ATKINSON, Professor Valerie Judith (Judy), Elder—Cultural Adviser, We Al-li Pty Ltd [by audio link] BODKIN-ANDREWS, Professor Gawaian, Director of Indigenous Research, Western Sydney University CARLSON, Professor Bronwyn, Private capacity [by audio link] LOWE, Professor Kevin, Chief Investigator, Culturally Nourishing Schooling MOSCHION, Dr Julie, Private capacity CHAIR: Welcome. Do you have any additional information on the capacity in which you appear today? Prof. Lowe : I'm with the University of New South Wales and I'm representing myself. Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : I am a Dharawal scholar from Western Sydney University. Dr Moschion : I am an associate professor. I'm from the University of Queensland. CHAIR: Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise you that this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as proceedings of the respective houses. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. I now invite each of you to make a brief opening statement. Dr Moschion : First of all, I'd like to thank you all for inviting me to speak about my work today. The work I'll be talking about stems from a project on historical frontier violence, its legacy and the role of truth-telling. This is in collaboration with the University of Melbourne, the University of Newcastle and the ANU. The multidisciplinary quantitative and qualitative work that we have done has brought forward some important insights. Today I will focus mostly on two insights that relate specifically to racism and the work of the joint standing committee: (1) that acknowledging the link between past and present and recognising the violence of settlement is critical to healing communities and (2) that addressing racism today requires engagement at the community level to generate trust and connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Firstly, on the link between past and present, some may say that the past is the past and that we need to move forward. What our research shows is that the processes that are at play in communities today are deeply ingrained by more than two centuries of violent relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Using data from across the whole of Australia, the quantitative analysis shows significant differences today between places where historical massacres have been verified and places with no verified massacres. These differences are not coincidental. They are symptomatic of deep fracturing in communities that persisted over time. We find that communities with verified massacre sites display increased levels of residential and school segregation, less support for self-determination and higher levels of what we call macroracism, which is racism expressed via the media and social media. Consistent with this, we also find greater strength and connections within both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The qualitative work conducted with the community in Moree, New South Wales, confirms the link from the massacres to the missions and now the pervasive racism that runs deep in the community. The link to the past extends to the present. Today, there is still a physical separation between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities that live in different neighbourhoods and whose kids attend different schools and sport clubs. These mechanics in communities are almost calcified and barely noticed sometimes. To address racism, it is critical to identify clearly the characteristics and mechanics that fracture communities, enable persistence across generations and leave very little chance for Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities to interact and get to know each other. Overall, in addressing racism, it is important to consider how historical frontier violence initiated fractures in the community that are still visible today through the way in which communities are structured, reinforcing patterns of racism. The power of community-level approaches that engage the whole of community in truth-telling and building connections between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous people. Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : Sorry, I didn't prepare notes, but— CHAIR: That's okay. You don't have to make an opening statement if you don't want to. Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : I would like to, please. I began my studies in racism in Honours, back in early 2000, looking at the automatic nature of racism and how it can be nonconscious for non-Indigenous peoples. As part of that, I became disillusioned by that research. In 2003, I began my PhD. After a considerable struggle, I was able to focus on, in part, racism as part of my thesis studies. From that point on, I'd probably argue I've been a considerable critic of how racism is understood in Australia and in research today. It is largely understood from the non-Indigenous people's perspectives. We see stuff like old-fashioned racism and modern racism. Whilst I do not contest their existence, I have argued through research with elders and high school students in rural and more metropolitan settings that these understandings of racism are way too simplistic. It is a much more complex multidimensional, insidious construct that has survived since colonisation and invasion. Racism from Indigenous peoples' standpoints is always overt, at least through findings. You can refer to David Mellor in 2003—one of the first studies to actually ask mob how they understood racism. Not only was it overt, blatant and in their face but there were no subtle forms of racism. Racism came out as a multidimensional construct. You had what everyone talks about in terms of your verbal racism, your physical racism and so forth, which happen in interpersonal interactions, but it is also an institutional construct that's perpetuated consistently over time. You're looking at selective attention. I've seen this in my own research with regard to schoolteachers. Students, whether they are Aboriginal or other minority students, are acutely aware of which teachers within schools may be racist, whereas the teachers themselves seem to think, 'That teacher may be a little bit racist, but the students don't know!' These findings just tell us how apparent it is that us mob experience racism today. Then there's macrocultural racism, where our history has become absolutely disordered and forgotten about. I'm two weeks away from the anniversary of the Appin massacre. Both my mother and father claim ancestral links to those who were slaughtered in the massacre or escaped the massacre. The community there has become divided in part, in terms of not only the truth-telling about the massacre itself—we have the sensitivities of some politicians and political entities and those with particular ideological mindsets—but even fractures within Indigenous communities, as the truth-telling and the history have been hidden for so long. We've come up with perspectives where we start attacking each other, for whatever the reason might be, and that's because of the histories that non-Indigenous people have written about us. As far as I'm concerned, racism in Australia is endemic. If we have to sit down and have discussions as to whether racism exists, regardless of its form, then it exists within Australia and any attempt to deny it is a massive problem. Finally, the most disappointing finding of my research is the impact of racism, particularly on our younger generations. Not only are they impacted by old-fashioned blatant racism but they're impacted by cultural racism, like seeing the opposition to welcome to country—that's more of an interpretation of late—and political messages in the media downplaying that. I grew up when native title first came about, and the abuse I faced at school because of that—what did I do to deserve something like that? Was it just because I was Aboriginal? Was it just because John Howard or someone wanted to distort the messages of the Native Title Act? And so forth. We all suffer, and that is all a representation of racism. It hits mental health. It hits physical health. It hits job opportunities—financial wealth, so to speak—and so forth, and it is intergenerational. There's more than enough evidence—and I'm talking about scientific evidence—that intergenerational trauma due to racism, in part, is passed on through the generations. Yes, racism exists both in terms of the perpetrators and, more importantly, in terms of those who must live with racism and experience it as an everyday part of their life. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you. Professor Lowe. Prof. Lowe : Thank you for the invitation to come and speak to you today. I don't come to you as an expert in racism research. I'm a practical schoolteacher who became a researcher much later in life. I started teaching in 1975. I taught continuously for 26 years in New South Wales government schools in country regions in both far western New South Wales and the far north coast. I spent 13 years in curriculum development for the New South Wales Board of Studies, and I was the lead for the development of Aboriginal curriculum in New South Wales, supporting the accreditation of non-government schools. It was only at 59½ that I left public service and became an academic. I wanted to bring to the table all the things that I have learnt and seen in my many years of education. Currently, I am the lead and chief investigator for the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project, which is a project that now runs across two states and one school in the Northern Territory. That's an eight-year project across two phases. It's a whole-school project that looks to really support schools to think completely differently about how schooling could be imagined and then articulate it in schools but within the structures of the current curriculum that's required of them to teach. We spend a lot of time with the schools, and we commit to a school for three years to work with them on really deep professional learning. It's during those observations, of course, and being at the school that many things have come to light. The second part of my work has been to lead a national Australian Research Council project on the state of the curriculum in Australia and the effect of curriculum on teachers' capacity to teach the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content. If there's one area that I might want to go to later on, it's probably that piece of work because I think it goes directly to the question of structural racism and how it is absolutely deeply embedded in the very structures of schooling and is pervasive across every school right across this country. I want to turn my mind to that and shed light on some of the evidence. That's a five-year research project. The third part of it is that I also do school based research both in our local schools with high Aboriginal student enrolments and in other locations in New South Wales. I've gathered a lot of more ephemeral research around that in terms of the impact of racism, students' experience of racism and how it gets played out in the everyday business of schooling. Those are the three areas I would like to draw on as part of the evidence that I'll give. CHAIR: Thank you, Professor Lowe. Professor Atkinson? Prof. Atkinson : I'm now 83 years of age. I've been out on the ground in different parts of Australia. This is an Australian issue. I've worked at Tennant Creek and Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. I've done some work in the Kimberley in WA. I have also worked in Cape York and different parts of Queensland, and I presently live in New South Wales. I want to start with New South Wales because it's uppermost in my mind. I have been asked to go out to—and I call it 'hanging out'—or be within schools. This is in my retirement years, in particular, in Moree, New South Wales. I saw racism there that nobody wants to deal with. It's the richest shire in Australia, and yet I saw Aboriginal kids and young people coming to school and white male students a couple of years older chasing them and throwing stones at them. It's not just the system itself; it's how what is embedded in a region can be the racism that then becomes part of what happens on a day-to-day basis. I've now named for you Moree, New South Wales, the richest shire in Australia. I call this 'hanging out' at the school. I was asked to go to a school that was the place where all the children who had been moved from other schools, kicked out of other schools, were. My story there is that I arrived at the school and this kid looked me up and down and said, 'Can you throw the hoop?' Between seven o'clock and when school started, every morning, we threw the hoop. I learned to throw the ball through the hoop. After we did that, we talked about the things that were happening in his life, and I saw the racism from older white youths in the schools around there towards the Aboriginal children in that school. I saw it in a way where they were running down the street after Aboriginal young people and throwing stones at them from the big high school next door. I wanted to name that as the first part of what I wanted to talk about. Now, this is in the last few years. It did not happen 20 years ago or 50 years ago. It's today. The second place I have worked in is Tennant Creek. It was a request to come after there had been some sexual assaults happening within the region on Aboriginal children and young people. I saw the lack of the services' capacity to respond to the needs of those young people. In fact, they tended to blame the young girls in particular for what had happened to them—'Oh, what were you doing? How did you entice that man or that person?' I'm naming that as something that we presently have after I was first called up there. It was a two-year permanent position of a good friend of mine now but one of my ex master's students working in Tennant Creek in that area with those young people. Tennant Creek is a dangerous place for young people. The trucks come through. If they're not receiving food at home, they'll get on a truck to get money to buy food for themselves, and that may not be a very good thing that they do. This sounds really crude, but they might do a head job to the driver. That's documented stuff. We have given that evidence to the Northern Territory government. Obviously, we've given it to the Tennant Creek regional council. I'm naming that as something that we need to look at in Australia. In Western Australia, I worked up in the Kimberley for quite some time. Again, we had the same issues that I'm talking about. On the other hand, I want to name something really important. Perhaps I should leave the Western Australian one until last because it's a good news story in what they were doing when I was there. In Queensland, I worked in Cape York, and I saw again what I've named for you—that the young people in the school were subjected to lots of pressure and lots of derogatory, racist comments. I don't know whether it's changed because I haven't been there for 10 years, but I saw it. I witnessed it. Also, again, I saw that builders coming into the communities to work in Cape York thought they had a right to the bodies of the young girls in particular in that community. I'm naming something really important here. I'm naming the element of sexual violence that young people that I've worked with are subjected to. Let me go back to Western Australia for you for a moment. I was called into a community out of Broome in Western Australia. I'd done some work in the Dampier Peninsula. This particular community asked me to go into their community. Again, I'm saying that on the truck routes it's dangerous. But this community had a history that had never been looked at properly. This is a good news story, in a way, because it tells you how powerful the community itself was. I was asked to work with a group of the young Aboriginal women who had graduated from universities with degrees and who were working across that region with the youth. It was a very powerful thing. But right at the very end—sorry, just before we started to get to the hard-nosed stuff of that workshop, two older women—now, I'm 83 at the moment, and they would have been about that age—walked into that room. I saw the young people who'd come in to do their work roll their eyes and say, 'Well, what would they know about anything?' I sat quietly and thought, 'Well, when there's time, I'll ask them if they can tell us what it was like living here.' I'll never forget. One of the women talked to these young Aboriginal university graduates about the thing that she remembered the most growing up. It was when she ran from the Mistake Creek massacre. She dropped her head and said, 'And I wet myself,' in a great deal of shame. The other older woman who was working there said she remembered the stockwhip was hitting her father's back when he was chained by men on horseback to a tree. They'd come into the community and they had whipped him. Those young university graduates did not know the history of that place. When this happened, when I did this particular workshop, that story by those two older women, who 15 years ago were my age now, went out into the whole community. What happened is the community itself decided to come together and talk about what those two older women had experienced as younger women growing up in that place—the killing, the murders of their family members as they ran from the massacre, when the men were captured and then tied to a tree and whipped. It's not long ago that I was up there. It's not many years ago. I'd say it's about eight years ago. When they told us this story, they hadn't talked about it before. The important part of that, however—I like to also demonstrate the positive with the negative—is that, once this story went out to the community, the elder law women came together and they realised that they had never heard the stories of the older women who'd lived through these massacres. They then worked with the young people, who put on a play. They sat with the elders, and the play told the story of that place, which was really powerful. More particularly, however, after we had finished, the elder law women said to me, 'You cannot leave here and take these painful stories with you.' As I said, I'd been working across the schools in that region in the work that I was doing. They said: 'You can't leave and take these stories with you. It'll be too hard for you to sit with them and remember them. You need to come out with us to our country.' So three Toyotas full of women drove about 35 kilometres right out into some very remote part of that area of the western part of Western Australia. We got to a river, and immediately they started to prepare themselves for the ceremony they wanted to do with me. This is a story I share often because it's not quite the kind of hard-nosed story I normally share. As I sat there watching and waiting for the women to finish their preparation to do the ceremony with me, I looked up at one of the ridges where we were. As I said, this was women's country. I could see some women and little children up there, and I thought: 'Wait a minute. They told me nobody lives up here.' So, when the law women came back from preparing to do the ceremony with me, I said to them, 'Can I ask you who lives up there?' They stopped, and then they said quietly, 'Why would you ask that question?' I said, 'I've been sitting here and I've been looking up at the ridges up there, and I could see women and children up there.' They looked at each other and said: 'When we die, we go there to prepare the little babies to be born. So those people, those women you can see, have moved from one place to another.' They'd gone to what I would call the spirit world. The law women used other words for that because they were using language words as well. 'They're with the little babies that are going to be born.' I've told that story as an end to what I want to say because it showed me that—that particular community was surrounded by massacre sites; that's why I was called in, working with the Department of Education of Western Australia. That's why I was called in. But when the two older women chose to come to the work we were doing and share their memories of the massacres, it took that community into a whole new element of reclaiming the depth of the power that they had in their deep culture. I've talked about Tennant Creek. We were called in to Tennant Creek because of the rapes, and we've now done nearly 2½ years of work there, skilling up a workforce in Tennant Creek. One of my graduate students from my master's course—I live in New South Wales, and we're doing, with We Al-li, fire, water, anger and grief—is now out running training, out of that package that I put together when I did my own PhD. We're running that across New South Wales, including in Moree, where I saw some of the worst—and I'm getting a bit emotional when I say this—racism that I've ever seen. Young white males were chasing after young kids that were at the school I was working with—the kids that had been kicked out of other schools because of their behaviour—and throwing stones at these young children. These were white kids at the high school next door. But we did do some really important and powerful work there to have them look at the history of place—what happened in the history of place in Moree. The massacres were associated with the sexual violence that also happened and the memories—the truckies coming through. We allowed the community to start to own those stories. Queensland— CHAIR: Sorry, I'm loath to interrupt you, Aunty Judy Atkinson. We do want to get to questions, and we are a little bit short on time. We do also have a brief opening statement to hear from Professor Carlson, but we only have this session until four o'clock. I'm sure there are members and senators who want the opportunity to ask you some questions as well. So I don't want to interrupt you, but I want to make sure we've got some time to ask you some questions. Prof. Atkinson : That's fine. CHAIR: Thank you. Professor Carlson? Prof. Carlson : Thank you for this opportunity to speak here today. I have been an academic for 17 years. Prior to that, I worked in the community at an Aboriginal community controlled health service. Across all of my careers, I have been witness to and experienced racism, hate and violence. I have focused a lot of my career on the politics of identity, and every single person I've interviewed in that space has experienced racism, hate and violence towards them because they identify as Aboriginal. It has nothing to do with the colour of their skin but the fact that they identify. I moved into my career to look at the online life, digital life, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I was very interested in social, cultural and political practices online. I've had three ARC grants, Australian Research Council grants, provided to me to conduct research in national projects. Across all three year-long projects, all of the people I spoke to across the nation experienced racism, hate and violence in online spaces. There was nobody who had not experienced that. For example, at one point, I focused on dating online, as it was becoming a really common practice for young people. In that space, people experienced being rejected by potential partners when they identified as Aboriginal. Some people would put on their profiles that they would want anyone except 'Abos', referring to Aboriginal people. When people discovered they were Aboriginal or saw that they identified as Aboriginal, it was met with violence, including in some cases where people would say, 'Let me defeat you like Captain Cook did,' in very violent and [inaudible], which, of course, was not what Cook was responsible for on this continent, but they were using that as a reference point. Aboriginal women, in particular, faced constant sexual harassment online and were sent direct messages of hate when they didn't respond. In terms of young people, they experienced a lot of online racism and discrimination, and a lot of people would try to bait Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into commenting by making racist comments. The biggest failure for me is perhaps the mandate of the office of e-safety and other platforms themselves in their protection for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I've done a significant amount of work with some platforms and the office of e-safety, and they focus on dehumanisation policies. They have no way to be able to think about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the racism and discrimination and violence we experience online, because most of the stuff is assessed offshore and the particular kind of racism and hate that we experience sometimes doesn't register. Often, it is not being called something—for example, using the n-word or other really derogatory comments. It might be referring to you as a 'primate', for example, which is specific to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on this continent. So they have no way of intervening, and most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will tell you that they have put forward a complaint to many of these online platforms and been met with 'the perpetrator doesn't contravene their community standards'. In regard to the office of eSafety—and this has to do with my work on the politics of identity as well—there are people who target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including Roger Karge, who identifies himself as a historian who's from Tasmania, and Andrew Bolt, who has been found guilty of racist behaviour towards Aboriginal people. These people are allowed to then target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and it's outside of the office of eSafety mandate to do anything about that, which I think is a failing. The fact that they publish personal details about people, including their names, dates of birth and family connections et cetera and that we have no way of stopping this kind of violence is, I think, very poor. I'll leave it at that. CHAIR: Thank you very much, Professor Carlson. We will proceed to questions. Senator Liddle. Senator LIDDLE: Thank you, everyone, for attending. I've got one question. Australia has been watching Central Australia in the last week. They've seen that online. They've talked about it over coffee, over breakfast, on the television and on the radio. This inquiry is into the nature, prevalence and impact of racism, hate and violence towards First Nations people. Given you're eminently qualified as academics, I'm interested to understand what that does to the nature and prevalence in the short term and over time. What I'm really interested in is what it does when most of Australia is watching this through a television screen and online and has no local context. Prof. Lowe : A piece of research that I did about seven years ago was to engage with—interviewing—around 120 Aboriginal students across seven schools in regional New South Wales. I was explicitly interested in the exact question you asked, which is: how do students themselves take on board the media talk about Aboriginal people—their lack of success, their failure at school—and how do they internalise that and what did they take from that? Beside that, I also interviewed specifically their parents—instead of just asking the community to come in—about the conversation they had at home around the same conversations. It was really interesting because those students explicitly articulated a view that every Aboriginal student in the school, to varying degrees, took on that negative self-reporting that was going on in the landscape, whether it was on the news, whether it was in the local newspaper, whether it was about the articulation of success at school at the end of each year—these multiple opportunities, when schools get an opportunity to tell the story about their school and when you get successive years of low attendance and all the stuff which is on the public record. I was working with students from year 7 to year 10, and many of these students really took that on board. As 12-year-olds, they understood what was being said about them in the press and articulated that, often in very, very low expectations of themselves and their success. They explicitly said that about themselves. But they often turned, also, to what actually brought them success. In the middle of all of that, students said over and over again that, when the schools were able to articulate ways that their identities could actually have a real presence in the school—not in a frivolous way, not in a way, a sense, of just doing footprints across the playground or a mural on the wall but something that was of substance, substantial work—that was the moment that kids then turned and said: 'That's the reason I go to school. I go to school because I have access to these sorts of programs, I do these sorts of things and they speak explicitly to my sense of identity in a positive way,' because all the other stuff was so negative. Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : I'm sorry; this is a classic example, I would argue, of a fetish Australia has of demonising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples without looking into why something like this could happen in the first place. When I say why, I'm not talking about good and evil; I'm talking about a man who was put into jail multiple times—what were the factors that would have caused that type of life for him? There is no debate; there's no discussion about that. There'll be no discussion about the particular communities they come from and the disadvantages that are being forced upon them whilst other, non-Indigenous remote peoples are doing absolutely fine and doing as well as their metropolitan counterparts. There are no questions about that. This fetish then—as Professor Lowe spoke about—turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that we hear, in academic terms, stuff like stereotype threat, where these narratives get pushed through the media over and over again and then they become internalised by minoritised peoples. This has been found not only across race but across gender and so forth. It's just really, really disappointing. It's a flashpoint, where the average Australian citizen can just look at the TV and say, 'Oh, that's just Aboriginal people,' and it's just absolute BS. The media has got so much responsibility here—and the politicians that push this over and over again and even the general public, who cannot think critically about the reasons why tragedies like this may occur. It's highly problematic and it's part of the racism in Australia, as far as I'm concerned. Dr Moschion: I think it's a really important question. The lack of context really comes back to, also, the lack of understanding about the root causes, which goes back to what you were saying as well. The risk is that it really increases the fractures between communities, so it's really important to address this type of racism. I think, going back to what was said about schools as well, education here is really important. The way we teach our children history is of utmost importance. I have two kids in primary school, and, from what I see, it's the same history that has been taught forever, really. So I think teaching context, giving context for people to understand, is really important and has to go through education. Prof. Carlson : I just want to speak to the impact that this has on people online. We find that a lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people feel they need to defend the position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people against the constant rain of racism. But the actual cause and cost is that you spend a lot of time living in a grief bubble. You're unable to move from it. In the project I did on help-seeking online, I spoke to a lot of people who spoke to serious issues that happened in the media and the way in which the media reported on them, and they felt really overwhelmed with being online. They felt overwhelmed in their community, and there were a lot of people who felt like they needed to withdraw and not participate fully in society, online or offline, because they felt that they were targeted and that they had to make up for anything that was seen as a deficit—the way it's framed in the media—and they felt exhausted by it. A lot of people then are also accused of being within the same category of any wrongdoing that's done by other Aboriginal people. So it's quite a significant issue in digital life. CHAIR: Thank you. I am going to need to share the call. I am predicting a bunch of questions on notice for this panel. Ms Cook, over to you. Ms KARA COOK: Professor Bodkin-Andrews and Dr Moschion, both of you spoke about history, and you spoke about some of the fracturing of history—about the frontier wars and about knowledge and education in schools and amongst young people. What role does truth-telling have in combating racism, in your view? Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : Truth-telling is absolutely critical, but it is only the first step of combating racism. If we are not aware of the problem, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. If we cannot truth-tell about the correlates and the causal relationships racism has with poorer academic performance—as I've referred to before—with poorer mental health outcomes, with post-traumatic stress disorder and so forth, then we cannot understand what could be impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across generations in that regard. So, as I said, truth-telling is important. On the other side of the fence, it also makes non-Indigenous peoples aware of the consequences of history itself and how it can have an ongoing impact and can also be perpetuated over time if we cannot learn from our past and ensure that those instances don't happen again. Whether it be, for example, a massacre; whether it be saying that a particular mob is not from this area; whether it be saying that the only history is a white blindfold history—we have to move beyond that. We have to truth-tell, and then we can move forward from that point to work out strategies—for example, the work Professor Lowe is doing in schools and having more strengths based and positive outcomes for Indigenous students. But, if we don't truth-tell, it's just going to be throwing a blanket over our history, our very lives and how we can become stronger in the future generations. Dr Moschion : I'm going to reiterate a little bit. It's really important to understand the root causes, because, when you don't, the risk is that you treat the symptoms. If you just treat the symptoms, it might be a very ineffective way of solving problems. So truth-telling and understanding and knowing history is very important to really identify how to fix the problems that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are facing today. The other aspect is one from the non-Indigenous perspective. I think people find the idea that the past from so long ago can still affect the present difficult. With that in mind, it's really important to have evidence, including quantitative evidence—I'm sorry; I'm a quantitativist, so I'm a bit biased here!—that actually demonstrates that the past is impacting the present. That is the basis on which we can move forward and address the root causes instead of just the symptoms. Prof. Lowe : Can I jump in for a second? It goes to the very assumption that, in fact, schools can be a place where these issues can be addressed. There are 10,300 schools in Australia. You would imagine that there are several hundred thousand teachers in schools every day educating kids. The question is: what's structurally wrong with schools that don't allow those histories that both Gawaian and Julie spoke about? For the last six years, I've been intrigued by it because I spent 13 years developing curriculum, thinking about what curriculum does and how we educate students from an Aboriginal perspective. I was guilty—and I am happy to admit that I was guilty—of perpetuating something that I didn't understand at the time, which was the very way in which curriculum is developed, right at the root cause of it when the act was written for the development of ACARA as the national curriculum authority. When I first started to write their documentation in 2010, they set out a set of principles that set out the ways in which Aboriginal content would be taught in every school in Australia—not just half of them but all of them. Go back to the documents and see what was written. The documents that were written and the shaping papers that were developed as the guide to the development of curriculum in Australia said two things: Aboriginal knowledges and content can never be understood, seen or be taught as a subject on its own; and its primary task is always to represent and support the teaching of disciplined knowledge. What I'm telling you is that Indigenous content always has to support the mathematics syllabus, the science syllabus, the history syllabus or whatever other syllabus it goes into. It has to primarily turn itself from being Indigenous knowledge and experience to teaching about mathematics, science or history. If it does that, then it can teach Indigenous content knowledge. Our research has shown categorically that teachers are absolutely unable—we've spent, for as long as I've been teaching, almost 50 years blaming teachers for students leaving schools in droves unable to articulate anything about Aboriginal experiences in history. They don't know. When you ask them, what they will tell you are individual elements: 'They had six seasons. They spoke 200 languages. They lived out in the bush.' But they don't have any coherent arc of knowledge about the history of Aboriginal people. Nobody has taught it to them from beginning to end so that they can actually answer and articulate a history of Aboriginal people in this country. We deliberately don't do that. I don't want to labour my point too much, because there are about 10 papers if you want to read them. They go specifically to the task of telling you that we've deliberately atomised knowledge. We've broken it up into a gazillion parts. We've scattered them across the planet, and we're asking teachers to teach these little micro moments of knowledge and then say to a student, 'Somehow or other, you've got to tiptoe your way through all of these opportunities, and you yourself have to build it into something that will make sense to you about Aboriginal people and their experience.' Those who've had children, all of us who have had children, will know that that is an impossibility. We, as teachers, teach people through an arc of learning. We take them from not knowing to where we want to take them by gradually building knowledge across a long period of time. You have a purpose. There's a function. That's what a curriculum document does. But, right at the very beginning of policy in this country, we developed a policy that said that Aboriginal peoples' knowledges can never ever do that work. When we talk about what teachers should be doing, I'm going to tell you that teachers can't do it and we've made it impossible for them to do it. This is a response to policies made by government instrumentalities, and nobody's questioning it. It's built right into the very documents that we actually are required to work with. It's an impossibility. It's a way of saying we should teach them these things. It would be wonderful if we taught them about massacres and stuff, but there is no place for that to happen. CHAIR: Thank you, Professor Lowe. I'm going to share the call and go to Mr Gee. Mr GEE: Professor Lowe, what would you put in place if you had control of the curriculum? What would you do? Prof. Lowe : That's a great question, and I've asked myself that many times. Thinking back in terms of curriculum theory, Indigenous knowledges and the story that this country wants to tell and that Aboriginal people want to tell about themselves should be brought back into a body of knowledge and teaching which is similar to every other body of knowledge. If we want to teach mathematics, we wouldn't take away the maths curriculum, scatter maths across all the other stuff and say to the English teacher, 'You teach these kids mathematics.' We would all just laugh, because it would be a total nonsense. So we would bring it back, and we would train teachers to actually teach—those people who are trained as Aboriginal studies teachers, of which there are many—and give them a subject that they could teach, that they would know. They could work with families and communities and actually do it like every other teacher. They could teach students across time a coherent body of knowledge so that students can actually arrive at a point where they can say something about racism or massacres or Australian people or the referendum or any of those sorts of things in a way of knowledge. That's the only way you could do it. Mr GEE: Just a general question: what else would be effective, in the panel's view, in terms of ending racism in schools? What else can be done, besides the curriculum? What else do you think would be effective? Prof. Lowe : The research is really clear on this. It is when students are engaged and given opportunities to really be able to articulate and learn, not just articulate what they know but learn in schools through their cultural identities, because we know that culture actually makes a huge difference. We know it's one of the reasons why kids get up and go to school. When cultural work is done at schools, whether it's through a structured Aboriginal language program or another sort of program that students will have access to, it's where good, coherent learning goes on. I worked in languages for a long time, in Aboriginal language work, and we had kids going into schools and learning head, knees and toes for years and years and years. They never actually learned a body of knowledge that allowed them to start talking in language. Where that happens—kids go to school, and, when Aboriginal languages are taught to non-Aboriginal people, it actually makes a really big difference, a huge difference, to the cohort of students who learn that language. Mr GEE: Is there anyone else who wants to have a crack at that one? CHAIR: I think Professor Carlson or Professor Atkinson wanted to say something. Prof. Atkinson : As I've been listening, I'm also aware that things that should be taught in schools are that each child has value, that each child has stories that come from their families and their communities. There was one experience I had when I was, as I called it, hanging out with a school. I went there for six months, and I was just at the school engaging with the young people. There were two things. The first day I walked in, one of the kids looked me up and down and said, 'Can you throw the hoop?' and I said, 'No, but you can teach me.' So from seven o'clock in the morning until school started, we got to learn. We got to know each other very well by throwing the hoop. He taught me. So he had value. The second thing, which I think is really more important, happened when the school principal took a group of young people to a restaurant for a meal in this particular town. As they started to walk into the restaurant, a young boy of eight suddenly stopped and said to the school principal: 'Oh, Aunty, Aunty, you'll have to go first. I can't; I'm black.' He was, therefore, anticipating that if he walked in, he would immediately receive the kind of treatment that was given out to the young people I knew in that particular town. The school principal said: 'Oh, no, we can walk together. Come on, hold my hand.' So the school principal, who was not an Aboriginal person, and the young fella walked in together. It was a simple statement by the school principal that he had value. She didn't walk ahead of him. She included him in the racism that he anticipated in that restaurant. They are just two stories I can share in watching how we can respond to the racism that I experienced every day when I was in that school. I call it hanging out. I was there for six months just working with the kids, because I had retired from my own work. They had value. They had the right to walk into a restaurant at the same time as the principal. We could engage and sit and talk with each other about the stories that they held. I was listening to those stories realising that the system itself—the education system, the legal system, every part of that town—was failing those kids at every level. I won't name the town, but it's in New South Wales. I think it's as simple as that, because my experience is that when young people were engaged and excited about what they were learning then they engaged beautifully, but outside that particular school they encountered racism on a day-to-day basis. Mr GEE: Thank you. Prof. Atkinson : I watched it. I saw it. CHAIR: I will take the opportunity to rotate the call because we are getting short of time. If you can keep your answer to one minute, I can let you respond very quickly. Prof. Bodkin-Andrews : I will try. I just want to back up what Aunty said there. In some of the research I did in high schools, the Aboriginal students themselves spoke very strongly about what's happening in community and the racism from non-Indigenous people in the community—not as much in schools, but it did exist. When we look at a school, it is a microcosm. If we're going to change curriculum, I think we have to change the narrative in the nation as well. We need to support the schools from within and without. Keep that one in mind as well. And we need to call out racism, whether it comes from the media or wherever it comes from. We need to call it out. CHAIR: Thank you. I'll now share the call and go to Senator Thorpe. Senator THORPE: I've got a million questions, so you'll be getting a whole lot on notice from me for you all. I'm going to stick to the high-level ones. Systemic racism is rife, but people don't get it. Government don't even get systemic violence. They don't even want to talk about systemic racism. In fact, they didn't even want it in the terms of reference for this inquiry. So I am going to make sure it's part of the reporting and a recommendation. It's our people going to hospital to die. I left school at 14 because I was dealing with racists and punching on with them. I ended up a senator because of the school of hard knocks. The racism is worse than I've ever seen it in my 52 years, right through to my grandchildren. We know the problems. We've got so many reports. This is just another inquiry. Can you explain to the people out there how systemic racism in this country operates and has successfully done so since colonisation. Secondly, how are governments—particularly the federal government, because we're all federal politicians—upholding systemic racism? Is it intentional? Is it to keep the colony alive? Prof. Atkinson : Wow. That's an interesting question. Is it intentional? Prof. Lowe : It's a good question. It goes to the question, of course, of how what happens within the parliament gets articulated outside the parliament in terms of the policies and practices of government that actually then flow down into everyone's homes. Several years ago, I did some work looking at New South Wales educational policy—how educational policy sets out to describe Aboriginal people and how then I could make sense of the strategies that are put in place, because in the end it's the strategies that go into policies that tell you a lot about what they really think. A policy that was written in New South Wales—for all intents and purposes, a policy that had a lot of Aboriginal people supporting it—was the Aboriginal languages policy that came out in support of Aboriginal languages articulation in this country. There were three other policies that sat around that, and I was particularly interested in schools, because schools are a particular site which could be really fruitful for supporting language programs if it was done properly. We found that while the policies themselves, when you look at the language of the policy, appear to articulate one thing, when you work backwards from the strategies that get funded—the funding is really important. Wherever the money goes tells you, really, what they're thinking. Working back from that, those policies actually infantilised Aboriginal people. In the end, when you pare it away, the policy was saying to Aboriginal people: 'We acknowledge you've had a really hard time—in fact, so hard a time you basically are unable to govern yourself or to support yourself, so you need us to step in and be your protector. We're going to actually protect you. We're going to fund these things in particular ways to do particular work.' So it's a really good example when you see how policy works—is it insidious? Of course it's insidious, but who do you blame for that in the end? Is it the lawmakers—yourself—who are making laws? Is it the way the policy is written in government departments? Who oversees that work? Who actually provides the insights into showing what these things do? Again, to my point, how did ACARA write the policy they did, which has sat there now for 15 years with nobody having challenged it, yet it actually undoes all the stuff that we've been talking about, all the funding that's gone into supporting schools to teach Aboriginal histories and languages and culture and knowledges. We have this expectation that teachers can do this, but we do not give them the tools. Who's to blame for that? I don't know, but I think that, in the end, our job has been to show and articulate and research and do the things that we think are right and send those things up and say: 'We're not unintelligent people. We've spent a lot of time thinking about this. We're trying to show you what's going on in schools. We just want you to read it and then think about it.' What's the implication of that? Prof. Carlson : I think one of the issues is that there's a real lack of literacy around structures like settler colonialism and how they work—how this actually operationalises through institutions—so the general public really have no clue. They think colonisation happened at a period of time and we've moved on. They don't understand settler colonialism is about their systemic racism. Our institutions are colonial institutions, particularly law and governments, and are all based on a colonial system. In the recent research project I did with Aboriginal women in the public service in Victoria, we found high rates of epistemic racism because of systemic racism in those institutions. People were told that they perhaps got the job because they were Aboriginal, as opposed to their two master's degrees and other degrees and qualifications that they might have had. There's this inherent belief that these systems are fair, equitable and just and that Aboriginal people are given all of this leeway all the time because we are undeserving and never meet the grade. That's what people were experiencing daily. For myself, in higher education, I had two ARCs, a book and a whole bunch of other accolades, and, when I asked to be on the research committee, for example, I was advised I could be on the equity and diversity committee. People rarely understand how systemic racism stops you from advancing in your career, being funded for your project or being able to fulfil any kind of aspirations you or your community might have, because these institutions are set up to act against you. I really feel that the public don't actually understand settler colonialism, even when we engage in truth-telling. When I wrote the book Monumental Disruptions, which looked at massacres and colonial commemorations and how all these operate, I was subjected to high levels of death threats and violence via email and phone et cetera into my workplace for daring to challenge the legacy of someone like Lachlan Macquarie, for example. When you try to challenge these things, these systems fall into place very quickly. Media will turn on you. Law will turn on you. It's very difficult for people to understand that those are actually colonial institutions, because we all think that colonialism and the colonial era were somewhere a couple of hundred years ago. Senator THORPE: Join the club. I'm in that club. Prof. Carlson : I know you are! Senator THORPE: Professor Atkinson, did you want to respond? Prof. Atkinson : I've been out there for a while. I've worked all across Australia and I have seen extreme racism. But nobody in the community, and I'm talking about Cape York now, was willing to name the man who came in to do some work—extreme levels of racism and violence in the way that he was behaving towards women, as well. When I saw that when I was called into that community, I felt that people had been silenced and were unable to name the things that I would call racist that were coming into that particular community. On the other hand, I've been in Western Australia, where people were starting to name the racism that they were seeing that was coming out of the systems of government and from people coming in to work. I can think of one community where the builders that came in were not just racist but incredibly sexist in their behaviour. It was sitting and talking to the older women that got them to decide that they needed to speak out about this. I think it's important that we give our own people the skills. They didn't feel heard by others to be able to name the racism that was coming in from different services that were put into the communities. Obviously, I'm talking about the remote communities I've worked in. I named a minute ago taking those young people out in Moree to go to a restaurant. The little eight-year-old wanted to go in first, and he pulled up. He stopped and said: 'Auntie, can you go first? I'm black.' So he was already giving himself a negative. I think we need to give our young people the opportunity to speak out about the things that they're experiencing that are harmful and shameful and that are putting them down in any way. That is the racist experience that they're having. What I have found is that, when you sit quietly with somebody or a group of young fellas—I'm talking about young fellas at this particular time—they're willing to name it. They're willing to speak out strongly about it. On the other hand, what I experienced—and I'm now talking about New South Wales in particular—when I was working with young women was that there had been sexual abuse activities or implications for those young girls. I'm talking about truckies thinking they have the right to the bodies of those young women. They didn't feel they had the right to speak to those issues until I 'hung out' with them, as I call it. I found a time when we could informally talk, and I said, 'Listen, I'm willing to stand up because, if somebody treated me like you've just told me, I'd be screaming my head off at all the people that have allowed that to happen.' Those young women had no idea they could speak out on those kinds of things, including a person in the schooling system who I found was not just racist but incredibly sexist. For me—and maybe it's my age—it's demonstrating that we all have the right and responsibility to stand up, speak out and, more particularly, teach our youth and our young people that they have that right too and that they will be heard, because we need to learn to listen to them and their experiences. That's all I want to say. Senator THORPE: Thank you. CHAIR: Senator Whiteaker? Senator WHITEAKER: Thank you very much for appearing before the committee today. I have a question specifically for Professor Carlson. Perhaps, depending on time, others can add their views. Professor Carlson, a lot of your work has demonstrated the ways that online platforms enable racism. I'm interested in what your views are about what more can be done to combat that kind of online racism. Is there a role for platforms to play in doing that? What more could be done in terms of holding those platforms accountable for what happens online? Prof. Carlson : Platforms make a lot of money based on hate, so they're not likely to move willingly into a space to stop racism and hate. From my experience, many of them have little understanding of racism and hate directed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people specifically. They really lack that racial literacy around us. They might look at some of us and think: 'You don't look black or phenotypically Aboriginal, so what is your problem? How does this count for you?' They really lack any understanding of the history of violence towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country. As other members have mentioned, schooling is lacking. We now are dealing with the consequences of that. People who are making decisions about what counts as racism or violence or hate towards us are the people who were taught nothing. A lot of it is shipped overseas to call centres as well. I think platforms could be held much more accountable. The problem is that a lot of the decision-makers who make these decisions are people who lack that racial literacy themselves. Now we're moving into an era of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making around what counts as hate or violence in online spaces. This is going to be really dangerous territory for vulnerable communities and, particularly in this case, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I was once asked at a conference whether I would pull the plug on social media, and I definitely would. I see from all the people I've interviewed over the last 10 years in this space the absolute violence that takes place online and the impacts on people—massive mental health issues and feelings of a sense of helplessness. Much more can be done by policymakers and in terms of how these things are regulated. Senator WHITEAKER: Thank you. CHAIR: Senators and members have already indicated that there will be a bunch of questions on notice for this panel. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon. If you've been asked to provide any additional information—and you will receive questions on notice—can you please provide it to the secretariat by 15 May. You will be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence, and you will have an opportunity to request corrections to any transcription errors as well. Thank you very much..