There are moments where you feel profoundly humbled by history. Not history in the sense of documenting events, but history in the sense of hearing and being taught to see the world differently.
I came to a meeting table having read Bringing Them Home (1997), still carrying the shock of learning about what it means to separate children from their parents, and families from their country, their knowledge, their language. And I came to a meeting table with an open sense of being sorry for believing what I was taught as a child: that there were no Indigenous people where I lived.
I never for a moment came to the table I sat at three months ago with the thought that I might be given something. And yet I was, we all were.
Indigenous consultation is a critical part of any development or construction project. This is not to entomb the past and to build over it, but to recognise through the built form and public spaces the living contribution of Indigenous peoples to nurturing and teaching country to all of us. And to achieve that, you have to listen and to think about the future through the past.
You have to really listen. What you begin to hear is a tumble of generous ideas driven by the desire to pass on knowledge, to teach.
Representatives from the Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council, Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation, King Brown Tribal Group, and the Ngarigu Currawong Clan have been helping us over nearly five years to peel back the concrete in the centre of our campus and to think about giving and teaching in a broader way.
It is with thanks to them that we will capture their family stories in a Creekside walk, create a teaching bush garden, show a map of country as you approach a bridge with the four families acknowledged on its columns, welcome people in language and provide a fire pit in recognition of the importance of smoking ceremonies.
These features all connect together under a history-making gift of language. Last week, the four local Indigenous groups gifted the University the name Kambri to describe the centre of campus. There has been no greater privilege in my working life than have been there at the moment that they offered this gift for the first time. It was the straightforward, matter of fact act of four elder teachers: you impart knowledge in the hope that the people who receive it will learn from it.
Their teaching is not simply the very epitome of philanthropy; a selfless act of giving with no expectation of return, an act of giving by people that have been treated less than generously themselves.
It is also the very epitome of what it is to be a university. When people write about, or give lectures on the meaning of a university, they inevitably turn to sources like that of Cardinal Newman and talk about free enquiry and the transmission of ideas through alumni. These are good ideas, but in the gift of Kambri we see the crucial role of country in what makes a university a university.
Kambri means meeting place. It encapsulates the profound observation that the giving and exchange of ideas in meeting takes place. Universities turn on these simple mechanisms of generosity. But these acts in turn are shaped by the places in which they take place. Places where tradition tells us not to walk on the grass, or to recognise a quadrangle as a place of learning, or to mourn the loss of a jacaranda tree. Places which denote flexibility or an openness to the future, or which can help people to feel included and respected. Sometimes place is so powerful that it overrides time: we may get the sequence of our university memories mixed up, but we may have a powerful sense of where they happened.
You can create a digital simulacrum of a university, of course, but it is bound to include assignment boxes, virtual lecture theatres, and silent exams. Squeeze it through binary and it still comes out looking like a place on the other side.
So what if we thought about how Indigenous understandings of country, and of teaching, might shape our understanding of a modern university? By this, I do not mean simply teaching a course on Indigenous perspectives, although I think this is a good thing to do. Nor am I suggesting that we turn our back on Cardinal Newman, but I suspect that our local elders gifted us a name because they think that we are ready to step up and to find our own sense of university, to speak it in country, and to speak it to the world.
This blog’s shout out is for Dave Johnston, Anne Martin, the Little Gudgenby River Tribal Council, Buru Ngunawal Aboriginal Corporation, King Brown Tribal Group, and the Ngarigu Currawong Clan.