Loudmouth,
cheers for that. There may well be many people who call themselves indigenous who achieve academic status. Sadly, their indigenous alliance comes to an abrupt halt when it comes to offer the expertise & usefulness of their achievement to the struggling communities. Struggling purely due to the constant interference by bureaucratic public servants. Left to their own I'd say most communities would function a lot better than under the "guidance" of those Departments. The increase of indigenous participation in Universities nowadays is mainly due to many people of different/partial background other than indigenous. They're the ones who have no desire to help build stronger communities. They merely take the opportunity to claim indigenous status for ease of funding access. I know this is a harsh statement but it is what I experience.

Well, Individual, firstly the graduates that I know who have tried to go back to either their 'home' communities, or to other communities, have usually got a lousy deal from those communities, of the 'who the f** do you think you are, coming in here, telling us what to do ?' or 'coconut !' variety.

Secondly, why should they have to go to communities, either their own, or to others ? Did they create the mess of problems that communities have built up for themselves ? I don't think so, so why should they have any more responsibility for contributing to the solutions than anybody else, graduate or otherwise, Indigenous or non-Indigenous ?

Thirdly, settlements usually are so small that many graduates simply would not find full-time work there: apart from teachers, nurses and administrators, anybody with expertise would need to travel around a number of distant settlements and out-stations to have enough work to do to warrant employment. Vets or archaeologists or chemists would find little work to do in many settlements. Those heroic people who are able to find work, and do so, deserve medals, but don't expect all that many to take it on, Indigenous or non-Indigenous.

In any case, the vast majority of Indigenous graduates (a) are from long-settled areas of Australia with few remote settlements, from cities and towns, (b) are the second-, third- or fourth-generation of their families living away from missions and fringe-camps, and (c) have as much right as any other Australian to pursue any damn career they choose without being dictated to.

And I do take exception to your denigration of Indigenous graduates, in that time-honoured right-wing way, as 'part-Aboriginal'. They have had a gutful of that sort of rubbish. With respect, Individual.

Joe

Loudmouth,
I acknowledge your comments your comments. I'm afraid I don't know of any other way of stating my experience. I knew I'd get that kind of reply, it's fairly standard.
Find it offensive or otherwise the point is that we're a long way from achieving a situation where the blame game ceases & responsibility kicks off. Would you be less offended if I'd said part european ? What is someone of mixed race ? What is the PC version ?

Individual,

Thank you for moving this discussion along. What is someone of mixed race ? Biologically, they are of mixed race, yes, but socially or politically, they carry their history with them and it can either inspire them or weigh them down. But think of it this way as well:

In many 'settled' parts of Australia, Aboriginal people were kept out of towns, and thereby any secondary education opportunities until well into the 1950s, the NINETEEN fifties. i.e. many Aboriginal people who are still only in their sixties were not able to access those educational opportunities that we now take for granted. They have been confined to unskilled and semi-skilled labouring jobs, or none at all. Agreed ?

The children of those generations, now in their forties and older, could access secondary schooling but had no guidance or assistance from their parents - as well as a common social expectation that they were not good enough to complete secondary schooling. Very few of these children completed secondary schooling and, given the increasing skill-requirements of the Australian economy, they also were confined to lower-level jobs. Agreed ?

THEIR children, usually now under forty, and born after the Referendum and Whitlam, do have parents who gained some secondary schooling, but very few have parents who completed it. Their parents could help them with some secondary schooling but only up to a point, and couldn't provide much guidance about tertiary education.

In other words, since the first large wave of people at university, say from 1980, Aboriginal people have generally had to battle through without much parental guidance, even with the best will in the world - they succeeded mainly with the support of university staff and each other.

But it's THEIR children who are now coming through the secondary system, in far greater numbers than a generation ago: here in SA, Year 12 completion numbers were stagnant until about 2000, but have quadrupled since then. History is not destiny.

It's happening, Individual, be confident of that, it's not all doom and gloom. All your efforts are not for nothing :)

TBC

Loudmouth,
that does sound promising. I only hope this chaniging attitude towards academic/tertiary education transcends to pragmatism & trade qualifications in all communities. What I mean by that is that it is one thing to be able to read the instructions to build a house & another thing to to actually build it. This one of the great problems we face in wider Australia now that people have education but don't know how to do things. I still shiver when I think back of the hundreds of those kids from the communities I frequented were sent to private colleges at full taxpayers expense & only a handful are now pulling their own weight in working life. If this can change I'll for once feel better.

Individual,

You're on to something here: In Saturday's Australian, Tim Soutphommasane wrote about the desirability of bringing back a form of national service, young people finishing their schooling and then doing a couple of years of service, not necessarily military training but community service. It used to be the practice in many European countries (perhaps it still is ?) that all students finishing school who wanted to go on to university, had to do two years' work either in a factory, on a farm, learn a trade or serve in the army. For example, the philosopher Karl Popper worked and studied to be a cabinet-maker in the early 1920s. It's said he could knock up a coffee table or a book-case in an hour. (No, I made that up). But the point is that uni students shouldn't get too far up themselves.

Conversely, a former colleague went straight from school to teachers' college, then to post-graduate study overseas, then straight into a lecturer's job and stayed there for 35 years - not a day of work out in the real world. So you've got a point :)

So ideally, all students intending to go on to uni should get their hands dirty for a couple of years - fruit-picking is not a bad start. I did twelve years of factory and farm work, then five years on and off picking apricots, citrus and grapes and I don't regret it - well, one day of 46 degrees during a ten-day period of 40+ degrees, I'm not so fussed about, but I learnt a great deal about the world of work in those years. Perhaps every uni graduate should also get a trade, just to keep their feet on the ground. And, of course, to be more versatile in small communities.

I don't know much about kids in boarding schools - it's not something urban kids have to do. But from my limited experience of kids from the West Coast and Broken Hill coming to Adelaide, they seem to do surprisingly well, given the isolation and home-sickness