Content area
Full text
Introduction
Born in South Australia during the assimilation era, Alice Rigney (1942–2017) first encountered the state school system as a student in a segregated school in her community of Point Pearce. She re-joined a reforming system as one of the first cohort of “Aboriginal teacher aides” in the 1970s. Successfully negotiating the complex interactions of race and gender, and unwavering in her belief in the potential of education to empower Aboriginal people, she worked at the cutting-edge of policy and practice throughout her varied career. Maintaining her activism as a Narungga and Kaurna Elder during retirement, she reflected:
In leadership you have to walk hand in hand with people and all work together for the future. It's important that this happens because I had a vision that incorporated culture and education, people and respect (Rigney, 2008, p. 83).
This article explicates Alice Rigney's commitment to entwining Aboriginal culture with education and honours her distinct status as Australia's first Aboriginal woman principal.
Alice Rigney's life began in a period when “education for Indigenous people was deliberately positioned at the periphery of all educational provision” in Australia (Herbert, 2012, p. 95). While much research in the history of education followed suit, the emergence of new critical research into education policies and administration, curriculum and practices, along with the experiences of Aboriginal families and children across overlapping eras of segregation and protection (Povey and Trudgett, 2019), assimilation (Marsden, 2018) and self-determination (Thomas, 2021) is deconstructing histories of education in Australia. For example, Povey and Trudgett and Marsden focus on the agency of Aboriginal families and students regarding state schooling and the inherently racist curriculum in remote Western Australia and rural Victoria. In both cases, families made the most of the limited and poor choices available to them. Likewise, this article will highlight the centrality of Alice Rigney's family and community in supporting her acquisition of cultural knowledge and engagement with state schooling. While these critical histories “reframe previous deficit representations of Indigeneity into strength-based narratives” (Povey and Trudgett, 2019, p. 77), it is also necessary to draw on scholarship into histories of women educators in order to address Alice Rigney's professional life and activism. Historical research into women educators in Australian state schools and kindergartens has focused mostly...