AAA / AIMA 2025 Joint Conference

Dr Corioli Souter
Western Australian Museum

Corioli Souter is an archaeologist, curator and Head of the Department of Maritime Heritage at the Western Australian Museum. She has been a practicing archaeologist since 1992 also contributing to exhibition development, film documentaries, academic teaching, and capacity building both in Australia and internationally. Corioli played a key curatorial role in the development of Boola Bardip, the Western Australian Museum’s landmark redevelopment, helping shape its conceptual and thematic frameworks and curating major content. Her research and community projects align with the Museum’s ‘people-first’ philosophy, promoting place-based, collaborative interpretation of maritime archaeological sites across Western Australia and the Indian Ocean region. Committed to ethical, inclusive, and sustainable practices, she advocates for greater accessibility to underwater cultural heritage and museum collections.

Dave Johnston-Pitt
Australian Indigenous Archaeologists Association and Australian National University

Dave Johnston-Pitt is Australia’s first academically qualified Indigenous Archaeologist, graduating with his Honours degree in Archaeology in 1989 from the Australian National University under the tutelage of Emeritus Professor Isabel McBryde (‘ANU’s Indigenous Engagement Champion’ and the collective champion of Australia’s first Indigenous Archaeologists in the late 80’s and early 90’s).

He has worked as a consultant, academic, volunteer Indigenous heritage activist, Co-film producer with Stuart Cohen, Bottle. Brush Media (Films; Millpost Axe Quarry; Gollion Ochre Quarry; I Remember the Dungeon with Dr Matilda House, etc), documentary film host (Foxtel History Channel: Coast Australia Series 4; and various ABC and SBS heritage documentaries), Indigenous Educator and continues to lobby and promote truth telling in Australia’s history and speaking out to further de-colonise our Australian University Archaeology Departments (eg. recruitment of Indigenous archaeologists and Indigenous lecturers teaching ‘our’ Indigenous content).

In 2014, Dave was awarded the Commonwealth Governments’, ‘Sharon Sullivan National Heritage Award: for his contribution to the Nations Indigenous Heritage Environment and his continual influence on practice’.

In recent years Dave has experienced the joy of fulfilling his lifetime quest of finding and reconnecting with his Queensland biological family (the Pitt’s) and his home country/s. He has ancestral decent to Erub (Darnley Is; Torres Strait Islands); the Nunnukul/Ngugi of the Quandamooka peoples (Stradbroke Is and Moreton Bay Qld); the Inagai/Goa people of Qld; as well as to England (the Atherton’s of Atherton Tableland) and Jamaica.