Paul,

Given that perhaps half of all young Indigenous people will, at sometime, enrol at a university in a standard award-level course, I don't see much elitist about that.

Thirty-odd years ago, there was quite a bit being written, especially in Britain, about 'mass tertiary education'. It was variously defined as 15 % and up to 35 % of an age-group. I knocked up an article about MITE, Mass Indigenous Tertiary Education, (when Indigenous participation was already around 12-14 %) that disappeared into the ether. So 50-55-60 % Indigenous participation doesn't look too bad now.

My wife Maria wrote a series of articles in around 2000-2007, suggesting that there could be fifty thousand graduates by 2020, and that they would surely have a major impact on Indigenous lives generally. At the time, there were only around 12,000 Indigenous university graduates. Such different times ! At the end of 2020, there will be somewhere between sixty (Ed. Dept) and eighty (ABS Census) thousand Indigenous university graduates, with another four thousand coming out each year. And increases in performance of around 7-8% p.a. So around 130,000 graduates by 2030, eleven years away.

Certainly, many of those graduates will take the easy road, and let themselves get sucked into the Indigenous Industry and the power elite, to which, in any case, many already related: nepotism and croneyism can be great for some careers. But i live in hope that many want to genuinely do a good job, for Australians generally and either/or/both Indigenous Australians.

By the way, is it true that Bruce Pascoe, the Aboriginal farmer, has no Aboriginal ancestry at all, pretty much all of it being English, specifically Cornish (and strangely no convict ancestry) ? But he has such a big beard, he must be Aboriginal !

Cheers,

Joe

Paul,

No, I don't know any more about Yuwali than what you have written: thank you. There are also other cases of people coming out of the desert much later, in the mid-eighties. But I suspect that people knew about that 'outside world', perhaps feared it, and may have come in temporarily to live at arm's length from missions or stations before moving back out.

I would have thought that the round-up of people in the path of the Woomera Rocket Range took place a few years earlier than 1964, maybe 1957-1959 ? But that's South Australia, which is all I really know anything about :(

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Joe,

I was making the point, when you only accept people because of certain criteria that is being elitist. I believe like all students Aboriginal children included, where possible should be part of the general education system. No one should be hived off because of their race or religion. I must agree with you, there is no case for a special aboriginal university.

1964 was the year of the Blue Streak Rocket tests at Woomera. The Percival Lakes in WA, several hundred miles away, was the dump zone for the rockets. What was unique about Yuwali story was that film was taken of hers and the others 'coming out'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEWBwE-FnOU

Paul,

Depending on how one assesses the Indigenous population here, currently about 11.2 % of all Indigenous people over 15, are university graduates. I was very surprised to read, on

http://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education?time=1970..2010&country=ZAF

that, back in 2010, the proportion in China was only 2.71 %

In Italy, 6.84 %

In Spain and the UK, about 15 %

In Australia as a whole, 18.52 %

And in the US, 26.76 %

So, Indigenous people's performance is somewhere between Italy's and the UK's.

By 2025, the Indigenous performance rate will be around 13.2 %, and by 2030, around 17 %.

Of course, Australia's performance rate will also be improving between now and 2030, maybe up to about 22 %. So at current rates of improvement, Indigenous Australians will have reached parity in graduate numbers by around 2040, twenty-odd years away, at around 25 %.

Joe

Hi SM,

You assume because a Western lifestyle has more of the material things, and life expectancy id greater etc, therefore it must be superior to the life of an aboriginal person. Only if you judge life by Western values. Many Australians despite have lots of material goodies have emotionally crap lives. In 1770 the British elite thought their culture was superior to all others. The fact was 90% of their own people lived rather miserable lives, born into poverty, living a wretched existence, dying in poverty. Was it really a superior existence to aboriginal people? I don't think so!

Materialistic conservatives such as yourself, will always think that way. For you happiness equals wealth, nothing else is important.

Hi Paul,

Your comment to SM: "You assume because a Western lifestyle has more of the material things, and life expectancy is greater etc, therefore it must be superior to .... " traditional Aboriginal life: on a point-by-point survey of Aboriginal opinions these days, I suspect that SM's observation would prevail.

Infant mortality in Australia is currently less than one per thousand p.a., while in traditional society, it could have been more like one in two. If traditional people survived into their early-adulthood, they could expect to live for another twenty or thirty years, with a chance of dying violently a few times higher than in current Australian society, especially if they were women.

Yes, many people in our society are unhappy, that's very sad, I'm devastated, but I'm not sure how one would measure happiness in a traditional society, given that almost none currently exist. It's 37 degrees in Adelaide today, so I expect that Aboriginal people here would prefer to have their air-conditioning on, rather than walk around in the sun, constantly looking for food.

Not that Adelaide matters much in the scheme of things.

Let's tell it like it is :)

Cheers,

Joe