper. These nuances should be kept front of mind as you continue to read this paper.

Background

The ATSISC team were developed in 2022 when UQ Library recognised that, in order to develop inclusive library practices that respectfully and meaningfully engage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and knowledges, they had to employ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to audit services and collections. This train of thought draws on the Protocols for libraries, archives and information services developed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN), which encourage Indigenous peoples to have access to and agency over how Indigenous knowledge is organised, described, found, accessed, and managed. In developing the ATSISC team, UQ Library effectively moved from merely acknowledging the ATSILIRN Protocols to implementing them into everyday library practice. One of the first initiatives led by the ATSISC team was the General Collection Audit. The General Collection Audit was a project developed in collaboration with other UQ Library colleagues, wherein we retrospectively recatalogued Indigenous knowledge with the Folklore subject heading from the LCSH controlled vocabulary. The idea to focus on the Folklore subject heading stemmed from an article wherein Jan Poona (2015) discussed relocating Aboriginal Dreaming stories from the Dewey Decimal Classification Folklore and Fairy Tales to Religion. The ATSISC team’s focus on the LCSH was because it is our primary controlled vocabulary at UQ Library. An Excel spreadsheet of 242 catalogue records – all of which were UQ Library-controlled general collection material that had been catalogued with the Folklore subject heading – made the basis of the General Collection Audit.

Like Poona, the ATSISC team took issue with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge being labelled folklore, myths, and legends. Many Indigenous groups catalogue their traditional knowledge as folklore, with Torres Strait Islander oral traditions often being referred to as legends (The University of New South Wales, 2019). However, this is not appropriate for all Indigenous peoples or in every circumstance (Moulaison Sandy & Bossaller, 2016) and more inclusive terminology such as ‘oral traditions’ have been used in reference to the Torres Strait Islands (David & Badulgal, 2006). For the sake of this paper, I will avoid referring to Indigenous knowledge as folklore, mythology, or legends. This is because I see cataloguing traditional knowledge as folklore, mythological stories or legends as positioning Indigenous people in the past, as though our cultures, customs, and lore are no longer practiced. Not only is this dehumanising, but it is also incorrect as we believe that our traditional knowledge are ongoing and based on truth (Koolmatrie, 2020; Rademaker, 2021, p. 661). Describing Indigenous knowledge as folklore can also contribute to the ‘othering’ of Indigenous peoples through ‘political and administrative boundaries, social and cultural divides and […] public policy’ (Howitt, 2001, p. 234) by creating an image of Indigenous people and culture as ‘primitive’ and therefore justifying colonialism itself (Suchet, 2002). Throughout this paper, I will use terms such as ‘Aboriginal Dreaming stories’ and ‘Torres Strait Islander oral traditions’ when discussing oral knowledge pertaining to these two distinct Indigenous groups and use ‘Indigenous knowledge’ when broadly referring to the concept of Indigenous knowledge. Other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people may refer to these concepts differently and those identifiers should also be recognised and respected.

Based on Poona’s article and an environmental scan of the General Collection Audit material, we assumed that a majority of the 242 catalogue records would relate to Aboriginal Dreaming stories and Torres Strait Islander oral traditions. Instead, we found a range of knowledge from Indigenous scientific, medical, astronomical, or ecological knowledge to information depicting secret, sacred, or otherwise sensitive rites and ceremonies. This reinforced our belief that the Folklore subject heading did not appropriately describe these records. We also did not believe that Poona’s approach of replacing Folklore with Religion was adequate for UQ Library material as colloquial uses of the term define religion as an ‘institutionalised system’ that believes in a god or gods (Collins English Dictionary, n.d.; Merriam-Webster, 2024). These definitions did not fit the ATSISC team’s idea of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge as being holistic and incorporating our oral traditions, histories, philosophies, and scientific knowledge. Our team began examining the different ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people organise, describe, find, access, and manage our own knowledge and information. We consulted the literature and work completed by Indigenous knowledge holders and library professionals, we drew on our unique perspectives and lived experiences as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and we embraced Indigenous ways of knowing and doing to develop an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approach to cataloguing practice that was nuanced, holistic, and iterative.

What is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Approach to Cataloguing Practice?

In Australia, organising, retrieving, and accessing Indigenous knowledge has been shaped by colonialism and ignores, silences, or disregards the holistic ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people manage and engage with our traditional knowledge (Watson, 2014). This is enforced through assimilation doctrine that diminishes Indigenous knowledge and positions Indigenous peoples as objects to be catalogued and accessed on-demand rather than as autonomous, heterogenous groups (Roy, 2016, p. 10, 12). This is acknowledged in the recently published Guidelines for First Nations Collection Description, where Tui Raven (2023, p. 25) states that,

The traditional classification approach falls short of representing the holistic nature of Indigenous knowledge and may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes or inaccuracies.

This colonial library practice is then strengthened when library workers positioning ourselves as ‘neutral’ arbiters of information who do not need to be held accountable for colonial practices (Chiu et al., 2021). While Raven uses the term ‘traditional’ when referring to long-standing descriptive practices, I prefer to use ‘colonial’ library practice or librarianship. This is because the term ‘traditional’ is used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to refer to our cultural practices. Even then, the term is used with caution due to the connotation of traditions being of the past. In this same vein, the idea that ‘traditional’ library practices are of the past fails to recognise the ongoing harm of these practices in relation to Indigenous knowledge. To reframe traditional library practice as ‘colonial’ librarianship moves away from these practices being considered the default and highlights the systemic challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within libraries.

The development of Indigenous approaches to cataloguing are not new. In the 1970s, the Brian Deer Classification System was developed to reflect Indigenous worldviews and ways of organising knowledge. This system was adapted by Canadian knowledge centres – including the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at the University of British Columbia, the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute, and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs Resource Centre – and was revised and adapted to fit each institution’s individual contexts (Bosum & Dunne, 2017; Cherry & Mukunda, 2015; Doyle et al., 2015; Swanson, 2015). Within an Australian context, the Northern Territory-based Galiwin’ku Community Library embarked on a similar project where they developed an Aboriginal approach to cataloguing practice that ‘reflects Yolŋu cultural knowledge management and concepts’ (Masterson et al., 2019, p. 284). In Canberra, the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) have developed the Pathways thesauri, nationally recognised subject and place headings, and the AustLang thesaurus, a database of Indigenous language and people headings from around Australia. These thesauri are becoming more widely used across Australian libraries and their use directly draws on ATSILIRN Protocol 5, which encourages the use of ‘national Indigenous thesauri’ and ‘geographic, language and cultural identifiers’ to improve information access for Indigenous peoples (ATSILIRN, 2012). At UQ Library, we do not yet have the resources to create our own local thesaurus and have therefore opted to use the AIATSIS Pathways and AustLang thesauri to better catalogue material that contains Indigenous knowledge.

When developing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approach to cataloguing practice, it is important to reiterate the diversity and nuance of Indigenous perspectives. As Nakata et al. (2005, p. 190) wrote,

The diversity of the Indigenous community means that Indigenous information needs and interests cannot be assumed, are not always easy to determine or provide, can be perceived to conflict with traditional notions of library/archive practice and service provision, and are not easily generalised across contexts.

One way to highlight this diversity of perspectives is the use of comprehensive vocabularies that allow clients to access one record through multiple access points (Howard & Knowlton, 2018, p. 75). As such, the ATSISC team took a maximalist approach and believed that applying as many relevant subject, place, language, and peoples headings as necessary was the most beneficial approach to cataloguing Indigenous knowledge. For some records, this meant adding one or two language headings. For others this meant including more than twenty additional headings from across LCSH, AIATSIS Pathways, and AustLang. We were also comfortable with removing the Folklore subject heading from the catalogue records entirely. While some cataloguers might see this decision as disrupting the historical record by erasing past practices, we saw this decision as recataloguing material that has been incorrectly catalogued in the past. A similar project conducted at the University of Denver reduced the use of inaccurate and offensive subject headings by replacing Indians of North America, a widely used LCSH (Pettitt & Elzi, 2023, p. 7).

They [referring to interview participants] support a replacement for “Indians of North America” as a more immediate action but asked that over time even the replacement be phased out in favour of recognizing specific tribal entities.

This was the same approach we took at UQ Library. The most common replacement headings were Oral tradition – Australia and Philosophy, Aboriginal Australian. Only subject headings that referenced folklore, mythology and legends in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge were removed from the catalogue record of each item. References to folklore, mythology, and legends elsewhere in the catalogue record – such as in the synopsis or additional notes field – were not altered. For example, one catalogue record focused on Pitjantjatjara and Luritja health, nutrition, and medicine. The only reference to folklore in this record was the Folklore subject heading. Here, we replaced Folklore with the Philosophy, Aboriginal Australian and Traditional ecological knowledge – Australia, both of which came from the LCSH vocabulary. We added several AIATSIS subject headings, including Indigenous knowledge, as well as the Pitjantjatjara, Luritja and Yolngu language and people headings from the AustLang thesaurus. The priority here was not to erase the historical record, but to ensure the Indigenous knowledge was catalogued appropriately.

While ensuring each record had multiple points of access via subject, place, language, and people headings was a priority, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people see access as more expansive. Recent years have seen international and national institutional support for reparative and inclusive descriptive practice. The OCLC project, ‘Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice’, takes a holistic view that not only considers cataloguing practice but the systems and barriers in place that continue to perpetuate colonial descriptive practices. This is evident in the framework developed for this project, which asks institutions to consider changes to organisational and leadership structures, operational workflows and daily practices, and professional and personal staff development (Frick & Proffitt, 2022, p. 16). At a national level, the ‘Guidelines for First Nations Collection Description' outline considerations for describing material relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. The guidelines synthesise cultural protocols, language and terminology, and other contextual information that Indigenous people consider when cataloguing Indigenous information (Raven, 2023). The University of Sydney Library’s ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Protocols' also call for the implementation of descriptive metadata that includes ‘cultural care notices and other contextual notes' (Sentance & The University of Sydney Library, 2021, p. 17).

At UQ Library, we were particularly mindful of the secret, sacred, or otherwise sensitive Indigenous knowledge housed within UQ Library collections. In recognising that Indigenous knowledge is continuing, we also recognise that this knowledge still has the potential to cause harm or distress if it is inadvertently viewed by an Indigenous person (Belarde-Lewis & Kostelecky, 2021, p. 117). For example, accessing information that is considered Men’s Business has the potential to cause harm and distress to Aboriginal women. Internally, the ATSISC team distinguish between secret and sacred information and information that is sensitive. We define secret or sacred material as information that has the potential to risk the cultural, spiritual, social, or economic wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This includes, but is not limited to, explicit details about closed practices, information about secret or sacred uses for plants and herbs including medicinal rites conducted by medicine men, explicit details and imagery of human remains, and images of secret and sacred sites. We define sensitive information as having the potential to distress, cause harm to, or significantly offend an individual or group. This includes but is not limited to inexplicit mentions of gender-specific practices like Men’s Business, details about death including massacres and mortuary rites, and details relating to the Stolen Generations. Where material contains secret, sacred, or sensitive information, we placed a cultural advice statement on the catalogue record. In rare cases, we have come across material that has been flagged by Traditional Owners as containing knowledge so sensitive that sharing such knowledge would perpetuate harm and risk the safety of their societies and cultures. For example, UQ Library houses a copy of Charles P. Mountford’s ‘Nomads of the Australian Desert’ (1976), a book that is unable to be purchased in the Northern Territory because it contains restricted Indigenous knowledge that should not be shared with women, children, and uninitiated men (Holcombe, 2015, p. 7; Terri Janke, 2005, p. 97). As such, we have meditated this book by removing it from the open shelves and housing it in a secure location. Clients can access meditated material, but extreme caution must be taken and, in some cases, discussions with Indigenous knowledge holders and Elders may be necessary.

The development of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approach to cataloguing practice at UQ Library has meant that Indigenous knowledge is organised, described, found, accessed, and managed in a way that aligns with Indigenous worldviews. Material containing Indigenous knowledge is continuing to be retrospectively recatalogued and new acquisitions are being catalogued using this approach. This means that cataloguing Indigenous knowledge is no longer conducted ad hoc or through targeted projects but is systemic and conducted through business-as-usual workflows. Our knowledges are no longer seen as an agenda item but are an agenda all on their own.

Challenges

Developing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approach to cataloguing was not an easy or simple task. We developed the methodology, conducted the General Collection Audit, and consulted the literature simultaneously. As such, there was a lot of stopping and restarting, reconfiguring, and reorganising. The major challenge for the ATSISC team here was the gaps in the controlled vocabularies, even when using LCSH alongside the AIATSIS and AustLang thesauri. While we replaced Folklore with Philosophy, Aboriginal Australian for several records, we found that there was no subject heading for Philosophy, Torres Strait Islanders in the LCSH vocabulary. This gap in Torres Strait Islander perspectives means that we had to spend quite a lot of time determining how best to describe Torres Strait Islander knowledge and further consultation with Torres Strait Islander communities is needed to continue this work in a meaningful way. We also found issue with certain terminology within the AIATSIS Pathways subject thesaurus. The thesaurus places the Stolen Generations under the subject headings Child welfare – Child / parent separation – Stolen generations. Here, we felt that using the term Child welfare in this instance propagated the belief that the Stolen Generations, a deeply traumatic part of Australian history that still affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today, occurred for the good of the children rather than because of racist and assimilationist government policies. This highlighted the fact that AIATSIS are one expert in cataloguing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material. However, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach and the ways in which one institution describes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures cannot and should not be applied unilaterally across the nation. This is not to discount the work AIATSIS has done and continues to do; only to widen the scope to allow more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to take ownership of how their knowledge is organised and described, like what has been done with the Galawin’ku Classification system. Before a project of this magnitude can be undertaken, institutions need to develop an understanding of what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge is held within our collections and build relationships with our local communities to understand how different Indigenous people organise information.

Opportunities for Current and Future Work

The challenges the ATSISC team encountered when conducting the General Collection Audit allowed us to see opportunities to improve current workflows and inform future work. Primarily, we saw the opportunity to develop internal governance and workflows to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to library practice more broadly. We began with internal guidelines for describing Indigenous knowledge, the first iteration of which were shared with a small test group in July 2023. These guidelines are the ATSISC team’s way of exhibiting the nuanced and holistic approach to catalogued practice and give UQ Library staff practice examples and resources to help them Indigenise descriptive practices across general collection material, special collections, and UQ eSpace. The national Guidelines for First Nations Collection Description were launched in November 2023 and, as a nationally recognised resource backed by peak-body organisations across GLAM, provided our work with an additional level of authority and urgency. Thinking on a larger scale, we developed the first draft of an Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) framework to be implemented across UQ Library. ICIP refers to Indigenous peoples rights to our own cultural heritage, including Indigenous knowledge and as this pertains to library collections, T. Janke (2021, p. 326) writes:

There are many different issues to do with ICIP, including cultural ownership, managing what is sensitive or sacred, display and collection, public access, digitisation and interpretation of the record, and the focus of future collections. If every institution in the country was to set up systems for ethically managing ICIP, we would see a situation that not only supports the self-determination of Indigenous people but benefits every Australian in understanding the cultural heritage of the land on which they live.

The ATSISC team saw ICIP as providing a holistic framework under which our internal guidelines for describing Indigenous knowledge can sit. An ICIP framework also opens our work up to collaboration with more UQ Library colleagues. An official ICIP framework is being created in 2024 with the help of Terri Janke and Co., an Indigenous owned and run law firm founded by Janke, to ensure our framework is cohesive, comprehensive, and centres Indigenous approaches to library practice.

The development of Indigenous-focused governance and workflows has also revealed the extent to which the General Collection Audit can inform other work in other areas of library services. For example, the General Collection Audit was conducted alongside Phase 1 of the Special Collections Audit, which audited the Indigenous knowledge of four collections in the Fryer Library (Murphy, 2023), as well as the UQ Thesis Audit, wherein the ATSISC team and a group of staff volunteers began updating the descriptive metadata of digitised theses within UQ eSpace. While the ATSISC team led the auditing work, we collaborated with teams from across UQ Library. UQ Library managers and leaders openly supported and endorsed our work within the library, which allowed us to share the cultural load with our non-Indigenous colleagues and have a level of autonomy with our decision making. In turn, this has opened up conversations within the ATSISC team. As an all-Indigenous team, we had safety in numbers and culturally safe spaces to share our opinions, perspectives, and expertise together before bringing in non-Indigenous colleagues. We shared robust conversations about our cultural beliefs and interpretations, and we took care of our social and emotional wellbeing. This was important because, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, our social and emotional wellbeing is just as important as our physical health.

Conclusion

The colonial history of Australia needs to be acknowledged and libraries play a vital role in truth-telling processes. As custodians of sources of information that may be culturally sensitive or considered outdated and offensive, libraries have a responsibility to keep accurate records without risking the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Identifying and auditing resources containing Indigenous knowledge is an important first step, yet this step must be undertaken with a critical awareness of the limitations of past and current cataloguing practices. As demonstrated in the General Collection Audit, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and indeed the strength of the project was recognising and centring the local contexts and communities we serve. Further, developing governance and workflow structures that systemically embedded Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being into library practice allowed us to ground the work in cultural practice, rather than positioning colonial librarianship as the default. This paper is only one chapter in a larger conversation. As I wrote this paper, I spoke with colleagues who were doing similar work across Queensland, including state and academic libraries. However, a lot of the work happening within these institutions is not published or publicly available. By sharing this case study, I hope that other library practitioners are empowered to look at their practices critically and implement Indigenous ways of doing and being into cataloguing practice that best suits their unique local contexts.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the lands on which I live and work. I pay my respects to the Traditional Owners and their custodianship of the lands, the seas, and the skies. I pay my respects to their Ancestors and their descendants, who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country, and recognise their valuable contributions to Australian and global society. I also acknowledge the work and support of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services and Collections team, and I pay my respects to our Ancestors and the lands that carry our songlines.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raelee Lancaster

Raelee Lancaster is a library professional and writer based in Brisbane. Raised on Awabakal Country in Newcastle, New South Wales, Raelee is descended from the Wiradjuri and Biripi Peoples.