In this paper we present a brief history of education at the community of Milingimbi in northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory from the mission times to today. In focusing on the emergence and implementation of bicultural curriculum initiatives we explore some of the difficulties and ever present challenges encountered by Yolngu educators, leaders and elders in developing a local vision of education which, in order to meet community needs and aspirations, needs to be grounded in Yolngu stages of learning, cultural values of identity, responsibility and structures of authority.

One of the projects engaged in within the text Rethinking Indigenous Education (RIE) (McConaghy, 2000) was an analysis of the colonial regimes that are reproduced within Indigenous education, often despite our emancipatory intentions. Through a detailed critique of the various competitions for epistemic authority in the field, the book explores the structural processes by which certain knowledges are legitimated as “truths” and the material and symbolic effects of these.The focus of the book was on the imagined worlds of various traditions of knowing Indigenous education and their claims to authority. It was a “how” rather than a “who” story that dealt with theoretical assumptions, broad-brush policy and curriculum inquiry and that attempted to avoid the identity politics that had gripped Indigenous education for more than a decade. Importantly the book also suggested that rather than being cumulative, critique is a process that needs to be ongoing, done again and again. This paper, Remembering Namatjira, has sought to move beyond the main projects of RIE, many of them structural in nature, to an analysis of more intimate aspects of Indigenous education. It addresses some of the “who” issues, not in terms of representation politics, who can know and speak what, but in terms of the psychic difficulties that we attach to knowledge in Indigenous education. Whereas RIE drew upon postcolonial and feminist insights, this paper considers the contribution of psychoanalysis to thinking through some of the more intractable issues that remain unexamined or underexamined in the field. Among the issues addressed are the fundamental dilemmas around our ambivalences in education; the notion of pedagogical force (and transferences, resistances and obstacles to learning); the work of ethical witnessing; and issues of difficult knowledge, or knowledge and memories that we cannot bear to know. Central to the work of rethinking Indigenous education again, in moving beyond deconstruction, is the process of making meaning out of the ruins of our lovely knowledges (Britzman, 2003), our comfort knowledges, about what should be done in Indigenous education.

This paper provides an overview of the Australian Indigenous higher education sector commencing from its development in the early 1970s to the present. It outlines how the first Indigenous higher education support program was developed, the reasons behind the development, and how and why it has been replicated across the Australian higher education sector. The whole process over the past 30 years of formal Indigenous participation within the higher education sector has been a very difficult process, despite the major gains. On reflection, I have come to believe that all the trials and tribulations have revolved around issues of “cultural safety”, but we have never named it as such. I believe that it is time that we formally named it as a genre in its own right within the education sector. We need to extend it from our psyches and put it out there to be developed, discussed, debated and evaluated. This is what is beginning to take place within Indigenous health - so why not Indigenous education?

Indigenous studies (also referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies) has a double identity in the Australian education system, consisting of the education of Indigenous students and education of all students about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and histories. Through explanations of the history of the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musics in Australian music education, this article critiques ways in which these musics have been positioned in relation to a number of agendas. These include definitions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musics as types of Australian music, as ethnomusicological objects, as examples of postcolonial discourse, and as empowerment for Indigenous students. The site of discussion is the work of the Australian Society for Music Education, as representative of trends in Australian school-based music education, and the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, as an example of a tertiary music program for Indigenous students.

This paper describes a “scaffolding” methodology for teaching academic literacy that has achieved outstanding success with Indigenous adults returning to formal study at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. The paper begins by outlining the background to the Koori Centre program and the literacy needs of Indigenous students. We then describe the methodology, including the approach to teaching academic reading, making notes from reading, and writing new texts using these notes. These are key skills required for academic study, which Koori Centre students need to learn. The paper concludes by describing some of the results for students’ literacy development and changing approaches to teaching in the Koori Centre.

This article describes Indigenous Australian languages as having a history of pejoration dating from colonial times, which has masked the richness and complexity of mother tongues (and more recently developed kriols) of large numbers of Indigenous Australians.The paper rejects deficit theory representations of these languages as being inferior to imported dialects of English and explains how language issues embedded in teaching practices have served to restrict Indigenous Australian access to cultural capital most valued in modern socio-economic systems. We go on to describe ways in which alternative perspectives where acknowledgment of rich, complex and challenging features of Indigenous Australian languages may be used by educators as empowering resources for teacher education and teaching in schools. Our paper stresses the urgency of establishing frameworks for language success within which to develop other successful learning outcomes of Indigenous Australians.

From the early 1900s, education in the Torres Strait was dominated by protectionism and segregation. In 1964 on Thursday Island the segregated state school system was abolished: “coloured children” could attend the high top from 1964 and thus secondary schooling became available to all as far as year 10. Since then there have been considerable changes. This paper describes and analyses some of these within a framework of relational justice and social access. Themes discussed include written texts about the people of Torres Strait and about education in Torres Strait; the growth of Torres Strait Islander voice in educational research; educational governance, facilities and staffing; teaching in Torres Strait classrooms; curriculum and vlanguage; preparing teachers to teach in Torres Strait; supporting teachers in Torres Strait; school-community relationships; and some recent initiatives.

Since 1990, the School of Education at James Cook University has produced and delivered a successful offcampus Bachelor of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their home communities through the Remote Area Teacher Education Program (RATEP):A community-based teacher education program for Indigenous peoples. This paper examines five key areas. One is the intersystemic management structure that has majority representation from Indigenous communities and peak education bodies as well as representation from the other three stakeholders: Education Queensland, the School of Education at James Cook University and the Tropical North Queensland Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE). A second area is RATEP’s innovative use of information and communication technologies in teaching and learning. A third theme is its dynamic evolution from (a) two dedicated RATEP sites in the Torres Strait to 12 sites throughout Queensland; (b) geographically remote sites to a combination of remote, rural, and urban sites; (c) a principle where students gather at a dedicated site with its own teachercoordinator to clusters where a number of students are living in different locations and the coordinator travels between these; (d) movement of sites from location to location depending on need and demand; and (e) a fixed program to a highly flexible one that allows multiple entry and exit points, including honours. A fourth area is the critical insights generated from research into the program by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. The final theme is the retention of graduates from RATEP within the classroom and their promotion into the administrative and advisory teaching sectors.

This paper presents a snapshot of concerns in the field of Indigenous education in the late 1960s as compared with those of today, highlighting areas of improvement. Indigenous people's aspirations are not being met and the gaps between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations on all major educational indicators are unacceptably large. These gaps are mirrored in other areas of social and physical well-being, including life expectancy and employment. Research demonstrates the interrelationships between education, health, unemployment, poverty, and general social disadvantage, exposing social barriers to learning. We describe two small-scale educational programs, which are tailored to the needs of the Aboriginal participants and which aim to assist families through education, mentoring and community development processes to work towards practical ways for meeting their long-term aspirations. The holistic nature of the programs helps people to overcome the social barriers, which have impeded their learning in the past. Synchronised inter-agency, inter-departmental collaboration is required by such programs, which are intensive and expensive to run. But USA Project Head Start, which is similarly intensive and expensive, has demonstrated longterm benefits to society and the participants, which far outweigh the original costs in terms of savings in the areas of criminal justice, welfare, and health.

This paper concerns my own reflections on ethnographic research with Indigenous students studying at university. I began the research by using the methodology of interpretive ethnography to discover what constitutes success for Indigenous students studying at university. But after some unflattering critiques of my initial interpretation of the data, I returned to the drawing board to reflect on the methods that I had used to organise and structure the data in my interpretation. This led me to the critical ethnographers who helped me to look back on my initial positioning to see things that I could not see before. The paper consists of critical reflections on how power and knowledge are produced through the ethnographer’s methodology to suggest that knowledge is not just found in the field or in the data but is also negotiated and produced through the relation between the participant and ethnographer. It is this relation that governs how the data are collected and what the ethnographer can find.