Peter Blackwood is a consultant anthropologist specialising in native title, Aboriginal cultural heritage and land claim work. His work with Aboriginal groups spans more than two decades, including positions as senior anthropologist with the Cape York Land Council and Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority in the Northern Territory. He is currently researching native title and statutory land claims in central and north Queensland, Cape York and the Gulf region.

John Burton is a Fellow in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program with current research interests in Papua New Guinea, Torres Strait and North Queensland. He specialises in social mapping, landowner identification and land ownership in Melanesia, the social impacts of mining on traditional owners, and native title research.

Derek Elias is a UNESCO Programme Specialist currently working in Bangkok in Education for Sustainable Development and Technical and Vocational Education and Training. He received his PhD in anthropology from The Australian National University and has worked in central Australia with Aboriginal people for nearly 10 years. His work there focused on the preparation of Aboriginal land claims, sacred site protection and the negotiation of mining agreements with Aboriginal landowners throughout the Northern Territory as well as the rest of Australia. He has consulted for a wide range of stakeholders including Aboriginal organisations, universities and the private sector.

Colin Filer holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Papua New Guinea, and was Projects Manager for the University of Papua New Guinea’s consulting company from 1991 to 1994, when he left the University to join the PNG National Research Institute as Head of the Social and Environmental Studies Division. Since 2001, he has been the Convenor of the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program at The Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

Jim Fingleton is a lawyer-anthropologist with more than 30 years’ experience advising governments in two dozen countries in the Pacific Islands, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. During the 1970s and 1980s he conducted fieldwork on the reform of customary land tenures in a number of provinces of PNG, and he has returned many times since to work on projects for the development of customary land. From 1993–95 he was head of the Native Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He is a Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society.

Katie Glaskin has undertaken applied and academic research with Aboriginal people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia since 1994. Her research interests include legal anthropology, applied anthropology, property relations, tradition and innovation, cosmology, ontology and dreams. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Western Australia.

Laurence Goldman was an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Queensland from 1984–2004. He joined Oil Search Ltd as a community affairs consultant in 2005. He has authored and co-edited various books and articles principally dealing with the Huli people of Papua New Guinea. His research interests include dispute resolution, child play, and sociolinguistics.

Alex Golub is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in the United States. His past research involves kinship, identity, and land tenure in Papua New Guinea and his current research focuses on policy elites in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea.

Dan Jorgensen began his fieldwork among the Telefolmin in 1974–75, and he has returned for five subsequent visits, most recently in 2004. During that time his research has increasingly focused on two of the most profound influences on Telefol life: large-scale mining and evangelical Christianity. He is currently chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

Robert Levitus is an anthropologist practising as a private consultant on issues of Australian indigenous land relations and native title. His main area of field research has been the Kakadu National Park region, and he has published papers on social history, human ecology and contemporary issues in indigenous policy.

Scott McDougall is a lawyer and Director of the Caxton Legal Centre Inc. in Brisbane. Scott has worked extensively on legal issues with indigenous organisations and communities in Queensland.

Keir Martin completed his PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2006. He is currently employed as a lecturer in anthropology at the same university, where he is involved in the coordination of an ongoing project examining moral reasoning and social change in the Asia-Pacific region.

Paul Memmott is the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre, based in the School of Geography Planning and Architecture at the University of Queensland. He is an anthropologist and an architect who operates a research consultancy practice on Aboriginal projects, specialising in the cross-cultural study of people-environment relations among indigenous peoples. His research interests encompass Aboriginal housing and settlement design, Aboriginal access to institutional architecture.

James Weiner received his PhD in anthropology from The Australian National University in 1984 and has taught anthropology at the ANU, the University of Manchester and the University of Adelaide. Since 1979, he has conducted over three years of fieldwork among the Foi of Papua New Guinea and has worked extensively as a consultant in the petroleum project area in Papua New Guinea since 1999. He has also conducted native title research throughout Australia since 1998. He is the co-editor, with Alan Rumsey, of the volume, Mining and Indigenous Life Worlds in Australia and Papua New Guinea.