Katelyn Barney

‘Taking your mob with you’: giving voice to the experiences of Indigenous Australian postgraduate students

Indigenous Australian postgraduate students experience different barriers from those encountered by non-Indigenous students. In the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate study, Indigenous students are more likely to come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, have lower personal incomes and lack family and other networks supportive of engagement with tertiary, and especially postgraduate, study. While there is a growing literature on Indigenous participation in higher education, with the exception of a few notable examples, there is little known about the effectiveness of support mechanisms and issues for Indigenous students undertaking postgraduate study. Drawing on interviews with current and past Indigenous postgraduate students at The University of Queensland, this paper problematises the postgraduate experience for Indigenous Australian students, identifying common themes in their accounts. It also discusses one of the outcomes of the project along with planned future developments that aim to provide better support for Indigenous Australian postgraduate students at The University of Queensland. By knowing and acting upon the kinds of mechanisms that can assist Indigenous postgraduate students, the disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous student participation in postgraduate study can begin to be addressed.

Unknown and Unknowing Possibilities Transformative Learning, Social Justice, and Decolonising Pedagogy in Indigenous Australian Studies

For tertiary educators in Indigenous Australian Studies, decolonising discourse in education has held much promise to make space for the diversity of Indigenous Australian peoples to be included, accessed, understood, discussed, and engaged with in meaningful ways. However, Tuck and Yang provide us with the stark reminder that decolonisation requires the return of Indigenous lands and does not equate to social justice. In this article, we take up Tuck and Yang’s concerns about decolonisation discourse into the terrain of transformative learning and pedagogical practice in Indigenous Australian Studies. We first position ourselves personally, professionally, and politically as non-Indigenous educators in the context of Indigenous Australian Studies in higher education and introduce the transformative learning environment of Political, Embodied, Active, and Reflective Learning (PEARL) in which we are currently involved. We then explore in more detail PEARL’s relationship to critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and decolonisation as praxis in the context of Indigenous Australian Studies. Ultimately, we enter into this discussion in a spirit of “unknowing” to question previously held assumptions about the transformative, socially just, and decolonizing potential of our educational praxis in Indigenous Australian Studies while at the same time exploring the possibilities, as Maxine Greene encourages, of decolonised vistas in this field as yet “unknown.”

Creating rainbows from words and transforming understandings: enhancing student learning through reflective writing in an Aboriginal music course

Reflective journal writing is acknowledged as a powerful method for promoting student learning in higher education contexts. Numerous scholars highlight the benefits of reflective writing and journaling for students and teachers in a wide range of teaching areas. There is however, little discussion of how reflective writing is used in teaching and learning in Indigenous Australian studies. This paper explores how reflective writing can help students think critically about the complexities of researching and writing about Indigenous Australian performance. We discuss ways of incorporating and enhancing reflection in teaching and learning Indigenous Australian studies and examine how the use of reflective writing in Indigenous Australian studies can engage rather than educate; democratise rather than dictate knowledge; critically question and reflect upon rather than control and censor what we can know; and actively transform instead of passively inform.

An Introduction to Sustainability and Ethnomusicology in the Australasian Context

The notion of sustainability includes many and varied aspects of music making and music research, some of which are now referred to as ‘applied ethnomusicology’. Reflecting an international turn towards ecological studies of music, this Special Issue focuses specifically on the work of Australasian ethnomusicologists, with emphasis on the Asia-Pacific region. This introduction provides context to issues surrounding sustainability and ethnomusicology in the Australasian context.

Move over and make room for Meeka: The representation of race, otherness and indigeneity on the Australian children's television programme Play School

Play school is an icon of Australian childrens television and an important part of Australian life – this programme, perhaps more than any other, has taken and continues to take centre stage in our living rooms and social worlds as young children. Play school is invested with an enormous amount of cultural capital and hence plays a significant role in the way that children engage and learn about social interaction, life and values in Australian culture. Aimed at preschoolers under the age of five, everything in the programme is done to relate as closely as possible to the social world and developmental level of the child and thereby assist their social, psychological and cognitive development. Through a combination of songs and dances, stories, dress up games and moments to ‘look through the window’ into the real world outside Play school, children are presented with a variety of sounds and images to engage with social concepts. In this paper we explore discourses of race, otherness and Indigeneity on Play school by deconstructing Aboriginalist images and representations featured on the programme and in doing so ask questions about the types of ‘race making’ that this programme engages in.

‘We need more mob doing research’: developing university strategies to facilitate successful pathways for Indigenous students into Higher Degrees by Research

ABSTRACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are still grossly under-represented in Higher Degrees by Research (HDRs) when compared to non-Indigenous students. Developing the pipeline of Indigenous students from undergraduate to postgraduate study remains key to increasing the number of Indigenous students undertaking HDRs. While much of the existing work has historically focused on explaining failure, more recent research has argued that the focus should instead be on deepening our understanding of the factors contributing to Indigenous student success. This paper reports on findings from a National Teaching Fellowship that explored how universities can increase the number of Indigenous students transitioning from undergraduate study to HDRs. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous HDR graduates, key success factors to enter into a HDR are examined. The paper also discusses outcomes from the fellowship that include strategies for successful pathways into HDRs for Indigenous students for university Faculties/Schools, individual staff, Indigenous Centres, and Graduate Research Schools. By knowing and acting upon the kinds of mechanisms that can assist Indigenous students to pathway into HDRs, universities can build successful strategies to increase Indigenous HDR enrolments across Australia and stimulate change in universities to implement stronger research pathways from undergraduate to postgraduate study for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Turning the colonial tide: working towards a reconciled ethnomusicology in Australia

This volume of essays honours the life and work of Stephen A. Wild, one of Australia’s leading ethnomusicologists. Born in Western Australia, Wild studied at Indiana University in the USA before returning to Australia to pursue a lifelong career with Indigenous Australian music. As researcher, teacher, and administrator, Wild’s work has impacted generations of scholars around the world, leading him to be described as ‘a great facilitator and a scholar who serves humanity through music’ by Andree Grau, Professor of the Anthropology of Dance at University of Roehampton, London. Focusing on the music of Aboriginal Australia and the Pacific Islands, and the concerns of archiving and academia, the essays within are authored by peers, colleagues, and former students of Wild. Most of the authors are members of the Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania of the International Council for Traditional Music, an organisation that has also played an important role in Wild’s life and development as a scholar of international standing. Ranging in scope from the musicological to the anthropological—from technical musical analyses to observations of the sociocultural context of music—these essays reflect not only on the varied and cross-disciplinary nature of Wild’s work, but on the many facets of ethnomusicology today.This chapter is a story about reconciliation. It is a story about the vision one person had for a music research organisation to be courageous and enter into discussion about disciplinary collusion in a coloniality of being. It is a story of what happened to begin to turn the colonial tide. On 28 May 2000, a milestone was reached in the process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Hundreds upon thousands of Australians walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge and other significant landmarks around the country in a groundswell of support for improving relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This gesture of support for Indigenous reconciliation put in place the impetus for institutional change, and placed renewed attention on the need for researchers and research organisations to reconsider the ways in which they engage in research with Indigenous Australian peoples.[Extract] Stephen Aubrey Wild was born in January 1941 in Fremantle, the maritime heart of Perth in Western Australia. His mother remembered hearing the five o’clock steam siren of the Fremantle docks from her maternity bed in hospital when Stephen was born. This might explain his wanderlust in the earlier part of adult life. Second among four siblings, Stephen grew up in the Perth suburb of Swanbourne. His love of music began as a child, both at home and at church. Music featured prominently in the Wild family. Grandfather Wild was choir master and church organist in a Melbourne Methodist church before his migration to Perth. Stephen’s father played the harmonica, and two of Stephen’s siblings also played the piano.The Study Group on Music of Oceania was proposed at the 1977 World Conference, held in Honolulu, and formally established two years later with Ricardo D. Trimillos as the first Chair (1979–83). Barbara Smith (1983–2001), Stephen A. Wild (2001–05), Raymond Ammann(2005–09), Denis Crowdy (2009–13), Kirsty Gillespie (2013–15),and Brian Diettrich (2015–17) have been Rics successors. The Study Group on Music and Dance of Oceania (SGMDO), as it is presently named, has held nine symposia in Australia (four times), Japan, Palau, USA, Papua New Guinea, and Guam. It sponsors panels and holds business meetings at ICTM World Conferences, issues publications, and has discussions of relevant issues whenever a number of its members are able to meet informally.