From 1982 to 1989, she was employed as an historian at the Aboriginal Heritage Branch of the Department of Environment and Planning in South Australia. Out of this came her first major publication, "Women Rites &amp; Sites. Aboriginal Women's Cultural Knowledge," an edited collection of referenced essays based on original reports to the Aboriginal Heritage Unit by herself and seven other non-Aboriginal women expert in this area (Catherine Berndt, Catherine J Ellis &amp; Linda Barwick, Helen Payne, Jen Gibson, Jane M Jacobs, and Luise Hercus), with an additional concluding chapter on the southern region of South Australia written by Fay Gale, a long-established academic researcher of Aboriginal people, to complete an overview of the whole State. The aim of "Women Rites &amp; Sites" was to demonstrate and correct the cultural bias and gender blindness of previous research on Aboriginal cultural life. It is an early example of new understandings of Australian indigenous history and culture that began to emerge in the 1980s following Henry Reynolds’ "The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia" (1981), a controversial history of relations between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers, which has been marked as the beginning of the History Wars.