Reading Julian: Our Grad School Our Way

A thousand research studies can talk of disadvantage, deficit and the plight of Aboriginal people within the academy, which is real and nothing that we will deny. Academia and the western academy have struggled to incorporate First Nations knowledge and perspective let alone current and historical truths. The white Australian consciousness and web of deliberate ignorance has inbuilt structures to marginalise and deliberately keep out First Nations’ perspectives and strengths in both an attempt to keep Aboriginal people in a narrative of crippled and hopeless and in need of saving and as an attempt to deliberately not know the truth. This is the place/intersection that Batchelor Institute’s Graduate School exists; whilst achieving western educational success we do it from a place of strength in culture, strength in our diversity, strength in our ancestral wisdom and a place of fierce truth telling. This safe space is our moral imperative as emerging Aboriginal academics. This paper will celebrate the centring of First Nations’ knowledge within an operationalised Graduate School that privileges First Nations’ perspectives and positions. Our practice will be demonstrated through a reading of Julian Aguon’s book The Properties of Perpetual Light (2021) as both gift across generations and continents and an influential example of truth telling in the face of colonial, assimilative and epistemic violence.