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The rise in the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander mothers is a major public health issue with multiple sequelae for Aboriginal children and the cohesiveness of Aboriginal communities. The purpose of this paper is to review the available literature relating to Australian Aboriginal women prisoners’ experiences of being a mother.

The literature search covered bibliographic databases from criminology, sociology and anthropology, and Australian history. The authors review the literature on: traditional and contemporary Aboriginal mothering roles, values and practices; historical accounts of the impacts of white settlement of Australia and subsequent Aboriginal affairs policies and practices; and women’s and mothers’ experiences of imprisonment.

The review found that the cultural experiences of mothering are unique to Aboriginal mothers and contrasted to non-Aboriginal concepts. The ways that incarceration of Aboriginal mothers disrupts child rearing practices within the cultural kinship system are identified.

Aboriginal women have unique circumstances relevant to the concept of motherhood that need to be understood to develop culturally relevant policy and programs. The burden of disease and cycle of incarceration within Aboriginal families can be addressed by improving health outcomes for incarcerated Aboriginal mothers and female carers.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on Australian Aboriginal women prisoners’ experiences of being a mother.

This paper draws on the archival records of the Victorian Education Department, literature produced by the governing authority of Tally Ho (the Central Mission), and newspaper reports produced in the mid-20th century about school and education at Tally Ho. This paper also draws on material from the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board and the Northern Territory Department of Welfare, as well as two historical key government inquiries into the institutionalisation of children.

This paper uses Tally Ho Boys’ Training Farm as a case study to examine the intersection of welfare systems, justice systems and schooling and education for Aboriginal children in institutions like Tally Ho in the mid-20th century. Further, it provides perspectives on how institutions such as Tally Ho were utilised by governments in Victoria and the Northern Territory to pursue different agendas – sometimes educational – particular to Aboriginal children. This paper also explores how histories can be reconstructed when archives are missing or silent about histories of Aboriginal childhood.

This paper demonstrates how governments used Tally Ho to control and govern the lives of Aboriginal children. By drawing together archives from a range of bodies and authorities who controlled legislation and policies, this paper contributes new understandings about the role of institutions in Victoria to the assimilation policies of Victoria and the Northern Territory in the mid-20th century.

Scholarship on the institutionalisation of children in the post-war era in Victoria, including the ways that schooling and justice systems were experienced by children living in care, has failed to fully engage with the experiences of Aboriginal children. Historians have given limited attention to the experiences of Aboriginal children living in institutions off Aboriginal reserves in Victoria. There has been limited historical scholarship examining the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children at Tally Ho. This paper broadens our understandings about how Aboriginal children encountered institutionalisation in Victoria.

By 1901 in New South Wales the blueprint for the relationship between Aborigines and Europeans had been established: Aborigines were ‘in a far better condition when living in small communities comparatively isolated and removed from intimate contact with Europeans’. This article provides a study of the Purfleet School on the Aboriginal Reserve near Taree township in the Manning Valley until the implementation of the assimilation policy by the Aboriginal Welfare Board. The key questions asked are: what schooling for children was provided? How were they equipped for adulthood? How did they suffer from being isolated from the mainstream of public education? The Biripi Aboriginal people remain a strong community in the region today.

The focus of this paper is to centre the lived experiences and perceptions of western education held by Aboriginal people who lived at Moola Bulla Native Cattle Station (Moola Bulla) in Western Australia, between 1910 and 1955. Of interest is an investigation into how government legislations and policies influenced these experiences and perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to promote the powerful narrative that simultaneously acknowledges injustice and honours Aboriginal agency.

The research from which this paper is drawn moves away from colonial, paternalistic and racist interpretations of history; it is designed to decolonise the narrative of Aboriginal education in remote Western Australia. The research uses the wide and deep angle lens of qualitative historical research, filtered by decolonising methodologies and standpoint theory. Simultaneously, the paper valorises the contributions Indigenous academics are making to the decolonisation of historical research.

Preliminary findings suggest the narrative told by the residents who were educated at Moola Bulla support a reframing of previous deficit misrepresentations of indigeneity into strength-based narratives. These narratives, or “counter stories”, articulate resistance to colonial master narratives.

This paper argues that listening to Aboriginal lived experiences and perceptions of western education from the past will better inform our engagement with the delivery of equitable educational opportunities for Aboriginal students in remote contexts in the future.

This paper will contribute to the wider academic community by addressing accountability in Aboriginal education. Most important to the study is the honouring of the participants and families of those who once lived on Moola Bulla, many who are speaking back through the telling of their story.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the mobility of indigenous people in Victoria during the 1960s enabled them to resist the policy of assimilation as evident in the structures of schooling. It argues that the ideology of assimilation was pervasive in the Education Department’s approach to Aboriginal education and inherent in the curriculum it produced for use in state schools. This is central to the construction of the state of Victoria as being devoid of Aboriginal people, which contributes to a particularly Victorian perspective of Australia’s national identity in relation to indigenous people and culture.

This paper utilises the state school records of the Victorian Department of Education, as well as the curriculum documentation and resources the department produced. It also examines the records of the Aborigines Welfare Board.

The Victorian Education Department’s curriculum constructed a narrative of learning and schools which denied the presence of Aboriginal children in classrooms, and in the state of Victoria itself. These representations reflect the Department and the Victorian Government’s determination to deny the presence of Aboriginal children, a view more salient in Victoria than elsewhere in the nation due to the particularities of how Aboriginality was understood. Yet the mobility of Aboriginal students – illustrated in this paper through a case study – challenged both the representations of Aboriginal Victorians, and the school system itself.

This paper is inspired by the growing scholarship on Indigenous mobility in settler-colonial studies and offers a new perspective on assimilation in Victoria. It interrogates how curriculum intersected with the position of Aboriginal students in Victorian state schools, and how their position – which was often highly mobile – was influenced by the practices of assimilation, and by Aboriginal resistance and responses to assimilationist practices in their lives. This paper contributes to histories of assimilation, Aboriginal history and education in Victoria.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the roles of accounting within state-based agencies which interpreted the ideal of protection for the Aboriginal population as principally about the removal of children from the Aboriginal communities to institutions of training and places of forced indenture under government-negotiated labour contracts.

The study uses the original archival records of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards (1883-1950) to highlight the link between pastoral notions of moral betterment and the use of accounting technologies to organise and implement the “apprenticeship” programmes.

The analysis reveals that accounting practices and information were integral to the ability of the state to intervene and organise this domain of action and, together with a legal framework, to make the forced removal of Aboriginal children possible.

The mentalities and practices of assimilation analysed in the paper are not unique to the era of “protection”. The study provides a history of the present that evokes the antecedents to recent welfare policy changes, which encompass a political rationality directed at the normalisation of the economic and social behaviours of both indigenous and non-indigenous welfare recipients.

The paper provides an historical example of how the state enlisted accounting and legal technologies to construct a crisis of “neglect” and to intervene to protect and assimilate the Aboriginal children.

This chapter explores inclusive approaches to reading instruction for Australian Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children. Drawing from the literature on effective reading instruction, culturally appropriate instructional practices, and the authors’ research on reading interventions in remote communities in Australia we assert that to be inclusive you must provide a learning environment that supports all students to learn. Further, that the approaches used in this learning environment should be evidence-based.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

When providing professional development for teachers, certain factors should be considered and included to ensure it is effective and enhances teacher practice and outcomes for children in their classes. While this is achieved in many curriculum areas, there has been little written about effective professional development for teachers in relation to Aboriginal education in Australia, enhancing teacher confidence in meeting the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This paper aims to describe a study concerned with the ongoing development of a professional learning framework empowering primary school teachers to infuse Aboriginal ways of seeing and being into their classroom practice.

Design-based methodology, using semi-structured interviews with teachers, allowed for iterative amendment and improvement of the professional learning experiences. A description is provided linking the elements of successful professional development for teachers to the implementation of this study’s professional learning.

Key findings are that if the elements noted in the literature pertaining to successful professional learning for teachers are included, change in practice does take place and is sustained, to the benefit of the children they teach. This study demonstrates the vital importance of ongoing collaboration and support for teachers undertaking professional development if they are going to change practice in the longer term.

The pedagogy described in this paper goes beyond content to an Aboriginal way of teaching children through modelling and how this can be infused into teaching practice.