Boarding and Australia's First Peoples: Understanding How Residential Schooling Shapes Lives 9811660115, 9789811660115

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Methodology and Structure
References
About This Book
Contents
Acronyms
Part I Providing Context
1 Understanding the Historical Context
1.1 A Short and Selective History of Settler-Colonial Australia
1.1.1 The Colonial Era: Asymmetries of Power and the Great Australian Silence
1.1.2 Government Policy and ‘Managing the Aboriginal Problem’
1.1.3 The History Wars
1.2 Deficit Discourse and ‘The Gap’
1.3 Place-Based Education
1.4 A Snapshot of First Nations Australia, 2020
1.5 Understanding the Architecture of Australia’s Education System
1.5.1 School Resourcing and Equity in Australian Education Systems
1.5.2 ICSEA and the Profile of Participants in This Study
1.6 Conclusion
References
2 Boarding Schools
2.1 Understanding the Role of Boarding in the Settler-Colonial World
2.2 Why Boarding?
2.3 Presumed Benefit of Boarding for Disadvantaged Students
2.4 Presumed Benefit of Boarding For First Nations Students
2.5 Power, Politics and the Educated Elite
2.6 Conclusion
References
3 First Person: Context is Everything
Part II Expectations and Transitions
4 The Purpose and Presumed Benefits of Boarding; Parents and Alumni
4.1 Autonomy and Individual Advancement
4.2 Opportunity and Choice in Remote Australia
4.3 Change/Challenge: Boarding School to Broaden Horizons and Enable Two-Way Learning
4.4 Free, Prior and Informed Consent
4.5 Problems in Community and Schooling to Interrupt Patterns of Behaviour
4.6 Attitudes to Social Dysfunction and Questioning Boarding Policy
4.7 Other Motivations for Choosing Boarding
4.7.1 Maximising Leadership and Academic Potential
4.7.2 The Promise of Professional Sport
4.8 The Choice of Boarding School for Urban Students
4.8.1 Practical Considerations
4.8.2 Political Considerations
4.8.3 Social Considerations
4.9 Conclusion
References
5 The Purpose and Presumed Benefits of Indigenous Programs: Education Participants
5.1 Identifying the Organising Narrative
5.2 The Monster and the Machine
5.3 Student Perspectives on School Priorities
5.4 Conclusion
References
6 Transition to Boarding
6.1 What Do We Know About the Transition to Boarding?
6.2 Living Through the Transition to Boarding
References
7 First Person: Haste, Hope and Hubris
Reference
Part III Factors Constraining Success and How to Neutralise Them
8 Homesickness
8.1 Homesickness, Belonging, and Collective Identity
8.2 Homesickness and the Abrogation of Responsibilities to Loved Ones at Home
8.3 Homesickness, Self and Making Sense of Two Worlds
8.4 Recognising Homesickness
8.5 Implications of Homesickness
8.6 Conclusion
References
9 First Person: Getting Lost, Being Found
10 Trauma
10.1 What is Trauma and What Effect Does It Have?
10.2 Prevalence and the Enduring Impact of Antecedent Trauma
References
11 First Person: Courage
12 Encountering Cultural Dissonance, Racial Stereotypes and Racism at School
12.1 Describing and Defining Racism
12.2 Inter-Personal Racism
12.2.1 In-School Inter-Personal Racism
12.2.2 Inter-personal Racism as an Opportunity to Educate
12.2.3 Intra-Group Conflict at School
12.2.4 Institutional Responses to Inter-Personal Racism
12.2.5 Reverse Racism and Encountering Lateral Violence at Home
12.3 Internalised Racism and Deficit Thinking
12.4 Institutional Racism and the Role of School Culture
12.4.1 Institutional Racism, Stereotypes and Essentialism
12.4.2 Gender and the Stereotyping of Female Students
12.4.3 Racial Stereotypes and a Culture of Low Expectation
12.4.4 Institutional Racism and Asymmetries of Power
12.4.5 Consequences of Institutional Racism
12.4.6 Cultural Dissonance and Institutional Racism
12.4.7 Institutional Racism and Curriculum
References
13 First Person: Challenging Structures of Power
References
Part IV Factors Enabling Success and How to Maximise Them
14 Family Support and Finding a Voice
14.1 The Social Gradient: Parents’ Social Class and How They Are Positioned to Support Their Children’s Education
14.2 Parents’ Lack of Trust
14.3 School Respect for Parental Support
14.4 Where There is no Parental Support
14.5 A Celebration of Grandparents
References
15 First Person: Two Grandsons, Two Schools
15.1 Conclusion
Reference
16 Resilience and Developing a Resistant Mind-Set
References
17 Metamorphosis. Fighting the Good Fight
17.1 Conclusion
References
Part V Education Dilemma
18 Education Policy, Choice and Remote Education. Lest We Forget
References
19 Understanding the Cost/Benefit of Boarding with Reference to Football
19.1 The Downside of Professional Sport
19.2 The Football Stereotype
19.3 Football, Health and Wellbeing
References
20 First Person: Football, Flourishing and Capabilities
References
21 First Person: Success. Or What Cost Education?
Part VI First Person: Reflections on the Impact of Boarding
22 First Person: Accountability
References
23 First Person: Success, Sacrifice and Identity
24 First Person: The Power of Positive Relationships
Reference
25 First Person: Trauma and Why Identity Matters
References
26 First Person: The Power of Insider Knowledge
Part VII Driving Change
27 Truth Telling and Transformations
27.1 Driving Change
27.2 Appearance and Reality
27.3 The Power of the Activist Voice
27.4 Strenuous Truth Telling
27.5 Progress
References
28 First Person: Turning the Ship Around
29 Conclusion
References
Glossary of Terms
A Note About Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity

Citation preview

Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World Series Editors: Sarah Maddison · Sana Nakata

Marnie O’Bryan

Boarding and Australia’s First Peoples Understanding How Residential Schooling Shapes Lives

Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World Volume 3

Series Editors Sarah Maddison, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Sana Nakata, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Editorial Board Miriam Jorgensen, Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA Sheryl Lightfoot, Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Morgan Brigg, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Yin Paradies, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia Jeff Denis, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada Bronwyn Fredericks, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD, Australia Libby Porter, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The series, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World, brings together scholars interested in examining contemporary Indigenous affairs through questions of relationality. This is a unique approach that represents a deliberate move away from both settler-colonial studies, which examines historical and present impacts of settler states upon Indigenous peoples, and from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, which is predominantly interested in how Indigenous peoples speak back to the settler state. Closely connected to, but with meaningful contrast to these approaches, the Indigenous-Settler Relations series focuses sharply upon questions about what informs, shapes and gives social, legal and political life to relations between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples, both in Australia and globally. This is an important and timely endeavour. In Australia, relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the state are at an impasse. In the wake of the government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement in 2017 there is no shared view on how Indigenous-settler relationships might be ‘reset’, or even if this is possible. The contemporary Indigenous affairs policy domain is characterised by confusion, frustration and disappointment that, despite a seemingly endless succession of policy regimes, efforts to ‘close the gap’ between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other Australians have not resulted in progress. It is into this contested space that the Indigenous-Settler Relations series seeks to intervene with new, agenda-setting research. The series editors are based in a research unit in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne—the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. The series will build on the work of the Collaboration in bringing together scholars and practitioners from around Australia, and around the world—particularly other Anglophone settler colonial societies such as Canada, the United States and New Zealand—whose work is concerned with Indigenous-settler relations across a range of disciplines. The multi-faceted approach to Indigenous-Settler Relations that defines the series seeks to capture how the question of relationality is already being asked by scholars across disciplines including political science, history, sociology, law, media, and cultural studies. Readers of this series will look to it for fresh perspectives and new ideas about how to transform Indigenous-settler relations in Australia and elsewhere. They will learn from the leading lights in an emerging field who will connect their rich, multi-disciplinary scholarship to urgent social and political questions at the heart of Indigenous-Settler relations.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/16142

Marnie O’Bryan

Boarding and Australia’s First Peoples Understanding How Residential Schooling Shapes Lives

Marnie O’Bryan Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

ISSN 2524-5767 ISSN 2524-5775 (electronic) Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World ISBN 978-981-16-6008-5 ISBN 978-981-16-6009-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6009-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

The following people have assisted in writing this book. Their narratives, among others, appear throughout and are reproduced with respect and grateful thanks: Darren Allen (Gunai Kurnai); Lucy Amon (Noonuccal, Quandamooka Country); Shawn Andrews (Mununjali, Palawa); Corey Atkinson (Yorta Yorta, Bangerang); Ngaree Blow (Noonuccal, Yorta Yorta); Kira Briscoe (Arrente, Anmajtre, Walpiri); Aaron Clark (Tjap Whurrung, Gunditjmara nation); Abby Rose Cox (NimanburrKija); Joshua Cubillo (Larrakia, Wadjigan); Malcolm Dotoi (Guuyu Mini); Elijah Edwards (Wangkathaa); Leon Egan (Wiradjuri, Yorta Yorta, Bangerang, Gunditjmara); Paddy Heenan (Tiwi, Anmajtre, Warruwi, Jilkminggan, Ngukurr), Skye Lockyer (Kariyarra, Ngarluma, Nyul Nyul, Yawuru); Melanie Mununggurr (Djapu, Yolngu nations); Anzack Newman (Bamaga, Northern Penninsula Area, Bardu Island); Eleisha Ozies (Djugan, Nyikina, Karagarri, Kidja); Danielle Sibosado (Baad and Yawuru); Joshua Sibosado (Baad and Yawuru); Samuel Schultz (Wilman, Njunga nation); Gningala Taylor (Njunga nation); Shane Tippamuntamurri (Tiwi, Anmajtre, Walpiri); Austin Wonaeamirri (Tiwi); Lorraine Kabbindi White (Gunmok, upper Liverpool region, West Arnhem). To young people who have elected to remain anonymous, to parents, grandparents, elders and mentors, I am equally grateful. In what follows I have attempted to honour diverse, sometimes contradictory perspectives which reflect personal experience and the collective wisdom of contributors. To teachers and school leaders who participated, sincere thanks for your candour and humility in reflecting on the programs with which you are or have been associated. In particular, I acknowledge Rick Hanlon, Ian Smith, Anne Mcmaster, Lynn Webber, Paul Carroll, Greg Wearne and Kathryn Gale whose life-long commitment to doing justice for First Peoples through education has been nation changing.

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Acknowledgements

I acknowledge my PhD supervisory panel, Distinguished Prof. Marcia Langton, Prof. David Beckett and Associate Professor Jane Freemantle. My thanks for your guidance and support in the research which underpins this book. To Barrie Burton and David Beckett, I am eternally grateful for your editorial advice and close reading of this book as it was in formation. Finally, to Michael, without whose support and encouragement this work would never have happened.

Introduction

Some years ago, Melbourne’s central business district was brought to a standstill by demonstrators protesting the threatened closure of remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. It was rush hour on a Friday afternoon, always an event in itself. Workers, weary at the end of the week, flood out of multi-storey office blocks and surge towards trains, trams and buses, eager for the weekend to begin. On this autumn evening, no one was going anywhere. Thousands of people blocked the city’s thoroughfares as protesters made their way, gathering force as they marched from Parliament House to the iconic Flinders Street railway station. In front of the station, a large circle had formed at the centre of the intersection, around which the crowd pressed. In the middle of this impromptu stage was a young woman. Standing on an upturned milk crate, draped in an Aboriginal flag, arms raised in defiance, she railed against the West Australian government and the Prime Minister of the day, who had endorsed the WA Premier’s decision to cease funding services to remote communities. He had declared ‘What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have’ (Medhora, 2015). By any measure, this young woman was someone fully participating in Australian society. She is a contributor to this work. She had graduated from one of Melbourne’s boarding schools some years earlier. Hers was not one of the communities slated to be closed, but others close to her home were. When I interviewed her for the first time, she had described herself as being ‘stuck in Melbourne’. Not stuck in a bad way she told me, but stuck nevertheless. She had come to like city life and didn’t feel ready to go home yet. For a time, she had been enrolled at university but at that moment she was managing a café and establishing a profile for herself in the arts. As I watched her rage against the machine, I thought of how she’d described her choice not to return home. I took her protest to be an outpouring of love for her family and her Country. I wondered if, when they watched the footage on social media, they would understand her advocacy. Whether they would recognise the passion and appreciate the significance of her actions. I wondered if they would understand the sheer audacity of bringing the city to a standstill on a Friday evening. I wondered whether they would be impressed by both the force of her fury and her ability to put vii

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it into words. I wondered whether any of this could have happened if she hadn’t gone to boarding school. As I observed her from the sidelines, it was absolutely evident to me that she was at home in this city. And in her own skin. I wondered whether, for all her anger and her pain, this was a moment in which she could reconcile the two hemispheres of her life. For years, she had been immersed in dominant culture institutions. She had successfully navigated systems, relationships, expectations other than her own, often at no small cost to herself. Now she was drawing a line in the sand. Now she was declaring her true allegiance. For a young woman from a small, isolated community to be in a major city on the other side of a vast continent and speaking her mind to an audience she herself had held captive, that was a gift she gave to the nation. Another time, another place. I was approached by elders from a community in Australia’s remote Northern Territory (NT), and invited to ‘tell the education story of our kids’. One, herself a former school principal, had come across the research project which forms the backbone of this book. She wanted to establish a solid baseline of data to highlight the personal and social consequences of policy mandating that remote-living secondary-aged young people board at schools away from home. In her community of 400 people, the consequences are not good. I asked Aboriginal activist, artist, educator and 2021 Senior Australian of the Year, Dr Miriam Rose Ungunmerr what it takes for young people from remote communities such as this to thrive in schools far from home. She thought for some time before responding. ‘Don’t treat our kids as individuals’, she told me, ‘They are not individuals, they are part of a collective. So, if you are going to deal with the kids, deal first with the collective’. To those of us steeped in Western patterns of thought, her statement throws up a challenge. Western education systems are geared to individual achievement, individual advancement. And without question that focus matters. Education policy seeking to maximise the potential of the individual presupposes a downstream benefit to the collective. When First Nations students are sent to the best resourced, highest performing schools; when they reside in those schools, day in day out, for 40 weeks a year, year on end, there is a presumption that their personal transformation will catalyse a transformation of the collective. Miriam Rose reminds us that it is not as simple as that. Over the course of 2019, a team of researchers from the Australian National University worked with a wide range of community members to map the education histories of 100 young people aged 12–21 years over a 10-year period. We recorded what each individual had done, in education terms, in each year since they turned 12. Their experiences had been many and varied. We found that between them, they had attended 38 different schools, in 16 different towns or cities, across every state or territory of mainland Australia (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). Far from travelling or being treated as a collective, it was as if they had been atomised and sprayed like a mist across the nation, landing sometimes singly, sometimes as one of a pair, in schools many could no longer even name. The majority had returned home within the first two years of going away. For most of them, their return marked the end of their formal education. In this, as in other remote communities, when a student

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drops out of boarding, they typically drop out of education altogether. ‘If these are our leaders of the future we should be worried’, one mother observed, ‘Where will they lead us? They can’t even lead themselves’. The 13-year-old who dropped out of school after a term, and the 23-year-old who didn’t, now sit at very different points on the social gradient. Both had attended boarding school, one in circumstances where she was empowered to make an informed decision between two good options, one local and one away from home. For the other there was no viable alternative. One has found her voice and has every intention to use it. The other is now functionally illiterate and faces a lifetime of consequences across various domains, but especially health and employment. When she has children of her own, these will, in turn, have intergenerational implications. Her capacity to exercise agency during her adolescence and into her adult life will be significantly diminished. Each of these young women has her own complex story to tell. From each, education has demanded compromise and sacrifice unimagined by the ‘mainstream’ students alongside whom they lived and learned during their time at boarding school. For each, small decisions have had seismic consequences. Boarding school is widely recognised as a locus of opportunity. There is compelling logic to making places available for Australia’s most disadvantaged students in the highest performing schools, but it must also be acknowledged that there is a high social, emotional, as well as financial cost associated with boarding. For traditionally oriented young people, with a language background other than English, to be away from home for long periods of time during formative years may well impact their language proficiency and the transmission of cultural knowledge. There has been scant attention paid to that issue in the formation of education policy. More than 80% of Australia’s First Peoples live in urban or regional settings (AIHW, 2019). For them, generously funded scholarship programs provide access to schools which would otherwise be beyond the financial means of many families. These schools offer distinct advantages. The architecture of Australia’s education system, which is discussed further below, means that students attending high feepaying schools are better positioned to gain access to competitive tertiary courses. Less obvious to the outsider, the independent school sector in Australia is renowned for the social networks it engenders: the power of the ‘old school tie’ continues to open doors for alumni throughout their adult lives. Many strong voices advocate for our First Peoples to be inducted into these networks through the provision of funded places in elite schools, but mechanisms designed to generate, or perpetuate, social privilege are complex and fraught with invisible traps. Middle and upper class systems work differentially to advantage their own (Lareau, 2011). For the 20% of First Peoples who live in remote Australia, there is no Plan B. That is a big problem. Young people in this demographic are more likely to be traditionally oriented and have a first language other than English. They have distinct social, educational and health profiles which urban educators, with Eurocentric perspectives on the world, may or may not recognise, understand or be equipped to provide for. Despite this, the infrastructure of local education provision has largely been dismantled in remote Australia (NT Department of Education, 2020). In the NT in 2021, there are 78 communities which have no secondary provision and no alternative programs

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the re-engage teenagers who have dropped out of the ‘mainstream’ (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). Despite a growing research base which points to a range of negative unintended consequences of boarding school for remote-living young people, policy settings remain firmly fixed on the boarding sector as the sole provider of secondary education. Understanding what happens behind the school gates has arguably never been more important. Each year, thousands of First Nations young Australians leave home to attend boarding schools. For some it is an active choice. For many there is no alternative. They come from situations as diverse as the continent itself. Some traverse many thousands of kilometres while others cross a few suburbs. Some set off from homes shared with multiple generations of family members, soldered together as much by cultural norms as by the chronic underfunding of housing in remote communities. Others leave a nuclear family unit at home. For some, English is a second, or third, or fourth language. Some long to be able to converse in their grandmother’s tongue. Their aspirations are as various as their postcodes. What they share is custodianship of the oldest living culture on the planet, and the challenge of understanding what that means in a system- and a society-framed by exclusively Eurocentric norms. Prioritising secondary education provision through boarding is part of a national strategy intended to reduce the disparity in education outcomes between First Nations and other Australian students. To that end, every year, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on costs associated with boarding. To give an example, in the 2019/2020 Federal Government budget, $5 million was allocated over a four-year period to tackle an acknowledged crisis in Indigenous youth suicide. In the same budget, $200 million was allocated to ‘fund additional scholarship placements and give more Indigenous students the support and mentoring they need’. This type of investment is justified on the basis that it promises to ‘drive school attendance and improve education outcomes which we know are so critical to a better future’ (Scullion, 2019). Ambitious claims are made about the success of students attending boarding schools, but there has been little independent evaluation of expensive Indigenous scholarship programs and a growing body of evidence to suggest all that glitters is not gold. Since this study was begun in 2013, a plethora of reports, investigations, studies, trials and policies have emerged, all centred on boarding schools, although many fewer reference original first-person data from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander student participants who live, or have lived, in boarding schools (Whettingsteel, 2020). They have looked at issues of access, of funding, of productivity and of mental health. They have considered the particular challenges facing families in geographically remote regions. Many describe boarding using the language of ‘opportunity’ and ‘choice’, although nothing could be further from the truth for remote families. While they acknowledge challenges, many continue to present boarding as an unequivocal good. Almost all presume secondary provision through boarding is an inevitability. Picking up on this as a business opportunity, one of the peak bodies for Australian boarding schools, Boarding Australia, rebranded itself early in 2019. Launching its new name, Indigenous Education and Boarding Australia, it announced:

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The new name brings Indigenous students who study away from their homes in regional and remote Australia into focus with a commitment to support closing the Indigenous education gap through boarding (IEBA, 2019).

The organisation claims that its vision is ‘that all Indigenous students attain educational outcomes that enable them to be successful in their future choices’, but nowhere does it advertise any concern for those who are left behind when boarding school proves not to be for them. In this, their approach is redolent of attitudes discernible in other service providers. There has been little consideration of how boarding impacts on language proficiency and the intergenerational transference of traditional knowledge for young people who spend the majority of their adolescence away from home. Until now there has been no investigation of the longer term implications of attending boarding school. Across Australia, education outcomes for First Nations students appear to be improving, but whether that can be attributed to investment in boarding programs is entirely another question. As always, the devil in in the detail. In 2020, Year 12 completion rates set as ‘Closing the Gap’ targets by the Federal Government were deemed ‘on track’, but closer inspection tells a complex story, and highlights the danger of treating First Nations students as an homogenous demographic (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020). While the rate of Year 12 attainment was 85% in major cities, in remote Australia it dropped to 38 percent, with academic outcomes achieved in inverse proportion to the degree of remoteness of a student’s home community. Our in-depth study of one NT remote community revealed that in 2019, 74% of students had dropped out of boarding before the end of Year 10. The greatest attrition was among students in Years 7 and 8. These young people could access no viable alternative education or training opportunities until they turned 17 (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). Despite all evidence to the contrary, remote education policy settings remain fixed on secondary provision through boarding. This is justified by reference to both economic matrices and the seemingly intractable difficulty of quality assurance in the bush. Inevitably, urban centres see a concentration of talent and opportunity which are hard to replicate in regional or geographically remote areas. Accordingly, boarding schools feature as a central plank of Indigenous secondary education policy. Programs developed with good will and noble intention to enable First Nations students access to high-performing schools reflect a commitment to a fairer and more inclusive nation state. They embody a shared recognition that education is the essential key to build individual capacity and ultimately to transform the collective. Nonetheless they sit at the intersection of complex personal, institutional, cultural and political tensions (Nakata, 2007). Questions abound. Do educators and families share a common vision for these young people? How and at what cost is social transformation for Australia’s First Peoples achieved through a boarding school education? Are schools culturally safe places for First Nations young people? Are schools with strong colonial links ready and willing to critically reflect on the values and assumptions that underpin their institutional cultures? What role are First Nations students required to play in challenging prejudice and debunking stereotypes in dominant

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culture schools? At what cost to themselves? What does ‘success’ look like? What impact does time spent in boarding school have on a person’s mental health or their longer term life outcomes; where they choose to live and where they feel they belong? This book explores these questions. It tells the human story which lies behind the studies and statistics. This project began in 2013, with original interviews conducted over an almost three-year period and generating in excess of 1,300 pages of transcript. Asked what factors enabled them to flourish during their time in boarding, or what made life harder, young people, even those who had only just finished school, had clear insights to share. Invited to speak back to the system, they did not hold back. In 2020, alumni participants were invited to contribute again in a manner of their own choosing. Almost half of the chapters in this book are first-person narratives of contributors who speak in their own voice. These chapters are taken directly from interviews: they record the insights, sometimes the life stories, of participants. Some were recounted in a single sitting, focus on a specific theme and are quoted verbatim. Others are more wide ranging, distilled from multiple interviews conducted over a seven-year period. In every case, first-person chapters have been workshopped with and expressly approved by the speaker. As a group, contributors decided that they would prefer to be acknowledged by name at the start of the book, but not have their name associated with their individual narrative. Several had reasons of their own for remaining anonymous altogether. Named or not, this book belongs to them. We do well to heed their voices.

Methodology and Structure This book has grown out of a doctoral study conducted through the University of Melbourne and governed by the ethical standards of that institution (O’Bryan, 2017). Using a narrative method, initial interviews were recorded, transcribed and de-identified. Qualitative analysis software was employed to subject transcripts to line-by-line analysis so that reoccurring themes could be identified. Over the course of 2019–2020, follow-up interviews were conducted with a wide range of the original research participants, including all but six of the alumni and a smaller number of parents, grandparents and staff working in boarding schools. By that time, I had also spent two years working with a community in the NT on an ethnographic project commissioned by elders, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment, and governed by Australian National University Ethics. The findings of that research are published as a Commissioned Report by the ANU’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research and referred to here as the NT Education Study (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). Interview data from that study are also used in this work. The same ethical standards and data analysis processes employed in the PhD research process have been applied to all subsequent interview data.

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Materials which appeared in the PhD thesis and in the NT Education Study are already on public record, but consistent with ethical undertakings, I have obtained express permission from interviewees to reproduce them in this volume. Where an interviewee has been unavailable for comment or not in a position to give approval, their contributions have been omitted altogether or significantly reduced to ensure anonymity. In this work, participants from the original research project have been de-identified by letter and number: ‘A’ for alumni; ‘P’ for parent or community member; ‘E’ for education informant, most commonly a teacher or school leader. Alumni and Parent participants are also identified by geolocation. Participants in the NT Education study are identified as such.

References Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) (2019). Profile of Indigenous Australians, Australian Government, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/profile-of-indige nous-australians. Bishop, R. & Berryman, M. (2002). The experiences of Indigenous Mäori students in New Zealand classrooms. University of Waikato. Commonwealth of Australia (2020). Closing the Gap Report, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, https://ctgreport.niaa.gov.au/. Durie, M. (2005). Race and Ethnicity in Public Policy: Does it Work?, Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, 24. IEBA (2019). New Beginnings: Indigenous Education and Boarding Australia http://www.ieba. com.au/new-beginnings-indigenous-education-and-boarding-australia/?fbclid=IwAR2UfdK Tnun8hJXrhRHXhR8z935JBfGw6s2rTAjY_Bux-_aF3HrIpx35C_4. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal Childhoods, 2nd edn. London: University of California Press. Medhora, S. (2015). Remote communities are ‘lifestyle choices’, says Tony Abbott, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/10/remote-communities-are-lifestylechoices-says-tony-abbott. Nakata, M. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press. NT Department of Education (2020), Remote secondary school choices, NT Government, https:// nt.gov.au/learning/remote-students-and-parents/remote-secondary-school-choices. O’Bryan, M. (2017). Shaping Futures, Shaping Lives: An investigation into the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian boarding schools. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne. O’Bryan, M. & Fogarty, W. (2020). A study of education in one Northern Territory Remote Community, ANU, Canberra, DOI 10.25911/5f1fff279309f, https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/research/pub lications/commissioned-reports. Scullion, N. (2019). 2019–20 Budget: Supporting a better future for Indigenous Australians through investments in education, employment and safer communities, Australian Government, Department of PM&C, https://ministers.pmc.gov.au/scullion/2019/2019-20-budget-supporting-betterfuture-indigenous-australians-through-investments. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies : research and indigenous peoples, 2nd edn. Zed Books. Whettingsteel, E. (2020). “It would give you a space to be yourself”: The role for interior design in Aboriginal students’ sense of belonging at boarding school. Unpublished PhD thesis, Curtin University.

About This Book

This book is published in Springer’s series on Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World. As a teacher, then as a researcher working with First Nations young people, the duty of care I owe is an onerous one. I am an Australian of settlercolonial heritage, and for that reason alone, it has been imperative to tread lightly when engaging with stories and perspectives other than my own. I have relied heavily on research participants to affirm and verify findings, and to guide me in analysing interview materials. A number of alumni participants are acknowledged here by name, but others elected to remain anonymous. I am equally indebted to them all. This book builds on a doctoral research project undertaken through the University of Melbourne and jointly supervised by Distinguished Prof. Marcia Langton, Prof. David Beckett and Associate Professor Jane Freemantle from 2014 to 2017. Immediately before undertaking that project, I had spent 10 years teaching in an elite boys’ boarding school in Melbourne. My research interest came about as a direct consequence of working with First Nations boarders in the classroom and beyond it. The insider/outsider status which I bring creates tensions but also affords opportunities. I have had a long association with the Independent school sector. Where inconvenient truths about schools and systems have been revealed, finding effective and uncompromising ways to communicate that message to practitioners has been an integral part of the project. Since the early 2000s, the role of Independent boarding schools in creating opportunity for First Nations Australian students has attracted increasing support from private sector philanthropic organisations and, perhaps on the back of their PR rhetoric, from the Federal Government. In response, a veritable industry in Indigenous boarding has sprung up, and with it, a proliferation of research interest, relatively little of which begins by engaging students or families themselves. For that reason, this book is committed to amplifying the voices of First Nations people. That objective has shaped the format of what follows. This work centres on the voices of First Nations participants, alumni of boarding schools from around Australia, parents, grandparents and community leaders. Each interviewee was invited to ‘speak back’ to the schools and/or universities where they, or their family members, were educated, and ‘tell us what we need to know’. Where xv

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About This Book

possible, alumni participants were re-interviewed over 2019–2020. Their now-adult insights have been merged with earlier interview material and provide invaluable longitudinal perspectives on how the experience of attending boarding school has worked to shape their sense of self, their political frame and their practical life outcomes. The objective has never been to establish positivist, externally verifiable ‘truths’, but rather to gain understanding into participants’ lived experience from their own point of view. The work is unapologetically qualitative in its orientation. It sets out to capture story; to put flesh on the bones of the rhetoric and statistical data used to justify policy settings and budgetary priorities. Individuals’ stories provide insight which, layered with others, give perspective, clarity and reliability to the picture which emerges about how attending boarding school works to shape the lives and futures of First Nations young Australians. The act of interpreting narrative is inherently political, and herein lies a danger. Tuhiwai Smith (2012) provides a salient reminder that as a Western researcher I inevitably risk falling back on culturally situated assumptions. She writes: Research in itself is a powerful intervention, even if it is carried out at a distance … When undertaking research, either across cultures or within a minority culture, it is critical that researchers recognise the power dynamic that is embedded in the relationship with their subjects. Researchers are in receipt of privileged information. They may interpret it within an overt theoretical framework, but also in terms of a covert ideological framework. They have the power to distort, to make invisible, to overlook, to exaggerate and to draw conclusions, based not on factual data but on assumptions, hidden value judgements, and often downright misunderstandings. They have the potential to extend knowledge or to perpetuate ignorance (2012, p. 178).

Her words highlight the reliance I have had not only on research participants to oversee my reading of their narratives, but also the wider First Nations community for ongoing guidance and interpretive advice. This project has always belonged to those on whose life stories it was built. That young people and their family members have entrusted their biographies to me is an honour I do not take lightly. The people acknowledged by name here are only some of those who contributed. Others had their own reasons for electing to remain anonymous but that does not minimise the contribution they have made to this work. All proceeds from this book will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Contents

Part I 1

2

3

Providing Context

Understanding the Historical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 A Short and Selective History of Settler-Colonial Australia . . . . . 1.1.1 The Colonial Era: Asymmetries of Power and the Great Australian Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.2 Government Policy and ‘Managing the Aboriginal Problem’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1.3 The History Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Deficit Discourse and ‘The Gap’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Place-Based Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 A Snapshot of First Nations Australia, 2020 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Understanding the Architecture of Australia’s Education System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.1 School Resourcing and Equity in Australian Education Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5.2 ICSEA and the Profile of Participants in This Study . . . . 1.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7 8 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 17 19 19

Boarding Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Understanding the Role of Boarding in the Settler-Colonial World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Why Boarding? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Presumed Benefit of Boarding for Disadvantaged Students . . . . . 2.4 Presumed Benefit of Boarding For First Nations Students . . . . . . 2.5 Power, Politics and the Educated Elite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23 23 26 28 29 32 33 34

First Person: Context is Everything . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

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Part II 4

Expectations and Transitions

The Purpose and Presumed Benefits of Boarding; Parents and Alumni . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Autonomy and Individual Advancement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Opportunity and Choice in Remote Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Change/Challenge: Boarding School to Broaden Horizons and Enable Two-Way Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Free, Prior and Informed Consent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Problems in Community and Schooling to Interrupt Patterns of Behaviour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Attitudes to Social Dysfunction and Questioning Boarding Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Other Motivations for Choosing Boarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7.1 Maximising Leadership and Academic Potential . . . . . . 4.7.2 The Promise of Professional Sport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 The Choice of Boarding School for Urban Students . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.1 Practical Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.2 Political Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8.3 Social Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.9 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

56 59 59 59 60 61 61 64 66 67

The Purpose and Presumed Benefits of Indigenous Programs: Education Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Identifying the Organising Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Monster and the Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Student Perspectives on School Priorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 70 73 76 77 77

6

Transition to Boarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 What Do We Know About the Transition to Boarding? . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Living Through the Transition to Boarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79 80 82 91

7

First Person: Haste, Hope and Hubris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

5

47 48 50 52 53 55

Part III Factors Constraining Success and How to Neutralise Them 8

Homesickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Homesickness, Belonging, and Collective Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Homesickness and the Abrogation of Responsibilities to Loved Ones at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Homesickness, Self and Making Sense of Two Worlds . . . . . . . . .

107 110 115 118

Contents

8.4 Recognising Homesickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Implications of Homesickness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

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120 121 122 122

First Person: Getting Lost, Being Found . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

10 Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 What is Trauma and What Effect Does It Have? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Prevalence and the Enduring Impact of Antecedent Trauma . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

129 130 132 136

11 First Person: Courage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 12 Encountering Cultural Dissonance, Racial Stereotypes and Racism at School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.1 Describing and Defining Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2 Inter-Personal Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2.1 In-School Inter-Personal Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2.2 Inter-personal Racism as an Opportunity to Educate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2.3 Intra-Group Conflict at School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2.4 Institutional Responses to Inter-Personal Racism . . . . . . 12.2.5 Reverse Racism and Encountering Lateral Violence at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.3 Internalised Racism and Deficit Thinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4 Institutional Racism and the Role of School Culture . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4.1 Institutional Racism, Stereotypes and Essentialism . . . . 12.4.2 Gender and the Stereotyping of Female Students . . . . . . 12.4.3 Racial Stereotypes and a Culture of Low Expectation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4.4 Institutional Racism and Asymmetries of Power . . . . . . . 12.4.5 Consequences of Institutional Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.4.6 Cultural Dissonance and Institutional Racism . . . . . . . . . 12.4.7 Institutional Racism and Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

145 149 149 150 153 155 157 158 159 162 165 166 170 173 174 177 178 180

13 First Person: Challenging Structures of Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Part IV Factors Enabling Success and How to Maximise Them 14 Family Support and Finding a Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.1 The Social Gradient: Parents’ Social Class and How They Are Positioned to Support Their Children’s Education . . . . . . . . . 14.2 Parents’ Lack of Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.3 School Respect for Parental Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.4 Where There is no Parental Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

199 202 204 205 206

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14.5 A Celebration of Grandparents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 15 First Person: Two Grandsons, Two Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 15.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 16 Resilience and Developing a Resistant Mind-Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 17 Metamorphosis. Fighting the Good Fight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 17.1 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Part V

Education Dilemma

18 Education Policy, Choice and Remote Education. Lest We Forget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 19 Understanding the Cost/Benefit of Boarding with Reference to Football . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19.1 The Downside of Professional Sport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19.2 The Football Stereotype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19.3 Football, Health and Wellbeing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

245 248 249 251 251

20 First Person: Football, Flourishing and Capabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 21 First Person: Success. Or What Cost Education? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Part VI

First Person: Reflections on the Impact of Boarding

22 First Person: Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 23 First Person: Success, Sacrifice and Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 24 First Person: The Power of Positive Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 25 First Person: Trauma and Why Identity Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 26 First Person: The Power of Insider Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Part VII

Driving Change

27 Truth Telling and Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 27.1 Driving Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324

Contents

27.2 Appearance and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.3 The Power of the Activist Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.4 Strenuous Truth Telling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.5 Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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325 326 327 329 330

28 First Person: Turning the Ship Around . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 29 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 Glossary of Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 A Note About Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345

Acronyms

ABC ABS ACARA AFL AIEF AIHW AISNSW ALRC ANZAC ASGC ASSOA ATAR CEO COAG DIY HREOC IEBA ISA ISCEA IYLP MCEETYA NAPLAN NSW NT OECD PISA UNDRIP

Australian Broadcasting Commission. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority. Australian Football League. Australian Indigenous Education Foundation. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Association of Independent Schools, New South Wales. AISNSW is the peak body for Independent schools in NSW. Australian Law Reform Commission. Australian and New Zealand Army Corp. Australian Standard Geographical Classification. Alice Springs School of the Air. Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank. Chief Executive Officer. Council of Australian Governments. do-it-yourself (kits). Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Indigenous Education and Boarding Australia, until 2019 known as ‘Boarding Australia’. Independent Schools Australia. ISA is the national peak body for the Independent school sector. Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage. Indigenous Youth Leadership Program. Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs. National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy. New South Wales. Northern Territory (of Australia). Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Program for International Student Assessment. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. xxiii

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US VCE VET WA WILPF

Acronyms

United States. Victorian Certificate of Education. Vocational Education and Training. Western Australia. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Part I

Providing Context

Abstract The chapters in Part I seek to orient the reader and provide context. The introduction to Part I considers the objectives of education by reference to national and international convention, and by considering the Capabilities approach to education and human development theory. Introduction to Part I Context is everything. To understand the lived experience of First Nations students in dominant culture schools we need context. There is always a back story. This is true at micro- and macro-level. It is true of personal experience and of government policy; of school culture and of personal identity. Naming the back story helps us to understand how the past continues to play out in the present. If we are to really hear what young people tell us about their experience as students living in Australian boarding schools today, we must first establish the context. The chapters in Part I seek to orient the reader, philosophically, by considering the purpose of education; historically, by reference to Australia’s settler-colonial past; and contemporaneously, framed by the peculiar architecture of the Australian education system. Identifying the Objectives of Education: Skills, Autonomy, Citizenship Education goes to the heart of what a person can do, their power to live the life they aspire to, and the way they contribute to the world around them. These competencies might be restated as the development of a young person’s skills and competencies, their autonomy and their citizenship rights and responsibilities. Education is recognised as fundamental to well-being. It is one of a number of social determinants of health. Inequality in education translates into inequality in employment, in socioeconomic status, in living conditions, in health. Inequality in education lasts a lifetime. Education is the bedrock on which any society is built. For this reason, education is deemed to be a fundamental human right enshrined in both the United Nations

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Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1990). Article 26 of the former document provides: (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace. (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children (United Nations, 1948). Further, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) establishes the right for Indigenous people to access culturally informed and responsive education, including education in their own language (United Nations, 2008). In Australia, the ‘Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians’ (MCEETYA, 2008) makes it clear that education has both functional and philosophical roles to play in shaping young people and the world in which they live. The Declaration points to several key objectives of education in this country including: • to equip young people with ‘knowledge, understanding, skills and values’; • to enable them to ‘take advantage of opportunity and to face the challenges of this era with confidence’; • to shape the ‘intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians’ (2008, p. 4). By developing an individual’s capacities and skills, education is also presumed to ensure the nation’s ‘ongoing economic prosperity and social cohesion’: As a nation, Australia values the central role of education building a democratic, equitable and just society—a society that is prosperous, cohesive and culturally diverse, and that values Australia’s Indigenous cultures as a key part of the nation’s history, present and future (2008, p. 4).

The Melbourne Declaration presupposes that education will endow young people with the capabilities, practical and emotional, and the vision, to shape their own reality. The broadly articulated purposes of education as conceived by the Melbourne Declaration and by international convention are in marked contrast to the objectives of education as defined by the Wilson Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory (Wilson, 2014). In that document, the aim of education is reduced to a far more prosaic set of outcomes:

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[From] the outset this review has made a pragmatic decision to focus on the skills and knowledge that underpin success in the Western education system. Some people will find this a challenging position. The review has taken as a non-negotiable that there must be an explicit focus on improving unacceptably low outcomes for Indigenous children and that this will not be achieved unless there is rigorous and relentless attention to learning English and gaining the skills that support participation in a modern democracy and economy (2014, p. 35).

Whatever other concerns such a narrow and mono-cultural conception of education might raise, it also highlights the dichotomy between education as a means to accumulate individual human capital on the one hand, and education to build citizenship and capacity in communities on the other. Wilson conceives of education in solely instrumental terms (what a person can do), but fails to engage with the question of how education and education systems speak into the lives of First Nations young people. Nowhere does the Wilson Review turn attention to ensuring that education systems are worthwhile places for young people to invest their energies. Purdie et al. argue that where a young person’s sense of self is shaped by cultural markers that are cast in a collectivist frame (including kinship, understanding of history, language and the role of place), schools that prioritise personal advancement and a competitive ethic may present as ‘alien and antithetical to home values and practices’ (Purdie et al., 2000, p. ix). Many of the participants in this study attended schools rooted and grounded in the settler-colonial assumption of the intrinsic rightness, and the intrinsic completeness, of that world view. In elite schools, accumulated privilege is too often mistaken for moral superiority. They make some little room for the marginalised outsider, but only ever on their own terms. Although an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander student might be physically present in the classroom, often by dint of a social justice scholarship program, their presence comes at no philosophical cost to those who identify with the ‘mainstream’. Philanthropic initiatives bear witness to an ethic of love and care for First Nations youth, but do little to displace schools’ Eurocentric world view. Too often, First Nations young people are then left to process these dynamics on their own. In this circumstance, many report that it is easier to opt out (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). A similar pattern of behaviour has been identified in the health domain. Sheperd et al. (2011) caution that unique historical circumstances, social and cultural characteristics, and profound and persistent marginalisation of Indigenous populations in Australia are plausible explanations for a much less consistent relationship between Indigenous health and socioeconomic status than for the rest of the population. These issues go to the very heart of understanding the lived experience of First Nations students in mainstream boarding schools, and the longer term implications of a boarding education. What a person can do, who they manage to be, the personal autonomy they achieve, all bear witness to the education they have received. In many cases, these outcomes only become visible over time. Far beyond a score on a test or a certificate of achievement, a ‘successful’ education is one which prepares a young person for an adulthood marked by choice and the agency to make informed decisions over their own life.

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A ‘successful’ education is one that recognises and enhances the human dignity of the individual and enables them to participate fully in the society in which they live (Nussbaum, 2011). There’s the rub. Literacy, numeracy and an understanding of the Western world view are, without question, fundamentally important to functioning in the modern world, but they are only part of the picture. As an exclusive point of reference for the Wilson Review, which continues to inform education policy in the NT, these priorities are disturbingly reminiscent of Stanner’s words from 1968: It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape (1968, p. 189).

Being able to add up or read a book certainly enhances human dignity, but if that were the end of the story, the world would surely be a more dignified place than it is. What then is missing? The purpose of a boarding school education is to enable our First Peoples to participate fully in the best modern Australia has to offer, but schools need to look back before they can look forward. Providing education opportunity to mitigate disadvantage is not the same thing as facilitating advantage through education. For a young person floundering in education disadvantage generations deep, being told how lucky they are to have been plucked from the mire adds injury to insult. Being helped to understand the intergenerational impact of having been marginalised by the education system throughout the colonial era and into the present day may be a more apposite place to start. This is not an exercise in semantics or political correctness. It is a common-sense application of the first rule of teaching, which is to start with where the learner is. That requires educators to understand the bigger picture. It requires us to know where the learner locates themselves within it. What is the ultimate aim and purpose of education? That is the threshold question to everything that follows here. Only when we have a clear understanding of where we are going and why, can we work through the inevitable problems, issues and barriers to success which present along the way. To answer it, I have chosen to apply the Capabilities Approach to Development, first described by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen as the lens through which to view education. Sen characterises education as an essential human capability because it is a precondition to human flourishing. According to Sen, individual advantage can be judged ‘in terms of the capabilities a person has, that is the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the life that he or she has reason to value’ (1999, p. 87). Sen, and the other great contributor to the Capabilities Approach to Development, Martha Nussbaum, recognise that human disadvantage is complex, because human lives are complex. Development approaches that do not engage with complexity are likely to founder on the shoals of lived experience. Nussbaum writes: What we seem to need is an approach … that defines achievement in terms of the opportunities available to each person. Such an approach had better begin close to the ground, looking at life stories and the human meaning of policy change for real people (2011, p. 14).

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In a person’s life story, Nussbaum argues, we discover the reasons that contribute to an individual’s capability to thrive, or the reasons explaining their inability to maximise return on the opportunities presented to them. To understand the ingredients that make up a successful education, we must look beyond the purely functional question of what a person learns to do. Education is also critical to inducting a young person into an awareness of who they are relative to the world around them, and what citizenship requires of them (Flores-Crespo, 2007). In other words, we need to ask whether education has invested a young person with the skills and knowledge they require to fend for themselves in the contemporary world, but also whether it has furnished them with the critical capability to understand their place in that world. We need to ask whether it has given them the tools to remake that world. To the young woman standing on a street corner far from home, decrying the injustice facing her community, these questions are of more than philosophical or academic interest. In that moment, for her to know that her voice could change the course of history, mattered. One day history will tell us it mattered not only to her, but to us all. In the chapters ahead, a pattern becomes apparent: the further participants have progressed through the education system, the more likely they are to describe their experience in political terms. For some, having an objective awareness seems to have enabled them to make sense of subjective experiences which may otherwise have derailed their education. Like others, they have had to navigate complex situations which challenged their identity. But they had a distinct advantage. They had a map and the legend to read it. They had been given the coordinates, and their compass remained true. Others were left flying blind. When they lost their way, they had no one to blame but themselves. The questions running incessantly through their minds, the secret insecurities which told them they didn’t really belong here anyway, gathered force over time. Eventually the most prudent thing they could do was to walk away. Whether they had developed perspective on their way through the system, by accident or design, or whether it had been ingrained in them before they stepped through the school gates, socio-political awareness was the key which, for many contributors to this work made the boarding school experience navigable. When they faced setbacks, when they felt inadequate to the task, they had the strength to fight on because they could see it was not just them. These young people managed to do school on their own terms. They could take the best and resist the rest. The longitudinal perspective of this book affords rich insights into this phenomenon. For young people who had discontinued school before the end of Year 12, or who had not progressed to higher education, second round interviews, recorded five or six years after their initial contribution, were markedly more focused on the system than on personal experience. With the benefit of time and the clarity of hindsight, they could see it was not just them. Most had made peace with the past and could now make sense of the present. More’s the pity that they hadn’t gleaned those insights years earlier, it might have saved them much grief. It reminds us that context is everything. If the broader social and historical context is important to First Nations boarders, it should be to us as well.

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References Flores-Crespo, P. (2007). ‘Situating education in the human capabilities approach’, in W. Unterhalter (ed.). Amartya Sen’s capability approach and social justice in education, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 45-65. Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA), 2008. Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians. ISBN 978–0–7594–0524– 0. Nussbaum, M. (2011). Creating Capabilities. The Human Development approach, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. O’Bryan, M. & Fogarty, W. (2020). A study of education in one Northern Territory Remote Community. ANU, Canberra, https://doi.org/10.25911/5f1fff279309f, https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/res earch/publications/commissioned-reports. Purdie, N., Tripcony, P., Boulton-Lewis, G., Fanshaw, J., & Gunstone, A. (2000). Positive selfidentity for Indigenous students and its relationship to school outcomes. Queensland University of Technology. http://www.aboriginalstudies.com.au/content/uploads/2012/07/2000-Purdie-eta lDETYA-Self-Identity-and-Outcomes.pdf. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press. Shepherd, C., Li, J. & Zubrick, S. (2011). ‘Social gradients in the health of Indigenous Australians’. American Journal of Public Health, 102(1), 107–117. Stanner, W. E. H. (2010). The dreaming & other essays. Black Inc. Agenda, Collingwood, Victoria. United Nations. (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, https://www.un.org/en/universaldeclaration-human-rights/. United Nations. (1990). UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/Vie wDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-11&chapter=4&clang=_en. United Nations. (2008). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, https:// www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/DRIPS_en.pdf. Wilson, B. (2014). A share in the future: Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory. Northern Territory Department of education, http://www.education.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/ pdf_file/0007/37294/A-Share-in-the-Future-The-Review-of-Indigenous-Education-in-the-Nor thern-Territory.pdf.

Chapter 1

Understanding the Historical Context

Abstract This chapter looks at the history of settler-colonial Australia and provides a snapshot of First Nations Australia in 2021. It describes how the dynamics of settler colonial history have left their mark on the particular architecture of the Australian education system. Keywords Australian education systems · Settler-colonial history · Boarding schools · Identity · Context · Lived experience What follows here is a short and selective history of settler-colonial Australia and a snapshot of First Nations Australia in 2021 which shows in statistical terms how the wrongs of the past continues to shape the lives of First Nations people today. They also leave a structural legacy. The chapter goes on to describe how the dynamics of settler colonial history have left their mark on the particular architecture of the Australian education system. Chapter 2 engages in a more detailed discussion of the role played by boarding schools in Australia and throughout the settler-colonial world. These elements all contribute to shaping the lives and futures, of First Nations students in Australian boarding schools. It is worth prefacing this discussion with a reflection on the particular logics of settler-colonialism. Whereas the colonial enterprise focused on resource acquisition (whether human, in the form of slavery or indentured labour, or natural, in the form of commodities), the objectives of settler colonists was the appropriation of land and the transformation of the new colony into ‘home’ (Veracini, 2010, p. 96). Indigenous peoples, with their intrinsic connectedness to the land, were inevitably a barrier to this objective. Hawaiian scholar Julie Kaomea argues: Indigenous populations in settler colonies are targeted in ways that differ from other colonial relations. For instance, prior to the abolition of slavery in colonial America, it was in the settlers’ economic interest to expand the exogenous labor population by importing slaves from Africa and decreeing that any offspring of a slave would remain a slave. By contrast, the colonial settlers’ relations with indigenous, native populations (whose presence serves as a continual challenge to the sovereignty of the non-Indigenous settlers) was, and continues to be, largely governed by a logic of elimination (2014, p. 126).

Whereas that logic was initially expressed through frontier violence, over time more insidious means were employed to ‘displace and replace the indigenous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 M. O’Bryan, Boarding and Australia’s First Peoples, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6009-2_1

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society’s sovereignty’ (Kaomea, 2014, p. 127). Boarding or residential schools were a key plank in the larger colonial project to eradicate language, culture and the distinctive First Nations identity.

1.1 A Short and Selective History of Settler-Colonial Australia Australia’s post-contact history casts a long and sobering shadow over the contemporary landscape of Indigenous policy in general, and Indigenous education policy in particular. However compelling the social imperatives which recommend boarding over community-based education, any initiative which separates young people from their families, communities, languages and cultures must be examined through the prism of the past if the repetition of past mistakes is to be circumvented. Considered through the settler-colonial lens, prevalent and persistent assimilationist dynamics can be traced through history and into the current era.

1.1.1 The Colonial Era: Asymmetries of Power and the Great Australian Silence Unlike other countries colonised by the British, Australia was occupied and its land laws framed by the precept that this was a land without owners, a terra nullius. No formally binding treaties were ever negotiated with the First Peoples of Australia. This is in marked contrast to colonial interactions with the First Nations of North America and Aotearoa, New Zealand (NT Treaty Commission, 2020). In her comparative study of the experiences of First Nations young women boarding in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, Rogers reflects on the long-term implications of treaty. While M¯aori boarding schools were originally established with aims of assimilation, the later reformation of Indigenous education in Aotearoa New Zealand in accordance with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi means they have developed into culturally inclusive schools which are: explicitly required to plan for the success and achievement of M¯aori, undertake self-review processes, and report back to the community on these processes and outcomes, recognising ‘the culturally distinct role M¯aori play in Aotearoa New Zealand as an indigenous people, and the capacity, aspirations and initiative of M¯aori to be self-determining’ (Goren 2009, p. v as quoted by Rogers, 2016, p. 53).

Although the ‘bizzare conceit’ (Keating, 1992) of the Australian continent as terra nullius was overturned by the High Court ruling in Mabo and others v Queensland (No. 2) (1992) the doctrine is relevant insofar as it reveals two aspects of early inter-cultural relations that continue to resonate in modern Australia and which have implications for First Nations students living and studying in ‘mainstream’ boarding

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schools. The first is the chronic imbalance of power between the First Peoples of Australia and colonists (Clendinnen, 2008; Stanner, 2010); the second is the apparent inability of the British to apprehend the subtlety or sophistication of a world view utterly different from their own (Verran, 2005). Widespread understanding of the trauma of colonisation and how it plays out in the lives of young people cannot be presumed in Australia. In History textbooks and the narrative of national identity, our First Peoples were for a long time written out of the script altogether in favour of wool, wheat and the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corp) legend. In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described how the brutal realities of European conquest had become the subject of ‘the great Australian silence’. He identified this as a ‘cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale’ (1968, p. 189). From an early fascination with the exotic ‘other’ (Clendinnen, 2003), the First Peoples of the occupied land had quickly become a ‘problem’ to be dealt with (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017). Their experience at the hands of colonial expansion were relegated to the status of a ‘melancholy footnote’ (Stanner 1968: 190) to a ‘white-out’ version of history: ‘a simple tale of the triumph of the Anglo Celts over deserts and empty places, ignoring the mosaic of different peoples we have always been, ignoring our first people’ (Clendinnen, 2008, p. 19).

1.1.2 Government Policy and ‘Managing the Aboriginal Problem’ From the initial period of dispossession, Indigenous policy can be divided into four broad areas and time frames that overlap considerably: protection (1840s–1950s), assimilation (1937–1970s), integration (1965–1970s), and self-determination (1972–). Early government policy was predicated on the belief that the protection of Aboriginal people was best achieved if their individual will be substituted by the will of their guardian, the Chief Protector of Aborigines (ALRC, 1986). Under provisions of the Aborigines Act 1905, the Chief Protector of Aborigines had legal power to remove any Aboriginal or half-caste child under the age of sixteen from home and family to be detained in an Aboriginal institution for ‘care, custody and education’. These children became part of what later came to be known as the Stolen Generations. The practice of removing children from their families was informed by eugenicist assumptions, clearly articulated by the then Chief Protector of Western Australia at the inaugural Aboriginal Welfare Conference of 1937, which brought together Aboriginal authorities from across Australia. His remarks were reported in the press: Mr Neville [the Chief Protector of WA] holds the view that within one hundred years the pure black will be extinct. But the half-caste problem was increasing every year. Therefore their idea was to keep the pure blacks segregated and absorb the half-castes into the white population. Sixty years ago, he said, there were over 60,000 full-blooded natives in Western Australia. Today there are only 20,000. In time there would be none. Perhaps it would take

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1 Understanding the Historical Context one hundred years, perhaps longer, but the race was dying (As quoted by Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997, p. 24).

This logic was used to justify the forced removal of children from their families between the 1890s and 1970s. Between 1910 and 1970 it is estimated that between one-in-three and one-in-ten First Australian children were taken from their families (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). In 1995, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) was asked by the Federal Government to conduct a National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their families. Two years later, the Commission handed down its landmark report called Bringing them home.

1.1.3 The History Wars Coinciding with the end of the assimilation era, a new generation of historians broke the silence identified by Stanner. In 1970 and 1971, historian and social scientist, Charles Rowley published a series of three books: The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970), Outcasts in White Australia (1971) and The Remote Aborigines (1971). The books delivered a vivid and previously little-known history of the encounters between First Nations and non-Indigenous colonisers (Inglis, 2012). Contemporary historian Robert Manne describes the trilogy as ‘one of the great scholarly and moral achievements of Australia’s intellectual history’. He claims that ‘with its publication and absorption into the nation’s bloodstream, Australia became a significantly different country’ (Manne, 2003, p. 2). Not all Australians agree: in 1993 Geoffrey Blainey described such works as promulgating a ‘black armband’ view of Australian history. His epithet captured the imagination of those anxious to ensure that the ‘Western liberal values and the British contribution to Australian society’ should not be diminished (Donelly, 2013). And so the ‘History Wars’ began (Macintyre, 2003). Since that time, a pitched battle has been waged in the media and notably against the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). For its prioritisation of Indigenous and intercultural priorities, ACARA is from time to time accused of being ‘hostile towards the institutions, beliefs and grand narrative associated with Western civilisation that make this nation unique’ (Donnelly, 2013). In 2017, a right-wing think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, published a monograph entitled ‘The History Wars Matter’ (Sammut, 2017). Its author, Dr Jeremy Sammut, introduces himself by explaining: As a think tanker engaged in the free speech debate, the arguments I have advanced in favour of repealing Sect. 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act have been deeply informed by my work as a historian on Australia’s (seemingly miraculous) history of successfully overcoming the racist legacies of earlier eras to create the diverse and tolerant modern country we know today (2017, p. 1).

He concludes his work by explaining:

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I used to make an exception to my account of our national success in overcoming the legacy of racism in the case of Indigenous Australians. But I no longer make the qualification that Indigenous people remain the victims of historical prejudice and disadvantage. This is because the nation has travelled most of the way towards overcoming the most vexing racial issue in Australian history. Nowadays, 80% of Indigenous people—who mostly live in metropolitan Australia—have the same social outcomes as their non-Indigenous peers…. [T]hese Indigenous Australians enjoy the full freedoms and opportunities of the Australian Dream as all other Australians regardless of race (2017, p. 9).

The contributors to this study would beg to differ.

1.2 Deficit Discourse and ‘The Gap’ Throughout the colonial era, Australia’s First Peoples were consistently cast in a deficit frame (Fforde et al., 2013). The assumption of racial superiority, and corresponding assumptions of cultural superiority, justified policy approaches that would lead to the eradication of First Nations’ language, culture and indeed people-hood within the Australian polity. This logic continued to be espoused well into the modern era. Commentators observe that a nuanced manifestation of deficit continues to permeate policy settings today. Fogarty, Lovell and Dodson claim: Political rhetoric is characterized by ‘deficit discourses’; that is, by modes of language and representation that frame Aboriginal identity within a narrative of deficiency, negativity, dysfunctionality and disempowerment … A focus on the statistical ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is one of the most common manifestations of deficit discourses. Indeed, attempts to quantify this ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians has become the default approach to defining policy problems in Australian Indigenous Affairs (2015, p. 4).

In her a critical analysis of Australian Indigenous education policy discourse and its political effects, Rudolph (2013) argues that ‘gap’ discourse continues to position First Australian students as the ‘problem’ and supports subtle forms of assimilation. She concludes: While Indigenous educational disadvantage is understood to be a persistent problem, … the deficit construction of Indigenous students is also persistent, having strong historical echoes. The reason for Indigenous deficiency has been rearticulated through time: in the 1930s it was explained by ideas of racial disability, in the 1960s it was understood as cultural deprivation and in the present it is explained by historical discrimination. The normative binary framework used to identify deficiency against non-Indigenous success, however, remains in place (2013, p. iii).

Current policies administered under the umbrella of the ‘Close the Gap’ campaign continue to focus on remediation of disadvantage, but in recent years there is evidence of a heightened level of cultural awareness within government and in Australian life more generally.

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The distinctive cultures of our First People are increasingly assuming a central place in the psyche of the nation and in the representation of Australian nationhood on the national and international stage. Through literature, media, film, the visual and performing arts, increased representation on the political stage, the contribution of First Australian leaders connotes a degree of national maturity that has been a long time in incubation. For the first time, the 2017 Prime Minister’s report on Indigenous affairs began with a statement on the importance of culture both to outcomes, and to Australia’s national identity: The importance of culture cannot be underestimated in working to close the gap. The connection to land, family and culture is fundamental to the wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures are the world’s oldest continuous cultures—they have stood the test of time. We must continue to preserve and respect Indigenous cultures for this generation and the future and we must acknowledge the impact of past policies on our First Australians, and work to heal the wounds of the past (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017, p. 6).

Unfortunately, it would appear that education policy, particularly as it affects remote Australia, has not kept pace. Instead, high stakes testing regimes and a largely Eurocentric curriculum continue to disadvantage remote students and especially those with a language background other than English (Fogarty et al., 2015; Guenther et al., 2014). Despite compelling evidence showing the importance of teaching and speaking traditional languages in terms of both community and individual wellbeing (Dinku et al., 2020; Oldfield, 2013), combined with a longstanding evidence base which argues for the use of first-language instruction for better education outcomes, discourses of education failure and monolingualism allow little space for Australian languages (Disbray, 2015; Oldfield, 2013).

1.3 Place-Based Education From his long experience as a teacher in very remote Australia, Fogarty observes that ‘education that is not connected to the reality of a student’s life will fail’ and that for Aboriginal people, ‘country [is] what matters’ (2012, p. 83). He argues that the contemporary state of Indigenous education in remote Australia cannot be understood without reference to ‘the dismal practices of both religious and government education systems in the past’. These include ‘banning students from learning their own languages, the training of Aboriginal students solely for domestic servitude and a complete absence of access to secondary education for the majority of remote Aboriginal students’ (2012, p. 83). Consistent with the findings of the Wilson Review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory (2014), place-based education pathways continue to be limited in remote Australia (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020). The NT Department of Education’s webpage reveals a strong bias toward regional or urban boarding programs and a minimalist offering to those electing to stay at home, or returning home prior to school completion:

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If your child stays in the community they will continue their schooling at the local school. The focus will be on post primary literacy and numeracy and an employment pathways program may be offered which will provide skills for your child to gain employment’ (NT Department of Education, 2020).

In looking to the boarding sector to improve education outcomes for First Nations students, no attention is given to how young people might be supported in their cultural identity. Nor has there been any investigation into how their cultural knowledge and language mastery might be impacted by long periods immersed in mainstream society. Equally, while the funding opportunities for boarding schools have grown, and an uncomplicated narrative of success promulgated by foundations’ own PR machines and supported by the media excites interest in Indigenous scholarship programs, no attention has been given to the cultural orientation of mainstream schools, and the cultural competence of the teachers in them. Questions arise as to whether this is an exercise in assimilation by any other name, and if not, how young people, communities and boarding schools have worked to avoid that outcome.

1.4 A Snapshot of First Nations Australia, 2020 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3% of Australia’s population, with 82% living in regional or metropolitan areas. While only 18% of First Nations Australians live in very remote places, they make up nearly half of all Australians living in those areas (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2019). The First Nations population is young compared to other Australians: 34% of First Nations Australians are aged 0–14, compared to 18% for the general population. They are also more likely to start families at a younger age: in 2015, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers were significantly younger than non-Indigenous mothers (the median age was 25.1 years for First Nations mothers and 31 years for all mothers). These women are more likely to have smoked or consumed alcohol whilst pregnant. Twice as many First Nations babies were classified as low birthweight babies (12% compared to 6.2% for the general population) (Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet, 2017). Low birth-weight is associated with a range of poor health outcomes, including higher rates of subnormal growth, illnesses, and neurodevelopmental problems. These include mild problems in cognition, attention, and neuromotor functioning. Long-term follow-up studies conducted on children born in the 1960s indicated that the adverse consequences of being born low birthweight were still apparent in adolescence (Hack et al., 1995). In 2018, 47% of children and young people in the NT had hearing loss (AIHW, 2019). The social and emotional health and wellbeing (SEWB) of First Australian populations will be discussed in detail in later chapters, but it is worth noting by way of context, that the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, 2014– 15 (NATSISS) found that the SEWB of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was compromised: 30% of respondents aged 18 years and over reported high or very high levels of psychological distress in the four weeks prior to the interview

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(Healthinfonet, 2017). According to the 2014–2015 NATSISS, 68% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 15 years and over experienced one or more selected personal stressors in the 12 months prior to the survey. The most prevalent stressors for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were death of a family member or close friend (28% of people surveyed), followed by; unable to get a job (19%); serious illness (12%); other work-related stressors (11%) and mental illness (10%) (Healthinfonet, 2017). These issues have obvious implications for educational outcomes. Although improvements are being made towards achieving parity of education outcomes for First Nations students relative to the general population, there is still progress to be made in a number of key indices. One of the most concerning statistics in Australia is the rate of incarceration of First Nations people, and young First Nations people in particular. The Law Council of Australia reports that in 2013, 26% of the nation’s jail population was made up of First Nations prisoners. Disturbingly, First Nations juveniles were 31% more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous juveniles. This does not bode well for their adult life: of young people given a custodial sentence, the Law Council of Australia reports that they are 74% more likely to reconvict than those given a non-custodial sentence (Law Council of Australia, 2013). Statistics such as those reported here all have implications for education. Some are used as justification for sending young people away from home for their secondary years. All have historical antecedents.

1.5 Understanding the Architecture of Australia’s Education System To appreciate fully the narratives recounted in the chapters that follow, it is necessary to understand something of the sociological context of boarding schools in Australia. As explained earlier, Indigenous scholarship programs are generally driven by a social justice agenda, and this has implications for schools, scholarship holders, their families and communities. To the extent that they are silent in acknowledging structural impediments that students may encounter in affluent schools, scholarship programs run the risk of replicating or condoning asymmetries of power that have historically worked to oppress the First Peoples of Australia (Hassim et al., 2016). Australia’s history as a settler-colonial nation explains much about the education landscape in the 21st Century. The earliest school in the Australian colony was established under the auspices of the Anglican church in 1793. Free ‘charity schools’ run by other denominations gradually came into existence in the decades that followed, but over time the Catholic education system assumed particular significance. Half of the convicts transported to Sydney Cover with the First Fleet were born in Ireland, many of them imprisoned for political crimes or rebellion against British colonial interests. A significant proportion of them identified as Catholic (K12 Academics,

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2020). Although in 1872, Victoria became the first state to pass an Education Act, providing for the free, secular education of all children, church based schools have never relinquished their position at what one participant in this study described as ‘the pinnacle of Australian education’. The educational landscape in this country still encompasses three powerful and sometimes competing interest groups: Government, Catholic and Independent school sectors each play an important role in provision of education this country. From humble beginnings 200 years ago, the Catholic system now educates one in five Australian students (National Catholic Education Commission, 2020). The inalienable right to choose between these providers is deeply ingrained in the psyche of Australian parents who have the financial means and who place a high priority on the education of their children. These people hold close to their hearts the freedom to choose between schools and pedagogical approaches for their own children with minimal government interference (OECD, 2017). An analysis of PISA1 data tells us why: in 16 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and 10 partner countries and economies, the typical private school student outperforms the typical public school student. This private school “advantage” shows itself in PISA reading scores that are 30 points higher (the equivalent of three-quarters of a year’s worth of formal schooling) among private school students than among public school students in the OECD area. The private school advantage is explained by reference to the socio-economic status of parents, the autonomy of the school and superior material resources (2011, p. 2). Advantage begets advantage. Consistent with OECD findings, the opportunity for students to make the most of the education system is determined in no small part by socio-economic status (SES) and by the capacity of families to exploit options within schooling system (Lareau, 2011; OECD, 2011). Geography also matters: students from urban schools generally outperform those studying in rural or remote schools (International Monetary Fund, 2019). Add to this the compounding effect of educating children in schools where their peer group is made up exclusively of those with similarly privileged backgrounds, and the result is a dramatically differentiated education market. Australian academic Jane Kenway attributes the concentration of privilege in elite school populations to ‘the age-old view that equity automatically means a dilution of quality- especially when it involves non-selectively admitting a reasonable proportion of students from the lowest SES quartile’ (Kenway, 2013, p. 13). Whatever the origins of the homogeneity evident in elite schools, the result is a perfect storm which over time cements inter-generational patterns of social division according to class. Australia has always prided itself on being a classless society, but the foundations of settler-colonial life are anchored deep in the grime of Charles Dickens’ London and the peat bog of English/Irish relations. While the New World created new frontiers of opportunity for both early settlers and convicts (to the exclusion of Australia’s First Peoples), sectarian tensions, evident from the earliest days, were a reminder of how the colonial endeavour had played out in a different part of the globe. Power 1

PISA is the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment.

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dynamics and old-world class divisions were baked into the bricks and mortar of social institutions at the foundation of the nation state. It would be a nonsense to deny that those dynamics and divisions continue today. In some institutions, notably elite boarding schools, they remain visible to the naked eye. In the built environment, in the uniform, in the extra curricula opportunities available, privilege in these schools is writ large. In more subtle and attenuated ways described by participants in this study, it is also to be found in the small print. For First Nations boarders, the barriers to educational participation and achievement are amplified by social class, ongoing asymmetries of power and the inequities which characterises the Australian education landscape. Not only do these young people face the difficulties and trauma associated with being a ‘subset of [the] wider problem’ of society’s ‘persistent failure to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and disadvantaged schools on the one hand and the wider school population on the other’ (Pearson, 2011, p. 23), they also have to live with the assumption that their cultural knowledge base has little currency in a ‘society where whiteness is positioned as normative, [and] everyone is ranked and categorized in relation to this racial norm’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 9).

1.5.1 School Resourcing and Equity in Australian Education Systems Nowhere is the inequity in Australia’s education system more evident than in how schools are resourced. This is important because it speaks to the capacity of First Nations families to access quality education close to home and within their financial means. School funding in Australia comes through a range of channels. Government schools are funded exclusively by State or Territory Governments, whereas schools in the Independent and Catholic sectors receive income from both the Federal Government and by levying fees. Out of every $5 spent by the Federal Government on education, $3 are directed to the non-government school sector. This funding model, of itself, raises concern. In 2017, The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a report into the funding of school education. It finds that where ‘sub-central governments’ (in Australia, State or Territory Governments) are responsible for funding school education from their own revenues, there is a risk that the different spending capacities of richer and poorer jurisdictions will exacerbate inequality of opportunity for students in different parts of the country (OECD, 2017). This is directly pertinent in the Australian context where education opportunity closely follows geolocation. Special research released by the International Monetary Fund in 2019 found that, of the world’s 22 most developed nations, Australia was ranked fourth in terms of the gap between well-off regions and those that are struggling (International Monetary Fund, 2019).

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In 2019, the Australian Broadcasting Commission conducted a special investigation into capital expenditure in Australian schools (Ting et al., 2019). Based on school finance figures from the Australian Government’s My School website, the investigation encompassed more than 8,500 schools, teaching 96% of students. Researchers found that half of the $22 billion spent on capital projects in Australian schools between 2013 and 2017 was spent on just 10% of schools. Those schools are amongst the richest in the country by annual income from all sources (including federal and state government funding, fees and other private funding) over a five-year period. They teach fewer than 30% of Australian students. They also reaped 28% of capital spending funded by government. Over a period of eight years to 2017, public funding for Independent schools increased by 52%. Over the same time, Catholic schools received 49% more funding, while Government schools saw a more modest increase of 27%. Such a discrepancy in funding arrangements has flow on effects for students in schools. The OECD warns: While school autonomy in generating funds can help promote local efforts to complement school revenues, there are concerns about the inequities this creates. Schools in challenging socio-economic circumstances will be less able to complement their budget with parental or other local contributions. In some countries insufficient monitoring of school income leads to a lack of transparency regarding the real resource levels of individual schools, which makes it difficult to achieve equitable resource levels through school funding mechanisms (OECD, 2017, p. 8).

The discrepancies exposed by the ABC investigation are amongst the most extreme in the OECD. If we returned to the fundamental goal of education as opening the door to full and fruitful participation in society, it appears that the Australian education system is not performing well. Far from anticipating the universal contribution of its members, in a system that extols the objectives of excellence and freedom to choose, governments seem to have laid down arms in the fight for equity. The minimalist standard adopted by the Wilson Review is one example of this. The failure to invest in place-based education, and the solitary focus on boarding schools for remote-living First Nations people, despite all evidence to the contrary, appear to signal an acceptance of the inevitability that some people will always be locked out of full and fruitful citizenship: fatalistic acceptance on a grand scale of the biblical aphorism that ‘the poor will always be with us’. By this analysis, those most marginalised are condemned to remain on the fringe of educational success.

1.5.2 ICSEA and the Profile of Participants in This Study A range of factors, both subjective to students’ own lives, and inherent in the schools they attend, influence students’ educational outcomes. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) created an Index of Community Socio- Educational Advantage (ICSEA) in order to enable meaningful comparisons of test achievement by students in schools across Australia as measured by

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the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The Federal Government’s My School website justifies and explains ICSEA saying: Key factors in students’ family backgrounds (parents’ occupation, school education and non-school education) have an influence on students’ educational outcomes at school. In addition to these student-level factors, research has shown that school-level factors (a school’s geographical location and the proportion of Indigenous students a school caters for) need to be considered when summarising educational advantage or disadvantage at the school level (ACARA, 2016).

Each school attended by key informants in this study had an ISCEA value well above the national average. Typically, between 70 and 85% of their students fell within the top quartile on the ICSEA scale, compared to the national average of 25%. These are predominantly non-Indigenous schools in urban or regional centres where upwards of 90% of students typically transition to university. The socio-educational advantage identified in the schools attended by key informants is important. Parents’ affluence (reflected in their occupation and the suburb where they live) and their level of educational attainment are known to have a major influence on the education attainment of their children (Redmond et al., 2014). By contrast, the majority of alumni participants in this study were disadvantaged according to family socioeducational background; whether they came from urban, regional, remote or very remote communities, most fell in the lowest quartile on the ICSEA scale. Evidence suggests that there are potent benefits which should flow from being educated in well-resourced schools, alongside classmates from the nation’s most educationally privileged homes. International literature confirms that peer effect has an influence on students’ outcomes and that students benefit from studying alongside high- achieving peers (OECD, 2017). While it is inconclusive about whether high- or low-ability students benefit most from more able peers, a number of studies find that the strongest relationship for own-achievement growth is for low-achieving students studying in heterogeneous classrooms (Imberman et al., 2012; Kiss, 2013; Lavy et al., 2011). Research into higher education participation in the United Kingdom and the United States confirms that students from disadvantaged backgrounds derive most benefit from being educated in elite institutions (Marginson, 2015). The Independent school sector in Australia represents a concentration of privilege where barriers to entry for the underprivileged are high. The most evident barrier is, of course, financial, with schools charging fees which remain prohibitively high despite the receipt of recurrent government funding. Successive governments have struggled to contain this problem, but challenging the hegemony of the private school sector strikes at the heart of parents and grandparents who are among the 34.3% who send their children to non-government schools (ABS, 2019). Rather than jeopardise their own children’s education, socially minded Australians recognise that if their privilege is the problem, it should also be part of the solution. To this end a range of scholarship programs have emerged which attract significant philanthropic and government support. Although these well-funded schemes mitigate or remove one barrier, money metrics are only one variable in a complex equation. In the chapters that follow, awareness of socioeconomic disadvantage relative to their peers is certainly a recurring theme, but it is only one, and not necessarily deterministic of outcomes. Even

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participants from comfortable, urban, middle classed homes, describe engagement in the boarding school environment as challenging. Questions of how multidimensional histories of exclusion from social life and education systems, lingering settler colonial perspectives and prejudices, and different cultural frames play out behind school gates also need to be factored in.

1.6 Conclusion This chapter has identified significant barriers facing First Nations students in high performing, well resourced, ‘mainstream’ schools in Australia. It has also identified the presumed benefits which should flow to less educationally advantaged young people. In exploring the historical and sociological landscape of education in Australia, one thing is patently obvious: there are winners and losers. The question for us is whether boarding schools achieve what they set out to accomplish. If so, why so? If not, why not?

References ACARA. (2016). Explaining ICSEA. http://www.acara.edu.au/_resources/About_icsea_2014.pdf. ALRC. (1986). Recognition of Aboriginal Customary Laws (ALRC Report 31). Australian Law Reform Commission. https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/recognition-of-aboriginal-customarylaws-alrc-report-31/. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (ABS). (2019). Estimates and projections. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2006–2031. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/3238.0. Australian Government. (2017). Prime Minister’s Closing the Gap Report. 978-1-925238-14-5, http://closingthegap.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/ctg-report-2017.pdf. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (AIHW). (2019). Profile of Indigenous Australians. AIHW, Australian Government, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/profile-ofindigenous-australians. Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet. (2017). Overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health status. Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet, . Clendinnen, I. (2008). True stories: History, politics, aboriginality. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing Company. Clendinnen, I. (2003). Dancing with Strangers. Text, Melbourne. Commonwealth of Australia. (2017). Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities. https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/catalogue_resources/20663.pdf. Dinku, Y., Markham, F., Venn, D., Angelo, D., Simpson, J., O’Shannessy, C., Hunt, J., & Dreise, T. (2020). Language use is connected to indicators of wellbeing: Evidence from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey 2014–2015, ANU, Canberra, https:// doi.org/10.25911/5ddb9fd6394e8, https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/2020/8/ CAEPR_WP_no_137_2020_Dinku_et_al.pdf. Disbray, S. (2015). Indigenous Languages in Education—Policy and Practice in Australia. UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts, 4(1). Donelly, K. (2013). ‘Don’t deny our Australian identity’. The Drum, https://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2013-01-23/donnelly---australia-day/4478982.

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Fforde, C., Bamblett, L., Lovett, R., Gorringe, S., & Fogarty, W. (2013). Discourse, deficit and identity: Aboriginality, the race paradigm and the language of representation in contemporary Australia. Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, 149(1). Fogarty, W. (2012). Country as classroom. In J. Altman & S. Kerins (Eds.). People on Country: Vital landscapes/Indigenous futures, The Federation Press, NSW. Fogarty, W., Lovell, M., & Dodson, M. (2015). ‘A View Beyond Review: Challenging Asuumuption in Indigenous Education Development’, UNESCO Observatory Journal of Arts Education, 4(2). Guenther, J., & Batt, M. (2013). Towards a good education in very remote Australia: Is it just a case of moving the desks around? The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 42(2), 145–156. Guenther, J,. Disbray, S., Osborne, S. (2014). ‘Digging up the (Red) Dirt on Education: One Shovel at a Time’, Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, 17(4). Hack, M., Klein, N. K., Taylor, H. G. (1995). Long-term developmental outcomes of low birth weight infants. Future Child, 5(1), 176–96. Hassim, E., Graham, L., & McKinley, E. (2016). Teacher education for equity: Perspectives of interculturality, inclusivity and indigeneity, vol 254. Centre for Strategic Education, Melbounre, 987-1-921823-84-8. High Court of Australia (HCA). (1992). Mabo and others v Queensland (No. 2), CLR. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (1997). Bringing them home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, https://www.humanrights. gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-report-1997. Imberman, S., Kugler, A., & Sacerdote, B. (2012). Katrina’s children: Evidence on the structure of peer effects from hurricane evacuees. American Economic Review, 102(5). Inglis, K. S. (2012). Australian dictionary of biography, vol. 18, Melbourne University Press. International Monetary Fund. (2019). Closer together or further apart? Within-country regional disparities and adjustment in advanced economies. IMF, Washington DC, https://www.imf.org/ en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/10/01/world-economic-outlook-october-2019-Chapter%202. Kaomea, J. (2014). Education for elimination in nineteenth-century Hawai’i: Settler colonialism and the Native Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s Boarding School. History of Education Quarterly, 54(2), 123–144. DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/hoeq.12054. K12 Academics. (2020). History of catholic education in Australia, https://www.k12academ ics.com/Education%20Worldwide/Education%20in%20Australia/Primary%20and%20Seco ndary%20Education/Catholic%20Education%20in%20Aus. Keating, P. (1992). Redfern Address. https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_tra nscript.pdf Kenway, J. (2013). Challenging inequality in Australian schools: Gonski and beyond. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2013, 1–23. Kiss, D. (2013). The impact of peer achievement and peer heterogeneity on own achievement growth: Evidence from school transitions. Economics of Education Review, 37, 58–65. Ladson-Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal childhoods (2nd ed.). University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles. Lavy, V., Paserman, D., & Schlosser, A. (2011). Inside the black box of ability peer effects: Evidence from variation in the proportion of low achievers in the classroom. The Economic Journal, 122(559), 208–237. Law Council of Australia. (2013). Indigenous imprisonment fact sheet. Law Council of Australia 2017, http://www.lawcouncil.asn.au/lawcouncil/images/LCA-PDF/Briefs_Fact_S heets_and_Publications/Indigenous_Imprisonment_Fact_Sheet.pdf. Macintyre, S. (2003). The history wars. Melbourne University Publishing. Manne, R. (2003). Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of aboriginal history. Black Inc.

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Marginson, S. (2015). The landscape of higher education research 1965–2015 Equality of opportunity: The first fifty years. Paper presented to SRHE 50th Anniversary Colloquium, 26 June 2015, Valuing Research into Higher Education, London. https://www.srhe.ac.uk/downloads/SimonM arginsonKeynote.pdf. National Catholic Education Commission. (2020). The facts about catholic education. National Catholic Education Commission, https://www.ncec.catholic.edu.au/resources/facts-about-cat holic-education. NT Department of Education. (2020). Remote secondary school choices. NT Government, https:// nt.gov.au/learning/remote-students-and-parents/remote-secondary-school-choices. NT Treaty Commission. (2020) Treaty Discussion Paper, by NT Treaty Commission. https://tre atynt.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/906398/treaty-discussion-paper.pdf. O’Bryan, M. & Fogarty, W. (2020). A study of education in one Northern Territory Remote Community. ANU, Canberra, https://doi.org/10.25911/5f1fff279309f, https://caepr.cass.anu.edu.au/res earch/publications/commissioned-reports. OECD. (2011). PISA in Focus. OECD, Paris. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisainfocus/ 48482894.pdf. OECD. (2017). The funding of school education: Connecting resources and learning. OECD, Paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264276147-en, http://www.oecd.org/education/school-resour ces-review/TheFundingofSchoolEducation_summaryENG_combine-min.pdf. Oldfield, J. (2013). Anangu Muru Wunka Subtitle: Talking Black Fella A Critical Policy Analysis of the Northern Territory First Four Hours of English, University of Melbourne. Pearson, N. (2011). Radical hope: education and equality in Australia. Black Inc. Redmond, G., Wong, M., Bradbury, B. & Katz, I. (2014). Intergenerational mobility: new evidence from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth. National Centre for Vocational Education Research Ltd, Adelaide, 978-1-922056-82-5. http://www.ncver.edu.au/. Rogers, J. (2016). Boarding school business: The voices of Aboriginal girls attending boarding schools. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Australian National University. https://openresearch-reposi tory.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/139177/1/Rogers%20Thesis%202018.pdf Rowley, C. (1970). The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, ANU Press, Canberra. Rowley, C. (1971). Outcasts in White Australia, ANU Press, Canberra. Rowley, C. (1971). The Remote Aborigines, ANU Press, Canberra. Rudolph, S. (2013). ‘Whiteness in Education: How are Notions of Educational Success in Australia Influenced by Images of Whiteness?’, in Behar, C. & Chung, A. (ed.), Images of Whiteness, Inter-Discinplinary Press, Oxford, https://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/wp-content/ uploads/2012/06/Images-of-Whiteness-Paper-SRudolph.pdf. Sammut, J. (2017). The history wars matter. Centre for Independent Studies: Sydney, ISBN:9781-922184-83-2, https://www.cis.org.au/app/uploads/2017/11/op159.pdf. Stanner, W. E. H. (2010). The dreaming and other essays. Black Inc. Ting, I., Liu, R. & Scott, N. (2019). Rich school, poor school: Australia’s great education divide. Australian Broadcasting Commission, Special investigation, Sydney. https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2019-08-13/rich-school-poor-school-australias-great-education-divide/11383384?nw=0 Veracini, L. (2010). Settler colonialism. Palgrave Macmillan. Verran, H. (2005). Knowledge traditions of Aboriginal Australians: Questions and answers arising in a databasing project. Charles Darwin University http://www.cdu.edu.au/centres/ik/pdf/knowle dgeanddatabasing.pdf.

Chapter 2

Boarding Schools

Abstract This chapter engages in a more detailed discussion of the role played by boarding schools in Australia and throughout the settler-colonial world. These elements all contribute to shaping the lives and futures of First Nations students in Australian boarding schools. Keywords Australian education systems · Settler-colonial history · Boarding schools · Identity · Context · Lived experience

2.1 Understanding the Role of Boarding in the Settler-Colonial World History makes visible social and ideological perspectives and priorities that worked to inform boarding school policy in the past. Recognising how these might continue to have resonance in contemporary settings is central to developing more nuanced understandings of the costs and benefits of a boarding education, and how time living at boarding school works to shape futures for First Nations young people. Although in many ways Australia’s history is distinct from other colonised countries, there are also similarities that warrant reflection. In 2009, the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues conducted a comparative study of Indigenous peoples and boarding schools around the world (Smith, 2009). The report found that First Nations peoples generally argue that the historical purpose of boarding schools was to assimilate them into the dominant society in which they lived. This was true in each of Canada, North America, New Zealand and Australia. In Canada and mainland North America, Native children were forcibly removed en masse from their families and sent to live in ‘Residential Schools’ as a way to address the ‘Indian problem’. In America, the policy was justified on the basis that it was necessary to ‘Kill the Indian in him and save the man’ (Pratt, 1892). Tragically, in many cases, neither the Indian nor the man survived. Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the US enacted laws and policies to establish and support Indian boarding schools across the nation. By 1926, over 80% of Indigenous school age children were attending boarding schools run either by the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 M. O’Bryan, Boarding and Australia’s First Peoples, Indigenous-Settler Relations in Australia and the World 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6009-2_2

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federal government or religious organisations (National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, 2021). In both the US and Canada, the full scale of the tragedy visited on First Nations through residential schools is still emerging. As at November 2014, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission had identified 3,201 student deaths in Residential schools for the period from 1867 to 2000 (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015) but that number is clearly a major underestimation. In May 2021, 215 graves were discovered by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation at the former Kamloops Indian residential school in British Columbia. A month later, a further 700 unmarked graves were discovered by the Cowessess First Nation at the Marieval Indian residential school in Saskatchewan province (Tilmouth, 2021). Adams (1995) argues that ‘Residential’ or boarding schools were ‘ideally suited’ for the purpose of ‘eradicating all traces of tribal identity and culture, replacing them with common-place knowledge and the values of white civilization’ (1995, p. 335). Although he concludes that boarding school ‘failed to fulfil reformers’ expectations’ (1995, p. 336), he and other commentators agree that the American Indian boarding school experience left an indelible mark on the history of the United States and Canada (Trafzer et al., 2006). In analysing boarding school experience Trafzer et al. use the motif of a traditional Native American monster story as a metaphor. They argue that for the students, the boarding schools, the English language, the foreign curriculum, and white officials represented monsters (2006, p. xii). Within their narrative, students are cast as traditional heroes who fight against the monster not for their own glory, but for the benefit of their people. They argue that the boarding school system was a ‘successful failure’: they acknowledge that government succeeded in providing ‘some measure of academic, domestic, agricultural, and vocational education to First Nations children’, but they ‘failed to assimilate completely Indian children or entirely destroy the essence of their being Native peoples’ (2006, p. 1). The lives of these children were forever transformed by the ‘new world’ they entered, but the authors insist that they in turn transformed the dominant system that brought them into the schools. They conclude that: Like the heroes of old Native American stories, the children who attended boarding schools were forever changed, but they also emerged victorious, champions of their cultures, languages, and peoples (2006, p. 29).

Similarly, settler colonial scholars argue that the very act of survival in oppressive systems represent a form of resistance. They describe this survival-as-resistance as ‘survivance’ (Kaomea, 2014, p. 139), no small feat given the genocidal proportions of the challenges they faced. It is important to acknowledge that while boarding schools in settler colonial countries are strongly associated with an assimilatory ideal, often brutally implemented, they were not always opposed by First Nations peoples. Scholars in different national settings acknowledge the benefits that could be extracted from a boarding school education. Of the American Indian experience, Trafzer et al. (2006) contend:

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Students fought the monster, struggled with it, and many survived the experience. Indian children who lived through the boarding school days were transformed. Many learned to speak, read, and write English, and they shared this and other knowledge with people back home. Students learned new subjects and trades, further developing themselves in new ways. But most Indians did not turn their backs on First Nations people or discard the cultural identities as Indians (2006, p. 3).

In New Zealand, Smith (2009) reports that, until 1941, no state funded secondary schooling was available to Maori. The only avenue available for a secondary education was in church run boarding schools. She claims that: The purpose of the Maori denominational boarding schools was to take Maori students that seemed to have the highest potential for assimilation, inculcate European values and customs, and then send the ‘assimilated’ Maori students back home to uplift their communities. The goal was thus to create a class structure within Maori communities whereby the more ‘assimilated elite’ could manage those parts of the community deemed “savage” by Europeans (2009, p. 17).

When in 1901 the Director General of Education sought to have Latin dropped from the syllabus, Maori elders resisted, arguing that ‘they could teach their children practical skills themselves; instead they wanted Maori youth to be equipped to become professionals’ (Smith, 2009, p. 18). Similarly, in Hawai’i, the residential Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children’s School (also known as the Royal School) in Honolulu, was started in response to a request by Kauikeaouli (King Kamehameha III) for a teacher to educate Hawaii’s future monarchs. The king believed that knowledge of the ways of the foreigners who had begun to settle in the islands was necessary for the kingdom’s survival. The school opened in 1840 with eleven royal children aged two to 11 and in all educated 16 children of the chiefly class. But here, as in other places, promises of empowerment through education were disappointed. Far from preparing future leaders to engage with the complexities of the modern world, Hawaiian scholar Julie Kaomea exposes the institution as ‘an exceedingly harsh and repressive school environment that stripped ali’i (royal) children of their cultural identities and traditions …[and] nearly eliminated the royal bloodline’ (2014, p. 129). Boarding schools in Australia, Canada and the USA were all implicated in colonial policy approaches that assumed that integration into white society represented the only realistic future for Indigenous peoples. Central to the policy of assimilation was the expectation that only by assimilating could Aboriginal people participate in mainstream economies and therefore ‘support the higher social standards which such natives will attain in the next generation’ (Hasluck as cited in Bolton, 2004). In the Australian context, boarding schools are not as closely associated with government policies of the forced removal of children as is the case in Canada and North America, but throughout the colonial era, Mission schools served that same purpose. In response to the recent grim discoveries in Canada, Arrente elder William Tilmouth from Central Australia wrote: First Nations people across Australia are mourning with Canadian First Nations families as evidence mounts of hundreds of deaths of children at residential schools. We are standing

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2 Boarding Schools with our Canadian First Nations brothers and sisters on these recent horrific discoveries. The massacres, forced assimilation and cultural genocide in Australia is something this country has yet to face up to. My own experience of being removed from my family and taken thousands of kilometres away to a mission home is part of that history. The massacres, removal of children, poisonings and atrocities inflicted on Australia’s First Nations peoples were designed to exterminate us, to erase the entire race of my people on this planet. I think about the day I was taken every day. The process was a continuing act of colonisation and assimilation and the aims of it was akin to being buried alive. That is how I feel every day (2021).

However much boarding is wrapped in the language of opportunity and choice, any policy priority of sending children away from family and community inevitably resonates with assimilatory practices of the past. The Bringing them home (HREOC, 1997) report into separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, observes that ‘past education policies have contemporary consequences’. The report goes on: In our recent past, the education and training system ... have been tools to systematically strip Aboriginal communities of not only our culture, but the living heart of our communities, our children ... Schools were not only used to deny Aboriginal children a culturally appropriate education whether separated or not, they were also used as points from which Aboriginal children were ‘removed’ (HREOC, 1997, p. 485).

The report explicitly documents the dislocation, and the emotional toll that resulted from lack of education opportunities in Indigenous communities and the necessity of sending Indigenous students away to boarding schools (Fogarty et al., 2015, p. 8). Similarly, Mander, in his study of the transition experience of Indigenous students in Western Australian boarding schools observes: Experiences such as colonisation, massacres, genocide, the forcible removal of children from families, social and cultural marginalisation, and racism have all made a contribution to the construction of the contemporary context of Indigenous Education (2012, p. 17).

Australia’s settler-colonial history casts a long and sobering shadow over the contemporary landscape of Indigenous policy in general, and Indigenous education policy in particular. However compelling the social imperatives which recommend boarding over community-based education, any initiative which separates young people from their families, communities, languages and cultures must be critically examined if the mistakes of the past are not to be repeated.

2.2 Why Boarding? Boarding schools have a long tradition of providing unique and holistic learning environments. A number of authors describe them as ‘total institutions’, a term coined by Ervin Goffman in 1961. Goffman identifies the central feature of total institutions as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating the three spheres of life: sleep, play, and work. In the context of boarding, this creates opportunity

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for building human and social capital, but also raises inevitable issues of how the institution works to shape students’ identities, values, tastes and ambitions (Goffman, 1961; Sommerlad, 1976). Goffman claims that total institutions are ‘a social hybrid, part residential community, part formal institution’ (1961, p. 8). He claims that they are of special sociological interest because they are ‘the forcing houses of changing persons; each is a natural experiment on what can be done to the self’ (1961, p. 9). Far from playing a compensatory role, in England and America boarding schools are more commonly associated with the cultivation and cross- generational reproduction of privilege (Duffell, 2014; Finn, 2012; Martin et al., 2014). Heir to the English throne, Prince Charles, famously attended a boarding school in Scotland, known for its especially rigorous curriculum. He described the institution as ‘Colditz in kilts’ (Debrett’s, 2020), a reference to a notorious prisoner of war camp used by the German army to intern officers from the allied forces during the second world war. Despite this, Charles subsequently praised the school, stating it had taught him ‘a great deal about myself and my own abilities and disabilities. It taught me to accept challenges and take the initiative.’ (The Telegraph, 2017). Enduring austerity, physical and emotional privation and coming out the other side, was an accepted rite of passage for the English upper classes, taken as proof of good character: Savage discipline, along with sexual confusion and formalised bullying, are so common in the schooldays memoirs of the British elite in the 19th and 20th centuries that you have to conclude that parents wanted and paid for their children to experience these things. To most of the class that used them, the private schools were factories that would reliably produce men and women who would run Britain, its politics, business and culture. Boarding school was a proven good investment. So thousands of men and women who had suffered awfully, by their own admission, sent their children off for just the same (Renton, 2017).

Former boarder, boarding house master and psychotherapist Nicky Duffell (2014) has written extensively on the experience of boarding in the United Kingdom and concludes: Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish—in any way vulnerable—or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities (2014, p. 10).

Although educational practices have evolved and high levels of accountability for pastoral care are demanded of boarding providers today, English and American boarding schools are still strongly associated with social class. Writing in the American context Finn (2012) claims: Elite boarding schools endeavor to instill in their students elite-class solidarity, strong beliefs in both meritocracy and the essential rightness of the status quo, and practical political knowhow. Each of these objectives is wholly compatible with the self-interest of their students and their families (2012, p. 57).

The same dynamics are evident in Australia’s elite boarding schools, which have tap roots reaching deep into the colonial period, even if contemporary boarding houses also play a more functionalist role. In Australia today, boarding schools,

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even those metropolitan schools that maintain elite British Public School traditions, are primarily designed to meet the practical needs of school families, or to offer Australian educational opportunities to overseas, typically Asian, students (Martin et al., 2014; Papworth, 2014). Cree (2000) characterises the objectives underlying boarding into the categories of: access; opportunity; social advancement or reproduction of privilege; deficits at home; or education continuity. In some situations, the author claims that boarding schools are better placed to offer holistic care than would be available to students in their family of origin. Whereas schools running boarding houses for adolescents are always acting in loco parentis, Cree suggests a special standard of care attaches to students from difficult family circumstances. In their research, Hodges et al. (2013, 2016) explore whether it is justified to conceptualise the boarding house as a ‘home away from home’. They found evidence to support that proposition. They emphasise the importance of the boarding environment in the social, emotional and personal development of boarders. They found that a lack of empirical research in the field meant that both staff training and boarder education appeared to be guided by staff anecdotal experiences. These informed staff selection, training and governance of boarding schools. To the extent that staff act in loco parentis, they found there was limited understanding of what this entails in real terms. Adolescent participants in their study noted that, in general, they did not consider that the boarding environment offered them sufficient emotional support. The authors concluded that this is of concern, given evidence which shows that a lack of supportive relationships at home are more likely to result in ‘poor adolescent outcomes such as decreased self-esteem, self-efficacy and in the development of internalising disorders such as anxiety and depression’ (Hodges et al., 2016). In a 2020 study of the transition experiences of young men to a boarding school in Western Australia, Lester and Mander found that transition support efforts by the school were successful in minimising the differences in factors associated with academic, emotional and mental wellbeing between boarding and non-boarding students at three months and six months post-transition. Mental health and wellbeing stayed at similar levels for both boarding and non-boarding students over the first year in secondary school, but internalising (e.g. emotional problems) and externalising problems (e.g. conduct problems) increased over time for boarding students (Lester & Mander, 2020). For First Nations boarding school students, questions of cultural and social identity add layers of complexity to an already psychologically complex education landscape (Mander, 2012, p. 243).

2.3 Presumed Benefit of Boarding for Disadvantaged Students Bass (2014) provides an analysis of the objectives underlying boarding programs for disadvantaged or lower SES groups in America. She argues that because the

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structure of boarding or residential schools provides an opportunity for schools to exercise control over large part of the student’s day, they are able to create structures and offer the supports students need to achieve academic success. Bass goes further to suggest that where students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, schools can shield students from negative outside influences such as drugs or gang culture (2014, p. 18). She cites the school as providing a range of programs including ‘the breadth and depth of their course choices, a wide variety of extracurricular activities and club offerings, opportunities to travel, a culturally and geographically diverse student body, exposure to the wisdom and knowledge they gain from having closer relationships with their teachers’ (2014, p. 26). Bass concludes that ‘Capable students who come from homes that are unsupportive or not conducive to learning are ideal for the boarding school environment’ (2014, p. 28). She later qualifies this statement finding that for ‘African American students or other students from high poverty populations’ separation from home culture ‘may pose an insurmountable obstacle’ because of the relational dimension of their home culture. She also cites lateral violence when they return home as meaning that for some students ‘the boarding school environment may not be the most appropriate alternative’ (2014, p. 31).

2.4 Presumed Benefit of Boarding For First Nations Students Education is a foundational human capability. It improves a person’s employment prospects and earning capacity, and the evidence points to a relationship between education and better health and raised civic and social engagement (McLachlan, 2013, p. 2). The responsibility to create opportunity and remove barriers to education lies heavy on any government. This is especially true in relation to society’s most disadvantaged young people (2013, p. 93). The compensatory potential of boarding schools for First Nations young people has long been recognised. In an early modern study of the experience of Aboriginal students boarding at Kormilda College in Darwin, Sommerlad (1976) examined the claim that the school signified ‘the way to tomorrow’ for students from remote communities in Australia’s NT. She found that Kormilda was established on a compensatory ideal: people looked to the school to act as an agent of change and a means of investing ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘culturally deprived’ groups with the aptitudes and attitudes necessary for school success (1976, p. 2). Sommerlad argues that when schools have to ‘compensate’ for things that are missing in the family, students are therefore looked at through a deficit lens. She argues that when education initiatives fail to enhance self-identity, or build on a student’s existing social and cultural capital, they leave young people conflicted, in a state of confusion and doubt: marginal members of two societies. Her findings are supported by contemporary scholarship to the extent that research on the prevalence and social impact of deficit discourse indicates a significant link between discourse

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surrounding indigeneity and outcomes for indigenous peoples (Bamblett, 2015; Nairn et al., 2006; Sarra, 2011; Shields et al., 2005). In the context of an Indian boarding school serving 27,000 indigenous students from 62 indigenous groups, Finnian questions whether a total institution can properly be described as a ‘Castle of Hope’ (Finnan, 2020). She argues that although most contemporary residential schools differ from those that purposefully sought to annihilate indigenous cultures and languages, their existence remains problematic because students grow up in institutional environments that typically favour integration into mainstream culture over maintenance of indigenous cultures (2020, p. 29). Despite this, she finds that although students at this school are separated from their families and communities and learn a set of behaviours critical to the smooth functioning of the institution, data indicate that they and their families accept the sacrifices associated with institutional schooling. For them, the promise of becoming societal change agents, comfortable in both indigenous and mainstream India outweighs the downsides associated with boarding. Similarly, although early boarding schools in Aotearoa New Zealand sought to assimilate Maori into settler society, the more recent reframing of education systems to reflect the priorities of the Treaty of Waitangi ‘mean that Maori boarding schools today are leaders in Maori cultural education and are attended by successive generations of Maori leaders, both male and female’ (Rogers, 2016, p. 52). In the contemporary Australian context, Indigenous scholarship programs to enable First Nations students to attend high performing schools, are characterised by reference to building young people’s personal autonomy and leadership capacity. The Federally funded Indigenous Youth Leadership Program, for example, refers to education as a ‘leadership journey’ (The Smith Family, 2020); scholarship provider Yalari has a mission to ‘bring about generational change’ through boarding (Yalari, 2020). Beneveniste et al. (2015) identify two objectives as underpinning the goals and intended outcomes of one urban residential program for remote Aboriginal students. One major objective is that students be able to ‘walk in two (both) worlds’ (2015, p. 165); the second is that ‘they should become ‘self-determining’ through the development of self and identity and critical thinking skills’ (2015, p. 166). The rhetoric of ‘walking in two worlds’ (AIEF 2015), or ‘orbiting between two worlds and enjoying the best of both’ (Pearson, 2011, p. 331), is often cited as justifying boarding school programs for First Australian youth. Despite the fact that First Australian students come from diverse geographic, socio-economic, language and cultural backgrounds, the different skill sets that might be required for students from heterogeneous backgrounds to ‘walk in two worlds’ have not attracted significant attention from those who look to boarding schools to ensure education ‘success’. Policy discourse does little to differentiate between students from urban, regional and remote home settings. In relation to education pathways available to young people living in remote settings, policy makers have an expressed preference for sending students away to boarding school for their secondary years, even to the extent of defunding secondary education delivery in remote communities (NT Education, 2015). This approach is couched in language of ‘choice’ and ‘opportunity’, but

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a strong research base indicates that in many cases the options available to families provide neither (Guenther & Osborne, 2020; Mander et al., 2015). While some scholarship foundations make extravagant claims about the outcomes of remote and very remote-living students on their programs (KPMG, 2020), empirical research conducted in remote Australia speaks to policy mandating boarding school for secondary aged young people as ‘comprehensively failing’ families and communities (O’Bryan & Fogarty, 2020, p. 17). For schools, students and families to have a shared understanding of the objectives of Indigenous programs is an obvious ideal, but evidence suggests that it is not always realised. The Australian Indigenous Education Foundation (AIEF) acknowledges that in many boarding schools, Indigenous programs have ‘developed organically’, often through ‘trial and error’ (AIEF 2015, p. 26). It proposes two different models that underpin programs in their partner schools. In the first of these, schools dedicate themselves to helping ‘students facing significant challenges’ to overcome those challenges. The second positions the school’s effort in narrative that identifies the potential for excellence in a group of students, and ‘dedicates itself to providing an opportunity for them to realise that potential’ (2015, p. 26). The author acknowledges that whichever narrative underpins schools’ programs, it will flow over into the school community and influence how First Nations students see themselves, as well as how they are seen by their peers, but they do not explore the impact of deficit frameworks on students’ motivation, engagement or self-concept (Bamblett, 2015; Fforde et al., 2013; Hattie, 2009; Sarra, 2011). Assumptions of deficit may undermine the very benefits that boarding schools are presumed to deliver. Consistent with Sommerlad’s earlier study, Beneveniste et al. (2015) found that in a program expressly developed to benefit young people from remote and very remote communities, staff often failed to acknowledge the social and cultural capital that students brought with them to school. The program therefore did not integrate or build on students’ prior knowledge or skills. The authors conclude that the degree of structure and dominance of mainstream skill development raised the question of how the program was able ‘to incorporate or acknowledge aspects of the ‘other’ world’ (2015, p. 168). The highly-structured life in boarding school was also not conducive to students being proactive and independent in decision making. In relation to the development of identity, the authors found that due to complex cultural and family ties, young Aboriginal people will understand who they are and their roles in the family from a very early age’ (2015, p. 168). They point to the importance of personal and cultural continuity and the ‘high costs’ associated with not meeting youth identity-securing requirements (Chandler & Lalonde, 2009; Cohler, 1982; Indigenous Elders, 2014). Biddle and Rogers (2015) also identify the ability to ‘walk in two worlds’ as a presumed benefit of attending boarding school, but point to the lack of research on the impact of boarding school on social connectedness at home or in the dominant social settings. They suggest that experiencing lateral violence at home, as well as never really fitting in at a non-Indigenous urban or regional school where they are in a small minority, may impact First Nations students and leave them ‘stuck in the middle’ of two worlds. By contrast, education providers and funders construct an

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uncomplicated narrative of ‘success’ and make extensive claims about the benefits for First Nations students of attending high-performing schools (KPMG, 2020). In contemporary Australia, the extent to which well resourced, often elite, boarding schools might mitigate educational disadvantage for First Nations students has captured the imagination of both government and the philanthropic sector. This is borne out in dollars and cents: AIEF’s 2020 Annual Report reveals that the organisation has raised in excess of $230 million since 2008, including $108 million in payments from the Federal Government (AIEF, 2020). Notwithstanding this is big business, and inevitably draws government and private sector investors away from place-based education initiatives, to date there has been little high-quality, robust and truly independent evaluation of the programs that are claimed to be effective in changing outcomes for these young people.

2.5 Power, Politics and the Educated Elite The political landscape surrounding Indigenous education in Australia is fraught. As a colonised country, asymmetries of power are embedded into the very warp and weave of Australian life. They are so normalised that when they are explicitly named, the public reaction is either disbelief or outrage, although there are signs of budding maturity. As explained, the ongoing ‘History Wars’ in Australia, as in other parts of the settler-colonial world, are one example of this (Madley, 2016; Manne, 2003). In this theatre of conflict, schools are on the front line. Asymmetries of power are a central issue of concern in this work. Of schools attended by key participants, all are privileged, and it would be a fiction to deny that most deserve the tagline ‘elite’, on both socio-educational and socio-economic grounds. They are direct inheritors of the colonial legacy, and far from repudiating colonial values and assumptions, they take pride in their historical roots. These are institutions that understand their privilege, and the social advantages it bestows. This is reflected in tangible and intangible ways: in school buildings; in educational experiences, which are increasingly global in their orientation; in the promise of outstanding academic results; and in a constant awareness of where the school sits in ‘league tables’. Prestige attaches to uniforms, and excites fierce loyalty not only from current students but also from the columns of alumni who march sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly, under the school flag. The connective power of old school tie networks is well understood, and parents are willing to make significant sacrifices so that their offspring might be able to call on them as they carve out their own niche in competitive market economies. To enlist the efforts of these schools in the fight to redress disparities of power that work persistently against our First Peoples is no small thing. To ask those schools to become critically aware of how asymmetries of power are expressed in their institutional culture, pedagogy and curriculum is another altogether. To question whether ‘success’ should be measurable only by reference to a Western capitalist

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frame raises a different set of complexities for schools, communities and policy makers.

2.6 Conclusion Indigenous scholarship programs are premised on the expectation that education is powerful in creating a just and equitable society, but what this means in real terms is complicated. Contemporary global priorities in education have profoundly changed the way we think about and consider justice claims (Keddie, 2012; Rizvi & Linguard, 2010). Iris Marion Young in her Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) argues that in a heterogeneous society, justice requires explicit recognition of difference. Redistributive justice, such as the provision of education scholarships to socially and economically disadvantaged young people, is undermined where difference is overlooked in favour of a civic public ‘which transcends particularities of interest and affiliation to seek a common good’ (1990, p. 97). Young argues that the denial of difference contributes to the oppression of social groups: claims to impartiality feed cultural imperialism by allowing the ‘particular experience and perspective of privileged groups to parade as universal’ (1990, p. 10). She acknowledges that cultural reactions are usually unconscious, ‘often exhibited by liberal-minded people who intend to treat everyone with equal respect’ (1990, p. 11). She concludes: A conception of justice that fails to notice and seek institutional remedy for those cultural sources of oppression … is inadequate. … Recognition of group difference also requires a principle of political decision making that encourages autonomous organization of groups within a public. This entails establishing procedures for ensuring that each group’s voice is heard in the public, through institutions of group representation (1990, p. 11-12).

Her argument speaks powerfully to the experience of First Nations students and their families as they engage with high-performing boarding schools. What it means for a First Nations student to succeed as a First Nations student at Australian boarding schools should be a central concern to educators and policy makers alike. In the New Zealand context, Sir Mason Durie (2001) argues that: To the extent that the purpose of education is to prepare people for participation in society, it needs to remembered that preparation for participation in Mäori society is also required. If after twelve or so years of formal education Mäori youth were totally unprepared to interact within te ao Mäori, then no matter what else had been learned, education would have been incomplete (2001, p. 3).

The narratives which follow speak to the various and creative ways that First Nations young people wrestle to extract the best from their time spent in Australian boarding schools. For some of the contributors to this work, their education was clearly incomplete and it has taken a monumental effort to fill in the gaps after the event. For others, adults at home and allies in the education system fought with them on the way through: they had a clear sense of purpose while they were at school and that continued into their post-school life.

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Whatever their experience, these young people are the heroes of the piece. Like their Native American counterparts, they have all had to put up a fight.

References Adams, D. W. (1995). Education for extinction. University of Kansas Press. AIEF. (2015). AIEF Compendium of best practice for achieving successful outcomes for Indigenous students in Australian boarding schools. Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, NSW. AIEF. (2020). Annual Report 2020. http://aief.com.au/cms/workspace/uploads/annual-report2020_online-edition.pdf. Bamblett, L. (2015). Aboriginal advantage: An insider look at an Aboriginal community. Parliamentary Library, http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parlia mentary_Library/pubs/Vis/vis1415/AboriginaladvantageLect. Bass, L. R. (2014). Boarding schools and capital benefits: Implications for urban school reform. Journal of Educational Research, 107(1), 20. Beneveniste, T., Dawson, D., Rainbird, S. (2015). ‘The role of the residence: Exploring the goals of an Aboriginal residential program in contributing to the education and development of remote students’. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 44(2), 163–72. Biddle, N., & Rogers, J. (2015). Stuck in the Middle: The effect of boarding schools for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students. House of Representatives Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs, Canberra,