Education - a passport from poverty

The Prime Minister is right - education is Indigenous Australians’ best hope, and they’re taking it.

In a major speech on reconciliation - his first for a year - Prime Minister John Howard is reported as saying the Government's approach was "very much guided by the spirit" of the 1967 referendum, which granted Aborigines full rights as Australian citizens.

He called for a greater effort on education, arguing it offers the "proven avenue of lasting hope for Indigenous young people".

"We need to foster a generation of Indigenous Australians who recognise and reap the benefits of a good education and pass these values on to future generations," he told a Reconciliation Australia/BHP Billiton luncheon in Melbourne.

I support the Prime Minister’s call for Indigenous Australians to tackle the difficult times ahead by maximising our opportunities through quality education.

But how will he make education sufficiently relevant that our youth will feel duty-bound, as representatives of their families, to stay at school to Year 12, and continue to further studies? What incentives will he offer mature-aged members of our communities to return to the classroom, through TAFE or enabling programs at universities?

I would suggest raising ABSTUDY above the poverty line and taking away the means-testing of ABSTUDY eligibility might be a good start.

I read a beautiful quote recently, from Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), Irish-born English writer and clergyman: “The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.”

As a naive child, growing up in a small rural community in southwest Queensland, I took the lessons of my white educators as gospel and never dared question the cultural accuracy of their teachings. I acquired formal knowledge entirely from Anglo-Saxon teachers, usually first year out of teachers college, and with a biased Eurocentric slant.

At university I became more of a critical inquirer, but I still felt there was something seriously missing in my schooling. It became patently obvious to me later in my tertiary education that the missing link was the dearth of Indigenous teachers. There simply weren’t any.

Indigenous-authored books in school libraries  were also conspicuous by their absence during my formative years.

Studying at university I became aware of theorists such as Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857), the “father of sociology”, who laid the groundwork for one of the first social theories - social evolutionism. I read of early modern theorist, Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) who coined the term "survival of the fittest". I also read about postmodernism, post-structuralism, critical theory and post-colonialism.

In my thirst for knowledge, as I progressed through tertiary studies, I also read of great writers such as Stephen Hawking who wrote A Brief History of Time, Isaac Asimov, and his Understanding Physics and Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, but I still sought to read an advanced theoretical standpoint of an Indigenous Australian.

I know my relatives found my collection of thick hard-cover text books a bit peculiar, taking their place on the dining table along side Mills and Boon’s romantic novels, Racing Form Guides and Rugby League Weeks, but they nevertheless understood my pursuit of education was something I felt passionate about.

Last month I was finally able to whet my appetite for quality Indigenous viewpoints, listening to and having meaningful conversations with two of the nation’s leading Indigenous academics at the a conference hosted by QUT, (Re) Contesting Indigenous Knowledge and Indigenous Studies.

The inspirational and challenging papers presented by Professor Martin Nakata (UTS) and Professor Eileen Morton-Robinson (QUT), in particular their level of intellectual discourse: Nakata on cultural interface - the place I was born into, and Morton-Robinson on cultural borderland - how that space is lived, were worth the admission fee by themselves.

Professor Martin Nakata, Director of Indigenous academic programs at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology Sydney, is the first Torres Strait Islander to receive a PhD from an Australian university. His current research work is in curriculum development and online pedagogies, with a particular focus on Indigenous learners.

Professor Nakata spoke articulately and concisely on the dynamics of his discipline:

In this contested space between the two knowledge systems, the cultural interface, things are not clearly black or white, Indigenous or Western.

In this space are histories, politics, economics, multiple and interconnected discourses, social practices and knowledge technologies which condition: how we all come to look at the world ...

Much of what we bring to this is tacit and unspoken knowledge, those assumptions by which we make sense and meaning in our everyday world.

For many Indigenous students and lecturers, regardless of their distance from what we understand as ‘the traditional context’, the Indigenous ... ways of “doing” knowledge are not completely unfamiliar.

These are embedded, not in detailed knowledge of the land and place for all of us perhaps, not perhaps in environmental or ecological knowledge, but in ways of story-telling; of memory-making; in narrative, art and performance; in cultural and social practices ... and so on.

But we are all also grounded in Western epistemology, through historical experience, through Christianisation, through the English language, through interventions of and interactions with colonial and contemporary institutions, through formal education, through subscription to the law, through subscription to the world of work, to democratic values, through everyday living, through use of technology, through popular culture, and so on.

Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Geonpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, talked broadly about whiteness from an Indigenous perspective but, like her writings in Talkin’ Up To The White Women - Indigenous Women and Feminism, her discourse is implicitly about Indigenous women:

An Indigenous woman’s standpoint is informed by social worlds imbued with meaning grounded in knowledges of different realities from those of white women. And we have become extremely knowledgeable about white women in ways that are unknown to most of them …

… All Indigenous women share the common experience of living in a society that deprecates us.

On white race privilege, Professor Morton-Robinson adds:

White race privilege in Australia is based on the theft of our lands, the murder of our people and the use of our slave labour. Whites’ position in our land and the benefits they reap has resulted from the historical fact of White dominance, which was built upon a belief in White racial superiority. If White people today share the beliefs and values of their White ancestors and enjoy the race privileges established by those ancestors, then by “whitefella” logic they are complicit in that historical dominance.

Professor Morton-Robinson also addressed the issue of blackness, and how centuries of Eurocentric anthropological writings painted blackness as being ugly, untrustworthy, suspicious, and evil and or of the lowest level of the human social stratum.

Her comments or words to the effect “so when the first fleet and its military and criminal passengers stepped ashore and sighted the Eora traditional owners, they had already been conditioned to a certain racial discourse from their motherland and as such viewed them, as black people, as being inferior”.

Professor Morton-Robinson alluded to this standpoint of superiority from the first contact between the races on the 26 January 1788 as the major factor contributing to the violent colonisation of Australia’s traditional owners. She argues this is still being perpetuated today in one form or another.

The three-day conference put me among a vast gathering of eminent Indigenous academics, mostly PhDs or doctorial candidates, all speaking the same language. Conference attendees’ remarks on epistemology, ontology, pedagogy and discourse, during session discussions and meal break conversations were gladly consumed and acknowledged by all.

Reflecting on the Prime Minister’s observation at the Melbourne luncheon that education is the "proven avenue of lasting hope for Indigenous young people", I wonder if he is aware that the trickle of Indigenous academic success in the 80s and 90s is turning into a constant flow in the new millennium, with graduates who have done the hard yards now assuming their rightful place in their chosen vocations.

Perhaps if he and his conservative allies, tucked away in their ivory towers in Canberra, stopped focusing the nation’s attention entirely on the horrendous issues confronting our people, maybe they, too, will begin to notice that Indigenous people are engaged in things other than child abuse, domestic violence and alcohol-fuelled criminal activities.