Meeting the challenges of preparing Expert anthropological Reports in the Native Title arena

Summary: In this CNTA-commissioned podcast, Kim McCaul interviews other senior anthropologists Ophelia Rubinich, John Morton and David Martin about the pitfalls in preparing and writing Expert Reports for the Federal Court. Despite the requirement for anthropologists preparing Expert (and in general Connection) Reports to adhere to the obligations of the Federal Court for expert witnesses, there is still a failure amongst practitioners to fully do so. The anthropologists in this podcast outline these requirements, and strategies for preparing reports that address them. These include how to maintain our professional independence,  not providing opinions on legal matters (such as whether the criteria for establishing Native Title have been met), clearly setting out both the ethnographic, historical and other materials upon which we base our opinions and  the specifically anthropological process of reasoning by which we reach those opinions from those materials.