Marcia Langton

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.

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.

She enrolled at the University of Queensland, becoming an activist for indigenous rights. Disillusioned with the conservative mainstream political reaction to these issues she then left Australia to travel, live and work in several countries including Papua New Guinea, Japan and North America. She returned to Australia and graduated in anthropology at the Australian National University in the 1980s. 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. For example, 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 has supported the Northern Territory National Emergency Response which polices alcohol sales and consumption, among other issues.

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, Northern Territory, before moving to Melbourne.

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