In this episode, I had the chance to explore technology transfer through the lens of one of the world’s most enduring and continuous cultures, Australia’s indigenous peoples, with Professor Chris Matthews FTSE, Chair of ATSIMA (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mathematics Alliance), and Associate Dean (Indigenous Leadership and Engagement) at UTS.
Chris set the scene by sharing his journey to mathematics, his embracing of programming and Commodore 64s as a means to getting through school and his childhood. This was a form of escape from the systemic racism that permeated his schooling and early career. While in retrospect, the journey was ‘bittersweet’, it led Chris to his interest in numerical techniques that formed the basis of his undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
Chris found himself called back to his community, finding connection between culture and mathematics. This connection, in a sense, needed to be rediscovered as years of western philosophy and methodology was to be suspended in order to reconnect to country and people. This reconnection presented as a perspective on knowledge and in turn technology transfer. Aboriginal culture is dominated by relationships among people, tribes and the lands and ecosystems on which they live. That kinship with the ecosystem and each person’s place within it was rediscovered through Chris’s leadership at ATSIMA.
Knowledge transfer is a strict system, based on these connections and the roles and responsibilities of people within those systems. Chris offered some perspectives on the balance that exists and is maintained and the role of story and songlines in carrying the knowledge system between generations. This was beautifully demonstrated by Chris as he reflected on songlines that go back to the last ice age and how those stories of survival endure.
I then asked of Chris about any inherent ability to adapt and adopt technology through the ages. Chris spoke of how new things, and indeed new people, are positioned in the ecosystem and balance is maintained. He briefly touched on the impact of people being taken out of country. Chris then shared the story of bush mechanics, which had been made into a documentary many years ago and how aboriginal communities were early adopters of the automobile as a means to maintain connection.
We finally contrasted western technology transfer systems and how indigenous culture could and should interact. In his closing thoughts, Chris reflected on the Australian National Science Priorities and the opportunity that the inclusion of indigenous culture and concepts could create new opportunities for both understanding and a better science and technology system.
I found this a fascinating conversation, reminding me of Episode 30 the podcast where we discussed tech transfer and theology with John Bloomer and Spiegare’s work with Amanda Garner many years ago when she was at ANFAB. It offered some challenges to the way we see technology transfer and opportunities to be better at considering the broader ecosystems we are working in – a theme that we explored recently with Dr John Howard in Episode 49. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a central theme that emerged for me was relationships and how the are built and endure through culture and time.
Transcript
CB: Hello everyone, and welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley, Managing Director of Spiegare, a consulting firm that does technology transfer. And joining me today is Chris Matthews. Chris and I met some time back at Science Meets Parliament, for those in Australia that know that event. And Chris opened up a very fascinating set of perspectives for me about the very long-standing history of technology transfer amongst indigenous cultures and indigenous peoples. And I am very pleased that Chris has come onto the show to have a chat to us about that and to give us some depth and breadth about how that works. Chris, hello.
CM: Hello and thanks for having me.
CB: To start with, I guess, how did you get into science and mathematics, which is your particular speciality, I understand, Chris.
CM: Yeah, yeah, look, it’s not a good story. me, me getting into maths and science. All the way through my schooling, the only Aboriginal kid within the class. To explain that, I did grow up away from my community. So, just as a way of introduction, I’m from the Quandamooka people, which is from the Moreton Bay region, which is on the east of Brisbane in Moreton Bay, with all the Bay islands as part of our country. And also what I should say to my role is I’m the CEO of the Aboriginal Australia Mathematics Alliance, which is a maths education organisation. It’s an NGO, but for me to do that work, I’m very pleased that the University of Technology of Sydney has taken me on as an industry professor, where my industry is mathematics education. But I did start my whole career as a mathematician, which I will get into. So, to sort of explain why I was the only Aboriginal kid in my class, I actually grew, I grew up away from my community in Toowoomba. My grandfather then had a choice of moving to Toowoomba, which had Bailie Henderson Hospital, which was a mental institution. So, he shifted up there, to work when my mother was young. So, I was born up there, raised up there. But there wasn’t that many Aboriginal people and families up there. There were, there were some. There was actually one family that connected with that was had a strong connection with that family, which was through this. One of our elders called Pompey Hatton, he used to travel from Toowoomba down to talk to my great grandmothers.
CB: Right.
CM: They say that they were like brother and sister. That was what we’ve been told. But I think it’s more like a kinship brother and sister rather than what you would say, brother and sister now. But he used to make that travel trip down there. My grandmother connected with them strongly when they moved to Toowoomba and my great-great-great-grandfather because of that connection. So, there was a connection in Toowoomba, but other than that, we didn’t know many other Aboriginal families besides our family or I did as a kid growing up.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Why is that kid in the class that was the only Aboriginal kid? So, so to get to the story of how I got into maths is that I was going to school from 1975 to 1989. So, in that period, there was the start of the computers being considered as a home thing. You know, like the Commodore 64 type thing or even earlier.
CB: Yeah, yeah. No, I think most listeners would have had one of those at some point.
CM: Okay. Okay. So, to escape some of the, because I was getting racism from both teachers as well as students. And the way teachers behaved. And one of them was actually my, um, mathematics teacher just sort of justified the way students behaved towards me. So, I had so I actually had hidden a bit of a shell. So, so to deal with it, I actually taught myself programming. I was a big science fiction fan. I love my Star Trek and everything else to do. Star Trek, anything to do with science fiction? And computers and this sort of techno utopia, I think, was always in the back of my mind. You know, there’s a, you know, there’s a better future out there, you know.
CB: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely.
CM: So, so I taught myself how to program in basic and, and, uh, and got really interested in, strangely, in what we might call numerical techniques, which was, you know, how to, how to solve equations that you can’t necessarily do by hand using numerical approximations.
CB: Okay.
CM: So, as a young kid, I always started to to, to program up numerical integration, numerical differentiation type stuff.
CB: Yeah. So that puts you in a limited field in Toowoomba where you’re doing basic programming of computers to solve very tricky maths problems.
CM: Yeah yeah, yeah.
CB: I sense that there’s your curiosity, but also driven by a little bit of escapism as well from, from the behaviours of those around you.
CM: Exactly. And I had to deal with that escapism all my life to get out of that bubble. You know, and it took me a while to be able to do that. But I never thought in my life, well, in my life I’d be doing lectures for hundreds of people or doing this podcast or whatever. You know, it was never, you know, in my field of vision, ever, as a kid growing up.
CB: Those things probably seem a long way from sitting in front of that Commodore 64.
CM: Right. Yeah, exactly.
CB: Yeah, exactly. Now, I understand that’s a bittersweet journey into the world of mathematics, I think it’s fair to say, and into the world of science. You know, it was, it sounds like a horrible but sadly familiar crucible for the 1980s in Australia. But in it you found your groove through the Commodore 64 and and through your programming language. So, having become a programmer, for want of a better word, um, self-taught programmer, how did you find your way then getting more involved in your role at ATSIMA (Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Mathematics Alliance)? And what was that bridge that you crossed? Before we get into actual knowledge systems per se, I’m interested in the bridge you crossed from programmer and student in Toowoomba through university to taking this leadership role at ATSIMA.
CM: I basically went to university and picked up any because there was no such thing as what I was trying to do with numerics. There was no degree program in it. Most of the degree programs in computing were to do with information technology, so it was to design databases. And before there was stuff off the shelf, you know, and it wasn’t really what I wanted to do. So, what I ended up doing is picking up any programming course I could and any maths course that I could. Just cobbled together this thing called a Bachelor of Science, majored in maths and computing…
CB: Okay, thats pretty good.
CM: …at Griffith University. I couldn’t find a job after my degree. So, someone said to me, ‘Do an honours program’, and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’, because I don’t know university systems. So, I end up approaching academics at the time and said, ‘Look, here’s my results. Can I do this thing called honours?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, sure. We’ll take you on.’ It wasn’t quite like that. It was like, ‘Oh, I think you’ve done enough. Let’s see how you go.’
CB: Okay, so they didn’t embrace you. It was a bit of caution I…
CM: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah…
CB: A bit of ‘Oh, we’re not sure, but we’ll have a look.’
CM: Yeah, exactly. So, so, my honors project was the first time that I deeply did math, what we’d call, uh, mathematical modelling. So the honours project was around modeling water flow through cover liners for waste dumps to prevent groundwater pollution.
CB: Right.
CM: So, it’s the first time that I’ve taken all this math knowledge I was learning and really applied it to something that was tangible in the world. Yeah. It was all written in Pascal…
CB: Oh, my goodness.
CM: …an old language.
CB: Yeah. Soon you’ll mention Fortran and get the truth, right.
CM: So, anyway, so, I did that and actually continued that when I did a PhD later, but I went and employed for one year, for a couple of years and I came back and did a PhD. So, what I’m getting in is, I started a career as a mathematical modeller, a research mathematician. And that did take me to a lot of places around the world. Even got a couple of stints at Oxford a couple of times. Which was, you know, just for a few weeks each time and sort of honed the skills, I suppose. But it was difficult for me to be in the mass community, because the easiest way to say it is they weren’t ready for an Aboriginal people to be that person to be there.
CB: Oh, okay.
CM: So this thing raised its ugly head again, and I had to deal with their views and their opinions about Aboriginal people. I actually did my PhD. I had them, I applied for an ARC (Australian Research Council) grant, which I’d never done before, and got an ARC grant to do a postdoc. Then once I’d finished that postdoc, I still couldn’t get interviews for a job, even at the institution I was at. I didn’t really want to move because I had young children at that time, so I was trying to stay around Brisbane, which made it, you know, wasn’t that many choices. But what annoyed me more than anything is I wasn’t even getting interviews at the institution, when people were getting interviews that didn’t even have a PhD yet, you know?
CB: Oh, yeah.
CM: I couldn’t justify it. And they couldn’t. And I’d ring up the thing and they couldn’t justify that to me either, you know?
CB: Yeah.
CM: Only recourse I had was to apply for another ARC grant and I ended up doing one in education because I was talking to QUT around mass education for Aboriginal kids at that time. So, I ended up securing that one as well.
CB: And that’s the bridge, in a way.
CM: Yeah, that is the bridge. Yeah. But the bridge also was that, because I still didn’t have a job and QUT (Queensland University of Technology) started to sort of say to me, or ‘Maybe we’ll take you on’ type thing. But the way I got my job was I end up going up to the Office of Research and just saying, ‘Look, I can’t get employment here. Can you tell me the process for transferring money if another institution comes up?’ So, that’s that, and I, and I wasn’t doing that deliberately, as a deliberate strategy…
CB: No, no, no, it was a genuine ‘I need a job. How do I do this?’
CM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, uh, and the lady at the Office of Research says, ‘Just hang on a minute and we’ll get back to you’. And unbeknownst to me they rang up the, oh, I knew afterwards, but unbeknownst at that time, they rang up the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and said ‘This bloke’s coming in wanting to transfer this’, you know…blah, blah. Told the whole story. And then she ended up ringing my Dean, saying, ‘Why isn’t this bloke, who’s had two RCs, got a job here’, you know? And then the Dean walks in the office and says, ‘What do you want? And I said, ‘All I ever wanted was just a lecturer’s position’. I probably should have asked for more.
CB: Just give me a job.
CM: Yeah, give me a job. So, that’s all I wanted, you know? Yeah. I’ve proved myself time and time again, but don’t seem to get anywhere.
CB: It strikes me, Chris, as you were explaining that you’ve gone through another crucible with another set of experiences where? And then the next bridge has come in front of you, where you cross that bridge across to the education side with QUT, I think you mentioned.
CM: I suppose, what really was the important thing for me, was I finally come to the decision to say, ‘I’m moving out’… It took me a while to do it because I really loved doing the mathematical modelling. Yep. I said I can’t work for youse anymore, but I’m going to work for my own people. And that was the important transition. Yeah. Okay. You know, so I’m no longer going to be working for your institutions and for the discipline. I’m going to work for my own people. And I knew, even when I started conversations with professors at QUT and statistically looking at results, you know, national level, they always say these kids are two years behind their non-Indigenous counterparts. But I knew that indigenous kids were smart kids. And so, that’s not really, it was more a reflection on the system rather than them.
CB: Yeah, I understand.
CM: Yeah. So, I was keen then to explore this thing that I’d started to sort of getting into before I transitioned into mathematics education. What is this connection between culture and mathematics? Because in some sense mathematics, I had to push away who I was as a cultural being to be successful as a mathematician.
CB: Yep.
CM: And now, it was time for me to say,’Well, what is this connection between culture, mathematics, and what would that look like if you gave the opportunity of supporting an indigenous students culture and identity?’ Why do you teach mathematics? So, that’s set me on that journey.
CB: That is quite a profound question, because what I think you said there, Chris, was you’ve identified that there’s a systems problem here. It’s not that the indigenous kids should be two years behind. There’s a system problem here, not an inherent problem with these young boys and girls, teenagers, etc.. So, you’ve grabbed the bit between the teeth and actually come in to start to make that change by finding the connection. What is the connection that you discovered as a step to the journey of how tech transfer works? I’m fascinated about culture and mathematics, and before we get into culture and tech transfer, because they’re going to be closely, closely related, I suspect.
CM: Yeah, there will be a connection because I did draw on my experience as a mathematical modeller, you know. And I don’t think people realised too much, for me to be successful in the maths field, I had to put a lot of effort into learning through the Western institutions, so to speak. So, I had a more of a European education than an aboriginal…
CB: Yeah, indeed.
CM: So I had to come back around full circle to start teaching, to learn again.
CB: Wow.
CM: So, I didn’t walk into any community knowing exactly this, what these connections are.
CB: Okay.
CM: I could start by looking at it from the mass knowledge that I did have. So, when I unpacked mathematics, to me, mathematics was, we reflect on the world around us. And as we reflect on the world around us, we get interested in certain processes that are happening, you know, and they could be anything. But what we do as mathematicians is that we go through an abstraction process and we take that process, we pull it apart, we try and understand what it is. We represent it in different ways. It can be drawings, it can be a whole range of things. But then it ends up being expressed as this algebraic expression of those processes.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
CM: But then I was thinking to myself this even when I went to Oxford this was more obvious to me anywhere else, is that when you look at mathematics, you should be able to read it in a way that then enables you to see how it could connect to the world. Yeah? So, it’s like a cycle. So, you go from the world, you’ve got an abstraction process to the maths world, but you also need the ability to critically reflect on the maths world and see how it connects back to the world that you come from. To make sure from one thing, what you’re doing in the first place works, but also might have different connections with other things. Other…
CB: Yeah.
CM: …races in the world. Now, the other part of that model too, that I talked about was that symbols are really important because they carry meaning from the world into the maths world. And I sort of said to myself, ’I think we don’t really teach enough about what those symbols mean and how it connects to the world’. And the other thing with that is that if maths is a person-made knowledge, then we’re always going to introduce our cultural biases within that. And the beauty about mathematics is that mathematics comes from many cultures around the world.
CB: It does.
CM: So, there is, there are representations within mathematics of all these different cultures, and some of them aren’t as obvious as others. But there are there if you delve into the history of it.
CB: Yep.
CM: So, there’s, there’s multiple cultural history to mathematics that we seem to ignore as well, which sort of denies the richness of that.
CB: Well, yeah, because every culture that’s formed independently across the globe over the last 65,000 years, all, each has a form of its own mathematics.
CM: That’s right, that’s right. And some of them got introduced into this mass that we learned through the English system, you know.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Filtered through all these different countries. To then become what Europeans like to see and then what the English like to see. Then they come to Australia, or what they thought was important, I should say. Not like to say what they thought was important to teach. So, from that there’s a cultural lens, even if you want to think of it that way, you know what they deemed important to be part of that education.
CB: Yeah.
CM: But then what you’re starting to think then, what opens the door is that if all cultures have different ways of expressing mathematical ideas, then what could we see within indigenous cultures that have that same mathematical expression?
CB: Yeah. And as you went through this journey just to bring it into Australian Indigenous cultures, because there are many cultures, which is an obvious statement. But were the mathematical lines or communication, were they substantially different between cultures on the continent of Australia?
CM: There are many different languages and many different cultures across Australia…
CB: Yeah.
CM: …as people always say. And that is true to an extent. But one thing that people don’t often talk about is that it does come, the cultures do come from a similar philosophical background.
CB: Okay.
CM: There is like a root sort of culture, if you like to all Aboriginal culture.
CB: Oh, interesting.
CM: Yep. Just like you would see in Europe, you know, you have the, the Latin type area…
CB: Yeah. The Latin roots and the Germanic roots and those sorts of things.
CM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But what’s nice behind that is that the philosophy of life, you know, that sort of main philosophies everyone lives by, you know, existed across, similarly across all of Australia, its just expressed differently.
CB: Yeah.
CM: And that’s what you should expect. You know, you know, you should expect that in a large continent but many, many people. So, there is differences but there’s a huge similarity. We’ll say that because Aboriginal culture was a culture that was not about, it was about, relationships were more important than quantity of things. That was not as important Aboriginal people as it is to Europeans. So, a lot of Aboriginal people’s culture is about understanding relationships. For me, the best example of mathematical expression from indigenous people is the social structure that Aboriginal people live by. So, if you map out a kinship system for Aboriginal people, it is really complex. The philosophy behind the kinship systems is that it’s not just kinship between people, but Aboriginal people make kinship with the whole ecosystem.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
CM: So, with animals, plants, wind, water, anything you can think of, you know, people call it all the elements in the world and things like that. But effectively it’s the ecosystem which has a whole series of relationships.
CB:Yeah. And it fascinates me in this moment, Chris, that relationships have a higher importance, if I can call it that, than, than the mathematics, and its relationships and interconnectedness which are words that I have heard from you when we were chatting prior to us chatting today, and relationships to places you just mentioned, to ecosystems. What really fascinates me is how has this system of place and interconnectedness worked in terms of carrying this language and carrying these systems forward? Because that to me seemed, you know, relationships in our narrative, if you want, with Tech Transfer Talk and the way we do our work is that relationships are more important than transactions. So, in its way, the relationships that you talk about are more important than counting out the money or counting out the number of whatever it is. So, I’m fascinated by what you’ve just put to me and everyone listening, Chris, that the relationships have a higher order. And those relationships are interconnected, not just amongst people but in the ecosystem. How does that ecosystem work or that interconnectedness work not only in a mathematical or language setting but for, I guess, the purposes of this conversation, the passing down of knowledge?
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CM: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s a very strict system. It has to be.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Almost like maths is a strict system because it has to be, you know. So, you can’t violate certain rules because they break down, and seem similar with that when you’re doing something that’s complex, you have a very strict system. And the first level of that generally, is that, Aboriginal people, society, put everything within that they call ‘moiety’, which is an anthropological term, it’s a Latin term, but the moiety means ‘two halves’. So, everything was put into two halves. If I use the Arnhem Land example, they call it the Yirritja and Dua. And do you know if there’s, um, the Adnyamathanha one they called Arraru and Mathari, um, you know, so there’s different languages for it, but it still sits within the same idea of that. Everything gets put into these two camps, people, animal plants. But the idea behind it is that these have to act to balance relationships. So, it’s a balancing…bit like Ying and Yang, you know.
CB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CM: They have to balance each other. And then from there, people get broken down into all these other categories. Uh, for example, you might have heard of skin groups, which is, uh, has also different language names for across different areas, which then puts you then into a particular clan group, which then puts you into a particular language group, which then puts you in connection to a particular part of the country and things like that.
CB: Okay.
CM: So, there’s all these sort of groups that define your identity in relationship to the country that you’re supposed to be looking after as well.
CB: Right. But I’m interested how this works with the interconnectedness to country. So, you can’t divide country into two halves, so to speak. There must be a very complex set of inner plays here between people and their particular country.
CM: May be hard to imagine, but way the system is almost fractal in the sense that it works on that sort of individual scale to position a person on a particular part of the country. But through that system again, it knows, that person knows they are connected to other parts of the country…
CB: Right.
CM: …in, in those other ways that’s defined by the system.
CB: Right.
CM: Just one country. It’s several countries depending on your relationship. And then your responsibility is to learn the knowledge to maintain balance. It starts at what we might call ‘moiety’, but it’s part of the whole system to understand balance, to understand relationships, but also to understand how you enact so that you keep those relationships strong and don’t undermine them for future generations. So, the whole knowledge is to actually strengthen and maintain the ecosystem in relationship to you and all people.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Now, if you think about the whole continent of Australia, that it actually had individuals responsible for all the bits of bits and pieces. So, you’re developing this network that stretched across all of Australia.
CB: Yeah.
CM:And people might have heard a thing called ‘songlines’ because the knowledge in acts across country in these lines that are significant, you know, significant points of knowledge, I suppose for want of a better word.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So, knowledge is embedded within the landscape through these systems and also transmitted through people, through these, through, you know, stories, through song and through dance, you know. And in that sense, I always reflect on how theatrical Aboriginal people are, you know, and that also knowing that knowledge, the importance of knowledge is not knowing, you know, what year something happened, but the importance of knowledge is the stuff that really underpins and sits within stories, you know. I think people think of stories as something that’s recreational, maybe even childish, maybe. but we all know that stories have levels of meaning and…
CB: They do.
CM: As you grow up, you learn those levels of meaning, you know?
CB: Yeah.
CM: And that’s sort of the levels of understanding and respect that people have for you. And you imagine this existing across the whole continent in connecting country.
CB: Yeah.
CM: And it is quite a, um, it’s, I often say that it should be one of the things that Australia is really proud of, but it should also be one they sort of, uh, you know, great wonders of the world or whatever, that this system actually existed.
CB: It’s an extraordinary cultural system for maintaining and transferring knowledge that it’s a combination of both the people and the landscape. As you said, you made a terrific point there, Chris, that the knowledge transfer happens through the stories, happens through dance. That is the means. It’s not stuck in a library written on a book. It’s living and passing from generation-to-generation. The ability, though, of indigenous communities to adopt technology is also, in and of itself, fascinating. It’s a really interesting concept because the distances indigenous people have had to cover over millennia. And yet, of course, you know, things like transport have improved with the introduction of horses and camels and more recently, automotive. Is there an inherent ability to adapt and adopt technology, do you feel within indigenous communities? I know I’m bringing Western stuff into local culture, but is that a theme that has existed over the millennia? The ability to adopt and adapt?
CM: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, um, I mean, you know, if you want to talk about longevity of knowledge, I mean, there’s many Aboriginal people who still have stories of the last ice age still firmly embedded within their culture and their stories.
CB: Wow.
CM: So, that’s the longevity of it, and also the fact that they had to adapt to that significant change, was part of those sort of stories as well. The thing for me, though, as I think about kinship systems even, is that the whole point behind kingship systems is as they, as new things arise, they will position it within the system in some form, because that’s almost, and they’ll do it with people. Like when I started working in Arnhem Land, they had to put me in the system, otherwise people would not know how to relate to me.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So even with new technology or even with the idea of when money was brought into that, there is a need to sort of say, ‘Well, how can we position this within our system?’ So, there’s always this adaptability that existed. Now, we also got to remember that particularly, you know, where I come from too is that, one of the easiest ways to disrupt the system I used to describe was to take people out of country and put them on other country. So, this was, this was one of the things that really destroyed our people in, in terms of, not necessarily the knowledge, not necessarily, maybe. There was you know, we always talked about lost culture, lost knowledge, but I don’t, I don’t even like to talk about that that in that firm because…, in that way, sorry, that family, in that way…
CB: Yeah.
CM: …because knowledge still exists within our landscape, as I’m saying, you know. We can always relearn all that. But I suppose what was carried through when in those sort of extreme positions is to hold on to that, the philosophies, you know, exist within Aboriginal society. Like one thing that never really died was the need to care for country, you know?
CB: Yeah, yeah.
CM: Most Aboriginal communities across the country would be still firmly embedded in that country. So, likewise, when we’re confronted with a new idea, like, like, um, and I think you’re trying to hint at the car, when they saw things that were, that could actually help them with their, you know, this is the way I’m imagining it happening because I wasn’t there, you know, I wasn’t there. But the way I imagine it happening is that they saw the need to have cars because it suited their cultural needs, yeah. So, for example, I talked about this beautiful book that was written from the Bush Mechanic series that was seen on SBS, but if you haven’t, you can probably Google it and see some of those. The SBS series focus on the community called Yuendumu, which is in Western sort of NT area in the middle of a desert-type area. And a lot of those people were travelling large distances culturally, but when they had the means for other things like cars, they saw a need to have that car because they can get to areas more quicker than what they were before. So, that suited them and suited them to connect with the other people they needed to connect with. Maybe, maybe with ceremony as well. They were still practicing, so there was a need to, they saw a strong need for this now. Now, if you think about, and when you actually read the book, Aboriginal people started getting cars in about 1915. And also there’s plenty of pictures in the 1920s of Aboriginal people owning cars. Now, if you think about that period from anywhere in Australia, we’re still smack bang in the early days of colonisation. And also that was around the time when Aboriginal people were restricted by, if they had any wages they were usually taken away from them because of stolen wages and so forth. So, they had to figure out a way of getting cars at an early time when a lot of the stuff that they were doing were restricted.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Actually, one of the earliest accounts was actually the Northern Rivers in Ballina, where a bloke had a car in the 1915s, the earlier date, and he obviously still wanted to have that for those sort of similar reasons, I imagine. But the neighbours and the authorities were complaining about how can this Aboriginal man get a car?
CB: And no-one else have one?
CM: No, no, no-one else had one. You know, and the same thing happened in this Central Desert area. And in the book they were showing how the superintendent of the mission was writing to the authorities, saying ‘These unscrupulous farmers are allowing Aboriginal people to be employed and giving them, you know, X, Y and Z’. You know, they weren’t given cars. They were given means to, in a sense, get resources underneath the table. So, then they can pool their resources and buy a car. And often a car was shared by many families because relationships are more important than individual wealth. So, all this sort of cultural stuff built into this way of actually owning cars really early.
CB: I did want to close out our conversation, just to tackle the subject, for want of a better word, in a different way, and that is that the Western form of technology transfer, and I’m going to go on broad brushstrokes, the Western tech transfer system relies pretty heavily on patents and protecting the knowledge that you’ve acquired and allowing other people to use it on basically terms that you agree to. And what isn’t done like that either is published and forms the basis of some of that future patenting, or is kept secret. And we’ll keep it to ourselves and we’ll show you little bits of it, but you’ll never have the whole picture. That sits, I’m really sensing from this conversation, Chris, in very, very stark contrast to the way that indigenous technology transfer happens, where, as as I’ve heard it through this conversation, this is about relationships and place and connection and an open sharing of that knowledge, and almost an open learning to continue to build on that knowledge. If I’ve got that right, and let’s just say I have for a minute, but if I’ve got that right, how do we look at indigenous tech transfer and indigenous knowledge and bring that into a Western system that, you know, how do we learn from that and bring it into a Western system which looks inherently geared against that ethos?
CM: Yeah, yeah. Look, I don’t have the answer for that at all.
CB: No, that’s okay, but even, just your thoughts on it, I mean.
CM: Yeah, yeah. My thought actually went to even, if you think about the economic system, like that’s the sort of same argument in my head.
CB: Yeah.
CM: Economic system is about accumulating wealth, and Aboriginal people is the exact opposite. It’s about, you know, if you look at early writings of Europeans, they would say stuff like, ‘These are wretched looking people, but no one’s hungry’. Everyone’s happy, you know?
CB: Yeah.
CM: But because everything was shared, you know, it was there was no one was not fed, you know. Um, and that’s the starkness between those two sort of ideologies, really, that you’re suggesting is that people can hold on to knowledge for themselves, for their own personal gain…
CB: Yeah.
CM: …or companies gain whatever you want to see it, but it’s actually a, you know, a set of people’s gain over the collective responsibility.
CB: Yeah, yeah.
CM: Um, so Aboriginal culture was more about individual, sorry it was more about collective responsibility than individual rights, you know? So, we live in a world of more about individual rights and accumulation. And that’s, you know, what I sort of hinted at when I said mathematics is more important within that cultural framework. In terms of number and making sure we understand number and how, you know, and through that lens than Aboriginal people who are more about relationships even though there are mathematical expressions of these relationships.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So, if you’re looking at something like tech transfer, I mean Aboriginal people are getting a bit smarter, you know, around this, like there’s a lot of people writing about AI. Um, so, if you think about AI, AI is only as good as the information it gets.
CB: It is.
CM: So there’s a lot of cultural bias within information that our eyes will draw on. There’s a lot of consideration about, you know, what outcomes will come from AI used, you know, technology that uses AI to do, a whole range of things. Indigenous people are also getting into indigenous data sovereignty. Data, when you own data, data is power as the world. And also it’s manipulated to tell certain stories that people don’t have control over. So, they’ve known historically how data has been used against Aboriginal people.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So now they’re trying to look at ways of ensuring that data is owned by people in our communities.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So, in some ways, I suppose you might even think about it is that we have to almost emulate that process, but within the goodwill of our own communities, in that sense. That we have to start holding back, too and then finding a trust relationship before anything else is then realised.
CB: I think you’ve brought us to a really interesting point of almost cultural fusion here, where the way that you’ve described communities taking ownership and stewardship of their own data for their own community outcomes is a Western approach, which is, if I boldly suggest that a community acts like a corporation here and is saying, ‘I’m going to look after this data as an asset for the benefit of my people who are, in fact, you know, my, my community, my corporation.’ So, it is an interesting sort of transition back the other way. I was kind of hoping there might be some infusion going the other way, where the Western system might actually be slightly tempered in its approach. Perhaps it’s going the other way.
CM: Yeah, well, I think that’s a longer haul, I think hopefully, I hope that will happen. But in the meantime, uh, we as a people, I think, are still trying to survive within this system that’s been created in Australia.
CB: Yeah.
CM: So, we have to, the trust relationship is what I would say is very low.
CB: Yeah.
CM: It almost requires us to still enact in a community sense and a, and a responsibility to country in our community.
CB: Yeah.
CM: But if you’re not going to be on board with that, then we have to do it separate to you, you know. And, but we would, we wouldn’t not interact with you or share with you ideas in some general sense, um, because that’s still what we do. Hopefully that shift will happen one day, maybe…
CB: Yeah. Indeed.
CM: And that shift should happen in a whole range of ways. And I think for me, that was the significance of the latest science priorities. So, in the National Science Priorities, we, for the very first time have a standalone priority that says that ‘We will invest…’, what’s it, ‘Elevate and invest in First Nations knowledges within STEM space’… in science, technology, engineering and mathematics?
CB: Yep.
CM: But also what was interesting about the priority is that it also had, across the other priorities, things that still referenced indigenous people and culture within those as well. So, that’s the significance for me in the shift that now we are entering a time where people are going to start to get to understand First Nations people and what the knowledge is about, and not just keep on being perceived as irrelevant and primitive people. There’s still a huge swathe of Australians who still think about aboriginal people as primitive. They got no relevance in our modern society. They should just get over it and assimilate and all that stuff. But these priorities for me will hopefully enable that greater conversation and we’ll see what the future holds from there.
CB: I think that’s a great way to wrap up our conversation. I think the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems in the science priorities, hopefully, is a bit of a bellwether and starting point for increased knowledge transfer from 65,000 years of continuous culture, and actually get that into the learning, get the understanding, the points of difference. It might actually improve knowledge transfer and heaven forbid even tech transfer in the years ahead of us. But Chris, that’s just been a terrific conversation from my perspective, taking us through some really profound perspectives around indigenous knowledge and how it comes together and how it’s structured. So, very appreciative of your time today, mate, and really look forward to our future conversations. So, Thank you again.
CM: So, thank you very much, Cameron.