YAY! - 27 year old West Australian Lilly Brown has become Australia’s first indigenous woman to graduate from Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University. Lilly Brown said her academic achievements were spurred on by the racism she confronted as a teenager growing up in the Perth outer suburbs. Ms Brown said that the racism hit home when reading one of her high school textbooks which reduced the history of Aboriginal peoples and of their culture to a single page. She identifies as Gumbangerrii from NSW mid-north coast, and was one of the first in her extended family to tackle higher education. However her father relocated to Western Australia. “I see education as really being a vehicle where we can think about change,” she said. “Education is so important. I am intrigued as to that process that can trigger more Indigenous participation. The levels of Indigenous education, the disparity is ridiculous. I really want to close that gap.” There is quite a gap to bridge with more Aboriginal peoples in prison than in tertiary education. No other country is known to have this disparity. Ms Brown graduated last month after completing a Masters of Philosophy in Politics from Trinity College, Cambridge. She said that she wants to undertake leadership roles among Aboriginal Australia and engage in national issues. Ms Brown had been accepted to both Oxford and Cambridge universities, and had been awarded the Charlie Perkins scholarship – Mr Perkins was Australia’s first Aboriginal university graduate – in 1996. “Whether you get a scholarship or whatever, you’ve obviously identified an issue you are passionate about and I think with that comes responsibility, you know it exists and you want to contribute to sorting it out. Ms Brown completed a degree in anthropology at the University of WA, Honours at Melbourne University in Indigenous studies focusing on activism, racial literacy and anti-racism within higher education. And she has within her experiences a secondment to McGill University in Montreal, Canada, working with the Mohawk people. Mr Brown met with Prince Charles with whom she enjoyed an audience. Australia’s racist past hits home every time it is exposed by an Aboriginal person becoming either the first in their field or the first to enter an institution that for far too many generations they were denied passage. Finally, in 2012 trailblazer Ms Brown became the first Aboriginal student at one of the world’s most famous and oldest universities. Before leaving for Cambridge last year the University of Western Australia graduate slammed lingering effects of racism that continue to hold back Aboriginal students in Western Australia from graduating high school and in entering university. She pointed to startling statistic. “In Western Australia, fifteen Aboriginal students graduate high school each year (who) are eligible for university. That is not many.” This is an appalling reflection on Western Australia which has its lowest literacy rates within Aboriginal students and peoples according to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Institute of Health and Welfare, and with many regions in WA, from the Pilbara to the Kimberley and the Central Desert, with high hearing loss levels of Aboriginal children from otitis media (glue ear) according to the Child Health Telethon Institute. Ms Brown spoke of a racist past that needs to be packed away once and for all. “My father was born at a time when if he was blatant about his Aboriginality, he could have been taken away from my grandmother.” Ms Brown’s father was raised in WA by his mother, a Gumbaynggirr woman from NSW. Ms Brown believes more needs to be done for Aboriginal peoples and hopes she can contribute to this and “help to make a better future for all Australians.”
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 04:25:30 +0000
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