OZEKVT

Hi, I am in my second trimester of study. It's been an interesting journey for me because at times the writing and study has been absolutely crazy and stressful and other times amazingly informative and deeply healing. It sounds like such a contradiction of terms and perhaps because the little study I have been involved in has been both liberating and also given me an insight into the formal and perhaps restrictive educational background I was educated within…

I am an indigenous Fijian who has grown up in the inner city suburbs of Sydney (before it became trendy) , we arrived in this lucky country back in the mid seventies and I've enjoyed the privilege associated with being educated here in Australia. At school, I learnt poems like Dorothea Mackellar's "My Country" and studied Wilfred Owen in Year 12. Anyways, fast forward several decades and I am looking back at where I have come from and wondering where did all my childhood friends go? What kind of work are they involved in how are their children and the indigenous Fijian community thriving here in Sydney, Australia?

I began teaching in Strathfield Sydney then migrated to Aotearoa where I taught for nine years in South Auckland, in New Zealand and had a year in London often working with marginalised people groups, I wonder how is it that access to, participation and completion of education by these marginalised people groups achieved? Camille Nakhid writes about the importance of being able to see/identify oneself within the educational spaces of tertiary education… I look back at my very formal education journey here in Australia and realise that I was taught within an education system that encouraged a certain way of thinking… a traditional western, anglo saxon perspective… Last semester in one of my research papers I had a conversation with one of my lecturers about the methodology I was beginning to look at for my research… This was when it was pointed out to me …that I was operating from a "colonised" perspective… thus my journey is 'new' and yet it is old… I am starting to connect some dots, mourning some thoughts and excited about the possibilities …

The question for my research is "What are the enablers and barriers to tertiary education for indigenous Fijians living in Australia?" AS I consider the fact that many of us migrants came to Australia for a better life however we come yearning to be successful yet not really having any idea how to do this and then when I look at the fact that some communities move much more quickly through this assimilation process, I wonder why is it that my indigenous people do not "seem" to be progressing as fast as the others… these are the issues which intrigue, excite and challenge me to learn, to read and to share …Okey dokey that's enough about me… I've only just discovered decolonisation Research methodologies and absolutely love reading and learning within this area… I'll be looking at using Nabobo-Baba's Indigenous Fijian Vanua Research Framework…

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