Australian Indigenous Education

First Nations educators from Australia and New Zealand have come together to promote Indigenous leadership within schools.

Kempsey was a place where Aboriginal heritage was treated as a shameful family secret when @IndigenousX host, Jimmy Kyle, grew up there. He was seen to have a choice of identity – but how can you choose the truth?

MILLIONS of dollars in Federal Government funding to boost indigenous economic development has gone to companies that employ very few indigenous workers, including one based in Malaysia.

Murujuga, also known as the Burrup Peninsula, on the mid-west coast of Western Australia, is a special place. Home to over one million Indigenous engravings on piles of ancient boulders, the landscape is of great cultural significance to the Ngarda-Ngarli – people speaking Ngarluma, Injabarndi, Mardudunhera, Yaburara and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo languages.

Some of this rock art, or petroglyphs, may demonstrate the first use of this arid landscape by people arriving over 45,000 years ago, when these hills were more than 100 km from the coast. Others show us the bountiful lifestyle of hunter-fisher-gatherers along this coastline before the arrival of historic explorers, pastoralists, pearlers and miners.

This school turned its Indigenous students' performance around. Can the rest of the country follow suit?

For many people living in remote Aboriginal communities, mobile devices are the sole means of accessing the internet. However, when the use of mobile devices oversteps social and cultural lines, it can have serious consequences for individuals and their families.

While some people avoid social media and online financial transactions as a protective measure, this can result in new forms of digital exclusion.

Knowing who you are – a sense of self, a sense of place; of connection to ancestral culture – is an important right. It is a right that is unnoticed by many, and too often denied to our children.

I am fortunate in knowing my shared ancestry: Gamilaray (Kamilaroi) and Scottish.

I am a yinar, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt; an Australian. I find peace and purpose in knowing where I am from, and where I belong.

The latest round of Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) has not allocated any of its National Priorities Pool funding to projects targeting Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander student access Australia wide, despite it’s focus specifically on increasing participation for students from low socio-economic backgrounds and remote areas.
 
Projects focusing on remote and regional engagement in the Northern Territory were also ignored, despite the majority of the Territory’s population being located in remote and very remote Australia.
 
Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) is a federal government program that funds higher education providers to increase the involvement in higher education by students from a low socio-economic status (SES) background. This includes assisting students from a low SES background who are also Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders or from regional and remote Australia or students with disability or from other backgrounds.

A beautiful interactive SBS online documentary puts the spotlight on Marra, an Indigenous language spoken fluently by just three people.

What you’ll do

In this exciting and rewarding role, you will provide a broad range of professional support and advice for the College’s outreach and engagement activities. In particular, you will:

provide specialist support and complex advice for the development and implementation of a comprehensive outreach and engagement plan for the College;

coordinate all USQ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student outreach activities and community engagement for the College;

actively promote the services and opportunities available to current and future Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students;

coordinate the organisation of events, awards and functions;

design and prepare marketing and promotional materials; and

develop and foster positive partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders.

This position will be based at USQ Toowoomba or USQ Springfield.

Suicide is the leading killer of young Indigenous people, with males between the ages of 25 and 29 having the highest rate in the world of taking their own lives.

But now a community-led initiative between Indigenous elders from the Warlpiri community in the Northern Territory and mental health awareness organisation, Black Dog Institute, will look to crowdfund a mobile app aimed at tackling those figures through the use of traditional Indigenous ideologies.

With popular Indigenous actor Jack Charles as its patron, the app will be titled Kurdiji 1.0 after the Warlpiri word for "to shield, protect or ward off". It will use traditional ideas to empower young people through a connection to their Indigenous identities, the land and their community in the hopes of reversing high suicide rates.

The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG officially launched the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) publication, Overturning aqua nullius.
 
The award-winning work aims to cultivate a new understanding of Aboriginal water rights and interests in the context of Aboriginal water concepts and water policy development in Australia. 
 
Overturning aqua nullius, by Dr. Virginia Marshall, argues that Aboriginal water rights require legal recognition as property rights. 

A University of Queensland study has highlighted the health inequalities between indigenous an

The most comprehensive genetic study of Indigenous Australians to date indicates that the group is the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth, dating back more than 50,000 years ago - and that modern Indigenous Australians are the descendants of the first people to settle Australia.

The new paper, alongside two others published today in Nature, reveal important information about the origins and migratory history of our species, including insight into the common ancestors of all non-African humans alive today.

According to the DNA results in two of the papers, most modern Eurasians are descended from a single wave of migrants that left Africa around 72,000 years ago.

From that original migration, Indigenous Australians and Papuans (ancestors of indigenous people from New Guinea) split off and ventured across the sea around 58,000 years ago before arriving in Australia roughly 50,000 years ago - and were likely the first humans to cross an ocean.

What does a traditional indigenous dance thousands of years old have in common with a fire-breathing, 50-tonne metallic contraption made from repurposed military and industrial hardware?

NITV has put together a list of 20 trailblazing Indigenous women who have changed Australia.

Indigenous slavery in Western Australia may form the basis of a class action on unpaid wages in the state, a lawyer says.

The action — launched by the uncle of prominent activist Noel Pearson in Queensland earlier this year — may be expanded into WA, and name both the State Government and companies that benefited from unpaid wages arrangements with Aboriginal people, Shine lawyers' Jan Saddler said.

"One of the causes of action that we are investigating is whether or not that type of arrangement effectively amounted to slavery," Mr Saddler said.

Just one generation ago Australian schoolkids were taught that Aboriginal people couldn’t count beyond five, wandered the desert scavenging for food, had no civilisation, couldn’t navigate and peacefully…