Beth Marsden, University of Melbourne
DOI
We walked to school, which is probably about five kilometres every morning and five back. Summertime it was good because we’d walk along the river track and then we’d accidentally get fallen into the water… In the wintertime we weren’t allowed to catch the bus because it was a whitefella’s bus only.[1]
This source is part of an ongoing project on the national history of government school systems in Australia. The project investigates the development of various state government systems, and the role of white non-Indigenous teachers and communities. Schools were not desegregated until the late 1960s. My methodology relies heavily on the personal accounts of Indigenous people as a necessary starting point. The history of Indigenous school experience presents numerous challenges: methodological, archival and political. Many of these challenges are common to scholars working in the history of experiences; others emerge from Indigenous Studies scholars’ disruption of the ways that research about Indigenous people is undertaken. Some are specific to the settler colonial context of Australia and my position as a non-Indigenous white settler historian.
To approach Indigenous people’s experiences of school journeys, I selected school journeys as a motif of childhood and school, often recalled in oral histories and autobiographies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Following the lead of historians of education who have gleaned insights into school experiences via autobiography, biography, and other forms of life writing, I have used these sources also to locate accounts of school journeys.[2] These are popular and oft-recalled childhood memories.[3] The experience of leaving the institution of the family for the institution of the school is remembered with a sense of independence, freedom and unsupervised adventure shared with siblings or neighbours.[4] Baraparapa Elder Esther Kirby’s account, cited above, captures this well. The walk invokes positive associations but in the framework of segregation. Her account shows that barriers to education extended beyond racist curricula and teachers to issues of access and conveyance.
This is a common theme in Indigenous people’s oral histories, including that of Frances Nean, an Elder of the Gamilaroi people:
I come from Walhallow… We were closer living to a White school than an Aboriginal school. We had to walk to school, past the cemetery, past the railway square, and all… It was about five miles a day… Wished we could have gone up to the other school— it was a lot closer, just a hop, step and jump. But in those days, it was racist out there.[5]
Racism shaped her experience beyond the school grounds, permeating her journey to and from her home. Her narrative conveys the injustice and absurdity of segregated schooling. Both accounts are evidence of the difficulties of school access for Indigenous people.
There are records detailing the establishment of a segregated school for Aboriginal students at Walhallow in 1906. For 15 years prior to this, Aboriginal and white settler children had attended school together.[6] These records comprise documents authored by non-Indigenous administrators, teachers and parents. Frances’ account provides a perspective that is missing from these files: they make no mention of the impact of segregated schooling on Aboriginal students, although there is much discussion about the distance that white students had to travel to get to school. This absence in the records prompts me to reevaluate the authority of archival sources.
The late historian Tracey Banivanua-Mar urged a focus on accounts of Indigenous mobility and action in the sources to navigate deficiencies in the settler colonial record. In this instance, my focus must necessarily remain on what Frances describes and what her actions can expose about the school system. I might be tempted to infer subjective meaning from her account, and to read deductively from her oral history to link to a theoretical framework such as decolonisation or critical race theories. For instance, later in her interview, Frances talks about contemporary changes to schooling at Walhallow, and describes Gamilaroi people as the owners of the land: ‘Because we really own it, don’t we?’ I can recognise that Frances’ experiences are connected to her being on her own Country, while also deciding not to attempt to infer what this meant for her lived experiences. But knowing this context does not mean I should step beyond my positionality to extrapolate beyond Frances’ own description of her own experience.[7] Her comments about owning the Country remind me that there are other layers to her story that are beyond the knowledge of those who are not Indigenous, and not Gamilaroi. How it felt to be denied education at a school located on Country belonging to her people is beyond the limit of my access. I cannot superimpose my own meanings into Frances’ experiences, her position or identity. In some ways this means accepting her personal account at face value, as a description of her lived experiences of segregated schooling without trying to elicit further meaning about identity from that account.
One aim of this project is to create opportunities for Indigenous people to see their experiences reflected in a critical history of education, by positioning experiences of exclusion and racism as systemic issues, and not isolated examples or ‘anecdotal’ evidence. Frances Nean’s experience of walking to school was marked by her knowledge that she was barred from the White school, and that her longer journey to school was one outcome of her people being dispossessed of their Country. Esther Kirby’s memory of her school journey contains both the joy of the river in summer, as well as the injustice of being barred from the bus during winter. Exclusions rarely feature in non-Indigenous peoples’ memories in Australia.
Another aim is to generate new knowledge and understandings in the non-Indigenous public. One of the most wicked tricks of settler colonialism is its invisibility to settlers. This makes it difficult to interrogate the ongoing processes of colonisation carried out through mainstream systems that are designed to benefit settlers, such as education, health and welfare. The apparent lack of awareness of non-Indigenous people to the racism of these systems is an oft-cited problem in Australian society. Research has shown this contributed to the failure of the 2023 constitutional referendum to include a representative Indigenous voice in parliament.[8] The development of methods to make critical histories of school (and other) systems accessible and understandable to a non-Indigenous, public audience is urgent. Attending to lived experience and showcasing Indigenous people’s perspectives will, hopefully, change the ways histories of settler institutions are constructed, and received, in Australia.
This remains a fraught task. It requires careful reflective and relational work. Non-Indigenous historians do not always have a great reputation with Indigenous people. Mariko Smith has suggested that ‘history and historians’ are seen as a ‘bit of a dirty word,’ by Indigenous people.[9] Raelee Lancaster, writing about the challenges of studying history in academic spaces, notes that disciplinary knowledge was routinely prioritised over Indigenous knowledge, and of her own ‘lived experiences being invalidated as anecdotal and therefore, unreliable.’[10] It is becoming less common for non-Indigenous historians to produce ‘Indigenous history’ without the collaboration, direction or co-design of Indigenous people. While this remains a work in progress for the discipline of history, Barry Judd and Katherine Ellinghaus have critiqued the ways that historians have engaged with Aboriginal people and used research, as ‘an extension of disciplinary power over the “truth”’.[11] This is in keeping with global Indigenous Studies, where numerous methodological and theoretical frameworks that critique and guide non-Indigenous scholars have been advanced.[12] These critiques are not, I think, intended to devalue history. Indeed, the role of history in truth-telling and processes of redress is often evoked by Indigenous leaders and communities. Instead, I take such critiques as generous and generative suggestions for how things must be done differently.
Why has so little been written about how Indigenous students in Australia have experienced school? Since W.E.H. Stanner labelled the one-sided construction of Australian history the ‘Great Australian Silence’ in 1968, historians have made significant moves to address and fill that gap. Yet, histories of education continue to make scant mention of Indigenous schooling experiences. Why is this the case? One factor is methodological. Different school systems operated across several jurisdictions, with local conditions meaning that legislation and policy was only applied in an ad hoc way. This has resulted in complex, messy and uneven education and school records. School systems reacted to Indigenous people’s engagement in a range of ways. Some governments refused to acknowledge the presence of Indigenous students. Other governments developed systems to exclude and segregate Indigenous students altogether. There are few records created by Indigenous people. Most education records were created by non-Indigenous administrators and often misrecognise, marginalise or omit the experiences of Indigenous people.
This is not to say that such records are not vital for understanding and exposing past injustices. As Maria Nugent has pointed out, ‘Our archives and collections… still contain plenty of damning evidence to hold the past to account.’ [13] However, writing history based only on records created by non-Indigenous administrators, agencies and actors can only do so much.
For historians, centring the perspectives of Indigenous people means a more ready engagement with lived experiences shared via oral histories, life writing, autobiography and testimony. The inclusion of these other forms of evidence, of diverse sources, is increasingly common. Yet this has been a slow process. Oral history, as an example, has an ambiguous status as a historical source and in Australia, labelled as unreliable, exaggeration, myth, or too political.[14] As historiographer Anna Clark notes, history in Australia has held tight to ‘rules of evidence and expertise’, and excluded historical perspectives that did not meet these definitions. Clark also points out that oral history, like family history – equally as important to Indigenous histories – is still marginalised from disciplinary history in Australia.[15] It may be that this is because oral histories are especially powerful in settler colonial contexts: the accounts given by Indigenous people usually provide a different perspective than ‘official’ and widely held settler understandings of the past.[16]
Indigenous people’s perspectives and experiences have been marginalised and derided because they challenge the ways that the past is organised and controlled by settler society. It is for this reason that there is so much transformative potential in foregrounding oral histories.[17] As well as presenting perspectives on historical events and structures that were not captured by settler record-makers, either through carelessness, indifference or by choice, the form of oral history is powerful too. Such non-textual accounts, created by Indigenous people, challenge the ‘hierarchies of knowers and knowing’ that settler-colonial structures depend upon.[18] Esther’s and Frances’ memories of walking to school have been mediated through time and the collective experiences of exclusion from schooling and other mainstream institutions. Paying attention to Indigenous people’s experiences reveals the ways settler colonial histories can be misleading, sometimes deliberately so. If I can now see the deceptions and errors of settler colonial histories, it is only because they have been pointed out by Indigenous people talking and writing about their experiences of school and education. Here I arrive at a central conundrum underpinning the methodology and the politics of this project. How can I represent the experiences of Indigenous people in ways that will create space for non-Indigenous people to understand the impact of racism? How can I aim to consistently recognise the limits of what I can know about Indigenous people’s experiences?
Of course (most) historians think about these questions, and about how to avoid appropriating others’ experiences. Caution about overstepping the bounds of historical sources, and questions of intentions, emotions and agency are not particular to my project. All historians deal with incomplete archives.[19] Questions about how race and Indigeneity necessarily complicate the theoretical and methodological approaches of historians of experience extend beyond this piece and my project. Researching people’s lives, especially the lives of people who do not share one’s own identity positions, is always fraught. And in settler-colonial contexts, like Australia, where the personal and the political are blurred, this is as it should be: difficult, discomfiting work.[20]
Notes
[1] Esther Kriby, Yulendji Group.
[2] Jo May and Helen Proctor, ‘Being Special: Memories of the Australian Public High School, 1920s-1950s’, History of Education Review, 42 (2013) 55-68; Anita Heiss, ed., Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2018).
[3] See Museum of Childhood Ireland, When We Were Kings and Queens of the Road; Julie McLeod and Katie Wright, Schooling Memories.
[4] Melanie Surmont, ‘The way to school as world in-between: narratives of boys [sic] and girls [sic] experiences in the 1950s’, Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographpie, 12 (2006): 75-8.
[5] Frances Nean, Gamilaraay Voices: Frances, ANU Experience, 12 November 2020.
[6] Walhallow Public School Records, Administrative File, NSW Education Department, Item No. [5/17983], New South Wales State Archives, Kingswood.
[7] Aileen Moreton Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota, 2015), 9-10.
[8] Nicholas Biddle et al., Detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum and related social and political attitudes (Canberra: Australian National University, 2023).
[9] Mariko Smith, cited in Kiera Lindsey et al., ‘“Creative histories” and the Australian context,’ History Australia, 19 (2022): 325–346.
[10] Raelee Lancaster, ‘Indigenous People are the Custodians of our Own Cultural Heritage,’ SBS Voices, 9 November 2020.
[11] Barry Judd and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘F.W. Albrecht, Assimilation Policy and the Education of Aboriginal Girls in Central Australia: Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence in Australian History, Journal of Australian Studies, 44 (2020), 3.
[12] Eve Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Harvard Educational Review 79 (2009): 409–428; Tammy Beatty-Nameikwe, ‘Dear White Academics, Indigenous Trauma is not your school project,’ Medium, 7 January 2023.
[13] Maria Nugent, ‘Truth Telling, Return to Uluru and Reckoning with the Sins of Fathers’, The Conversation, 9 April 2021.
[14] Alistair Thomson, ‘Oral History,’ Australian History Now, eds Anna Clark and Paul Ashton (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013) 57-8; Peter Read, ‘Making Aboriginal History,’ Australian History Now, eds Clark and Ashton, 23.
[15] Anna Clark, ‘What is History in a Settler Colonial Society? Mapping the Limits and Possibility of Ethical Historiography Using an Australian Case Study’, History and Theory, 63 (2024), 66-7.
[16] Nēpia Mahuika, Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[17] Timothy J. Stanley, ‘Witnessing Exclusion: Oral Histories, Historical Provenance and Antiracism Education,’ Oral History, Education and Justice: Possibilities and Limitations for Redress and Reconciliation, eds Kristina R Llewellyn and Nichola Ng-A-Fook (London: Routledge, 2019), 32.
[18] Lisa K. Taylor, ‘What does it mean to story our shared historical present?’ Education and Justice, eds Llewellyn and Ng-A-Fook, 134.
[19] Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and Karen Vallgārda, ‘Voices and Sources: Lessons from the History of Childhood,’ HEX Digital Handbook of the History of Experience, 2023.
[20] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization Is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (2012): 1–40.