Preparation and support programs for teacher trainees were instituted in South Australia in 1978. By that time, only thirteen Aboriginal/Islander people had ever graduated as teachers in South Australia. Since that time, and by the end of this year, over one hundred awards will have been completed in South Australia, eighty percent by people who had been prepared and enrolled through special entry preparation and support programs such as ATEP (Aboriginal Teacher Education Program) at Underdale and the Magill Early Childhood Education Program. Graduates now work across the range from pre-school to tertiary education. Around seventy percent of graduates are in classrooms, with another fifteen percent otherwise involved in education. Very few, if any, are employed.

By the end of 1990, at least three hundred Aboriginal and Islander people had graduated in South Australian tertiary institutions, from associate diploma level and above. In 1990, the annual graduation rate surpassed forty, the great majority at three-year level or above, including at least one Honours, one doctorate and graduates in architecture and law. The eight-fold increase in graduate numbers over the total up to 1980 reflects the active presence on campuses of Aboriginal/Islander-oriented support services and, even more so, of preparation programs: some three-quarters of all graduates had participated in some form of supplementary preparation.

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, one could detect an inexorable logic in the development of Aboriginal affairs from the time of the initial conquest of the country until at least the Second World War. The assumption of what Mr Justice Blackburn termed the “legal fiction” of peaceful settlement ofterra nullius(an empty land) nothwithstanding, the entire country was, in the view of its long-term inhabitants, definitely not empty, nor without law and government. (Even the South Australian Colonisation Committee seems to have concurred in this view by assuring intending settlers that they would be protected from hostile savages, in 1834, two yearsbeforeformal settlement.The non-fictional fact of conquest, however, placed at the doors of colonial administrations the responsibility for those conquered remnants who survived the process of settlement. But since theraison d’êtreof settlement required the fiction of empty and available land, the proprietary rights of its owners had to be denied from the first. To this was rapidly added the impropriety of heathen representing themselves or giving evidence in court, since they could not take the oath. Thus, although Walmadjeri and Tanganekald alike were henceforth British subjects and liable in British law, certain of their legal rights had to be postponed until they could understand their full importance – which could take an indefinably long time during which they might die out anyway. Understandably, with British civilisation at the pinnacle of human evolution, ahead of even the French, the German and of course the Hindu civilisations, and Aboriginal barbarism at or even below its base – George Grey surmised that Aboriginal life must represent some animal regression from that of the Garden of Eden – this period of apprenticeship for civilisation was a necessary burden for those with Christian charity to bear (Rowley, 1972:126)