The ACIH's research project, Beyond Reconciliation: Truth-Telling for Indigenous Wellbeing and the Health of the Nation, has successfully won a grant from the ANU's Grand Challenges Scheme.

The Grand Challenges Scheme invests in transformative research to impact on the world’s most intractable problems. It is designed to build large scale and long-term interdisciplinary programs of research and provide strategic investment in high-risk activities recognised for bold leaps, rather than incremental advances.

The 2019 ANU Grand Challenges Scheme focuses on research that will have a positive impact on Indigenous Health and Wellbeing.

As Australia's national university, ANU has a particular responsibility towards addressing the disproportionate and unacceptable burden of illness and disability experienced by Indigenous Australians.

Rather than the Grand Challenges being of a competitive nature, the aim was to identify groups of researchers at the ANU to form an Indigenous-led, significant and inclusive, collaborative, and cross-ANU research initiative. Beyond Reconciliation's large, interdisciplinary team includes institutional partners and leading Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. They understand that lasting solutions to Indigenous health will not be found in medical breakthroughs or individualised interventions alone. As humanities, arts and social science scholars, the Beyond Reconciliation team are committed to pursuing transformative social change through critical, creative and interpretative approaches.

The call for a thorough-going process of truth-telling about – and not merely reconciliation with – Australia’s past is growing louder and more urgent. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the country demand the right to tell their own histories. Beyond Reconciliation aims to ensure Indigenous communities cantell the true stories they want to tell in the ways they want to tell them, contributing to greater understanding, acknowledgement and respect for their historical truths, epic ancestral narratives, cultural, linguistic and environmental knowledge, and temporal perspectives. Acknowledging the truths about our past is essential to all our futures.