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The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history.

The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years.

State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment.

This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.

Recent research into the nature and impact of racial discrimination directed at Aboriginal Australian children and youth has revealed how such a stressor can negatively impact upon varying physical health, emotional well-being and education outcomes. Despite the strength of these findings for identifying need for action, such research has been largely limited by either a lack of consideration as to the potentially complex nature of racism targeting Aboriginal Australians or alternatively offering little in identifying sources of resiliency for Aboriginal Australian students. It is the purpose of this investigation to identify the voices of high-achieving Aboriginal Australian post-graduate students with regard to their experiences of racism, how they may have coped with racism and their advice to future generations of Aboriginal youth.

A series of in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with seven Aboriginal Australian PhD students within an Australian University. The interviews were designed to capture the perceptions, experiences and coping strategies used when faced with racism. The data was carefully and repeatedly scrutinized for emerging themes that were shared by the majority of participants.

Numerous themes emerged with issues pertaining to the veracity of racism and conceptualizations of racism across historical/cross-generational, contemporary, verbal, physical, institutional, cultural, political, electronic, personal, reverse/internalized and collective/group dimensions. In addition, the negative impact of racism was identified, but more importantly, a series of interrelated positive coping responses (e.g. externalization of racism, social support) were voiced.

The implications of these results attest to the need to understand the many faces of racism that may still be experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders today. In addition, the coping strategies identified may be seen as valuable agents of resiliency for future generations of Aboriginal youth.

Emerging discourses focusing on the social, emotional, educational, and economic disadvantages identified for Australia’s First Peoples (when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts) are becoming increasingly dissociated with an understanding of the interplay between historical and current trends in racism. In addition, it may be argued that the very construction of Western perspectives of Indigenous identity (as opposed to identities) may be deeply entwined within the undertones of the interplay between epistemological racism, and the emergence of new racism today.

This chapter shall review a substantial portion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational research, with a particular emphasis on the acknowledgment of the impact of racism on the educational outcomes (and other life outcomes) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with a focus on higher education.

This review has found that while there is evidence emerging toward the engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in all forms of education, there is also considerable resistance to targeted efforts to reduce the inequities between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and all Australians (especially within the university sector). It is argued this resistance, both at the student and curriculum level, is clear evidence of preexisting epistemological mentalities and racism.

The implications of this review suggest that greater effort needs to be placed in recognizing unique Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experiences and perspectives, not only at the student level, but such perspectives need to be imbedded throughout the whole university environment.

This paper aims to outline the possibilities of intersectional history as a novel method for management history. Intersectional history combines intersectionality and the study of the past to examine discrimination in organizations over time. This paper explores the need for intersectional work in management history, outlines the vision for intersectional history and provides a brief example analyzing the treatment of Australian Aboriginal people in a historical account of Qantas Airways.

This paper contends that intersectionality is a discursive practice, and it adopts a relational approach to the study of the past to inform the method. This paper focuses on the social construction of identities and the enduring nature of traces of the powerful in organizations over time.

The example of Qantas Airways demonstrates that intersectional history can be used to interrogate powerful traces of the past to reveal novel insights about marginalized peoples over time.

Intersectional history is a specific and reflexive method that allows for the surfacing of identity-based marginalization over time. The paper’s concentration on identity as socially constructed allows a particular focus on notions or representations of the marginalized in traces of the past. These traces may otherwise mask the existence and importance of marginalized groups in organizations’ dominant histories.

In the last decade, Indigenous enterprises and entrepreneurs have played an increasingly important role in Australia. This has not always been the case. Historically, Indigenous Australians have been excluded from the broader economy. However, more recently, the number of Indigenous businesses has significantly increased despite the limited access to capital and lower level of education. This chapter provides a historical perspective of Indigenous entrepreneurs in Australia and argues that entrepreneurial leadership development can play a critical role in developing Indigenous entrepreneurship. The historical context of Indigenous Australians is first discussed, and the current status of Indigenous entrepreneurs in Australia is then examined. In particular, we focus on entrepreneurship among the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Finally, the importance of entrepreneurial leadership development in the future landscape of Indigenous entrepreneurship in Australia is highlighted.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

The aim of this chapter is to critically analyse multiple stakeholders’ self-perceptions of the value, nature, success and impact of core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education university courses.

Participants were drawn from two universities in New South Wales which taught a core Aboriginal Studies subject as part of their primary teacher education degree. The methodology was informed by Yin’s (2003) multiple-case study replication design. This replication presents a picture of the perceptions and events which have impacted on the participants in the study.

The findings have important implications for theory, research and practice. The results of this study demonstrate that core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses can make a positive difference in changing the perceptions of many pre-service teachers about Aboriginal people.

The purpose of this study was to assemble an evidence-based rationale, which includes the voices of multiple stakeholders, to test the extent to which core Aboriginal Studies subjects in primary teacher education courses are vital to improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal children, advancing reconciliation and creating a more socially just Australian society.

Undertaking professional training through a core Aboriginal Studies subject builds pre-service teachers’ self-concepts, attitudes, commitment, knowledge and skills, and ability and understandings to teach Aboriginal Studies, incorporate Aboriginal perspectives and to be committed to effectively teaching Aboriginal students.

The study supports the need for the inclusion of core Aboriginal Studies subjects in all universities with teacher education courses.

Research on Indigenous students has mostly adopted a deficiency model. In contrast, this study takes an explicitly positive perspective on Indigenous student success by focusing on the active psychological ingredients that facilitate successful learning.

This paper aims to examine the nature and level of disclosures on engagement with Aboriginal communities by Australian mining companies.

Content analysis of annual and sustainability reports of Australian Stock Exchange listed companies was undertaken to address the central research aim of this paper. An Aboriginal engagement framework was developed based on the five dimensions suggested by Reconciliation Australia.

The findings of the study report an overall low level of disclosures on Aboriginal engagement by mining companies and reveal that corporate disclosures largely focus on Land and Native title agreements, Aboriginal employment and corporate investment in Aboriginal socio-economic development. The least reported issues include Aboriginal immersion experience, Aboriginal inclusion in leadership roles and commitment to the reconciliation process. The findings of the study suggest that although corporate engagement practices have started to recognise and incorporate marginalised stakeholder rights and issues, only a few companies have created necessary avenues to empower Aboriginal communities. Regarding the reconciliation process, the findings reveal that the companies are mostly reporting on only three out of the five dimensions of the framework.

This study provides a better understanding of the current state of Aboriginal engagement practices in the mining sector, in particular the issues and gaps in reporting Aboriginal engagement to align it with the national reconciliation process, which will be useful for policymakers and, possibly, standard setters to develop future Aboriginal engagement and disclosure policies.

In spite of the rapid development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure, disclosure of corporate impacts on Aboriginal people and reconciliation with Aboriginal communities has been given little attention in business CSR practice and previous CSR disclosure literature. This research fills this gap and investigates the increasing uptake of Aboriginal engagement disclosures by business corporations.

This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of collaborative teaching in this space.

The authors, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal, draw on a history of collaborative teaching that stretches over more than a decade, bringing together conceptual reflective work and empirical data from a 5-year project working with Australian university students in an introductory-level Aboriginal history subject.

It argues that teaching this subject area in ways which are culturally safe for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students, and which resist knowledge structures associated with colonial ways of conveying history, is not only about content but also about building learning spaces that encourage students to decolonise their relationships with Australian history.

This article considers collaborative approaches to knowledge transmission in the university history classroom as an act of decolonising knowledge spaces rather than as a model of reconciliation.