Fiona Skyring

Fiona Skyring is an Australian historian and award-winning writer. Her book, Justice; A history of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, won the WA Premier’s Prize for 2011, along with the WA History Prize and the Margaret Medcalf Award. She wrote the introduction to Five Bells; Being LGBT in Australia, by visual artist Jenny Papalexandris, and published by The New Press, New York, in 2016. Fiona has also authored chapters and articles on the topics of writing history for native title in Australia, and the history of the stolen wages of First Nations peoples. Fiona has worked as an expert witness in the native title sector and in recent years wrote the expert historical reports for stolen wages class actions in both Western Australia and the Northern Territory. These matters in the Federal Court, where the applicants were represented by Shine Lawyers, resulted in government settlements of $180.4 million and $202 million respectively. Since writing expert historical reports for the Rubibi native title claims in the early 2000s, Fiona has worked with Yawuru people in Broome on several award winning museum exhibitions, the most recent being ‘Wanggajarli Burugun/ We are coming home’. Fiona lives in Sydney on lands of the Eora nation.