According to 2016 Census data, the number of Indigenous university graduates has risen rapidly in the last ten years, to 48,700 (compared to 19,340 in the 2006 Census). Adding in last year's and this year's graduates, and the total soon will be around 56,000. Overwhelmingly they are base in the cities, most likely those in which they (and perhaps their Indigenous parents) were born, and more or less where they will want to forge their careers. Those 56,000 represent about one in every six Indigenous adults in the cities, one in every four or five women. Ten years ago, it was more like in twelve. In ten years' time, it will be more like one in four.

Meanwhile, in many remote 'communities', graduates come and go, but hardly any more are staying now than ten years ago. Many have no graduates at all, and never have. And, as long their kids don't go to school, they never will. Their choice.

Since the 2006 Census, Indigenous home ownership and purchasing has more than doubled in numerical terms, from 45,000 to nearly 99,000, so that, in spite of home ownership being all but impossible due to leasing restrictions in many remote communities, across the country, almost 38 % of Indigenous dwellings are either owned or being purchased. Someone please tell John Bilger, so that he can distort those figures for his British Gullibles.

In South Australia, and I'm sure in other States, the proportion of young people finishing Year 12 has gone up around twelve times since the mid-1990s. So inter-generational mobility is certainly a rapidly-growing possibility.

How fast ? I would suggest that the Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous working people is closing VERY fast. Yes, I know this might upset many on the 'Left' who might prefer people to stay poor but happy, in the dirt but with their 'culture'.

But either way, it's the choice of Indigenous people, not of their more knowledgeable 'Left' friends, or of Indigenous elites.

Joe

Joe, with regards the graduates in remote communities, at a guess I would say very few are ever likely to live in these places.
Locally grown students are reluctant to return to known dysfunction, especially with the job opportunities available to actually brown skinned people with degrees.
And any fair skinned urban indigenous graduate who does happen to venture into a remote community is likely to run screaming from a lifestyle they could never imagine existing.
You need to be a thick skinned, skilled survivor to adapt to life in those communities.

Hi Big Nana,

Yes, what I am very depressed about is the rapidly-growing Gap between urban and rural/remote Indigenous societies, each going off in their own very different direction. It seems that one population is quite legitimately seizing opportunities, putting in the hard yards, and trying to reap the benefits. The other population seems to be ever-more determined to sit on its collective arse, get dumb Whitefellas to do more and more for them, and find ever-new ways to whinge about the vast and evil forces of colonialisation, aided by the 'Left' and urban-based Indigenous elites. But never, never going back to the bush for life.

Actually, my dear wife Maria wrote about this ten years ago, "Two Indigenous Populations" (of course, those two can be differentiated into many, but let's say two for convenience), and I've put her article on my web-site, www.firstsources.info, on the 21st Century Page. Noel Pearson, I'm a bit chuffed to say, cited her and the article in his essay "Radical Hope". She also alluded to a growing class structure (i.e. the genesis of 'many populations'). What is amazing is that, at the time, the best estimate of graduate numbers was about fifteen thousand. Ten years later, there are around 57,000. Something's taken off, and it ain't remote communities.

Should urban people stop, turn round, drop their studies and skills and go bush ? No, of course not. Try telling them that. I'm sure the extremely virtuous Left would think so, and tut-tut over their Kale Lattes about people losing their culture by becoming skilled and relatively comfortable (and nearly 40 % of indigenous people now own or are buying their own homes - wow, that would piss off the Left even more). Perhaps, for them, universities should bring back courses in the Evils of Apartheid 101. Nah, let's talk uncritically about the glories of culture instead. Non-Western culture, that is. The Enlightenment ? Feh !

The push for 'Recognition' (treaties, separate States, perhaps a separate nation) has fizzled. What's left ? As always, the far, far more difficult task of

[TBC]

[continued]

of genuine, truth-based, Reconciliation. I don't mean hands in the sand or walks over bridges, or everybody joining hands and saying "Om," and then going home fulfilled, but realisation on all sides that atrocities may have occurred in our history (on both sides) AND that what the Torres Strait Islanders call "the Coming of the Light", bringing Indigenous people here into the modern world, has brought vast benefits to all of us.

It's going to be a very long process. But first, the rural and remote areas beckon with their exciting challenges to get kids to school, to stop blokes beating up their beloved and kicking their dogs, to stop humbuggers from standing over their grannies for their welfare cheques and get them (the able-bodied young people, not the grannies) into training for skills and to become worthwhile human beings.

Of course, one problem is that those slackers have used up most of the enormous goodwill that Australians have for Aboriginal people generally, much of it based on a naive romanticism about Stone Age life, and a possibly racist pity that, as they may see it, Indigenous people can't seem to do anything for themselves, 'they're still so primitive'.

Well fifty seven thousand Indigenous people have proven them wrong on that score. AND there's a lot more to come :)

Now, where to start with genuine Reconciliation ? Learning the ruth, based on evidence, about our past, and not relying on baseless assertions about unbelievable atrocities and Satanic government polices, would help. Long way to go, folks, but as they say, from little things big things grow.

Love,

Joe

Yes Joe, aboriginals will only really prosper when they forget the words aboriginals & Indigenous exist. They have to join the mainstream to gain the most Australia has to offer.

The do gooders & the aboriginal industry knocked many of them back decades, with the industry in particular being more interested in having clients, than the good of those clients. Those who ignored the industry & got on with their lives are your graduates & success stories today.

But what does Stan say? Waleed?

Unfortunately there is no media or political interest in the good news stories, the strides taken in tertiary education, employment and socially, and in population numbers too.

Besides, there are buildings to claim and very likely drag some $millions grants out of 'gubbermint' for restoration, then suck dollars out of holding them, or sell,

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/5041577/pigeon-poo-graffiti-holes-in-the-floor-millions-to-restore-old-post-office/?cs=305

Maybe a Canberra restaurant, that could be fun for a while and get some headlines.

Hi Hasbeen,

" .... aboriginals will only really prosper when they forget the words aboriginals & Indigenous exist. They have to join the mainstream to gain the most Australia has to offer."

No, I don't think so: If people take it that they are Aboriginal as a matter of fact, since their earliest years, however defined, and that they aren't, after all, anything else, then why (and how ?) can they let that go ? My wife was Aboriginal, her mother was Aboriginal, HER parents were aboriginal, and so on - how do you forget or deny that ?

As for joining the mainstream, 'southern' Aboriginal people have been in it for 170 years or more. Almost by definition, Aboriginal people on missions were 'in the mainstream': they were bases for the men to go out from, and work all over the surrounding regions, and for the kids get good schooling.

A totally unrelated anecdote about my wife's great-grandfather, John Sumner, perhaps true: He was sitting on the bank of Lake Alexandrina fishing, when a white bloke came up to him and declared, "You, know, you're descended from a monkey. I read it in a book !" Sumner thought for a bit and answered, "Yes, that may be so. But if you get a monkey to sit down here beside me, and talk to both of us in your language, and if I can understand you but the monkey can't, then no, I'm not descended from a monkey. Then if you sit down next to the monkey and I speak to you both in my language, Ngarrindjeri, if you can't understand me any better than the monkey can, then you're descended from a monkey."

As an 'orphan' on the streets of Goolwa (well, the street of Goolwa) in the 1850s, he was working from about eight years old for a local farmer (named Sumner), and later worked as the gofer for the Protector, Dr Walker; he took out the first agricultural lease by an Aboriginal man in SA, got cleaned out by his relatives twice, so gave it away.

Joe

As you know Joe, I live in an area that has a high level of dysfunction, fuelled by drugs, alcohol and welfare. It's not the majority of aboriginal people here, but it's certainly a large enough percentage to cause a lot of social problems.
If I had any power I would focus it all on the first, basic step and that's getting every child to school very day. Not schools that teach dumbed down programs that focus heavily on indigenous language but actual standard literacy and numeracy, history and social studies.
Show aboriginal kids that they are not the first or only culture to experience dispossession and loss of culture. Give them the skills to engage with the wider community, and instead of focusing on past grievances, give them examples of aboriginal people who have succeeded, in situations they can relate to.
When I see newspaper articles praising indigenous achievement, for example indigenous doctors who have graduated, I wonder how community kids can relate to someone who looks like a middle class white person, and truly believe they can achieve the same.
They need exposure to successes from similar backgrounds and the educational skills to follow suit.
One great example is young Vinka Barunga, a girl from a dysfunctional community just outside Derby, in the Kimberley, who has recently graduated from medical school. Her story, and that of others with similar histories, should be told in all schools with indigenous students.

Hi Big Nana,

Yeah, language: my wife's sister, also a brilliant teacher, was a Reading specialist. So her school principal, with one of those really sweet smiles (you know the type), asked her if she wouldn't mind taking all the Aboriginal kids in the school for Aboriginal language, i.e. Pitjantjatjara. None of the kids were Pitjantjatjara, being if anything Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna, Narrangga, Booandik, Nukunu, Adnyamathana or Murning. [But it's all the same, isn't it, Aboriginal language ? Same with Aboriginal culture ? All the same ?]. She declined and the principal asked again. And again. As well as having all the Aboriginal kids dumped on her (i.e. that's multiculturalism: a multicultural class dumped on a multicultural teacher ?), this sort of segregation was tarted up as progressive. She resigned.

Of course, another idiocy with this sort of trick is that Pitjantjatjara kids can already speak Pitjantjatjara, if not all that well (and English usually not at all). They wouldn't have needed it at school. But by Christ they would have needed - do need - English at school, loads of it. But if course, that wasn't the reason for promoting an Aboriginal language, it simply got Aboriginal kids out of teachers' hair. Racism dressed up as 'cultural support'.

One thing that is forgotten and/or ignored and/or denied, is that, in the 'South', the 'settled' areas, basically the urban, agricultural and non-pastoral country, Aboriginal people have been embedded in a Western economy and society, albeit on its edges, since the earliest days. When George Taplin started up his school at Pt McLeay in 1860, he studied the Ngarrindjeri language very hard, since, as a missionary, he believed that one could not save anybody's soul unless one spoke in their language, but he was a bit taken aback to find that some of his kids were from elsewhere on the one hand, but that all could speak English on the other. Eventually he had to drop Ngarrindjeri and teach in English. Kids were familiar with towns, horses, ships, the harvest, money, grog, books, etc. from the 1850s - i.e. bi-cultural.

Love,

Joe

It is not just aboriginal teachers Joe.

My wife is librarian. When she was head librarian for a coastal Queensland city she used to run library courses for most of the schools in the district.

She found it amusing that teachers who reckoned 25 was as many kids as they should have in a class, would dump 80 to 90 kids on her, & shoot through to a staff room for a cup of tea. Interestingly it was the state school teachers who did this, not the other lot.

Hi Hasbeen,

With respect, you're missing my point. I'm suggesting that, for an Aboriginal teacher, Aboriginal kids, 'probes', language classes, whatever, get dumped on them - effectively, segregation in the name of progressiveness. Perhaps it happens in other fields of work as well, for Indigenous graduates: "Well, you're the Blackfella, aren't you ? So you do all the work with Blackfellas. What, don't you want to work with your own people ?'' My sister-in-law wanted to work as a teacher, an ordinary, if highly-qualified than average, teacher of all of the kids in her ordinary class, Aboriginal, Arab, Greek, Vietnamese, Anglo. But no, if you're Aboriginal, you get Aboriginal.

To take up an earlier point that you made, that Aboriginal people have to forget their Aboriginality to join the mainstream. Yes, they may 'forget' their traditional culture, at least down here in the 'South': some Aboriginal people easily became bi-cultural very early on, living and working in towns and on farms and ships. Adopting a package of Western practices, they simply made rational choices about the opportunities available.

Gradually- sometimes rapidly - their living world, revolving around that Western package, pushed the traditional world further onto the back-burner. Nobody stopped people from speaking their language or employing any cultural practices - even now, there are no insurmountable obstacles to any of that. They simply become impractical. I think people down around my wife's community may have forgotten even their clan names and countries by the end of the nineteenth century. So, yes, people have been Aboriginal AND Western for a long time and, in their own inventive ways, still are, certainly genealogically if not in any anthropologically cultural sense. And will continue to be.

Joe

Hi Leoj,

"Unfortunately there is no media or political interest in the good news stories, the strides taken in tertiary education, employment and socially, and in population numbers too."

Yes, this has puzzled me for a long time, the passing over of news about ingenious university graduates. Why the silence ? From both Indigenous elites and most of the media, and from most Australians, Black and White, as well ?

I recall talking to n Aboriginal academic about the rapid growth in graduate numbers; his face fell and he said, "Yeah, but it can't keep going like that. Can it ?" Well, yeah ! But I've rarely come across any hot-shot Indigenous academic or bureaucrat etc. who seemed positive about the notion of tens of thousands of graduates. Clearly power and control is involved there.

But I'm sure many people - and not just Whites either - just don't believe there could possibly be so many Indigenous graduates, or even any Indigenous graduates at all. Won't they lose their culture ? Don't they need their 'own' courses, even their own universities or more likely TAFE colleges (this has been pushed by Indigenous elites for forty years) ? Even if they don't want to enrol in them ? Well no, equal rights means equal rights to enrol [my computer writes "toenail"] in any damn course they like. And the vast, vast majority want to enrol in mainstream courses.

Possibly there is a sort of racism underlying everything in Australia, unconsciously in all of us, that Blacks are (or should be) locked into 'their own culture' to which, of course, something like university study is alien. So it's probably not happening. Well, yes, it is: since 1990, around 130,000 Indigenous people have at some time enrolled at a standard university. Close to twenty thousand are currently enrolled, and more than fifty thousand have graduated.

In fact, on most definitions, Indigenous people have achieved 'Mass University Participation'. In terms of graduate numbers, the Indigenous stock of graduates is roughly equivalent to Australia's in the early nineties.

Le's get used to it.

Cheers,

Joe

I saw Jacinta Price with Mark Latham last night. A few more like her could solve all indigenous problems

A breath of fresh air,

"Alice Springs councillor Jacinta Nampijinpa Price against changing date of Australia Day

Indigenous Alice Springs town councillor Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says aboriginal people have become professional mourners and it’s time it stopped...

Ms Price said there was no need to change Australia Day and people who celebrated on January 26 need not feel guilty..

“It is the aboriginal middle class who are concerned about date changes. Those pushing the agenda come from privilege themselves in comparison to the aboriginal people most marginalised.

“I’m sure if we are pressured enough to change the date then there will be something else for aboriginal middle class activists and guilt ridden white fellas to be offended about.

Ms Price says present indigenous problems should be fixed ahead of what has past.

“Why aren’t these people as concerned about the aboriginal people affected by domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse?” she said.

“People want to call it a day of mourning. Us aboriginal people have become professional mourners … we are constantly in a state of mourning. What do we have to benefit from being in a constant state of mourning? Mourning does not give us freedom, it imprisons us ... I’ve had enough.

“I want everyone to have opportunity. I want to pull my people out of their crippling state of mourning and I don’t want anyone to feel bad or guilty for feeling joy and celebrating a country we love.”

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/alice-springs-councillor-jacinta-nampijinpa-price-against-changing-date-of-australia-day/news-story/426d70114e2436d0b71f6134e76391b1

Hi Ttbn,

That's for sure ! My hope is that, once graduates get their eye in, they will look around, speak out, maybe get organised, and start to reach over their 'spokespersons'.

One amazing possibility: if you differentiate those graduate numbers, 57,000 or so, what leaps out is that many cities have big numbers of graduates - Sydney alone has around eight thousand, Brisbane nearly as many. Out around Penrith, for example, there are more than fifteen hundred between Campbelltown and Richmond and St Mary's. What if they held an annual Graduate Reunion ?

More than a thousand around Cairns. Nearly three hundred just around Wagga. Two and a half thousand just around Perth. Hey, what if they all held annual Graduate Reunions ? Who knows might come from those Reunions. Maybe even a more representative range of opinions about treaties, representation, etc.

It may not happen soon, but it will happen. Oh happy day !

Cheers,

Joe

//Of course, another idiocy with this sort of trick is that Pitjantjatjara kids can already speak Pitjantjatjara, if not all that well (and English usually not at all). They wouldn't have needed it at school.//

Yeah, I'm not sure I buy that argument. Bilingual education, even when the second language learnt is of little practical value for communication, does seem to have it's own inherent benefits.

My cousins are bilingual because they're Swedish, and apparently that's how Swedish kids are taught. They're fluent in two languages... the Swedish for talking to fellow Swedes, and the English for talking to the rest of us, like the simple Australian cousins. I am rather envious.

But my aunt could have just as easily married a Welshman as a Swede, and emigrated to Wales, and had Welsh children. In which case, I'd have bilingual cousins who spoke Welsh instead of Swedish. And what's the point of that? Welsh is crap language: you can't even have a decent game of Scrabble without an extra 50 L tiles. So why bother?

Well, it gives you a sound understanding of the importance of grammar for a start... something that seems to be sorely lacking in today's society. It gives you a basic understanding of linguistics. It seems to provide an overall cognitive benefit. It's worked well in the past, and works well in other countries.

And it would seem that what the language is doesn't matter too much - it might as well be Dothraki or Klingon as Swedish or Welsh.

And the arguments against? Well, they seem to revolve around the idea that learning in a extra language in addition to English means that your English necessarily suffers. And given that my Swedish cousin's have better written English than half the regulars on this site... I don't believe it.

Nope, I can't see a problem with bilingual education. As long as you can get the teachers, that is...

Sorry, spotted a stray apostrophe.

This:

//Bilingual education, even when the second language learnt is of little practical value for communication, does seem to have it's own inherent benefits.//

Should have been this:

\\Bilingual education, even when the second language learnt is of little practical value for communication, does seem to have its own inherent benefits.\\

My bad.

Hi Toni,

My point was, since English is the common language across Australia, the language of TV, schooling and university, it is vital for kids from remote areas to learn it as well as the language(s) that their mothers are quite capable of teaching them. One hears of young people having to take their grandparents into town if they want anything interpreted for them or buy anything.

My fear is that a rapidly developing class structure in Indigenous society in which urban versus rural populations, and educated/working people versus phenomenally-UNeducated/ welfare-oriented populations, broadens a Gap which it's nobody else's business to close except those disadvantaged populations. Indigenous society has always been very fragmented, probably for the sixty thousand years that it's been in Australia, so it's simply people's daily reality, even though it's looming as presaging the disintegration of Indigenous society. So those rural and remote populations have a longer and longer road ahead of them, with little guidance or motivation.

Of course, universities ' Indigenous programs have a major role here: twenty years ago, we used to go out to schools to enthuse the kids about working hard at school, going on to either uni or TAFE and getting solid, worthwhile, fulfilling jobs for life. Some schools, I recall, we would visit a a couple of times a year. Strangely, the lower down we went, down to Class/Grade Six or even lower, the more enthusiastic the kids were about their careers: one lovely kid I talked to after a session who was only in Class Two in a semi-remote community on the West Coast, she wanted to be a nurse. I hope she made it. Linda.

It seems universities don't do that any more, but are content with the low-hanging fruit of urban children coming through Year 12. Meanwhile those poor buggers out in the sticks are thereby condemned to short, boring and violent lives. Shame on them, heartless bastards.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe what I meant was put it into the background, rather than the forefront.

They need to become a mechanic, professor or what ever, with some or a lot of aboriginal heritage, rather than an aboriginal who does mechanics is a professor. Fixating on that aspect of their lives is I believe counter productive

I know I have some Irish & some English heritage, but I know very little about anything else. I could have aboriginal heritage. My mother was an orphan, with no knowledge of her parents. Her sister spent years trying to prove her heritage was English aristocracy. We believed none of it, & it interested the rest of us not at all.

If my mother & her sister had lived their heritage it might be different, but it should never become all consuming.

Hi Has been,

Yes, if we've learnt anything from this citizenship fiasco, it's that almost all of us have relatively recent migrant ancestry. Yet, none of those involved seem to have ever acted on behalf of any other country, so .... ?

Many of us are quite proud of a particular ancestry and fair enough. For many southern Aboriginal people, pale as they may be, they don't know of any other living ancestors and relations but Aboriginal ones. They've usually assumed almost from birth that they're Aboriginal, however they may define it. It's up to them. We're all Australians, with those (if you like) mini-identities nested within a broad common identity. Fair enough.

Cheers,

Joe

One funny thing about social change is that it sort of sneaks up on planners, while they're preoccupied trying to bring it about - but it takes forms that weren't directly intended. Hence, urban Indigenous people have been quietly forming a substantial middle class, based on their own efforts, with little input from policy-makers - through a determination to get through university and trade-training and onto secure employment.

As the wonderful policy scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Elmore insistently pointed out, social policies often, perhaps usually, have unintended consequences - and may not produce anything like the results that all the fanfare promoting a particular policy is accompanied with. Sometimes, sort of alongside policy, people themselves, en masse, bring about social change - which in turn has unpredictable consequences. Since people can't be tightly controlled, what they do, how they respond to opportunities, is out of the hands of planners and experts and elites: consequences follow regardless.

Building up stock of Indigenous graduates is a slow process: Whitefellas who are currently alive have had three generations to do it, Indigenous people maybe one and a bit. But from little things, etc. There are many steps between Indigenous graduations and satisfactory Indigenous employment, too many get sucked into the jaws of the Industry. Hopefully, that will change quickly as new graduate numbers out-pace the ability of families and cliques to entrap them all in lifelong but pointless jobs. Home ownership is another straw in the winds of opportunity and individual independence: clearly it's an urban phenomenon, and a very good indication that people don't ever intend to move out into the sticks, surely a logical cornerstone of the bankrupt notions of separatism and bogus 'self-determination'. So two distinct populations.

We can't tell the future but boy, will it be interesting.

Joe

Sorry. Way off topic, but it's not worth another thread: Pat Dodson has now been linked with other dual citizen MPs because of his father, John's, Irish heritage. Sheesh! See it today on ABC online.