Book Review

Quentin Beresford and Gary Partington (eds.). Reform and Resistance inAboriginal Education: The Australian Experience. Perth: University ofWestern Australia Press, 2003. 296 pp. Paper, $9.95.

This collection of ten chapters by twelve authors in varying combinationsprovides a useful introduction to many of the contemporary difficultieswhich face young Aboriginal people as they seek a good education incontemporary Australia. There is a short historical section, but the greatpart of the book concentrates on present policy directions and theway they play out in schools and communities with high proport-ions of indigenous people. School and education issues include thoseof language, attendance, behavior management, and best teachingpractices. The contexts of schooling are explored in chapters aboutAboriginal families, health, and the criminal justice system.

It appears to the reviewer that the imagined audience for this book isAustralian undergraduate and postgraduate students, especially those whoexpect to be, or already are, working in schools or communities withAboriginal people. Nevertheless it certainly has strengths that make it auseful text for a broader audience, including a good overview of Aboriginaleducation.

What the book does signify, and this is no criticism of the bookitself, is the extremely underdeveloped state of the Australianhistoriography on education for Aboriginal people. It is something ofa scandal that there are still virtually no comprehensive or authoritativestudies of the history of education concerning Aboriginal people. Whatexists are relatively short articles, often written by non-historianssummarizing the ‘‘historical experience,’’ based usually on too few re-search sources. Some of the best studies, such as the work on Aboriginaleducation in New South Wales by Jim Fletcher (Clean, Clad andCourteous, 1989) were self-published and are now somewhat out-dated. The thesis literature often addresses particular institutions andrestricted areas and times. The field cries out for scholars who candevelop histories and the historiography to the next level.

This said, Quentin Beresford is the author who provides in thisbook the most recent ‘‘outline’’ of Aboriginal educational history(chapters one and two). The argument that ‘‘separate and unequal’’ arethe defining characteristic of that history, given the present state ofresearch, is certainly plausible. The history of Aboriginal ‘‘dispossess-ion, cultural differences within the mainstream society and longstandingexperiences of racism within this [Australian] society’’ (p. 18) are addedto the other causes: Aboriginal poverty and community breakdown,poor access to the labor market, the youthful demographic, and theremote and rural locations of so many Aboriginal communities.

History of Education Quarterly Vol. 47 No. 1 February 2007

Theories about the causes of disadvantage are enumerated, althoughinsufficiently tested against the experience of Aboriginal people inspecific times and places. There are useful discussions of the attemptsto ‘‘civilise’’ Aboriginal people in colonial times through schooling and asummary of the various possible effects of the laws encouraging theremoval of children, especially those of ‘‘mixed blood’’ from Aboriginalfamilies, and succeeding segregation and integration policies whichaffected Aboriginal education and schooling. There is also recognitionof the laws, such as those in New South Wales, which enabled thecomplaint by any one white parent about the presence of Aboriginalchildren in a public school to have such children removed.

There is a good discussion of the burst of activity from the 1970s inAboriginal education, which followed the assumption by the federalgovernment of wider powers in Aboriginal affairs. It must beremembered that it was only in the 1960s that Aboriginal personscould be counted in the national census, and arguably, only from thattime, that they were afforded full Australian citizenship in the countrywhere archaeology now dates their arrival back some 60,000 years.

Many of the chapters discussing contemporary policy and practicein Aboriginal education have useful things to tell historians. Sims,O’Connor, and Forrest discuss the differences between European andAboriginal Australians’ understandings of children and childhood andthe problems this can cause in the ordinary government school. Thereare evocative and important discussions of the prevalence of earinfections among Aboriginal children and the devastation wrought onchildren and their parents by substance abuse. In many parts of Australia,besides the impact of deafness arising from ear infections on theeducation of Aboriginal children, there is also the brain damagearising from petrol-sniffing by far too many children.

In summary, this book provides an important statement about thecontemporary condition of Aboriginal education in Australia. Towardthe end there are good chapters on ‘‘best practice’’ pedagogies forschools with high proportions of Aboriginal children. There is also avirtual ‘‘advice manual’’ for persons who teach and live in Aboriginalcommunities. For readers of History of Education Quarterly, however, abook like this is only a start. The origins and the history of the presentcircumstances in Aboriginal education is a field awaiting energetic andserious historians.

CRAIG CAMPBELLUNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Book Review 101