About Us
Awaye! is produced and presented by Aboriginal broadcasters and is Australia's only national Indigenous arts and culture program.
Awaye! covers music (from the yidaki and gumleaf to techno), arts, spirituality, politics, dance, literature, theatre - in short, the healthy and vibrant diversity of Aboriginal culture across the country. Awaye! is also a showcase for features and documentaries produced by indigenous people overseas, including Maori, Polynesian, native American and South African broadcasters.
Daniel Browning
Daniel is from the Minjungbal clan of the Bundjalung nation whose traditional country is on the far north coast of New South Wales. He grew up in the shadow of Wollumbin, the culturally significant peak that Captain Cook renamed Mount Warning. Through his mother, he is a descendant of the Kullilli people of south-western Queensland, with family who were dispersed to the mission at Taroom and later Cherbourg.
He also identifies as a South Sea Islander – his paternal ancestors came from what is now Vanuatu. They were brought out as indentured slaves to work in the Queensland canefields in the latter part of the nineteenth century before being deported, leaving their youngest son in the care of a kinsman who was exempt from the forced repatriation. Among his other ancestors are an English merchant seaman who married above his rank into the family of the paramount chief of Fiji, and an intrepid West Indian who jumped ship in Australia in the late nineteenth century – disappearing from official notice by marrying into the Aboriginal community.
His prolonged university career included a very short stint at the Australian National University in Canberra. He later studied English and art history at the University of Queensland. To everyone's relief he eventually completed his Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) at the Queensland University of Technology, where he majored in painting.
Daniel first joined the Awaye! team on a short-term basis in 1997-1998 and again in 2004-2005. A former news director at Triple J, he has worked for the ABC since 1994.
Over the years he has interviewed artists such as Judy Watson, Brook Andrew and Esme Timbery, curators Margo Neale, Brenda L Croft and Stephen Gilchrist, filmmakers Ivan Sen, Rachel Perkins, Wayne Blair, Warwick Thornton and Beck Cole, actors Rachel Maza and David Ngoombujarra, poets Yvette Holt and Samuel Wagan Watson, historian John Maynard, activist Roberta Sykes, sportspeople Kyle van der Kuyp, Yvonne Goolagong-Cawley and Lloyd McDermott and the former ATSIC regional chairman Murrandoo Yanner. His personal hero is the fastest Australian ever, athlete and multilingual foreign affairs officer Patrick Johnson, with whom he once exchanged niceties at a Deadlys after-party.
Daniel and the rest of the Awaye! team is committed to representing the depth, vitality and diversity of Indigenous art and culture – from Gali'winku to Cape Barren Island, from Broome to Cape York and everywhere in between.
