Two Indigenous Populations ? Two Diverging Paradigms ?
Maria Lane
12th March 2007
Indigenous tertiary participation is being transformed by a shift from Special Entry
enrolments to enrolments straight from Year 12: the numbers in the Year 12 agegroup have risen dramatically since 1998, by fifty percent, but Year 12 enrolments
have risen even as a proportion of the age-group, tripling over the same period,
while the number of Indigenous students gaining their SACE rose nearly four times
between 1998 and 2006. Clearly, increases in quantity have been accompanied by
improvements in quality, regardless of any educational interventions and perhaps in
spite of them. This suggests that a radical change is occurring in the level of
indigenous participation to Year 12, and also suggesting that this extra student
population, with quite different participation rates, is of a different nature to the
pre-existing population, which has participated at roughly the same rate for
decades.
This may indicate the development, over the past couple of generations, of two
different Indigenous populations, operating on completely different, in fact
antithetical, ethics and paradigms:

one risk-averse, welfare- and security-oriented

and the other more opportunity-, effort- and outcome-oriented.
Of course, the two populations are linked through kinship and continuing
interaction. I suggest that much of this difference relates to, among other things, the
high rate of inter-marriage of a large proportion of the latter Indigenous population
since the seventies. This is already having important quantitative and qualitative
implications for secondary and tertiary education, for tertiary student support
services, and ultimately for graduate employment. Indigenous education policy has
been designed, almost exclusively, and with almost no positive outcomes, to cater to
the needs of the Embedded Population. Much of this policy has reached exhaustion
point, as has the entire paradigm of Dependence and Bureaucratic Control, on
which the Embedded Population has centred its survival for nearly forty years.
However, a new paradigm – strictly speaking, an old paradigm which has been
suppressed for forty years – is set to take centre stage, thanks largely to the efforts
of Indigenous working people and university graduates: around the country, the
long, slow grind of effort has finally produced a population, possibly a majority of
Indigenous people in the cities, a minority elsewhere, with quite different work and
cultural practices. This resurgent paradigm focuses more on universal human
rights, the rights to a rigorous, standard education and equal rights to a place in the
Australian society and economy – recognizably a much more liberal, even bourgeois
ideology, individualist and competitive.
The former ideology may have been intended to be collectivist, community-focussed
and independent, but degenerated into a protection for a work-shy, welfare-oriented
population, an ideology which has become an individualist parody on its charter,
parochial rather than communal, welfare-dependent rather than self-determining.
This paradigm may have been developed with good intentions, even under the
banner of ‘self-determination’, but has now demonstrated its severe limitations after
nearly forty years. It has allowed Indigenous people to externalize all responsibility,
either onto the non-Indigenous world, onto the bureaucracy or – worst of all – onto
their own biology. It has been dominant not just in education policy, but in policies
directed at indigenous health, housing, community government, correctional
services, legal services – in fact, in all aspects of Indigenous life. None of the policies
associated with this paradigm can be said to have worked, except those in higher
education.
But a new set of practices, based on more active rights- and agency-focussed
ideologies, is displacing the old bankrupt and passive paradigm. Gigantic tasks lie
ahead, to bring about a transformation from one paradigm to another across so
many vital fields of activity, and from passive models of structural and external
responsibility, to active models in which Indigenous people are the agents of their
own future.
Introduction
In South Australia, it seems clear now that we are in a time of substantial improvement in
Indigenous secondary school success. Evidence of this is the very rapid growth in the numbers of
Indigenous students gaining their SACE, particularly in the numbers gaining sufficient TER
scores to enrol directly in tertiary study. These improvements have accompanied an increase in
the number of Year 12 finishers over the last eight years, which in turn has been disproportionate
to the healthy increase in the number of Indigenous people in the Year 12 age-group.
In quantitative terms, for 2006 relative to 1998,

ear 12 age-group numbers have risen fifty percent,

the number of Indigenous students enrolling in Year 12 has more than doubled,

the number of Indigenous students gaining their SACE has more than tripled,

and the number gaining good TER scores is likely to have at least tripled.
Clearly, the demographic changes have been accompanied by some other, more qualitative,
improvements which have been responsible for the vastly better SACE and TER results. We
suggest that policy-driven interventions have had nothing to do with these improvements, that
they are endogenous to the Indigenous population, and that the rapid increases in the birth-rate are
a function of a differentiation within the Indigenous population, into a welfare-oriented
population (which monopolises the attention of policy-makers) and a work-oriented, mainly
urban, population. Further, that inter-marriage has greatly expanded the size of the work-oriented
population, particularly its younger generation. And more controversially, we are suggesting that
it is this younger generation of the work-oriented population which, on reaching Year 12 age, has
hugely increased the numbers involved at Year 12, and improved the rate of Indigenous success
in terms of SACE and TER. Finally, we suggest that, as a consequence of this much higher rate
of participation at Year 12, we are on the cusp of a massive improvement in the quantity and
quality of Indigenous students in higher education.
Historical Background
In itself, this requires some explanation, and a recap of the history of Indigenous migration from
segregated communities since the Second World War, and up until the eighties may help us to
understand its likely causes:

from the late forties until the early seventies, many Indigenous people moved away from
government settlements to the city in order to find work and better lives for their existing
families, and the families that they hoped to start. For most, this was a risky move into
the unknown, but one that for most paid off, insofar as this course of action enabled
Indigenous people, their children, grandchildren – and now their great-grandchildren – to
work in the general economy and to operate comfortably in an open society. Fortunately
for many, the move to the city coincided with the economic upturn of the fifties and
sixties;

Many Indigenous people also left their settlements, but to small country towns, railway
towns and hamlets, and to towns in the fruit-growing areas of the southern vales and the
Riverland. Many of these people either stayed or went back to settlements, or eventually
made their way to the city. But often they arrived just as the economy was cooling down,
in the late sixties;

Crucially, many people did not move, but stayed on settlements, ‘Missions’, in order to
maintain the basic level of welfare security that they had been used to since the twenties;

The Dunstan government abolished almost all discriminatory legislation, and extended its
social services to Aboriginal settlements. And in some of its first acts, the Whitlam
government extended the full range of federally-funded welfare rights to Indigenous
people wherever they lived. This enabled a large number of people to stay on settlements
without having to look for work. As well, it was a spur for a few people to return to
settlements from country towns, and to make the choice for welfare-based security rather
than work-oriented opportunity. The Fraser government’s introduction and extension of
CDEP through the eighties reinforced this life-choice and provided even more security in
rural areas, for up to a quarter of the entire Indigenous population.
The Population Boom since the Eighties
The Indigenous birth-rate slumped between the late sixties and the early eighties, but started to
rise again after this time. The marginal increase in the birth-rate continued to the early nineties
and has increased at a lower rate, but still quite rapidly, since then. In fact, the birth-rate doubled
between 1981 and 2000: birth-group numbers across the country rose from about six thousand in
the early eighties to eleven thousand by the early nineties, and have since risen to about twelve
thousand. In other words, the size of age-cohorts has doubled in twenty years. Non-Indigenous
age-cohort numbers have risen by barely 20 %.
The birth-rate upswing has now reached tertiary age. Simply because of the very rapid
Indigenous population increases of the eighties and nineties, it seems to be clear that there will
not be any diminution in commencing Indigenous tertiary numbers into the future – age-group
numbers alone doubled between 1980 and 2000, and Year 12 participation has improved as a
proportion of the age-group. And SACE graduations are increasing as a proportion of Year 12
enrolments. But in order to understand the nature of these increases in enrolments and
achievements, we may have to differentiate the two different Indigenous populations, each of
which have very different educational strategies and preferred life-trajectories:

because such a high proportion of Indigenous people have inter-married with nonIndigenous people since the seventies, an increasing proportion of this population growth
will be made up of what might be called an ‘open society’ population, often of families
in which both partners work, and this population will make increased efforts to ensure
that their children seek careers through tertiary study. This population sees education
quite explicitly as the means, the instrument, towards improving their economic position
and security. I am suggesting that the Year 12 increase after 1998 has been composed
mainly of the children of this population. Consequently, we can expect the number of
Indigenous students completing Year 12 to keep increasing and, of course, for increasing
enrolments at university at much lower ages than the current median age;

conversely, a comparatively smaller proportion of what might be called the ‘embedded’
or ‘encapsulated’ population, which has tended to remain in rural areas and in the outer
suburbs, and has had to rely more on welfare payments of all kinds, may come on to
tertiary study at mature ages and as Special Entry students – in fact, participation from
this group may diminish rapidly over the next five years, and not pick up at all. This
population will not decline significantly over the next few years, but it will not
necessarily gain much more from formal education than it has up until now: certainly,
some members of it will come on to tertiary study, but at later times in their lives, and in
smaller numbers. As well, as Bridging, preparation and lower-level courses are phased
out at universities, their numbers may plummet while those of Year 12 finishers may rise
rapidly. So for a number of reasons, the numbers of Special Entry students may decline
significantly between now and 2020.
In fact, it may well be that the birth-rate decline of the seventies reflected the poor circumstances
of the encapsulated population at the time – it is even possible that their numbers have actually
continued to fall ever since 1970, and that the birth-rate of the Embedded Population did not
significantly rise along with that of the Open Society – and that the subsequent population rise,
from the early eighties, is an expression of the remarkable effects of inter-marriage and of the
growth of an urban working population and in the number of families with one Aboriginal parent
rather than two.
Inter-marriage enables a population to increase its overall numbers of Indigenous children
without necessarily having to have big families. Indigenous families are rarely as large as they
were up to the sixties, when ten and twelve children were common – nowadays, a family of three
or four children is unusually large. But with one Indigenous parent to a family instead of two, the
numbers of Indigenous children can increase rapidly, without the need for any family to be large.
And it is possible that, without inter-marriage, overall Indigenous population growth could have
kept slowing, even to bare replacement rate (or even below it) and that the Indigenous population
could have remained much the same or even declined, as high mortality rates outpaced low birth
rates.
But this does not take into account the slight population growth in rural areas, where much less
intermarriage has occurred (although it is not uncommon), but where CDEP has provided a
welfare cushion which may have enabled families to grow with some degree of security. Of
course, this is all about to change as Commonwealth policy trends towards the abolition of the
option of lifelong welfare which CDEP represented.
The slump and boom in the Indigenous birth-rate since the sixties can be easily discerned in the
following Table (note that the birth-rate more than doubled between 1975 and 1997, and that
children born in about 1988 are now reaching Year 12):
Table 1: South Australia: Indigenous Births by year 1966 to 1997
Birth Yr
Numbers
‘66
310
67
269
68
271
69
357
70
348
71
322
72
337
73
285
74
273
75
275
76
284
77
296
Birth Yr
Numbers
82
419
83
466
84
514
85
478
86
534
87
527
88
540
89
580
90
610
91
647
92
647
93
94
95
96
97
588 688 640 651 704
[Source: DECS Statistics]
78
259
79
323
‘80
351
The Development of an Open Society Population

in the cities, from the late fifties, the first generation of urban Indigenous schoolchildren
grew up with a more cosmopolitan and work-oriented ethos than had been possible back
in the settlements – certainly their parents had made a more risk-prone life-choice but one
which enabled them to seize opportunities as they arose.

The children of the fifties started to reach adulthood during the sixties and seventies, and
while some married Indigenous people, many socialized with and married nonIndigenous people with whom they had grown up and gone to school and worked with.
As migrants striving to set themselves up in the cities, they sought regular employment
and tended to have smaller families, but to expect that their children also would find
employment once they left school – for many in this population, welfare was a last resort;

As with migrants generally, they came to understand that opportunity was tied to
economics and that, in turn, a better economic position depended to a large extent on a
better level of education. In fact, it is likely that children had to find this out for
themselves, given that many parents had grown up on the settlements without being able
to access any secondary education at all, so it is no surprise that information about
tertiary education, and the possible benefits accruing to it, was very slow in permeating
through the Indigenous population in the sixties, seventies and eighties;
81
411

This second, thoroughly urban, generation went to school, worked and socialized with
non-Indigenous people to a much greater degree, and a much higher level of
intermarriage ensued, more out of serendipity than intent. So the birth-rate rose quite
rapidly through the eighties and into the nineties (replacement rate plus growth factor),
even though individual family size may have been kept quite low (actually at barely
replacement rate, demographically). Again, both parents in these families were often
working, and investing much more time and funds into their children’s education;

The comparison with the experience of migrant groups is inescapable: although migrants
from Greece and Italy and Yugoslavia and Lebanon in the fifties and sixties were
expected to be content with employment in factories and on farms, they also did not
expect their children to follow them: very often, in the second generation, their children
have gone straight onto tertiary education and professional employment. I am suggesting
that a high proportion of Indigenous people have followed a similar path;

This third Indigenous urban generation, coming to tertiary age after 2000, is far more
likely to complete Year 12 and come on to tertiary study: perhaps half of those who have
grown up in the city will succeed in this way. They will be most likely studying fulltime, on-campus, internally, as Standard Entry students, in mainstream programs at
degree level;

These generations of urban Indigenous people are far more likely to be in secure
employment (often in the Indigenous Industry), to be fitter and in better health, to be
better educated, to own their homes, to have no experience of trouble with the Law or
with addictions, and to be more actively in control of their own lives, not subject at all to
the whims or changes in welfare policies. They are probably far more likely to believe in
their ability to actively make changes in their world, that they are not passive victims and
most certainly, that they are not in any way subject to the authority of any Indigenous
elder, guru or bureaucrat. In a sense, this population has revolted against the fate that
history has ordained for it.
The Congealing of an Embedded, or Encapsulated, Welfare-Oriented Population

But at the same time, a large proportion of Indigenous people who moved to the cities did
not find regular work, and had to re-embed themselves even more firmly in the more
familiar strategy of relying on welfare payments for minimal security. In effect, this
population decided on a welfare-oriented pathway, rather than an employment-oriented
pathway, to security and well-being and it was encouraged to take this pathway by
positive changes in welfare entitlements. The Whitlam reforms of the early seventies
cemented these attitudes in place at a time of declining employment opportunities, and reembedded families have tended ever since to raise their children to have the same lifelong
welfare expectations;

In the country, CDEP provisions tended to have the same effects of reinforcing a welfare
orientation, even though this was certainly not the stated intention of the Program.
Again, this sense of security through lifelong welfare payments, encouraged the growth
of larger families. But the cost of this strategy has been for the people involved to deskill themselves, and unintentionally to ensure that their children stayed poorly educated
and unskilled in order to meet the requirements of the welfare system;

Indigenous people who have chosen this path are far more likely to see themselves as
passive victims, and to externalize all problems either as the responsibilities of white
bureaucrats, teachers, doctors or social workers (who ‘should do something about it’) or
as a product of their biology (‘and there’s nothing we can do about that’.) Many, many
‘community’ folk beliefs reiterate this belief in the immutability of the world. A
corollary of this belief is that white people have the knowledge and should use it to help
Indigenous people, who should never be expected to gain it. So schooling, from the
viewpoint of this paradigm, has little to do with useful knowledge for Indigenous
people’s futures.
But after all, even children can understand that if you are going to live in frugal comfort on
welfare for life, what is the point of any education ? As Roslyn Arlen Mickelson wrote twenty
years ago, children take their cues from what their parents and significant others express around
the kitchen table and the TV (cf. ‘The Attitude-Achievement Paradox’): as Mickelson found,
children learn more less from abstract declarations about the value of education than from the
concrete, even tacit, ‘what has it done for me?’ attitudes of their parents. As a logical
consequence of lifelong welfare expectations, children come to devalue education (and effort) as
a means to any effective ends. We are now witnessing at least the second generation of the
transmission of this implicit lesson. The grave defects of this strategy are only now starting to
catch up with the ensuing generations. In turn, the educational policies which attempted to cater
for the needs of students in step with this paradigmatic way of thinking have reached the point of
exhaustion, with few observable outcomes.
Two diverging populations ?
So the Indigenous population has been differentiating itself for more than fifty years now, into at
least two recognizable entities, or classes, each with its very different ideology, and very
divergent trajectory:

A working class, even a middle class, which is forward-planning and future-oriented,
opportunity-driven, work-focussed, and therefore far more attuned to the value of
education for their children, if only to ensure that their children do not follow them into
the drudgery of factory or farm work. Many in this group have already moved up into the
bureaucracy, and well into the middle class. This group also contains a rapidly growing
elite, or upper middle class, in very comfortable circumstances and in high-status
positions in public bodies and academia;

An underclass, or sub-class, relatively comfortable (for the time being), which is presentfocussed, security-driven, welfare-oriented, often preoccupied with health, housing, legal
and addiction issues, and therefore far more attuned to trying to sustain a wholly
publicly-funded status quo which, as Noel Pearson would say, ultimately cannot be
sustained.
It really is time – forty years after the 1967 Referendum in which Indigenous people won their
rights to be counted, and treated, as equals with other Australians – to draw attention to the
unavoidable evidence that Indigenous people have interpreted, and acted on, their new-found
rights in these quite different ways, and that a complex class structure has been crystallizing out
across the country.
We are suggesting that these two populations have very different profiles, not just in education
but in health, housing, attitudes to the law, addictions, child-rearing practices and general worldoutlook. One could say that the two populations, which of course still overlap to an extent
through their close kinship and regular (but perhaps declining) interaction, operate on two quite
different paradigms, and see the world and its opportunities (or threats) in quite different ways.
In our view, unless this distinction is recognized, a great deal of policy and effort will be wasted –
on the one hand, the problems of orienting the Embedded Population to educational opportunities
will continue to be mis-diagnosed as cultural, problems with relevance, cultural sensitivity,
language, appropriate curriculum, role of elders or parents or community, self-esteem,
cooperativeness, need for outdoor activity, focus on sport, love of art, remoteness, etc., while the
children of the Open Society Population are, more or less, being motivated by the same forces
which motivate non-Indigenous children: the instrumental value of education as a prerequisite to
good careers, and the need for positive encouragement and close support while they are going
through school. In short, good teaching practice.
Yet the Open Society children are the ones who tend to succeed in school. The difference may be
that, for the Open Society children, education is a motivating factor in itself, the clear and direct
key to a busy, hard-working future, while to Embedded Population children, school is a
meaningless set of hurdles and restrictions. To Open Society children, effort is a necessary
means to an end, but to Embedded Population children, effort is unpleasant, pointless and to be
avoided. At present, educational policy seems to be directed solely at finding ways to keep the
children of the Embedded Population happy and off the streets, on the misguided assumption that
it is in fact the entire Indigenous school population, that there is, in fact, no such thing as an Open
Society population.
It should be noted that already the children of each ‘Population’ tend to enrol in a different range
of schools, with Embedded Population children tending to enrol in rural and remote schools, and
in outer suburban schools, while Open Society Population children tend to enrol in quite different
schools, urban, inner-city and in more affluent suburbs. Of course, there is a lot of overlap. It is
very likely that children from the Open Society Population are far more dispersed across far more
schools, but in small numbers, while children of the Embedded Population are enrolled in fewer
schools, but in greater numbers at each school.
The segregation of Indigenous children is measurably much greater in the country than the city,
with large numbers of Indigenous students at some schools but none at others. This may also be a
factor which impacts more severely on Indigenous boys than girls, since far more girls
consistently reach Year 12, and gain their SACE, although paradoxically roughly similar numbers
gain a sufficient TER score to enrol in tertiary study as Standard Entry students: in 1999 forty six
Indigenous students enrolled in Year 12 across the state, as follows:
Table 1: Indigenous students in Year 12, SA, 1999
Ru ral
Male
SACE
TER > 55
Female
4
3
Male
11
4
Ur ban
Female
14
17
6
8
Total
46
21
[Source: Mercurio and Clayton, ‘Imagining themselves, imagining their futures’, SSABSA, 2001, pp. 22-23]
Back in 1999, two thirds of Indigenous students gaining their SACE, and of those gaining a
sufficient TER score, had attended city schools. But almost half of the metropolitan students had
attended an Independent or Catholic school (Mercurio and Clayton, 2001: p. 17). So a third of
these students were enrolled at non-government schools, a third were at urban government
schools and a third were at rural government schools. In fact, it is possible that fewer students
gained a sufficient TER score at urban government schools than at rural government schools in
1999.
The SACE results for 1999 were a high point in twenty years of results. But between 1999 and
2006, the proportion of the 18-year-old age-group, the Year 12 age-group, gaining their SACE
has almost doubled. Since 1999, the demographic boom has hit Year 12 and, I am suggesting, the
Open Society children have been responsible for massively improving the retention and success
at this level. Certainly, something has been happening at Year 12 since 1999:
Table 2: Indigenous students in Year 12, SA, 1999, 2004-2006
Rural
1999
2004
2005
2006
Totals ’04-06
Totals ’04-06 %
Urban
Male
Female
15
40
30
29
99
31
52
51
81
184
18
32
38
35
105
28
60
43
75
178
35 %
65 %
37.1 %
62.9 %
Totals
46
92
81
110
283
No. in
% of
ageagegroup
group
411
11.2 %
17.2
534
15.4
527
20.4
540
1601
17.7 %
[Source: DECS and SSABSA data]
On these figures, it appears that the country areas remain behind: distance and remoteness are
certainly factors against Year 12 participation (cf. EIP 98/14: Western et al.; NBEET Report No.
63, 1999: James et al.).
Two Populations ? - Or an Emerging Class Structure ?
But class may well be playing a larger part in differential performance, with urban Embedded
Population children attending schools along with a high proportion of white working-class, and
under-class, children, with whom they share many cultural practices and ethics. In rural schools,
of course, class is much less of an issue. Mercurio et al. suggest that nearly two-thirds of the
1999 SACE completers came from the lowest SES quartile, and 80% came from the two lowest
SES quartiles (2001: p. 19), which may indicate fairly clearly the proportion of all Indigenous
children who were in the lowest SES quartiles at that time.
On the other hand, urban Open Society children may be more likely to attend schools with
children from the upper working class and from the middle class. Of course, this has major
consequences for the differential schooling from the earliest grades of children from the two
populations.
But differential performance in education may be simply the articulation, and clear evidence, of
the development of a more defined class structure amongst the Indigenous population, a division
along the same class lines as the rest of Australia:

an unclassed, or de-classed, population, which could be negatively termed a lumpen class,
or a lumpen proletariat: perhaps half of the entire Indigenous population are still in this
category. This is still the Indigenous population on which is focused the vast amount of
policy attention, the population which is content to be dependent on welfare payments,
what I am calling the Embedded Population;

a lower working class, a small, breakaway, portion of the Embedded Population, which
may be in irregular employment, and/or at any time involved in TAFE or even tertiary
study, a population which is struggling to gain security and a more self-respecting way of
life than is favoured by the Embedded Population;

a working class, which is in regular employment, often inter-married, future- and goaloriented, ambitious for their children, but basically wanting to be left alone by Indigenous
policy-makers, forming the core of what I am calling the Open Society Population;

a lower middle class, of semi-professionals and tradespeople, often graduates, in secure
employment and integrated into the Open Society, making sure that their children do well
in school and go on to tertiary study;

a middle and upper middle class, usually professionals and graduates, in permanent
employment in government and academia, sending their children to private schools,
thoroughly immersed in the Open Society but often seeing themselves as spokespersons
and champions of, and gaining their kudos from, the Embedded Population.
With twenty thousand tertiary graduates, perhaps ten thousand tradespeople, perhaps another
twenty thousand unqualified and semi-qualified Indigenous people working in the multitudes of
bureaucracies and organizations across the country, at one end of a spectrum, and thirty thousand
CDEP participants and tens of thousands of semi-destitute indigenous people, mainly in the rural
and remote areas, at the other end, it really is time to dispense with the rather lazy depiction of the
Indigenous population as an undifferentiated ‘community’ and recognize that Indigenous people
are these days following a plethora of trajectories, which can be loosely grouped into typical class
trajectories, and, for convenience, into the two major pathways that I have described above. My
suspicion is that the pathway taken by the Embedded Population will soon reach an impasse, as
governments decide that lifelong welfare support is not going to continue to be an option for ablebodied and intelligent people, or for the next generation of their children.
Implications for Secondary and Tertiary Education
With these factors in mind, we can cautiously project the likely numbers of Indigenous students
gaining their SACE, up to 2011:
Table 3: Projected Nos. of Indigenous Students Gaining SACE, 2003-2011
Birth Year:
Birth Nos.
Yr 12 Year:
SACE Nos.
% of birth group
85
478
‘03
56
86
534
04
92
87
527
05
81
88
540
06
110
89
580
07
135
90
610
08
150
91
647
09
170
92
647
10
172
93
588
11
160
gaining SACE
11.7
17.2
15.3
20.4
23.3
24.6
26.3
26.6
27.2
This projection suggests that, of the age-groups born in the early nineties, more than a quarter will
be gaining their SACE by the year 2011 – in other words, that nearly six times as many students
will be gaining their SACE as in 1998 with only seventy percent more children in the age-group.
As success becomes more the rule, perhaps the attitudes of Embedded Population students will
change favourably towards study and effort.
If this assessment is accurate, then, as the numbers in age-groups rise towards seven hundred
through the next decade – twice as many children as in the age-groups born in the seventies and
early eighties – up to eight times as many Indigenous students will be gaining their SACE by
2015 (all other factors being held constant) as in 1998: two hundred compared to twenty eight, or
34% of the age-group.
We have suggested that the massive population growth has been mainly a consequence of
extremely high rates of inter-marriage particularly of partners at least one of whom are in regular
employment. Further, we are suggesting, more controversially, that the rapid improvement in
Year 12 performance has been a consequence of this inter-marriage factor, that the students now
gaining their SACE are overwhelmingly from this population. Conversely, this suggests that
there will be little improvement in the educational performance students from the Embedded
Population.
But it is quite concerning that, extrapolating all of these factors well into the future, unless the
Embedded Population lifts its game, by 2020 the Indigenous population will be divided starkly
into an uneducated and semi-destitute minority and a well-educated and relatively affluent
majority, with an enormous social gulf between the two.
Implications for Future Planning
The upshot of the various population shifts over the past twenty five years is that the pool of
Indigenous tertiary students has grown massively:

Year 12 numbers have tripled in South Australia since 1998, and the numbers of
Indigenous students gaining their SACE have increased almost four times. The numbers
of Indigenous students gaining sufficient TER scores to enrol as Standard Entry students
is likely to be increasing at an even greater rate;

This has been balanced largely by a decline in the number of Special Entry enrolments,
which has been accelerated by a rapid winding down of preparation and bridging
programs, and of diploma-level programs. These have tended to be the only Indigenousoriented programs at universities, for example at the University of South Australia, the
Associate Diplomas of Arts (Aboriginal Studies) and (Aboriginal Affairs
Administration). Standard Entry students almost never enrol in Indigenous-oriented
programs, even those at degree-level, and it is likely that Indigenous enrolments in
Indigenous-oriented awards will wither away to complete insignificance very soon;

Indigenous Standard Entry students tend to have much better retention and completion
rates than Special Entry students (in fact, better rates than non-Indigenous Standard Entry
students), and to complete their programs of study in the required time. In due course,
Indigenous graduations can be expected to increase dramatically, certainly from about
2010: across Australia, annual graduations could reach two thousand before 2015;

The upshot is that far more Indigenous students are now or soon will be enrolling in
‘mainstream’ programs of study, outside of Indigenous Studies, and also to that extent
completely outside of the influence of Indigenous staff;

Two major consequences follow from the above:
o
that Indigenous student support services must be re-aligned, more to the needs of
Standard Entry, but much younger, students;
o
that Indigenous students will soon be graduating in much greater numbers from
‘mainstream’ programs and seeking employment in the much more competitive
environment of ‘mainstream’ career structures.
Policy Re-Directions ?
For more than a generation, Indigenous student performance to Year 12 barely improved, in spite
of a plethora of interventions and explanations. Then, after 1999, coinciding with a massive
demographic rise, Year 12 numbers and SACE numbers rose remarkably. The number of
Indigenous students gaining sufficient TER scores to enrol in tertiary study as Standard Entry
students appears to be increasing dramatically. Clearly, something is happening regardless of
whatever interventions are implemented, supposedly on their behalf. In fact, it could be said that
Indigenous students may be achieving much better results at Year 12 level in spite of
interventions, since, anecdotally, most of those students appear to be more likely to attend schools
not known for any specific Indigenous-oriented interventions. These would be schools, one could
surmise, where Indigenous students are thought of as students, while – at the risk of gross overstatement – Embedded Population students may be more likely to attend schools which offer a
wide range of interventions to encourage attendance, and at which Indigenous students are more
likely to be thought of, and treated, as Indigenous. As an aside, it could be said that being treated
as Indigenous first and foremost is consonant with the ideologies of the Embedded Population,
while being treated as students along with their school-mates, fits in with the ideologies and
intentions of the Open Society population.
Whether any of the multitude of interventions has made a positive difference for Indigenous
students should be the subject of far more rigorous evaluation than we are capable of. But at least
it must be noted that Indigenous Year 12 success is not strongly associated with any, or any
particular, intervention, apart from the ‘intervention’ of strong academic support and motivational
inspiration for all students, including Indigenous students, as students. Perhaps this is one
definition of ‘social inclusion’ which was not intended, but one which actually works.
Indigenous education policy has trended in a similar direction for nearly forty years: to cater for
the perceived needs of students from the Embedded Population. Open Society families and their
children were left to fend for themselves, without much interference, which was pretty much as
they liked it. As the Open Society Population grows rapidly, and especially as its children
succeed at Year 12 in ever-greater numbers and move on to tertiary study, it is becoming clearer
that new policies – which focus on motivation and support rather than just keeping children at
school and keeping them happy – are desperately needed. Otherwise the policy-makers will
continue to be behind the game, unable to respond to the rapid changes being brought about by
Indigenous people themselves.
The bottom line in Indigenous education is clearly that the current paradigm – teaching to
assumed fundamental differences and with lowered expectations – has never worked, in any of its
permutations, and desperately needs to be replaced by a paradigm which recognizes Indigenous
students as students, and respects them accordingly, with high expectations and rigour, and with
close and on-going support and clear forms of motivation.
Time for a Paradigm Shift ?
And as for education, so for the full range of social policy areas: health, welfare, housing, crime,
addictions and legal issues, community governance – while each of these areas is still a captive of
the old paradigm, they all appear to have hit a brick wall, to have failed to thrive after forty years,
and to have exhausted the imaginations of policy-makers. Perhaps it is time for a completely new
paradigm, one based on assumptions of Indigenous potential rather than problems, and on
achievement rather than on reconciliation to failure, one which takes the successes of Indigenous
people in higher education – the current twenty thousand graduates – as a beacon for other levels
of education, and for other areas of social policy – that, if twenty thousand Indigenous people can
conquer the heights of tertiary education, why can’t Indigenous people succeed in other fields ?
Why, in short, pander to the lower expectations which have become such a comfortable, but
glaringly destructive, feature of the outmoded paradigm ?
In fact, Noel Pearson is canvassing a similar need for drastic paradigmatic change, in his recent
comments on Indigenous health: ‘Passivity in relation to health – as with employment, housing
and many other basic social and economic factors – is characteristic of many if not most
Indigenous communities in Cape York.’ He asserted that Indigenous health was linked to
‘individual choices and social and policy barriers.’ (The Australian ,15.03.07) I would suggest
that Indigenous education is also a function of ‘individual choices’ but also to ‘social and policy
barriers’, including those erected by policy-makers, Black and White, who have been making
fundamentally incorrect assumptions about Indigenous educational needs for forty years now.
Mr Pearson’s remarks about Indigenous health are pointers to a new paradigm in Indigenous
affairs generally, one which:

‘meant enabling Indigenous people to look after themselves’;

‘involves making hard decisions about forcing individuals to take responsibility’ –m
health, for ‘their own treatments, their own diets, their own exercise regimes’;

will enable ‘interventions that change not only individuals’ actions but also community
norms, health [and all other social, economic and motivational] systems and the decisions
of policy makers’;

will transform Indigenous people from passive recipients to active shapers of policies
affecting their lives;

will involve far more effort, more sensible and well-planned utilization of resources, and
far broader facilitation of genuine Indigenous self-determination.
A more appropriate paradigm would embrace many areas besides education and health, as Mr
Pearson suggests. In housing, for instance, there appears to be a policy move away from lowrent, public housing (Embedded paradigm) towards owner-occupied, private housing (Open
Society paradigm). Perhaps, one day, somebody will suggest that the emphasis in Aboriginal
health might move away from victimhood, innate poor health, cure and palliative care (Embedded
paradigm) to more a educative approach to diet, exercise and moderation (Open Society
paradigm).
In policy generally, perhaps there will be a shift away from a focus on difference (which has been
a rock-solid belief that almost everybody has held since 1788, and which forms the basis and
rationale of the Embedded paradigm) towards universal equal rights – which after all, was the
major goal of the 1967 Referendum, and from which Indigenous policy has been retreating ever
since.
But confronting this range of issues will be the task of many people, Indigenous and nonIndigenous with the appropriate expertise, over a long period, mainly in devising ways to involve
and positively the condition and potential particularly of the Embedded Population, to ‘decongeal’ it in imaginative, relevant and motivating programs which assume the humanity and
human aspirations of the entire Indigenous population, to encourage them to take their rightful
place in Australian society, and to assist them to take their lead from the path-breaking efforts of
the Open Society population – and for policy-makers to work themselves out of their jobs and get
out of the way.
In sum, it seems clear that a major paradigm shift is under way in education, forced along by the
Indigenous people themselves, with policy-makers trailing behind, with many refusing to
recognize that the old pathway has come to a dead-end. But there is no doubt that one by one, the
various sub-fields of the old paradigm have exhausted themselves – Noel Pearson’s comments
attest to this in health, and twenty thousand Indigenous people have confounded it at the highest
levels of education.
The need for a complete paradigm shift has not yet (as far as we can tell) permeated through to
policy-makers and implementation agencies, although by its current initiatives, the Federal
government certainly seems to be trying to force a much stronger critique of the shortcomings of
social policy than the spokespersons of the Embedded Population, the Indigenous and nonIndigenous bureaucrats in Indigenous organizations, seem to be able to make themselves. We are
certainly in a period of flux, and perhaps the upshot, once the dust settles, will be a complete reassessment of the old ‘self-determination and welfare’ paradigm (surely an oxymoron!) and its
replacement by a more pragmatic, individualist, skills-based ‘rights and opportunity’ paradigm,
one with education as its key driver, and one which recognizes at last that effort and work have
always been, and must always be, part of Indigenous social life.
Conclusion
It appears that the Indigenous population is becoming differentiated into two distinct populations
with potentially antithetical ideologies:

one, an Embedded Population, which has been for more than a generation (some may
say for at least three generations) focused on maintaining a welfare-oriented and riskaverse, even an education-averse life-style;

and another, an Open Society Population, which has, for at least two generations, been
determined on an opportunity-oriented, and therefore welfare-averse, life-style, and
which has raised its children, its third generation, to see education as the provider of
economic-related opportunities. The latter population, which has increased rapidly over
the past couple of decades, is far more likely to encourage children to stay at school until
the end of Year 12 and to move on to tertiary study, as the major instrument in accessing
professional careers. This Population is showing the way to the future, and to a new
paradigm.
While the Embedded Population resists having to re-consider its welfare-oriented life-style, and
refrains from providing its children with a solid educational foundation, the Open Society
Population will, like so many migrant groups before it, strive to ensure that its children exploit all
opportunities available to secure careers as professionals and tradespersons, to the highest levels.
The implications for tertiary education include much greater support for Standard Entry students,
and for Indigenous graduate employment services. Clearly the two populations have radically
different aspirations and trajectories and, regardless of future policies, will move off in quite
different directions.
The development of an Open Society population seems to have caught policy-makers, Black and
White, unawares. In education, bodies such as the IHEAC and NIHEN, operating on a very
simplistic statistical foundation, seem to be getting ready to sound the death-knell of higher
education, just as Indigenous student numbers are set to explode, partly in response to the
demographic boom, but more so in response to the qualitative changes in that population growth.
Fortunately, the rapidly growing Open Society population has qualities such as resilience and
self-reliance, which render it impervious to most of the damage that policy-makers have wrought
in the past.