Indigenous Content in Education: a dichotomy

The heady days of Aboriginal Education reform throughout the Hawke Keating years resulted in a plethora of studies on Indigenous education; report after report highlighting the poor education standards of Indigenous Australians.

Things changed in the 1990’s with increased funding we witnessed the creation of Indigenous support centres within higher education institutions. The growth of Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness (ASSPA) committees at primary and high school levels had a positive foundational impact. The school playground slowly changed from the negative to the positive. Many supportive non-Indigenous people assisted, plus a flood of do-gooders seeking some intrinsic exotic prize however Aboriginal education became an industry with the hematophagous preying on the funds that should have been distributed towards Indigenous educators teaching and researching in their centres of excellence.

In 2012 the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education's (DIISRTE)‘Review of higher education access and outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’, commonly referred to as the Behrendt Report, named after its Chairperson, arrived like an butchers knife. For it has killed 25 years of positive policy with its ‘mainstreaming’ of Indigenous education; back to where it was before the struggle for Indigenous self-determination in education began. This paper hopes to highlight some of this story.