Education - a passport from poverty

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.