Professor Joe Fraser became UNE’s first Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous early in 2022. He spoke to Pulse about his path into academia, and the value of an Indigenous perspective on education.

Pulse: Can you talk about your path to UNE?

PVCI: I grew up in the Top End, around Katherine. When I was really young, my family lived on a number of cattle stations across the Territory – places like Dungowan Station, out on the Murrangai to the southwest of Katherine, which my father managed. My grandparents were miners.

In that environment, you learned to be self-reliant and take care of yourself.

I left school at 15. I joined the Air Force and I did 20 years in the military. I loved aircraft, but mainly I just couldn’t see myself growing up in Katherine where you then had a choice of two jobs: being a ringer on a station or working for the council, fixing roads. So I became an Air Force aircraft maintenance engineer. Towards the end of my military career, I started working in training facilities, so I went and did a Bachelor of Adult Education by block release through an Indigenous program at the University of Technology Sydney. I went to UTS three times a semester, for a week each time, and completed my undergrad degree in the last three years before I got out of the Air Force.

After the first year of study I got promoted and moved into the Defence Force’s Indigenous Employment Strategy role in Canberra. I worked on things like national cultural training programs and recruiting across the country, particularly into remote communities. At one point we were engaging people through displays about Len Waters, Australia’s first Aboriginal fighter pilot. Len Waters flew with 78 Squadron in the Pacific in a Kittyhawk called Black Magic. He was born in Boomi, within in the footprint of this university.

Pulse: How did you take to formal education?

PVCI: I loved it. I mean, up until I started with UTS I didn’t really know what university was for. As a kid I didn’t anyone who had been to university. I think a couple of kids in Katherine went to Emerald Ag College, but that was about it.

In the military I did lots and lots of mechanic training courses, but when I went to uni, I was just amazed that there was all this theoretical context to explain the world. I really was just astounded; it just opened up the world in so many ways.

I went straight from my undergrad into my Masters. When I finished in 2001, I got a job at UTS teaching in the Education faculty – and that was the start of my higher ed career. From there I went to Newcastle, and ended up as the head of school at Wollotuka Institute, the school of Aboriginal Studies, then moved on to become Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education, Arts and Social Sciences at Batchelor Institute.

And then I moved to the United States for 10 years as Chief Education Officer at Kanu O Ka Aina Learning Ohana (KALO) in Hawaii, a native Hawaiian community education organisation.

Pulse: This opportunity to look at education from the perspective of two cultures must have been fascinating?

PVCI: Yes, and we were fortunate that we were able to freely create. We created a program that blended native Hawaiian values, culture and practices together with a Western curriculum. We trained teachers for Native Hawaiian children in their own communities. It was just such a rewarding job to see people being able to blend their own indigenous knowledge into Western systems of knowledge.

In Hawaii, there’s a saying that means “not all knowledge is learned in one school”. One can learn from many sources. A lot of our work was premised on indigenous knowledge carrying certain values, and how those could be transferred into the classroom so that culture and education was synonymous. I felt that it was an authentic process for dealing with the things that were important to the community.

We spent 10 years working on that, and we got accreditation in 2013 as a State-based teacher education program.

Pulse: Would you like to see more of that approach in Australia?

PVCI: One of the things I want to work on is developing an ‘Indigenous knowledges’ field that’s based in a strong philosophy of education: an Indigenous philosophy of education, so that we can actually scaffold our practices through a philosophical base. That’s what we did in Hawaii.

I think there are elements of it in Australia, but I’m not sure if our accreditation bodies are ready to expand into an integrated framework of cultural knowledge and teacher education. I’d like to get some sort of an academy going, with a set of cultural and educational standards, so we can talk about Indigenous knowledges from a solid philosophical base. I’d like to build something that would help us understand what Indigenous education and Indigenous knowledge are, and how they fit into a wider concept of education.

There’s this concept, epistemicide, which is the death of other knowledge systems. Our Western systems have a strong political element that makes them very effective at creating dominant ways of thinking.

I prefer that we try and deal with Indigenous knowledge in its true form, rather than get caught up in some of the critical theory aspects of it, but I’m not sure we can do that. Maybe we do have to address those aspects, but we’ll see.

If you read some of the phenomenology works of Husserl and Heidegger, they spend a lot of time within theoretical frameworks that help justify why their approach is valid. I think to some extent, Indigenous knowledge just needs to approach things in a similar way. Science is about measurement and observation, and Indigenous knowledge comes from the same basis. It’s just a bit more holistic, and it’s based in a different epistemology and ontology.

Pulse: What can the rest of the world learn from First Nations peoples?

PVCI: I think a more holistic approach to Knowledge and Being makes the world more sustainable. If you’re thinking about the land as an ancestor, the land is family, the land is me, we’re not separable, then you’re probably less likely to dig it out, poison it, mine it and sell it. So I think that there’s a sustainability aspect there: the world is probably better off if we use some of the Indigenous approaches to caring for it. Fundamentally, if we see the land is just an extension of ourselves, we’re probably more likely to take care of it.

Pulse: What can what can First Nations people take from Western culture (or whatever we call the cultures that have become the dominant cultures through the former territories of First Nations peoples)?

PVCI: Interesting question. Indigenous people across the world have always taken on new technology and new knowledge. The wood carving practices in the north of Australia were perhaps due to the introduction of metals by the Makassens. In Hawaii, metal was highly prized by the elite, the chiefs; they would take any metal that was washed ashore from shipwrecks.

There’s obviously a lot of Western theory around Indigenous people determining their own future. I don’t think all theories are necessarily accurate, but I think people can take knowledge and adapt it, just as they’ve always done. It’s not like we’re locked into one place and one time. It’s about Indigenous peoples learning and benefiting from new knowledge.

Pulse: Do you think the Western education system is helping Indigenous people? Failing them?

PVCI: One of the issues with the Western education system is it has tried to take Indigenous kids and turn them into little white kids. It’s said that the three tools of colonialism are the church, the gun, and the chalkboard. Education systems are a really powerful thing, and they’re great equalizers if everyone can share in them. But if the system is about transforming you into ‘something other’, then it becomes problematic.

I think Western society spent a lot of time trying to make people conform rather than educating them, and that’s one of the issues we need to consider from where we are now.

I think those Western power structures are going to continue to exist, and there’s no point ignoring that. You can’t critique something if you don’t know what it is. You can’t adapt something if you don’t know what you’re adapting. I think it was Paulo Friere who said that the dominant language doesn’t have to be the only language you learn, but you do have to know it if you want to engage the process. It’s really hard to engage with the system without being literate in the system.

Of course, the flip side is that Freire also said that the only model of leadership that we have is that of the oppressor, so we tend to replicate that as well.

Pulse: Do you think tertiary education imposes a degree of conformity on its participants?

PVCI: Universities either work or don’t work based on the pipeline from a school, so the school creates the initial template of expectation for the student. If you haven’t matriculated from school, where writing is the dominant form of assessment, there’s very little in terms of alternative assessment. If you haven’t fitted into those conventional delivery systems, then you’re probably less likely to succeed than somebody who has developed all those skills in grades 10,11,12 – and by then, you’re already conforming.

There hasn’t been a lot done by universities around multiple intelligences or multiple perspectives on pedagogy.

Pulse: Do you hope to address some of these challenges as PVCI?

PVCI: We need to further work out the agenda for Indigenous Education at UNE. In my first few months of being here, I have to address the employment strategy, the education strategy, and the Reconciliation Action Plan. They are the three documents that will carry us forward. But at a personal and educational level, I’d love to see UNE develop that field of Indigenous knowledges.

Oorala can play a large part in this, and I think that the footprint of UNE will be increasingly important. We need to build much stronger relationships with the community in Moree, Tamworth, Taree – wherever we’re going to operate. The other big role for Oorala will be to continue to try and engage students in academic success. It is all about engaging people in this learning journey.

Pulse: Do you anticipate that Indigenous ways of seeing will one day inform mainstream thought?

PVCI: One of the things I constantly harp on about is that everything is not about social justice. What’s good for Indigenous people is good for everybody. When we try to diversify pedagogy, there’s assumption that the 80% of the classroom that is not Aboriginal is not going to benefit from multiple intelligences or authentic assessment – but we know for a fact that two thirds of that room is sitting there hating the reading and the writing, and they want to do something more engaging. So Indigenous education, Indigenous pedagogy that draws on epistemological pluralism and pedagogical diversity, is good for all people.

I talk about trying to have mapped career paths for Indigenous academics – but every academic wants that! They all want to know what their next promotion is, and what they need to do to get there. They want to know that they’re going to be supported in the process.

Dominant systems tend to set up standards and expectations and then get people to find their way over, it. My view is that we should be helping each other over the fence, not just building the fence.

Pulse: Some observations now that you have your feet under the desk at UNE?

PVCI: It’s been a wonderful start here. I’ve really enjoyed the enthusiasm and motivation to engage in different discussions. I’ve had people coming to me, expressing their hopes about what we could do – and I mean, across the whole University population, not just Aboriginal participants. I have people coming from the faculty saying, “we need more authentic engagement, we need a more authentic curriculum, we need to diversify our pedagogy”.

I’ve been really encouraged by that level of enthusiasm and motivation, and I’m excited about what the future holds in this regard.