Author/Editor: Diane Bell

Diane Bell’s home town might be Melbourne, but she has lived in many different places – a decade in Canberra, several years in the Northern Territory, several in NSW and seventeen years in the USA. When George Bush was re-elected, she came home and settled on the banks of the Finniss River, South Australia. “It’s where I feel at home; where I know the Ngarrindjeri stories for the place, the names and songs of the birds,” she says. “And it’s where I continue to work. Knowing the people who are the traditional owners of the land, creates the possibility of being at home on someone else’s land. There is the possibility of negotiation.”

Diane is a feminist anthropologist who lives her politics and does not shy away from controversy. Her commitment to social justice is apparent in her work in the area of land rights, law reform, violence against women and environmental causes. She is equally at home in the halls of academe (Professor Emerita of Anthropology at George Washington University and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide) as she is giving expert anthropological testimonies in the Federal Court or being a “talking head” for National Geographic programs.

Diane in currently consumed by the struggle to return the Murray-Darling River system to health and her next book will be an anthropological analysis of the curious conflicted and confused people she terms the 'Water Tribe'.