Bucknell & Mannion (2007) commented that student responses in the 2006 VCE Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) exam could be boiled down to the simple formula of "Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad" (p. 8). They suggest that the subject of OES is to rich for such pat answers. This paper uses this formula of "Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad" as a springboard to explore some of the ways notions of the environment, race and ethnicity intersect and how this is taken up in the OES curriculum. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the productive tensions of environment, race and ethnicity as a strategy for richer and more complex debates around peoples' interactions with the environment.