Judith Ketchell is a proud Torres Strait Islander woman who has balanced her own family of five wonderful children and two grandchildren. She graduated as a teacher in Townsville in 1982 and has worked in remote, rural and urban school communities throughout Queensland. Teaching has always been her destiny, and her rewarding career has provided her with many opportunities to take on various leadership positions across the P–12 sectors of schooling; but more importantly, it has created a vehicle for Indigenous participation in decision making. Judith has worked extensively developing curriculum at the local, state and national level and more recently established a curriculum frame that builds upon the foundation of Torres Strait

Given the focus of this chapter is the importance of preparing teachers to deliver on the promise of education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students the following brief reflection of my personal journey in education provides some useful insights.

I am a Narungga man born on the York Peninsula of South Australia, and hail from the Aboriginal community of Point Pearce. I have a brother, John, and baby sister, Geraldine. My elder sister, Lorraine, is deceased. I attribute my success in life to the close relationship I have with my family; this has kept me culturally strong and focused on community needs as my career has developed over the years. I was proudly married to Mary for more than 30 years until she passed away in 2015, and we have two children, Peter and Lorraine. I firmly believe that being a husband and father are the most important roles I have had in life. Along with Mary I also had the privilege of providing care to our nephews and nieces from time to time when necessary.

How can you exist? They qualified this question by saying that, according to statistics, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are severely underperforming in mathematics and yet you, an Aboriginal man, have a PhD in applied mathematics. How can that be? I was perceived as an anomaly: a glitch in the system.

Growing up, my family moved around a lot. I was born in Tamworth, New South Wales, and soon after, the family moved to western Sydney to live with my extended family. We lived in Seven Hills, Mt Druitt and Colyton. My uncles, who were very close to me in age, treated me like their brother. They taught me how to be street smart. I did not really enjoy school, primarily because I changed schools regularly. Having attended four primary schools and three high schools, I left school in Year 10 and became a motor mechanic. I feel like I have never really settled in anywhere and not sure where to call home.

And even though the impact of the Inquiry’s findings has led all state and territory parliaments to express such practices as abhorrent, determining that they will not happen in their respective jurisdictions, there is still a prevailing attitude in the broader community that what was done, was done ‘with the best intentions’ and ‘in the best interests of the child’. I would like to suggest an alternative perspective that may better explain the actions of early 20th-century politicians, pastoralists and developers.

Upon reflection, I had, as a child, become a sound state-school student within a culturally diverse student group. The physical environment, from infants and primary school sites to the secondary school site, was not particularly diverse. It was often characterised by interiors of neutral-coloured linoleum, regulation departmental mid-blue accents, modular timber cupboards and exteriors defined by seriously brown brick walls, asphalt playgrounds and modestly allocated grass areas. Grey wire-fences surrounded the built environments of almost every school site. Landscaping was limited to an agglomeration of concrete-bound, sandstone forms providing an edging to the asphalt and was usually located near the entrance of the school. The plants inside were mostly hardy ‘natives’ that irrespective of their apparent suitability seemed to struggle to survive.

I am the youngest of nine children and was born when my parents were in their mid-forties. As a consequence, all but the sister closest in age to me had long left home. For five years I had seen my sister Rosemary heading off to school each day and couldn’t wait to get there myself. However, by little lunch on the first day I had decided that was enough and taken myself home. Eventually I came to love the primary school experience, probably because I was fairly good at most of what happened there. We enjoyed reading, spelling and comprehension, mental arithmetic, geography, nature studies, art, physical training and history. Each week on Friday morning, we had a spelling, dictation and mental arithmetic test. I learned to add, subtract, divide and multiply. I learned my times tables and have never forgotten them. I so much enjoyed tracing countries of the world from my atlas and transferring them to my geography book, colouring in the countries and pencilling in a lovely blue fringe around the islands, naming and placing the capital cities in appropriate spots and marking in significant features of the landscape (never dreaming I would drive down and up the exotic sounding ‘Great Dividing Range’ at least once a week as an adult); copying down text from the board onto my lined page and in “science” drawing the parts of flowers (so helpful these days with crosswords) on the facing blank page; learning how to draw a stick figure; completing physical jerks and playing rounders; and learning an inaccurate history of Australia.

Over very long periods of time, as people moved to different parts of Earth, they began to recognize that nature was the source of their lives and livelihood and that Earth should be treated with respect and care. This knowledge became the basis of indigenous understanding and cultures, which are the result of hard-earned lessons gained over thousands of years.