Don Wu/Getty ImagesWhen I graduated from high school more than 25 years ago, I received a phone call. I hadn’t met the caller, but they knew of me. They informed me that, according to their records, I was one of only 50 Indigenous students to successfully complete secondary school in the states of South Australia and the Northern Territory combined.When I graduated, Indigenous students completing secondary studies was cause for our communities to come together to celebrate. I was invited to an event at Adelaide Festival Centre to mark the achievement alongside my fellow graduates. For many of us, the memory of generations before us who were never afforded the opportunity to attend the later years of schooling remained clear.The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational attainment has improved since then – in 2025, South Australia achieved population parity in Indigenous Year 12 graduation rates, which was almost ten times the level it was when I finished school. But the gap in educational attainment is still not closed, and our community, now greater in number within the halls of higher education, takes very seriously the need to highlight and celebrate Indigenous strengths and build up the next generation.More and more Indigenous uni studentsWe now see second- and third-in-family Indigenous students on our university campuses. Whereas once Indigenous students made up small cohorts in community-focused degrees such as education or health, ever-growing numbers of Indigenous peoples are studying across all disciplines.Indigenous student enrolments at universities are growing year on year. Higher degree research graduations are steadily increasing, and the number of Indigenous academics is following suit. Indigenous academics and students are also leading research and education agendas across all disciplines. We currently have a record number of Indigenous-led Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence across the sector, and the newly established Australian Tertiary Education Commission appointed an Indigenous First Nations Commissioner in Gunditjmara Professor Mark Rose. It is testament to those who came before us that Indigenous voices are now being included at some of the highest levels of governance. Read more: ‘What do you want to be?’ The spark that helps Indigenous people go to uni What are the real barriers?Many of my Indigenous colleagues would agree the barriers to Indigenous achievement in education are cultural misrepresentation and irrelevance of content – not, as historically alleged, Indigenous peoples’ inferiority or inability to learn. We are not seeing a lack of interest and motivation from Indigenous students; rather, we are hearing these students (and staff) call out teaching and research paradigms that exclude Indigenous perspectives. The task for Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders now is not to continue to boost Indigenous student numbers without considering the quality and relevance of the education that they will receive. Read more: There’s a new plan to help First Nations students from daycare to uni. What does it need to work? Unequal research traditionsIndigenous peoples’ relationship with research and research institutions across the past 250 years has left much to be desired. Western frameworks of knowledge emerging from the Enlightenment and assumptions about the cultural and social evolution of humanity, intertwined with an imperial desire for the expansion of empire, have produced complex and vastly unequal foundations. Researchers, mostly anthropologists, accompanied early European explorers to this continent to observe, measure and document their encounters with some of the world’s oldest continuous cultures. These researchers brought with them assumptions about cultural and evolutionary hierarchies. Such assumptions provided an inescapable Western lens through which to view these lands, waters, skies and societies.The overwhelming narrative in much of this research was that Indigenous peoples of this continent were inferior in every way. Anthropologists in the early years of European arrival posited that Indigenous societies, seen as more primitive than European societies, offered a glimpse into the missing connections in human evolution. This was a narrative that suited the colonial endeavour. For if Indigenous peoples had not formed recognisable civilised societies, the trope of discovery could be more easily applied to the invasion and theft of a continent. The myth of terra nullius came to be supported by researchers’ evaluations that no meaningful connection or use of the land could be observed. The knowledges created in this vein began to furnish the libraries, archives, museums and galleries of Europe, and eventually the research institutions of Australia. Colonial legacies remainIn the mid-nineteenth century, the first Australian universities were established, in Sydney and then in Melbourne. As of 2026, there are 37 public universities in Australia. These institutions were built on the legacies of knowledge creation and dissemination through principally Western frameworks. In 1976, fewer than 78 Indigenous Australians of any age held a tertiary degree; today, approximately 50,690 Indigenous Australians aged 25–34 (47% of the Indigenous population in that age category) do .But the legacies of Western colonial knowledge systems remain. Indigenous peoples are still under represented in higher education on both student and staff metrics. Indigenous knowledges are still seen by many as peripheral to the dominant Western knowledge system. The centuries-long casting of Indigenous cultures as inferior has proven difficult to shake. Despite some shift in public sentiment, overcoming foundational assumptions about the incompatibility of Indigenous knowledges with Western traditions of knowledge creation and sharing continues to present challenges.There is so much at stakeOver 250 years of colonisation saw dispossession and marginalisation of the oldest living cultures on Earth, and the impact is ongoing. Indigenous Australians can expect, on average, to attain lower levels of education, to live shorter lives, to experience greater health inequalities and levels of family violence, and to live with the legacy of lost language and culture. And yes, young Indigenous men are still more likely to have contact with the carceral system than to graduate from a university.Universities have a crucial role to play in addressing these shameful trends, and they are very much up for the challenge. But lasting progress cannot be made unless Indigenous peoples within these institutions lead the way. Indigenous voices must be present in our classrooms and our lecture theatres. And we must be present in the boardrooms where decisions are made about how we deploy our institutional resources to create the greatest impact for Australia and the world.Indigenous peoples, walking in the footsteps of those who came before us, are now asking that institutions engage in a process of meaningful truth-telling. That is, a process where we cast a critical eye over the legacies of knowledge creation about us through a purely Western lens. A process where these Western frameworks are the subject of critical scholarly interrogation and where Indigenous perspectives and voices are fully embedded.Only in addressing this history honestly can we move forward together to a future where we see nothing about us, without us.This is an edited extract from Nothing About Us, Without Us, published by Monash University Publishing, as part of the In the National Interest essay series.Tristan Kennedy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.