Indigenous university student success, 1980-2013

Those much larger age-groups are due to peak at university-age around 2020. And a bigger wave will hit university-age around 2030, the children of this boom-generation.

But you've noticed ! Why ?! How come Year 12 numbers have increased many times since 2000, and the size of the relevant age-group has risen substantially, but only by 50 % ? Is there something 'different' about that sudden increase in births since the early eighties ?

We need to also explain why, after steady-state birth numbers through the seventies, did they rise consistently through the eighties and into the nineties ? Here's my conjecture:

Work and inter-marriage

Across Australia, after about 1960, Indigenous families started to move to the cities for work opportunities. The children of those young families grew up in the cities. As the children of those families left school, usually at fifteen, and found work, as their parents had done, they of necessity worked and socialised with non-Aboriginal people. Working people tended to marry working peope, but inter-marriage quickly became a very common social practice for working Indigenous people: perhaps 80% of young Indigenous people were intermarrying by the eighties, and this has risen to 90 and 95 % in some cities.

Inter-marriage was not the only factor – 'both parents working' played a bigger role - but it has had the effect of massively increasing the number of children with Indigenous ancestry, even if births in each family don't rise materially: instead of two Indigenous people marrying and having one family with, say, two children, if two Indigenous people marry two non-Indigenous people, and each family has two children, then - hey presto ! four children. Double the birth-rate. So widespread inter-marriage can massively boost total Indigenous birth-rates.

It's no coincidence that the state with the largest Indigenous population and the largest cities, New South Wales, has very high rates of inter-marriage, up to 95 %, and very active Indigenous participation in higher education, while Northern Territory has the lowest Indigenous employment rate, inter-marriage rate AND the lowest Indigenous birth-rate. And the poorest university participation.

Earlier urbanisation

And the children of a working Indigenous person and a working partner, with such major role-models, would, according to this scenario, be more likely to be focussed on careers early, and to go on to Year 12, and beyond. And so it has been. Most of the increases in Indigenous university participation since 2005 has thus been a function of an increased birth-rate since 1981, especially an increased birth-rate of urban, working parents, which in turn was a consequence of the massive urban migrations in the sixties and seventies.

One must add, as an aside, that the urban migration wasn't a simple, or single-shot process: one has to go back to the immediate post-war labour situation for Indigenous people: with the huge backlog of rural infrastructure projects (roads, railways, rural electrification, forestry, reservoirs and dams, pipelines, public housing), Indigenous people quickly seized opportunities that were much more long-term than the seasonal work that they had relied on: they could now find work which allowed them to bed down in country towns, and eventually bring their families to live with them and access the basic facilities there, so that their kids could get better schooling than ever before.

From small towns, railway siding villages and hamlets, people found work and moved to larger towns, and many families, or at least their teenage members, eventually moved into the cities. But this process took some time, ten and twenty years or longer. However, during that period, young Indigenous people had the benefit of basic, standard education, they were not constrained by either the lack of any education at all in the fringe-camps or by the 'culturally-adapted' curriculum provided at schools on government settlements. The vast majority of Indigenous children still left school at fourteen or fifteen, and very few finished Year 12 - in fact this was the case right up to the nineties. The percentage of Indigenous children going on to Year 12 was still in single figures until then. Now it seems to be well over 50 % and still rising.

So the children of Indigenous descent now coming through secondary school may well be the great-grandchildren of those pioneers who moved to country towns for better work opportunities, and for better educational opportunities for their own children, the grandparents of today. It's certainly been a hard, slow grind but it will just as certainly pay off in the next decade or two.