Jeanie Bell is a
Jagera and
Dulingbara woman born in south-east
Queensland, and grew up in
Brisbane. After leaving school, she moved to
Melbourne, Victoria, and attended
Monash University. After graduating from Monash, she spent three years teaching linguistics at the Yipirinya school in
Alice Springs, Northern Territory, training Aboriginal
interpreters for the
Institute of Aboriginal Development, and editing two books for the Aboriginal Languages Association. She also taught Indigenous Australian language studies at the North Queensland Institute of TAFE in
Cairns. In 1984 she was appointed Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education in
New South Wales, and in 1985 she became the first coordinator of the Aboriginal and Islander Studies Unit at the
University of Queensland. After this role, she returned to Alice Springs and worked at the Institute for Aboriginal Development as acting assistant director. In 1988, Bell was a member of the National Aboriginal and Islander Education Policy Task Force, and in 1990 she undertook research for the
Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. She has also been part of the Research Committee at the
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and between 2004 and 2005, she worked as a linguist and researcher for the
Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, based in Melbourne. She received a master's degree in
Linguistics from
The University of Melbourne for her 2003 sketch grammar of the
Badjala language, a variety of
Gabi-Gabi spoken on
Fraser Island (K'gari) on the southern coast of Queensland. She was closely involved in
language revitalisation work focusing on
Badjala and
Yagara languages, and was involved in research on
kinship and marriage in Aboriginal communities as part of a PhD at the
Australian National University. Her contributions to Indigenous language maintenance and revitalisation were recognised, along with those of other founding members of the Aboriginal Languages Association, at a 2012
NAIDOC event hosted by Governor General
Quentin Bryce. In 1993, she was one of six Indigenous Australians who jointly presented the
Boyer Lectures for the
International Year of the World's Indigenous People (IYWIP). A scholarship exists in her name for Indigenous PhD students at the Bachelor Institute, to further her legacy in the field of transcultural knowledge creation. Bell passed away in an aged care home near Caboolture on 12 May 2024. == Key publications ==