‘Universities are not the safe places we would like to think they are, but they are getting safer’: Indigenous women academics in higher education

This paper outlines some of the experiences of Indigenous women academics in higher education. The author offers these experiences, not to position Indigenous women academics as victims, but to expose the problematic nature of racism, systemic marginalisation, white race privilege and radicalised subjectivity played out within Australian higher education institutions. By utilising the experiences and examples she seeks to bring the theoretical into the everyday world of being Indigenous within academe. In analysing these examples, the author reveals the relationships between oppression, white race privilege, institutional privilege and the epistemology that maintains them. She argues that, in moving from a position of being silent to speaking about what she has witnessed and experienced, she is able to move from the position of object to subject and gain a form of liberated voice (hooks 1989: 9) for herself and other Indigenous women. She seeks to challenge the practices within universities that continue to subjugate Indigenous women academics.

Indigenous research and broader issues in the Academy

The Rudd Labour Government rode to power in Australia on the education promise of 'an education revolution'. The term 'education revolution' carries all the obligatory marketing metaphors that an aspirant government might want recognised by the general public on the eve government came to power however in revolutionary terms it fades into insignificance in comparison to the real revolution in Australian education. This revolution simply put is to elevate Indigenous Knowledge Systems, in Australian Universities. In the forty three years since the nation setting Referendum of 1967 a generation has made a beach head on the educational landscape. Now a further generation who having made it into the field of higher degrees yearn for the ways and means to authentically marshal Indigenous knowledge? The Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin has for over twenty years not only witnessed the transition but is also a leader in the field. With the appointment of two Chairs of Indigenous Knowledge Systems to build on to its already established research profile the Institute moved towards what is the 'real revolution' in education – the elevation of Indigenous Knowledge as a legitimate knowledge system. This paper lays out the Institute of Koorie Education‘s Research Plan and the basis of an argument put to the academy that will be the driver for this pursuit.

Using the semantic grid to build bridges between museums and indigenous communities

In this paper we describe a Semantic Grid application designed to enable museums and indigenous communities in distributed locations, to collaboratively discuss, describe and annotate digital objects and documents in museums that originally belonged to or are of cultural or historical significance to indigenous groups. By extending and refining an existing application, Vannotea, we enable users on access grid nodes to collaboratively attach descriptive, rights and tribal care metadata and annotations to digital images, video or 3D representations. The aim is to deploy the software within museums to enable the traditional owners to describe and contextualize museum content in their own words and from their own perspectives. This sharing and exchange of knowledge will hopefully revitalize cultures eroded through colonization and globalization and repair and strengthen relationships between museums and indigenous communities.

From Jindabyne to 'Jindabyne' : immigrant and indigenous specters

This paper reads Ray Lawrence's film Jindabyne (2006) in order to consider how "Australian" connotes as "immigrant" or "Indigenous" in contemporary Australia. Although the film is an adaptation of an American short story, it exploits an existing grammar of place in Australian cultural production in order to interrogate this very culture. If questions of race, gender, and class have haunted post-settlement Australia, Lawrence's film simultaneously stages these spectres and gestures towards the necessary failure of any attempt to exorcise them in a place where indigeneity is invisible. Thus, the location of Jindabyne, the town drowned in the name of progress, offers an exemplary visual metaphor for the failed project of identity formation in a place where forgetting is a survival tool.

Life on the edge : housing experiences in three remote Australian indigenous settlements

This analysis of housing experiences and aspirations in three remote Indigenous settlements in Australia (Mimili, Maningrida and Palm Island) reveals extreme liveability problems directly related to the scale and form of housing provision. Based upon field visits to each of the settlements and extensive interviews with residents and local housing and community officers, the paper analyses two aspects of living in such housing conditions at two spatial scales, the layout of the settlement and the design of individual houses. The failings at both scales are shown to be the fault of a dysfunctional housing system that is only recently been addressed.

Culture-fair assessment : challenging Indigenous students through effortful mathematics teaching

This paper reports on a mathematics education research project centred on teachers’ pedagogical practices and capacity to assess Indigenous Australian students in a culture-fair manner. The project has been funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage program and is being conducted in seven Catholic and Independent primary schools in north Queensland. Our Industry Partners are Catholic Education and the Association of Independent Schools, Queensland. The study aims to provide greater understanding about how to build more equitable assessment practices to address the issue of underperforming Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) students in regional and remote Australia. The goal is to identify ways forward by attending to culture-fair assessment practice. The research is exploring the attitudes, beliefs and responses of Indigenous students to assessment in the context of mathematics learning with particular focus on teacher knowledge in these educational settings in relation to the design of assessment tasks that are authentic and engaging for these students in an accountability context. This approach highlights how teachers need to distinguish the ‘funds of knowledge’ (González, Moll, Floyd Tenery, Rivera, Rendón, Gonzales & Amanti, 2008) that Indigenous students draw on and how teachers need to be culturally responsive in their pedagogy to open up curriculum and assessment practice to allow for different ways of knowing and being

Differences in Treatment and Management of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Patients Presenting with Chest Pain: Results of the Heart Protection Partnership (HPP) Study

BACKGROUND: Indigenous patients with acute coronary syndromes represent a high-risk group. There are however few contemporary datasets addressing differences in the presentation and management of Indigenous and non-Indigenous patients with chest pain. METHODS: The Heart Protection Project, is a multicentre retrospective audit of consecutive medical records from patients presenting with chest pain. Patients were identified as Indigenous or non-Indigenous, and time to presentation and cardiac investigations as well as rates of cardiac investigations and procedures were compared between the two groups. RESULTS: Of the 2380 patients included, 199 (8.4%) identified as Indigenous, and 2174 (91.6%) as non-Indigenous. Indigenous patients were younger, had higher rates hyperlipidaemia, diabetes, smoking, known coronary artery disease and a lower rate of prior PCI; and were significantly less likely to have private health insurance, be admitted to an interventional facility or to have a cardiologist as primary physician. Following adjustment for difference in baseline characteristics, Indigenous patients had comparable rates of cardiac investigations and delay times to presentation and investigations. CONCLUSIONS: Although the Indigenous population was identified as a high-risk group, in this analysis of selected Australian hospitals there were no significant differences in treatment or management of Indigenous patients in comparison to non-Indigenous.

Psychometric validation of the growth and empowerment measure (GEM) applied with Indigenous Australians

Objective: Empowerment is a complex process of psychological, social, organizational and structural change. It allows individuals and groups to achieve positive growth and effectively address the social and psychological impacts of historical oppression, marginalization and disadvantage. The Growth and Empowerment Measure (GEM) was developed to measure change in dimensions of empowerment as defi ned and described by Aboriginal Australians who participated in the Family Well Being programme.---------- Method: The GEM has two components: a 14-item Emotional Empowerment Scale (EES14) and 12 Scenarios (12S). It is accompanied by the Kessler 6 Psychological Distress Scale (K6), supplemented by two questions assessing frequency of happy and angry feelings. For validation, the measure was applied with 184 Indigenous Australian participants involved in personal and/or organizational social health activities.---------- Results: Psychometric analyses of the new instruments support their validity and reliability and indicate two-component structures for both the EES (Self-capacity; Inner peace) and the 12S (Healing and enabling growth, Connection and purpose). Strong correlations were observed across the scales and subscales. Participants who scored higher on the newly developed scales showed lower distress on the K6, particularly when the two additional questions were included. However, exploratory factor analyses demonstrated that GEM subscales are separable from the Kessler distress measure.---------- Conclusion: The GEM shows promise in enabling measurement and enhancing understanding of both process and outcome of psychological and social empowerment within an Australian Indigenous context.

Demonstrating Indigenous women’s educational leadership : Tiddas Showin’ Up, Talkin’ Up and Puttin’ Up!

This is the opening paper for a special edition of the Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues and comes from an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Leadership for Excellence in Learning and Teaching Program funded project titled Tiddas Showin’ Up, Talkin’ Up and Puttin’ Up: Indigenous Women and Educational Leadership (Bunda and White 2009). The project name, Tiddas Showin’ Up, Talkin’ Up and Puttin’ Up, draws from two Indigenous sources. Firstly, it reinscribes the white way of knowing the familial relationship of ‘Sister’ in the Indigenous generic language term of ‘Tidda’. Secondly, Showin’ Up, ‘Talkin’ Up’ (Moreton-Robinson 2000) and Puttin’ Up calls into being the constructions of our leadership as Indigenous women, grounded in our communities and with particular reference to our leadership in universities.

The CAPA Indigenous Project. Indigenous postgraduate education: A project into the barriers which indigenous students must overcome in postgraduate studies: A short history 1993-2000.

This brief paper outlines some of the early work undertaken in Indigenous postgraduate activism in Australia. In particular, the work undertaken in the lead up to the 'Project into the Barriers which Indigenous Students must Overcome in Postgraduate Studies'.

Indigeneity and the judicial decision to imprison : a study of Western Australia’s higher courts

Internationally, sentencing research has largely neglected the impact of Indigeneity on sentencing outcomes. Using data from Western Australia’s higher courts for the years 2003–05, we investigate the direct and interactive effects of Indigenous status on the judicial decision to imprison. Unlike prior research on race/ethnicity in which minority offenders are often found to be more harshly treated by sentencing courts, we find that Indigenous status has no direct effect on the decision to imprison,after adjusting for other sentencing factors (especially past and current criminality).However, there are sub-group differences: Indigenous males are more likely to receive a prison sentence compared to non-Indigenous females. We draw on the focal concerns perspective of judicial decision making in interpreting our findings.

Improved design method for biosecurity surveillance and early detection of non-indigenous rats

A recent advance in biosecurity surveillance design aims to benefit island conservation through early and improved detection of incursions by non-indigenous species. The novel aspects of the design are that it achieves a specified power of detection in a cost-managed system, while acknowledging heterogeneity of risk in the study area and stratifying the area to target surveillance deployment. The design also utilises a variety of surveillance system components, such as formal scientific surveys, trapping methods, and incidental sightings by non-biologist observers. These advances in design were applied to black rats (Rattus rattus) representing the group of invasive rats including R. norvegicus, and R. exulans, which are potential threats to Barrow Island, Australia, a high value conservation nature reserve where a proposed liquefied natural gas development is a potential source of incursions. Rats are important to consider as they are prevalent invaders worldwide, difficult to detect early when present in low numbers, and able to spread and establish relatively quickly after arrival. The ‘exemplar’ design for the black rat is then applied in a manner that enables the detection of a range of non-indigenous species of rat that could potentially be introduced. Many of the design decisions were based on expert opinion as data gaps exist in empirical data. The surveillance system was able to take into account factors such as collateral effects on native species, the availability of limited resources on an offshore island, financial costs, demands on expertise and other logistical constraints. We demonstrate the flexibility and robustness of the surveillance system and discuss how it could be updated as empirical data are collected to supplement expert opinion and provide a basis for adaptive management. Overall, the surveillance system promotes an efficient use of resources while providing defined power to detect early rat incursions, translating to reduced environmental, resourcing and financial costs.

Doing justice : young people’s representations of the Murray-Darling Basin

The business of helping children to grow up as ‘custodians’, or ‘future managers’ of the Murray-Darling Basin is not simple, and that single sources of information and ways of seeing the environment are not enough. Children (and adults) need to be able to relate individually, emotionally and aesthetically to their places if they are to learn to love them. However, they also need access to a variety of ways of thinking and seeing those same places if they are to be able to take action to sustain them – action that inevitably involves forms of communication with their fellow citizens. This chapter documents the writing and art program Special Forever, with its focus on communications, as an important intervention into promoting eco-social sustainability.