Judith Ketchell is a proud Torres Strait Islander woman who has balanced her own family of five wonderful children and two grandchildren. She graduated as a teacher in Townsville in 1982 and has worked in remote, rural and urban school communities throughout Queensland. Teaching has always been her destiny, and her rewarding career has provided her with many opportunities to take on various leadership positions across the P–12 sectors of schooling; but more importantly, it has created a vehicle for Indigenous participation in decision making. Judith has worked extensively developing curriculum at the local, state and national level and more recently established a curriculum frame that builds upon the foundation of Torres Strait

I am a Narungga man born on the York Peninsula of South Australia, and hail from the Aboriginal community of Point Pearce. I have a brother, John, and baby sister, Geraldine. My elder sister, Lorraine, is deceased. I attribute my success in life to the close relationship I have with my family; this has kept me culturally strong and focused on community needs as my career has developed over the years. I was proudly married to Mary for more than 30 years until she passed away in 2015, and we have two children, Peter and Lorraine. I firmly believe that being a husband and father are the most important roles I have had in life. Along with Mary I also had the privilege of providing care to our nephews and nieces from time to time when necessary.

I am the youngest of nine children and was born when my parents were in their mid-forties. As a consequence, all but the sister closest in age to me had long left home. For five years I had seen my sister Rosemary heading off to school each day and couldn’t wait to get there myself. However, by little lunch on the first day I had decided that was enough and taken myself home. Eventually I came to love the primary school experience, probably because I was fairly good at most of what happened there. We enjoyed reading, spelling and comprehension, mental arithmetic, geography, nature studies, art, physical training and history. Each week on Friday morning, we had a spelling, dictation and mental arithmetic test. I learned to add, subtract, divide and multiply. I learned my times tables and have never forgotten them. I so much enjoyed tracing countries of the world from my atlas and transferring them to my geography book, colouring in the countries and pencilling in a lovely blue fringe around the islands, naming and placing the capital cities in appropriate spots and marking in significant features of the landscape (never dreaming I would drive down and up the exotic sounding ‘Great Dividing Range’ at least once a week as an adult); copying down text from the board onto my lined page and in “science” drawing the parts of flowers (so helpful these days with crosswords) on the facing blank page; learning how to draw a stick figure; completing physical jerks and playing rounders; and learning an inaccurate history of Australia.

In this chapter we will discuss the important role of the Arts in addressing the cross-curriculum priorities of the Australian Curriculum. The cross-curriculum priorities serve a number of functions, including fostering intercultural understanding. We will also explore ways the Arts can be used to respond to issues of sustainability. The chapter includes innovative and practical suggestions for developing continuous and sequential cross-curriculum learning in the Arts.