Indigenous Professoriate Lecture series

Event Name
Indigenous Professoriate Lecture series
Date
7 September 2022
Time
01:00 pm - 03:00 pm
Location
Parramatta South Campus

Address (Room): Western Sydney University Parramatta Campus Building EA, Level 2, Room EA.2.13 Parramatta, NSW 2150

Description

As the Black Lives Matter movement gathered global momentum in 2020, the words ‘I can’t breathe’ became a recurring refrain; forever linked to the African American man whose life was extinguished by police on a US city street. The then Prime Minister, Scott Morrison expressed relief that such things did not happen in Australia. Few recall the same words uttered years earlier, in 2015, by an Aboriginal man in a police cell in Sydney, as his life too was violently terminated. Yet, more than thirty years ago, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody made sweeping recommendations for change which should have prevented that death and the almost 500 deaths that have occurred since.

Amongst a plethora of recommendations, the Royal Commission directed at the judicial and custodial institutions, were a small cluster of instructions relevant to higher education and the professionals that universities educate. What the commission findings made abundantly clear was that modern Australia is inextricably tied to its colonial past in ways that are not necessarily evident to the majority of non-Indigenous Australians.

Esteemed Aboriginal poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal notes “let no-one say the past is dead, the past is within us” (Noonuccal 1976: 94), however the past is not a single entity, equally understood as a universal truth. The need for a ‘truth-telling commission’ which emerged from national Indigenous dialogues preceding the Uluru Statement from the Heart, suggest that there remains much to reconcile in national account of historical truth. Similarly, there remains widespread Indigenous silences in our disciplinary curricula. This disciplinary ‘ignorance’ might be explained as gaps in knowledge or, as a more systematic unknowing designed to reproduce racial oppression.

In this presentation I examine the colonial pasts of our universities to illuminate some of the blind spots which impede educational reconciliation.

Speakers: Professor Susan Page

Web page: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/indigenous-professoriate-lecture-professor-susan-page-tickets-379379443127

Contact
Name: Crystal McDermid

c.mcdermid@westernsydney.edu.au

Phone: 0499 479 426

School / Department: Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Indigenous Leadership