Marcia Langton

On 30 October 2019, Langton was announced as a co-chair on the Senior Advisory Group of the "Indigenous voice to government", convened by Ken Wyatt, along with by Professor Tom Calma AO . The Group comprises a total of 20 leaders and experts from across the country.

In 2017 she campaigned against "environmentalists" thwarting native title reform as part of their case against the Adani Carmichael coal mine. Her criticisms of Indigenous litigants have been rebuffed by other Indigenous lawyers.

Langton has been on the judging panel for the annual Horne Prize since its inception in 2016.

In 2012 she became the patron of the Indigenous Reading Project, charitable organisation that uses digital technology to improve the reading ability of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

She has argued that settlement with mining companies on Aboriginal land often benefits local interests more than the Australian government, and that the proposed 2010 Resource Tax on mining in Australia needed a redesign to support Indigenous rights and employment.

In May 2008, the federal government appointed her to a committee looking into reform of the Australian native title process.

Her 2005 PhD thesis in geography at Macquarie University applies phenomenological theory to the study of Aboriginal peoples of the eastern Cape York Peninsula.

In 1999 she was one of five Indigenous leaders who were granted an audience with the Queen to discuss the proposed recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Australian constitution.

In 1995 she moved full-time into university research and teaching. She spent five years as Ranger Professor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) in Darwin, before moving to Melbourne.

On her return to Australia, Langton studied anthropology at the Australian National University in the 1980s, becoming the first Indigenous honours graduate in anthropology. She then worked with several organisations dealing with Indigenous social and cultural issues and land claims. These included the Australian Film Commission, the Central Land Council (where she was a land claims anthropologist), the Queensland Government and, in the early 1990s, the Cape York Land Council. As a member of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Issues Unit she worked for the 1989 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Her report, "Too Much Sorry Business", raised serious concerns about alcohol consumption and the lack of government action to control it; "from an Aboriginal perspective and from the Aboriginal experience alcohol plays a primary role in both the reasons for detention and for the subsequent chances of deaths occurring". The conclusion was that alcohol supply needed limits. Almost 20 years later, she supported the Northern Territory National Emergency Response which policed alcohol sales and consumption, among other issues.

Marcia Lynne Langton AM (born 31 October 1951, Brisbane, Australia) holds the Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne in the Faculty of Medicine. In 2016 she became Distinguished Professor and in 2017, Associate Provost.

Marcia Langton was born in 1951 to Kathleen (née Waddy) and grew up in south-central Queensland and Brisbane as a descendant of the Yiman and Bidjara nations. Her father had no presence in her life. Her mother married Scots-born, ex-Korean War veteran Douglas Langton when Marcia was a year old.