And guidance is sorely needed. Of course, there have been plenty of instances of blatant dishonesty and theft of Indigenous intellectual property, and Janke recounts these. Often, however, those wanting to celebrate Indigenous cultures in their teaching, art, or business are nervous about setting a foot wrong. Recently, I listened to a professor warning students to steer clear of Indigenous topics, the protocols these days being too difficult to navigate. Not wanting the richness of Indigenous histories and cultures to be sidelined by such anxieties, Janke shows us a way forward.

Janke is a lawyer. Her company specialises in Indigenous cultural and intellectual property as well as commercial law. It also runs workshops to help corporations and government agencies navigating Indigenous engagement develop their reconciliation action plans, and work with Indigenous communities according to ten ‘true tracks’ principles. Janke developed the ten principles for her doctorate, and they underpin the guidance of this book.

True Tracks, a comprehensive work, contains chapters spanning language, art, architecture, music, film, writing, dancing, food, science, research, education, digital technologies, the GLAM sector, tourism, and business. Each has examples of what not to do. Some of the most egregious transgressions are simply fraud or theft: the non-Indigenous author who faked an Indigenous persona for a prize-winning biography; the ‘authentic’ Aboriginal handicrafts, made in Indonesia; the anthropologist who published details of secret ceremony, assuming its owners would never find out; the non-Indigenous artist who depicted Ancestral Beings in faraway Country without permission or even consultation.

Other examples brought Indigenous ownership to my attention in new ways. I learned that Indigenous knowledge of plants’ healing properties is being commodified, but that knowledge holders have little legal recourse to ensure that they are properly compensated. The trouble is that Western legal frameworks are the wrong shape for cultural ownership. Australia’s system of patents and copyright law presumes that knowledge and ideas arise from ‘discovery’ and might be held by individuals or corporations. But Janke is showing us knowledge of another kind.

There are also examples of things done the right way. We learn that Tara June Winch, a Wiradjuri woman, worked closely with senior Wiradjuri elder Uncle Stan Grant Sr for the development of her book The Yield (2019). A portion of her royalties was assigned to the Parkes Wiradjuri Language Group. Lest the reader be overwhelmed, each chapter concludes, reassuringly, with a list of ‘what you can do’. Seek permission. Share benefits. Create opportunities. Check your motives: should I be the one to do this now? Janke is committed to being practical, and so ‘what you can do’ is followed by a list of resources. We are not left simply to ‘educate ourselves’. We are led.

Janke is a deft guide through sometimes challenging ethical terrain. Nonetheless, I was unsettled by her book. At first, I thought this might be a product of what seemed an underlying tension. On the one hand, Janke advocates for Indigenous knowledges to be included in school curricula, asks settler to learn Indigenous languages, and insists on Indigenous science being woven into research and environmental management agendas. She wants this knowledge recognised and valued by all. On the other, she argues that Indigenous people must retain full authority over these knowledges. But can Indigenous knowledge be both unleashed and controlled?

Janke does not consider this a tension, as I first did. Rather, she is gently correcting assumptions about knowledge itself. I already knew from my collaborations with Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory that, in these worlds, knowledge is owned, embodied, and relational. People hold obligations to protect and convey knowledge: some are responsible for holding knowledge, others are overseers who ensure that all is done in the right way. Some people are authorised to know things, and some people are authorised to teach them.

What Janke has done is to extend this relational, embodied understanding of knowledge into my world, the academy (and beyond). In this world, as our liberal assumptions would have it, we tend to assume that knowledge is disembodied and ‘out there’. Knowledge, ideally, belongs to humanity as a commons; we are the better for sharing it freely, as the open-access movement proclaims.

Janke rejects this. She takes particular aim at Wikipedia for publishing details of palawa kani (a Tasmanian Aboriginal language) against the wishes of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. For Wikipedia, taking the page down would ‘chill free speech’, threatening ‘research, education and public discourse’. Janke reads the dispute as a conflict between copyright law and Indigenous cultural heritage rights. But it’s more than this: it’s about knowledge itself. She reminds us that ‘Indigenous cultures are like Indigenous lands; they are not free to be taken’. And there’s the rub. With the usual caveats around plagiarism and attributions, knowledge, for non-Indigenous scholars like myself, is not like land precisely because it is free, and the freer the better. But Janke would ask, for whom is it free?

Approaching this topic as a lawyer, Janke foregrounds the legal challenges and obligations for those wanting to do right by Indigenous people. She exposes the limits of Australian law. Ultimately, though, True Tracks is about more than that. It is pointing to something deeper than how we might acknowledge Indigenous authorship. Perhaps knowledge never was nor could be disembodied and ‘free’. Janke left me wondering whether something is profoundly wrong with the way I understand understanding itself. Here, she shows us a better way.