A New School of Thought

Disclaimer: This article mentions racist language.

I always thought of school as a place for learning that was devoid of any biases or imperfections. It was the place that taught me how to write, how to read, how to count, and it facilitated the creation of memories that I will never forget. School was the place that held supreme authority over the way in which I perceived reality and the way in which I participated in society. It was the authority I never thought to question because, as a student, you were never supposed to. But, in remembering some of my experiences in primary school and high school there were a lot of things that needed to be questioned, and these questionable experiences have held my mind captive for the longest time – whether I knew them to be there, or not. As of this writing, I am four years removed from high school, in my penultimate year of study at QUT, and I believe that I finally have some answers to the questions that I never thought to ask.   

Knowledge from Place 

For some background into who I am, I want to talk about Inala. When I speak of my family in Inala, I am not just talking about my brothers, my parents, my nan who lived down the road, or my cousins who were everywhere, I’m talking about the Blak Inala community that ran all the way from the edge of Freeman Road right up to Lorikeet Street. It was a proud community that would show up at football games, touch carnivals, festivals, funerals, Vietnamese chip shops, and even at my primary school. It was specifically Uncle Shannon Turbane and Uncle Josh Shadford, that showed up at my primary school to teach my cousins and I the traditional dances of the Yuggera and Quandamooka peoples – allowing us to know and perform cultural dance from a very early age, as part of our schooling experience. Although having been raised in Inala and through my dad’s connection to the Tyson family, embodying culture through traditional dance was something I had already experienced, long before I knew what the inside of a classroom looked like.   

For me, traditional dance was always more than just a performance. It was a type of education that they didn’t teach at school; an education that physically moved you to feel a pride in your skin and in your community. I remember how even after the dances had finished, I would leave that ochre to fix in my hair and crumble on my skin because, I wanted the whole world to know the people that I belong to. Unfortunately, our traditional dance was a cultural pride that not everyone at my school had the benefit of learning from. Even for those that belonged to various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, our pride could not be so easily replicated, manifesting some weird racial experiences that have stayed with me throughout the years. I remember back when there was an older brown child who mocked my curly hair because it was ‘gay’, despite himself having curly hair. And how there was another child who called me a ‘n****r’, despite being darker than me even on my most Blakest days. I especially remember the time a Polynesian child brandished an actual American flag, as he shouted at another brown child for being a terrorist, despite the fact that he was not American, and that child was not a terrorist. To this day, I do not know where he got that flag, how he pulled it out, or where he pulled it out from. For the longest time, I could only draw from these memories that my school was profoundly comedic, but I realise now that there was a much more dramatic dynamic at play.   

Knowledge from Race   

As cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, culture is a language founded upon the subjective values and experiences of a society and there founding civilisations. In Western culture, there is a fascination with race that informs their entire language and consequently their understanding of reality; an incredibly limited category from which their knowledge of things is based on. In the cultural language of the West, whites are superior, civilised, mature, and advanced. And the others, the non-whites, exist in a binary category contrasted to the white, supposedly inferior in every category. Generally, in the West, ‘the others’ are dumb, childish, backwards, and not worthy of human consideration. This is the foundation of Australia, and you don’t need to know Stuart Hall to understand this. For myself, all you had to do was watch the children. They wanted power in Australia and as children they saw power in the form of whiteness. It’s why they mocked my hair, my skin, and raised a flag of a country that is not theirs; they would do anything to not be at the bottom of this advanced civilisation of so-called Australia.  

My high school experience was largely defined by a private Catholic school based in Indooroopilly, where I no longer had the warmth of community around me. Despite the usual monkey business, a Blak child and his cousins would have to deal with at this school, I often reminisce about this place with a peculiar fondness because, it gave me more questions than it ever did answers. And in my mind, if I had not had the chance to ask myself those questions, I would be a shell of a person. This new school was similar to Inala in that the most important lessons I learned from them didn’t come from the school curriculum; it came from all that existed outside of it. It was in the questions that the school never thought to ask themselves, and their presumption of knowledge that was the most gratifying lesson that I learned from here. For no matter how rich, ‘elite’, important, and powerful this school appeared to be, there was a foundational limit to their knowledge and way of being in the world that they could not even recognise – and that was the humorous part about it. It was the ham-fisted MLK and Ghandi Quotes during school wide assemblies, the white taiko drummers, and most of all it was the school band’s cover songs that could only appeal to a semi-retired white man. It was a circle jerk circus that utterly transcended my understanding of the world, having been raised in Inala.  

I think back to the time when we had an excursion to a Flexi school in Ipswich, a school for children who found difficulty with mainstream education. Our teachers dressed it up as a cultural immersion experience, briefing us that we might see something that will ‘challenge our perspective’. Forty minutes of anticipation later and there was nothing extraordinary or dangerous about the children. We had lunch and played basketball with some children, an activity that I would’ve done the very next day. But it was my teachers and the Flexi school teachers who congratulated us at the end of day for ‘giving today a go’, as if something extraordinary took place. Now, I very much enjoyed that day, as did the children from the Flexi school, but there was nothing worthy of the adulation that these adults showered us with. Not unless you somewhat valued the humanity of the private school children over the humanity of the Flexi school children – which is what seemed to have taken place here. As journalist Amy McQuire argues our imagined racial boundaries are often reinforced through geography. In this way, the ‘otherness’ that is ascribed to non-white races becomes more ‘literal’ because, it becomes grounded in a physical reality. ‘The whites live here, the Blaks live over there.’ This idea of difference is further cemented by the obvious class distinction, which plays into the racial dichotomy of wealth being intrinsic to the white category and poverty belonging to the Blak. This geographical difference of race is so heavily imagined that even the ‘whites’ who live in Blak zones become marked by the same otherness. So, for the Ipswich Flexi school children, of whom a significant portion were white, they were marked by their adjacency to the Blak zone of Ipswich. They were imagined to me as everything that I was imagined to be as a Blackfulla because of their physical and social circumstance. And, because of my own social and physical location as the private school kid from Indooroopilly, I was ascribed with every imagined attribute under the white category. I became the intelligent, wealthy, compassionate Blak saviour for these poor, disadvantaged, and possibly dangerous white children. It was a freaky Friday situation where I was the Blak lady Sarah from Inala, saving the numerous white Nullah children from Ipswich. And all the adults uncritically supported this imagination, which made the school’s close mindedness a lot harder to laugh about.    

I remember how in our history class we listed the pros and cons of colonisation, and how we would always discuss the history of this country as if we were always a great distance from it. We talked of the massacres and slavery, but we never discussed ongoing issues such as Blak deaths in custody, which are historical and ever present. There was a deliberate distinction between Australia then versus now, as if Australia’s history had no effect on the political landscape of today’s country – which is a uniquely odd thing to teach in a supposedly objective history classroom. But as I’ve come to realize, there was nothing odd or unique about their revisionist history. If anything, it makes complete sense why the colony would teach history in this way. In this fictional world, where we are meant to pretend that our history has no effect on our modern world, ‘Indigenous issues’ are not the result of a centuries-long, state-sanctioned genocide, they are a natural consequence of our biology. Complex matters of health, incarceration, land rights, are hand-waved away because, in the mind of the colony, we are undeserving of human consideration. It was only a few years later that I would witness a conversation in my biology class where a student denied the existence of generational trauma, as I sat there reaping the rewards of an education that our people had no voice in.   

Knowledge from Within   

Despite what this school tried to teach me, I had always known that I was connected to a culture and way of living that had existed long before me and will continue long after I’m gone. And it wasn’t until my attendance at QUT Carumba Institute’s writing retreat at Woppa, that I would experience an education that reflected that. Unlike my experiences of school, where the lessons could be found outside my experience of the curriculum, the education within this writing retreat demanded my full attention because, it was a way of knowing and being that existed within our culture, not outside of it. Unlike any academic institution I’ve been in, there were no judgments or assumptions of knowledge because we were all there to learn. Here, everyone was curious about the types of knowledges that we all had individually, which allowed for a supposedly non-traditional way of learning that was uncomfortably open and honest. As a result, we did not just learn from the lecturers, we learnt from the other 30 or so Blakfullas that also attended the retreat with us. And amongst the group was an Elder and PHD student, Uncle Graham Brady, who sat in many of the reading/writing activities, teaching us things that cannot be found in the textbooks written about us. Of all the stories he spoke about – his experience of racial violence in school, his father’s role in the Brisbane Black Power Movement, and his family’s work in bringing back traditional dance to QLD – there was one lesson that stay fixed in my mind. It was a point that he always reiterated, even when he didn’t speak about it directly; and it provided me with the answer to all my questions and any other question I could possibly have about the world. But it wasn’t an answer. It was a reminder.  

As Uncle Graham echoed throughout the retreat, our people were never a tribal people. He reminded us that “we are a family orientated and family motivated people” (Brady,2024). He insisted that we remove this tribal label from our minds because, hierarchy was never our way, it was theirs. We didn’t have kings and chiefs because, we simply didn’t believe in their hierarchical version of humanity. As Blakfullas, our humanity is not defined or reduced by one’s socio-economic status or cultural identity; it only contributes to it.  

This Blak humanity, as my community had taught me, is not exclusive to one group or another. A Blak humanity is the recognition of the fact that we are human simply by virtue of us being born into this world. And, although we live in a country whose cultural consciousness continually undermines this fundamental human consideration, it is our proud Blak communities like Inala, that remind us of our wholehearted humanity.