Who Gets to Be Smart: Privilege, Power and Knowledge
Author: Bri Lee
Date: 2021-06-01 05:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Praise for Who Gets to be Smart

‘A searing exposé of the unacknowledged wankiness in our most revered ideas and structures, imbued with Bri’s unmistakable unflinching self-examination.’ Alice Pung, author of Unpolished Gem and Laurinda

‘Bri Lee is that most wonderful of writers: she uses language in the service of thinking. Who Gets to be Smart is an electric thrill of a book. Lee takes the very idea of intelligence and pokes at it, turns it over and reshapes it so that we might be unshackled from our worst instincts. The writing is impeccable and driven by a delicious curiosity. Though the subject can often become disturbing in its implications, I took a distinct pleasure in reading every line.’ Rick Morton, author of A Hundred Years of Dirt and My Year of Living Vulnerably

‘A fascinating, eye-opening and sometimes hurtful reminder that we have a lot of unlearning to do. This book was a sharp wake-up call, asking me to reflect on who I personally regarded as smart, and why. Or worse, who I regarded as dumb. Also got me thinking, why do humans go out of their way to create wiiiildly subjective reasons as to why our particular views and our approach to life makes us smarter than others?’ Lillian Ahenkan / Flex Mami, author of The Success Experiment

‘Once I started reading, I couldn’t put it down! Bri Lee brilliantly explores the criss-crossing of money, power and colonialism with notions of knowledge, education and smartness. She does this with heart while fearlessly delving into her own insecurities and assumptions, challenging me to do the same.’ Senator Mehreen Faruqi

‘I love how this book’s mood starts out with genuine humility, turns fiery, and finally emerges into a bright clear light. It is essential reading for anyone who suspects that ‘intelligence’ is not a fixed, objective quantity but a sophisticated con job. It left me full of hope.’ Malcolm Knox, author of Bluebird and Truth Is Trouble

‘What is so very impressive about Lee’s book are the precision and clarity of her arguments, and also the elegance and attentiveness of her prose. I was absorbed by Who Gets to be Smart from the first page. This is debate and questioning done with absolute verve, with eloquence and generosity.’ Christos Tsiolkas, author of Damascus and The Slap

‘Intriguing and vital examination of contemporary elitism and how privilege determines who lucks out in the game of education and its associated opportunities for life.’ Liz Allen, author of The Future of Us

Praise for Eggshell Skull

‘Just finished this in tears, full of admiration. Bri Lee’s story of standing up for herself and braving a biased, underfunded, incompetent legal system to demand justice is beautifully written, tender and powerful. Accompanying Lee through her transformation from a frightened girl into a blazingly formidable adult—whose courage comes from her determination to stand up for all women—was moving, gut-churning, and ultimately triumphant. I punched the air when I finished. RESPECT.’ Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things

‘An important story, beautifully told.’ Julia Baird

‘I loved Eggshell Skull. It is grim, intense but utterly triumphant. Congratulations.’ Jane Caro, author and public education advocate

‘Half the people I know are reading this or have just finished and with good reason. Confronting, tough and very, very necessary. Thanks for holding your nerve, @bri.e.lee.’ Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident

‘Brutal, brave and utterly compelling, Bri Lee’s extraordinary memoir shines a light on the humanity and complexity of our justice system and the limitless courage victims of crime must summon in a legal process stacked against them at every turn. In the age of #MeToo, Eggshell Skull is a prescient personal account of a young woman’s fierce and unflinching battle against her abuser. I can’t remember a book I devoured with such intensity, nor one that moved me so profoundly.’ Rebecca Starford, author of The Imitator and co-founder of Kill Your Darlings

‘Just wow @brieloiselee. Eggshell Skull is extraordinary. Vulnerable, moving and ever so wise. Huge congratulations.’ Tracey Spicer, AM

‘Scorching, self-scouring: a young woman finds her steel and learns to wield it.’ Helen Garner

‘If you have ever uttered the phrase “there’s no such thing as a rape culture”, you need to read this book. If you believe that “women lie all the time” just to get revenge or out of guilt over sex, you need to read this book. If you think men are being unfairly accused by women and that the system is predisposed against them “because feminism”, you need to read this book.’ Clementine Ford, Sydney Morning Herald

‘Lee walks a precarious line with incredible control, is never exploitative or voyeuristic, and remains frank and articulate … Above all, Lee is simply a good writer. She tells her story with remarkable empathy, vulnerability and clever, even humorous, prose … Eggshell Skull will leave you feeling triumphant and crushed. Sitting at my kitchen table after reading the final page, I put it down and cried.’ Good Reading

First published in 2021

Copyright © Bri Lee 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

If you have any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the publishers at the address below.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 980 8
eISBN 978 1 76106 189 9

Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

Cover design: Lisa White

Cover image: Shutterstock

Contents

1 Oxford

2 Kyriarchy

3 Schools

4 Science

5 Language

6 Western civilisation

7 2020

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Harper’s,

‘Let Us Begin: An invitation to action on poverty’

While the unimpeachable impression of scientific objectivity was maintained, somehow the gold standard of beauty and intelligence always turned out to be the scientist himself. His own race was safe in his hands.

Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science

New shit has come to light.

The Dude, The Big Lebowski

1

Oxford

The feeling I remember most clearly from that first visit to Oxford is wonderment. It was as though, after years of longing and tugging on people’s sleeves, I was finally seeing Disneyland. Coming up on your left is the college where Oscar Wilde read, and on your right is the library where Locke and Hobbes wrote those theories that changed society. These large trees overhead provided shade for Stephen Hawking as he passed underneath. Everything sparkled with meaning and history. I had to fight the urge to buy something from the gift store.

In many ways, both for me individually and the wider world, 2018 was a very long time ago. My friend Damian had just begun his life as a Rhodes scholar. He would likely scoff at that characterisation—that any new kind of life was beginning for him—but it was how things appeared to me at the time. He had stepped through the magical gates into a Masters in English Literature at Oxford. Damian and I met through my boyfriend, Vincent, in 2015. The two of them had gone to the same private boys’ high school in Brisbane, though Damian was two or three years younger than Vincent and me. They reconnected at university, at a conference in Vienna they both attended, and Vincent then introduced the two of us. ‘Come with us,’ he said one afternoon when they were catching up for a beer. ‘I think you’d like him.’

I did. Tall with sandy-coloured hair, he is specific and idiosyncratic in speech and hand gestures; he avoids unnecessary physical contact with others. In a different time, he would have been described as a Renaissance man or Universal Man. Academically gifted, he is also a writer and flautist. He has large muscles from rowing but stays lean by running. And Damian understands style. I have watched his develop, particularly as he makes his way through his twenties and more so since he left Brisbane and moved to a university town; now he’s a little less likely to be yelled at or beaten up in the street for having an earring. Think pale shorts and socks, with biceps bulging out of the rolled-up sleeves of a crisp tee. When I went to visit him he had a pair of mint green overalls on high rotation.

I’m not sure I know anyone else who would appreciate like he did my tidbit about the poet and author Ocean Vuong sending a paper clip to his aunt in Vietnam, who organised for it to be cast and made out of silver for Vuong to wear as a single earring. I treasure the memory of sharing this piece of trivia with Damian; it was a very rare instance of me knowing something that he did not. The only reason I did was because I read it in an Instagram comment, and Damian is not on Instagram. Nor is he on Twitter or Facebook. His commitment to a social media-free existence seems to be both a symptom and a product of the other facets of his personality and priority matrix.

His days are long. Most of us regular human beings would only be able to sustain Damian’s lifestyle for one or two weeks before collapsing. Sometimes—not often—people ask me ‘where I get all my energy’ or ‘how I get so much done’. These people have not met Damian.

As far as I could tell, based on our respective performances at educational institutions, Vincent and Damian both had me beaten in the brains department. Vincent was raised bilingual, and is fluent in both French and English, and Damian comes from a family in which both parents and all siblings are different types of doctors; I was a half-step behind them at each turn. They both graduated from school with the best possible exit score, which placed them somewhere within the top 3 per cent of their student cohort. It would be fair to say that, by contrast, I nursed a chip on my shoulder right where the graduation cap’s tassel irritated. I certainly didn’t get the grades to enrol in a law degree straight out of school. What I perceived as their intellectual superiority was one of the reasons I sought their companionship. Conversation was always rich, we laughed a lot, and I learned new things. Fundamentally I felt myself improved by proximity to them—and I had a rabid drive towards self-improvement. The brain was a muscle that could be stretched and massaged, I believed, and my relationship with Vincent and friendship with Damian would help coax it into a limber expansion.

When I heard Damian had received a Rhodes Scholarship I took it as confirmation of his superiority, although an academic I spoke to a few months before my 2018 trip to Oxford had serious reservations about my perspective. I had made a careless comment about visiting ‘the smartest people in the world’, and this incensed her. Of course I didn’t actually believe there was a smartest anything in the world, I clarified, but at the time I thought her defensiveness was more illuminating than my own hyperbole. What I tried to articulate was this: if you accepted the definitions of ‘smart’ and ‘successful’ given to you from years one through twelve, which were reaffirmed and in fact intensified once you hit university, it was reasonable to conclude that a Rhodes Scholarship was one of a limited number of possible apexes of achievement. If proof of academic capability and this particular type of intellectual rigour could be imagined as a winnowing flowchart on which hundreds of thousands of us start at the bottom, and each year just a few dozen reach the top, wouldn’t you like to spend time with someone at the peak? Wasn’t it possible a little of that specialness might rub off on you? I had my fingers crossed for a smattering of osmosis. The academic scowled. ‘It sounds more like a pilgrimage,’ she said, unimpressed.

I smiled. ‘Exactly.’

•

Damian was waiting at the station when my train from London pulled in. He was reading at a little aluminium table, his body still while he focused fully on a large book. The day was bright and clear but cold, in a bearable October way.

‘Let me take this,’ he offered, reaching for the handle of my little red suitcase, saving me the public embarrassment of its wheels banging against the cobblestones as we crossed streets and bridges to get to the centre of the university town. ‘Picturesque’ was an understatement. Walls and churches and houses and gates, stained-glass windows and wrought-iron fences, well-kept lawns and nicely dressed folks. We turned a corner and I recognised the alley with the Bridge of Sighs passing overhead.

‘I’m thinking we get some food,’ Damian said. ‘I know a good place for falafels and sandwiches.’

We sat on the steps of the Radcliffe Camera, near the Bodleian Library, eating and catching up. I was glad to have just come from France so that I had interesting things to report. Damian told me he had classes to attend, as well as orchestra rehearsals and rowing training, but between commitments he would show me around. I assured him I had plenty of reading and some work to do myself, which was true, though it felt insignificant by comparison.

After lunch we went to drop my suitcase in his room. He lived in a new, U-shaped building full of nice dorms and with communal kitchens on each level. In the centre of the U, a huge tree stood in a lush green square reached by a white gravel path. From the window above Damian’s tidy desk I watched a family of squirrels bouncing around the tree’s boughs. It was a modern update to the fully bourgeois scenes I’d imagined when reading Brideshead Revisited. Elsewhere in Oxford there were still open fireplaces, of course, but there was no need for them in a building with such silent and effective central heating. The wealth was present but a little less audacious. Damian had a bar fridge built into the cabinetry rather than a butler. In that fridge was a small parcel of special cheeses his parents had sent him. I wasn’t sure what his financial arrangements with his parents were or how generous his scholarship stipend was, but I knew from our conversations about the local bookstore and the falafels that he didn’t have a lot of cash to splash around. His tastes were those of someone who grew up with white-collar parents. That is to say, he might not have been able to afford fancy cheese for himself, but it is a certain type of family that would send a cooler bag of fancy cheeses to a young man as a gift. Perhaps I was just projecting, but it did seem as though he fit in with the place. The way he moved about the room demonstrated the room was his. Students who are the first in their family to go to university often speak about a pervading sense of alienation and discomfort, not knowing how to address professors or what to wear to different types of events. Damian may have had to borrow books from the library instead of just being able to buy them, but he also appeared very comfortable in those libraries.

That evening we went to watch a debate at the Oxford Union, a famous debating society. Sometimes they had lords and ladies on the program, sometimes famous authors and politicians. Speakers wore black tie and no topic was off limits: drones; assisted dying; Thatcher; sex work; ISIS; Holocaust denial. Everything was discussed vigorously, in front of a judgemental and boisterous crowd, in a storied building, in evening wear. The topic on this particular night was ‘This House Believes the War on Terror Has Been its Own Worst Enemy’. The speakers included ambassadors and former defence ministers and CEOs and an American congressperson. We paid about the price of a sandwich to go watch this extraordinary display of argument and elocution then simply walked home. It left me with the sense that the usual chasm between myself and the powerful, world-affecting people had been bridged, if only for a moment.

My visit to Oxford would span three nights. The friends- and-family accommodation on the college grounds was only available for two nights at a time, so on my first night I slept in Damian’s bed and he slept on the floor. He insisted this didn’t bother him. I probably wouldn’t have believed anyone else when they said this, but as he got into his sleeping bag Damian said, ‘This is nothing,’ and told me about how he’d spent several weeks sleeping on the bare, rocky ground while hiking across some remote part of New Zealand. We joked about the personal ads that used to be in the back pages of the London Review of Books and drifted off. I slept lightly, nervous that I would snore.

In the morning we went to a special hall for breakfast. There were long wooden tables, high ceilings, and walls covered in oil portraits.

‘Do you ever feel, I dunno—’ I looked up from my toast to the dozens of framed faces I didn’t recognise staring out at me ‘—overwhelmed? By the history?’

Damian nodded and answered thoughtfully. ‘Certainly there can be a feeling of belatedness. It’s almost an anxiety, or exhaustion, when one considers the enormity of everything that has come before.’

On the way back to his room after breakfast we ran into two young men on the white gravel path. They were handsome and dressed in simple but clearly expensive coats, holding books and steaming coffees. Damian exchanged pleasantries with them, introducing me. They were trying to find ‘a quiet library’, they told us, the one on the ground floor of their own building apparently not up to the task.

‘They’re both studying physics,’ Damian said as we crunched on down the path. ‘One specialises in atomic physics. He’s from India, and he’ll go back and work on his country’s nuclear program. The other is an Israeli.’ He went on to explain how a Rhodes Scholarship affected the young man’s national service requirements. ‘You have to be 25 or under to be a Rhodes scholar, so—’

‘What?’

‘There’s an age cap.’

‘Oh.’

He kept talking as we climbed some stairs, and I was glad he couldn’t see my face. I hadn’t realised that I’d passed the age where I could ever be eligible for the program. It was an ugly shock. I’d never looked at the application requirements, knowing there was no point in even applying, but for some reason it still felt like a slap in the face to learn that I’d passed their milestone for brilliance-in-youth. At 26 I was over that hill. Insufficiently promising.

Back in Damian’s room, he prepared for classes and I stood at the window gazing out at the square. The squirrels were still running up and down the tree. I didn’t think I’d ever met a physicist before that day, and there I was having been introduced to two in a single morning. Whenever people recalled the moon landing or I saw it depicted, I knew that if I’d been alive at the time I would have been one of the people sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of the neighbour’s television, watching in awe. I never pictured myself as the man in the spacesuit or even as one of the people in Mission Control. It occurred to me that the people at Oxford might consider their role in an historical event like the moon landing to be an active one, as a contributor or participant. I was merely a tourist, there to listen and observe. To gaze up at them from my cross-legged spot on the floor.

Damian needed to buy an exercise book before his transcription class, and as we walked to the shops our conversation meandered through all kinds of fascinating historical and literary topics. I’d just finished Down and Out in Paris and London and we debated whether Orwell was a phoney tramp, knowing he could have called upon his family for money and reprieve at any moment of his life on the streets. Stepping out through the old gate that separated the college grounds from the public street, people on bicycles with backpacks zoomed by. Vines grew lazily over centuries-old masonry. Everywhere I looked I saw my dreams reflected back at me: a life dedicated to learning, discussion, and thinking. An endless horizon for the expansion of the mind. From the inside, the bubble glistened, shimmering, technicoloured, and iridescent.

We split—him off to class, me off to find a quiet spot for cake and reading—agreeing to meet up at Rhodes House in a few hours’ time. I finished the first half of A Room of One’s Own over my coffee and pastry. I hadn’t read any of Virginia Woolf’s works before then. She had felt like a tidal wave waiting behind a glass door on which I was too timid to knock. A dear friend had to press her copy of A Room of One’s Own into my hands to break the spell. The book is an extended essay based on two lectures on the subject of ‘Women and Fiction’ that Woolf was invited to give at Cambridge in 1928. The result is biting, illuminating, and hilarious.

Woolf opens by setting the scene: ‘The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning.’

A jolt of recognition ran through me. I looked up and out the window of the cafe, saw the tops of the poplars peeping over the walls of a nearby college, hints of bright green lawn winking at me through gaps in the foot traffic. It was as though Woolf had reached through the page to find me on my own peaceful October morning in Oxbridge.

She went on to describe how she was sitting by a stream, considering this question of ‘women and fiction’, when she was struck by a fine idea. She got up and headed for the university, but was yelled at to stay off the grass. Shortly after, she was told that she wasn’t allowed into the library. ‘Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction!’

Again, this was familiar. My entire time in Oxford—even eating lunch on the steps outside the Bodleian Library—was only possible because I was accompanied by Damian. His student ID was like a rare and expensive passport.

What Woolf hones in on is the economic inequality of the sexes. Her retort to the status quo is that it was absurd to suggest women weren’t as capable writers as men, using their lack of historic output as evidence. By 1928, she pointed out, women had only been able to have money or property of their own for 48 years. She is invited to a lavish lunch at one of the men’s colleges of Cambridge, at which great thought and conversation flowed along with the wine. She is then frustrated and disheartened to return to the comparatively shabby women’s college, which proffered no such luxuries due to a lack of comparable endowments or benefactors. She considers the structures—social and architectural—of the university as representative of the centuries of investment in the intellect of a very specific group of people.

An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig, and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft.

Woolf goes to the public library and selects an assortment of books about women. One she finds is titled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. ‘Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and difficult of explanation was the fact that sex—women, that is to say—also attracts agreeable essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the MA degree; men who have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.’ Ha.

•

It was quite a remarkable thing, to read A Room of One’s Own for the first time and immediately thereafter be taken on a private tour of Rhodes House. I had the feeling that the thick walls around its perimeter had somehow blocked the interim 90-odd years of history from infiltrating. Money has a powerful ability to protect and preserve its preferred interpretations of the past.

‘This is the rotunda,’ Damian said, gesturing upwards into the structure we had to walk through to enter the grounds, our footsteps echoing loudly on the marble floor, ‘and these are the names of all the Rhodes scholars who served in the wars.’ ‘Right.’

We passed through to the other side and a vista of the house itself opened up in front of us. It was designed in the style of a ‘Cotswold mansion’, whatever that meant. On the ground floor we walked through to the Portrait Hall. There was a piano over by some gorgeous windows, and all the other hallmarks I was beginning to recognise: high ceilings, wooden everything, and walls covered in portraits.

‘Significant Rhodes scholars are chosen to have their portraits here,’ Damian told me, and I laughed. Of course. It wasn’t enough to be a Rhodes scholar. There was a separate designation for Rhodes scholars ‘of significance’—a further winnowing. There was never actually a peak. Nobody ever finished climbing this particular ladder of esteem.

‘Either that or they’ve donated a lot of money,’ he added, just as Woolf had described.

‘No Tony Abbott?!’ I declared with fake horror after looking around and not finding him.

‘Ha-ha, no.’

Next we went upstairs to the Scholars’ Library, a beautiful, long room lined with bookcases.

‘The idea is that every Rhodes scholar is invited to contribute a book to the library, and there’s a sticker inside each book for the scholar to write their thoughts or reflections or whatever.’

‘You’ll have a book in here one day!’ I exclaimed, excited for him, then I laughed and pointed out a copy of Everyone Poops, glad to see some of his predecessors had a sense of humour.

There were portraits of previous cohorts hanging around the place too. I found the point in time when women were first allowed—1977—despite Rhodes specifying in his will that the scholarship was for men only and explicitly refusing any suggestion to the contrary. Women were allowed some ‘Visiting Fellowships’ after a meeting of the trustees in 1968 where they formally rejected the possibility of allowing women, and when Harvard put three female candidates forward in 1973, their applications were ignored. The criteria didn’t change to admit women to be actual Rhodes scholars until after the British parliament passed the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. In other words, until it became illegal the foundation and those running the program might have carried on happily excluding women.

‘A lot of them had particularly shit experiences,’ Damian told me about the first women allowed in the program.

‘Look—’ I gestured to a photo of the 1979 cohort from Australia ‘—there’s double the number of women within two years.’

‘Yeah, but then there’s that plateauing,’ Damian replied with a wary tone, referring implicitly to the ongoing challenge of achieving actual parity, and as I walked along the rows of pictures I saw he was right. It’s extremely difficult to find overarching statistics about gender balance in the program globally, but America keeps score of their own. In 2018, 21 out of 32 scholars being women represented a record high, but the year before that there were just 13, the same number as the first American cohort in 1977. In 2010, the Chair and CEO of the Rhodes Project and scholar from 1978, Ann Olivarius, wrote an article titled ‘Second-class Citizens? How women became Rhodes Scholars’. In it she explains that ‘the average female uptake of the Scholarship in the U.S. has been around 35 per cent’, which is quite a contrast to the general population of students in undergraduate programs in both the UK and USA having reached parity decades ago.

In his 2008 book Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships, Philip Ziegler writes: ‘The advent of women does not seem notably to have affected the balance of Scholars among the various professions, though it has reduced the incidence of worldly success.’ A charming and undoubtedly ‘empirical’ assessment, as is his comment that ‘driving ambition is far from being a uniquely masculine attribute, but it does not so often appear to be so dominant in the female’. Olivarius notes in her article that Ziegler’s book was actually commissioned by the Rhodes Trust and that his statement about women’s ‘worldly success’ seemed to be based on how many scholars had featured in Who’s Who magazine. The Rhodes Project has been collecting data on women scholars since 2005 and Olivarius makes compelling arguments, directly contrary to Ziegler’s, about their varied and profound successes, adding that ‘while a not insignificant number of male Rhodes Scholars have gotten into serious trouble—lost their bar licenses, been charged with crimes and SEC violations and using charitable funds for their own purposes—our research has not unearthed any women Scholars who have committed similar lapses’.

I found a document online titled ‘Forty Years of Rhodes Women: Australian Reflections’ in which some of the first women to ever be named scholars talk about their experiences. A woman called Elizabeth Woods writes about sitting at a lunch where three Australian scholars from 1977 spoke openly about what a bad idea it was to let women in, thinking she and the others at the table were scholars’ girlfriends. The warden of the program told her, ‘I would never have picked Queensland as the first region to pick a female scholar.’ Vicki Spencer, who commenced a decade later in 1986, writes that it felt like winning a million dollars when she got the scholarship, but that her Oxford dream was ‘quickly dented due to the unabashed sexism’. In 2007 Anthea Lindquist had an old professor at a medical awards evening express surprise that she, as a woman, was eligible.

‘What’s an “Ebola detective”?’ I asked Damian, amazed, gesturing to one of the more recent photos that listed the scholars’ professions and areas of research.

‘Oh yeah.’ Damian nodded in recognition and told me about the groundbreaking, life-saving work of Dr Pardis Sabeti. Her name has appeared on Time Magazine’s annual list of the world’s ‘100 Most Influential People’, and as well as undertaking the real-time DNA sequencing of virus samples she sings in a rock band and was a competitive tennis player.

Finishing in the library, Damian guided me down the stairs and through a door that led outside.

‘There’s this one gardener who does everything himself,’ he explained, and I gazed in wonder at the shrubs and blooms and lawn, so beautiful that it was a favoured spot for weddings. ‘And every year he enters gardening competitions he wins the prizes, but he doesn’t enter every year because he doesn’t want to win every single year. He also teaches archaeology here.’

I’d stopped bothering trying to find new ways to say ‘wow’. The why-bother feeling was back; anything you might be interested in had already been done, and done better, and done best, by people who were supported by their generous benefactor.

From Rhodes House we went on a wider tour of Oxford, and Damian’s knowledge of both the history and trivia of the colleges proved thrilling. Magdalen College—its name pronounced like the adjective maudlin—was one of the wealthiest of all, and it had a special tower.

‘The whole thing about Magdalen Tower,’ Damian said, pointing to it, ‘is that you have to be shown how to get up there by someone who has already been.’

I didn’t think that was a ‘thing’ about a tower. I thought it was the whole thing about the whole place. You had to be shown the way. No fresh blood. All insider knowledge.

On the first of May each year a choir comprising men and boys—no women or girls allowed—sings and everyone gathers to listen. The tradition dates back to the time of Henry VII. I found out later that the college was founded in 1458 by William Waynflete, the Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England, with help from some other lord who wanted to fund a religious college. The gender-specific choir performance was part of the founder’s statutes. C.S. Lewis was one of the most famous alumni of the college, which makes sense given his whole Aslan-is-God-and-girls-suck deal. That year, 2018, the college’s endowment was over £270 million.

Further on was Pembroke College. Samuel Johnson, whose famous Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755, studied there. (Though when I looked this up online I discovered he was kicked out after a year because he couldn’t afford the fees. Later, when he was successful enough, Oxford awarded him an honorary degree.) Tolkien, too, studied at Pembroke.

We walked on to Christchurch, which backed onto a pasture. Damian told me the students there used to bring a cow from their estate, and each individual student would be brought the milk from their individual cow for breakfast and tea and so forth. Online I found a blog about cows of the world, and it had a whole article about these Christchurch College cows, and an interview with the man who cares for them now that they’re just kept for ‘aesthetic reasons’. According to worldcowgirl.com, ‘Like many things at Oxford, the longhorns represent a cultural narrative about the history of Britain, a history that continues to inform Western ideals of a desirable and civilized life.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself, World Cow Girl.

Having finished with the colleges, Damian took me to the Church of St Mary the Virgin, where we ate at a small cafe near the bottom of the building before climbing the 120-something steps to see the view from the top. It was so very, very beautiful.

‘That’s All Souls,’ Damian said, pointing to a nearby structure shaped like a square doughnut with a quadrangle of grass in the centre. He’d described the place to me earlier. It was one of the most exclusive and elite colleges, only taking two or three new students each year, making its name quite ironic.

Across High Street, in the other direction, a great big statue of Cecil Rhodes featured prominently on the facade of Oriel College. Oriel was Rhodes’s college in the 1870s and when he died in 1902 he left them a shit ton of money. Now he stands atop the building, wearing a loose-fitting suit that could easily be imagined in linen rather than sandstone, hat in hand, one leg extended so that his front foot protrudes from the base a little bit, as though he might step out and right on top of you.

‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘it’s a bit gross the way it’s standing over the entrance like that, looking down on people.’

‘That’s part of the problem,’ Damian explained, describing some of the articles he’d read about the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement and this particular statue. ‘It’s about having to look up to him, having people like him above you as you enter.’

Cecil Rhodes was a real piece of work. He made much of his fortune running the infamously bloody de Beers diamond trade. As prime minister of what is now South Africa, he instituted a blueprint for apartheid with the Glen Grey Act. He was a committed colonialist and white supremacist, and the stipulations he made for his scholarship recipients illustrate his ideals very plainly. In 2016, John Newsinger, emeritus professor of history and author of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, discussed this in a great article called ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’: ‘He actually specified that candidates should be marked out of ten, with four marks available for scholarship, two for “brutality” which the trustees understandably changed to “manly sports”, two for tact and leadership and two for “unctuous rectitude”.’ While Rhodes specified in his will, ‘No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a Scholarship on account of his race or religious opinions’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world’ and then selected a total of four schools in South Africa eligible for the scholarships—all of which only admitted white boys. No people of colour from South Africa were awarded scholarships until the end of apartheid in the 1990s. In 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement successfully petitioned to have his statue removed from the University of Cape Town campus. The Telegraph reported that the decision to keep the statue at Oriel, despite similar calls for its removal at Oxford, had been made after donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down.

In a piece for the London Review of Books in 2016, Amia Srinivasan, a professor and former Rhodes scholar herself, explained what the student members of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford were up against: ‘Its first action was to protest against the Oxford Union’s “Colonial Comeback”-themed cocktail, served on the night of a debate about reparations and advertised with a poster of shackled black hands. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Two years prior a group of students at St Hugh’s put on blackface to illustrate Jay-Z and Kanye West’s N*ggas in Paris as part of a “song titles”-themed bop.’ These highly visible incidents occurred against a backdrop of more insidious and structural issues of access and curriculum: ‘Only 3.9 per cent of Oxford’s professors have a Black and Minority Ethnic background; even at Cambridge the figure is 6.4 per cent. Undergraduates can still complete a history degree without studying the non-European world.’ The Rhodes Must Fall movement is really about the structural inequities, but, as Srinivasan notes, curriculum changes don’t command the same public outcry as a toppled statue might.

Damian told me that Rhodes scholars such as Srinivasan have been some of the most outspoken critics of the coloniser’s legacy. University of Cambridge academic, historian, and author Mary Beard argued in the Times Literary Supplement in 2015 that scholars ‘[could not] have your cake and eat it here: I mean you can’t whitewash Rhodes out of history, but go on using his cash’. But she also made the point: ‘Much more important is to look history in the eye and reflect on our awkward relationship to it, and what we are actually beneficiaries of, not simply to photoshop the nasty bits out.’ One of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, South African Rhodes scholar and lawyer Ntokozo Qwabe, replied to Beard by saying he was looking history in the eye, and ‘all that [Rhodes] looted must absolutely be returned immediately. I’m no beneficiary of Rhodes. I’m a beneficiary of the resources and labour of my people which Rhodes pillaged and slaved.’ Touché.

One of the most common criticisms of the Rhodes Must Fall movement is that Rhodes should be judged by the standards of his time, not ours. The inherent presumption in this argument is that Rhodes’s contemporaries did not decry his actions. That presumption is incorrect. Newsinger’s article tackles this head on, explaining that in his own time Rhodes was an extremely divisive figure.

What he is celebrated for is extending the British Empire, for his African conquests, which he, in a very deliberate effort at achieving some sort of immortality, modestly named after himself: the Rhodesias … In 1889, Rhodes established the British South African Company (BSAC) with the intention of extending British control to the north. This method of Imperial rule had been discredited in the 1850s by the Great Indian Revolt that brought down the East India Company, which had ruled India …

In other words, when the riches of Africa were in sight, the British chose to ignore the lessons they should have learned in India. Rhodes had the support of the Conservative government, which saw colonisation by private companies as a convenient and less expensive means of imperial expansion. When Rhodes had his men commit a massacre in 1893, he proclaimed it ‘a victory for the British Empire’ but ‘he had no intention of allowing any sentimental British concern for the “natives” to interfere with their ruthless despoliation. Such interference, he warned, was how “the mother-country lost America”’.

For his actions, he was ‘actively condemned and opposed’ by people ‘from across the political spectrum in Britain’. In 1893, the radical MP Henry Labouchère condemned Rhodes’s ‘pernicious company’ and his ‘filibustering and massacring expeditions’ in the House of Commons. ‘He savaged Rhodes as “the head of a shady gang of financiers who forced on a war”’. Articles criticising Rhodes’s actions appeared even in conservative publications such as The Economist and The Spectator.

But! In early 1895, according to Newsinger, Rhodes visited Britain, ‘where he was lionised by the rich and powerful, met with the Queen at Windsor and was appointed to the Privy Council by the Liberal government’. He had added territory to the empire that was ‘equal in extent to France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands’. Again, it wasn’t that people ‘didn’t know better’ in Rhodes’s time; it was that there were riches to be taken and they could get away with it.

Later in 1895, the collective consciences of government and thought leaders were sufficiently aroused when sufficiently embarrassed; Rhodes had bungled the Jameson Raid and around 500 of his men were defeated, so he was heavily fined. The behaviours that were rewarded were no less barbaric than those that were punished, it was a question of efficacy.

In 1892 Rhodes had been awarded an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from Oxford. When he went to receive it in 1899, 92 academics ‘protested against giving such an award to an international criminal’ and the two elected proctors said they would exercise their right of veto at the award ceremony. Opposition to the award of the degree crumbled, though, when Lord Kitchener, who was offered the same honour, said he would refuse his in protest if Rhodes’s was vetoed.

The opposition Rhodes met at Oxford seemed to firm in his mind an intention to conquer that place too, and he did so the way he did everything else: with racism and with money. Newsinger notes:

Rhodes made Oriel College a major beneficiary of his will, leaving £100,000 to go towards the erection of a new building, Rhodes House, and to supporting the fellows, with £10,000 earmarked for maintaining “the dignity and comfort of the High Table”. The college responded to this transparent bribe with the infamous statue, a number of portraits, a Rhodes Fellowship in Modern History, annual Rhodes Memorial Lectures and an annual Rhodes dinner at which the assembled academics enthusiastically toasted this fraudster, thief and killer, their benefactor.

He makes abundantly clear: ‘As far as free speech at Oxford is concerned, money has always had the loudest voice.’ The type of money we are talking about here—gained from slave labour and brutal exploitation—is enough to shape history. It is enough money to obscure and rewrite history. The volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire devoted to the nineteenth century, for example, was edited by Andrew Porter, the Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College, London, and The Rhodes Trust contributed £150,000 to the publication of the four volumes. Do not ever let anyone tell you that statues are important ‘historical’ markers. The ‘story’ of Cecil Rhodes that was funded by him is a work of fiction, the statue commemorating it purchased with blood money. People think history is carved on a tablet, but it’s more akin to chalk on a blackboard. Depending on who is standing at the front of the room, the lines can be rewritten or even erased altogether.

•

Further fuelling the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford are allegations that porters at the gates to the colleges are guilty of racial profiling. Because only students and staff members are allowed on college grounds, the porters are authorised to request ID of those who seek to enter. People of colour report being disproportionately stopped. Donald Brown, a Black Rhodes scholar from Mississippi, wrote in Times Higher Education that he was frequently singled out and asked for identification when entering his college, and on several occasions was asked if he was a ‘construction worker’.

‘Then there’s the whole class thing,’ Damian added as we stood there in the cold wind, squinting at the Oriel College statue. There was quite a clear divide, he explained, between the blue-collar porters and white-collar staff and students. When Priyamvada Gopal, a professor at Cambridge, spoke out in 2018 about racist treatment by porters at Cambridge’s King’s College, some of the pushback she got was from people telling her she was being elitist and a snob.

‘Imagine what it looked like when Rhodes was a student,’ I said.

‘Well,’ Damian replied, ‘they wouldn’t have allowed you here and I’d be in prison.’

We laughed. It was a spectacular day and the grounds were a sight to behold, but I was hearing a minor chord in the birdsong. I could see the ‘unending stream of gold and silver’ stretching out in front of me. The foundations laid, and built upon, layer after layer, over generations. And for whom? Almost a hundred years ago rich white women were newly permitted among the dreaming spires. Now people of colour were still having to fight for dignity and access.

•

Climbing back down the stairs, Damian took me to see the inside of the Bodleian Library—yet another privilege only allowed if you were accompanied by a student or staff member of the university.

‘Some of these books are so old they would literally crumble if you opened them,’ he told me.

It was there that I was most struck by the tactile and immediate feeling of history. Perhaps it was something about the more porous surfaces—the wooden hand railings by the steps to the top levels and the shelves of worn leather-bound books—that made me wonder at how many fingertips and palms had caressed the same surfaces I was now touching. Of course it was hard for these institutions to look to the future when everything around them was so laden with the gilded past.

When we finished our wide sweep of the grounds I checked into the little guest room where I’d be staying for the next two nights. It was pleasant and a supposedly affordable option for the friends and family of college students—though children were strictly forbidden.

‘What? Why?’ I asked.

‘You know what these places are like,’ Damian replied, rolling his eyes. ‘Someone told me a story about their family coming to visit, and bringing a child with them—like, a ten-year-old. They were getting ready for bed when one of the porters came and knocked on their door to inform them they’d infringed upon college rules.’

‘Was there some problem? Was the kid screaming or something?’

‘No, there was nothing wrong. Someone must have seen there was a child, and reported them just for having a child here.’

‘Jesus.’

‘They were allowed to stay the night, but they had to leave first thing the next morning.’

‘So what are you supposed to do if you—’ I didn’t have to finish my sentence. We both knew the point I was going to make: that historically and generally speaking when people say ‘no children’ what they want to be able to say, or indeed what they are saying in practice, is ‘no women or children’.

Damian further explained that the family—who were Black—were told the child was not permitted to have breakfast or any meals in the college. They were then asked how they would feed the child, implying they couldn’t. The ‘fellows and scholars only’ identity ran deep and the fealty to Empire was alive and well.

•

I had a few hours to spare before Damian and I would meet up again, so I kept on with Woolf and clicked around the internet.

When people started requesting the statue of Rhodes be removed from the front of Oriel College, the college sought opinions from alumni and benefactors. Many replied quite heatedly. They were insulted and angry. Woolf touches on a similar expression of defensiveness coming from the men who didn’t appreciate women stepping out of the domestic sphere:

Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface … Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.

She goes on to write that life is a struggle for everyone, and that struggle is made all the harder if one lacks self-confidence. ‘And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people.’ A man criticises author Rebecca West for being an arrant feminist, and Woolf contends that actually he was protesting ‘against some infringement of his right to believe in himself’. Her phrase struck me. When the alumni were asked their opinion of the Rhodes statue, they became upset because someone was infringing upon their right to believe in themselves. That moment of affront—that defensive spark—was always the precursor to ugly retaliation.

•

That evening, we went to dinner in the apartment of two other Rhodes scholars. The sun was setting on the deep green grass of the quad outside my window. The air was cold as I passed under arches and tunnels and I was wearing a stupid blue beanie to compensate for my lack of a real coat. My body told me, with muscle memory from the tension in my belly, that I hadn’t felt this anxious to impress for a long time. The dozen of us crowded into a modest kitchen-dining-lounge space. There was red wine, white wine, and Moscow mules. Conversation took meandering turns from a debate about French postcolonialism versus British postcolonialism, to ethics in tech, to rhubarb pie. Some of the people were beautiful and some were not; some seemed straight and some very camp and others in between; there was an assortment of accents. When dinner was served—a fantastically huge amount of tacos—we seated ourselves at the small table, on the couch or on the floor. The party was divided into groups of conversations now; people might excuse themselves from one conversation to get a second helping of tacos, and end up joining another group. I was quieter than normal, and I watched Damian from across the room. He made insightful contributions, more than once making the entire group erupt in laughter. It was obvious he was well liked.

In all the wonderful conversations and discussions I had that night, not a single person at the party asked me what I did. In Sydney the first thing people ask is ‘what do you do?’ and the second is ‘where do you live?’ and the third is ‘where did you go to school?’. I wished they had been mean or rude, these Rhodes scholars, so that I could resent them for valid reasons instead of purely out of my own insecurity, but no such luck.

The plummet in my spirits after I returned to my room that evening arrived right on schedule. I had no excuse not to be brilliant like them. I could point to no obstacle in life that had prevented me, nor had I had many speed bumps to slow me. I dropped onto my bed. The only way I could pull myself out of the funk was to think, well, maybe it was okay that I was not ultra-smart and amazing. So I hadn’t peaked at 25, well, maybe it was better for a person not to have skipped over ‘good’ too fast in their pursuit of ‘great’. If I really applied myself for the next 30 or 40 years there was a chance that I might be able to produce something really good eventually. In the meantime, I would reply to that email from my mum, I would thank that friend for their favour, I would eat less meat. I made those small resolutions so that I might quieten the chatter in my mind that had lingered long after the busy voices of the dinner. It still hurt my feelings, wounded my pride, that I did not belong. I had known it would. I had been granted a tourist visa for the place where I longed to live. I had tried on the dress I knew I couldn’t afford. I had known how it would make me feel, and still I went, just for one night, like a delusional Cinderella. But now midnight had come, and I was alone in my room with my not-good-enough brain.

I looked out over the quad and saw the golden, lit-up windows of other people’s rooms and offices.

‘My Milton class is up there,’ Damian had said that afternoon on our tour, gesturing towards a stairwell that looked like the one I climbed to get to my guest room. A whole class for a whole semester, just on one part of Milton, not even all of Milton, imagine that! I’d never read Milton. I’d not even read Woolf until that day. What had I been doing?

•

The next day, while Damian was at a class, I was emerging from yet another sandstone archway, and saw a strange thing, like a glitch in the matrix: a laundrywoman. She was in uniform pushing a trolley with some cleaning products and a big basket full of sheets. I recalled now that, when I’d asked, Damian had mentioned something about how his room was cleaned for him and his laundry done. I suppose I had just accepted that information as a given, until I saw an actual human being who would likely be on the other end of that exchange. There’s a line in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol when Tom Cruise’s character is trying to play down the gravity of a situation, acting like his team’s adversaries present no great challenge. He says: ‘These guys aren’t Rhodes scholars, you know?’ You can imagine it elicited a bit of a chuckle from the theatre audiences. Such is the synonymity of intelligence with the Rhodes Scholarship program that a major American blockbuster can rely on the line as a source of humour. The laundry trolley wheels bumped loudly along the uneven ground, like my suitcase wheels had so recently, disturbing the ‘spirit of peace’ otherwise blanketing the grounds. Imagine being a cleaner, emptying the bins of a brilliant young man. Imagine pulling his fitted sheet off the corners of his bed, removing his pillow from his pillow case. Everything in the whole world, even the movie you just spent 30 minutes’ wage for a ticket to see, tells you both that he is special, and that you clean the sheets upon which he fucks and sweats and snores. This is the way of things.

I finished A Room of One’s Own. The second half includes a thought experiment on what the life trajectory of a sister of Shakespeare might have been. The hypothetical woman was equally gifted, but ended up broke and pregnant and died alone, of course. No options, no practical avenues to realise her talents or even an independent life at all. This was the way of things.

Woolf writes:

… I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

I couldn’t imagine possessing, not even for a millisecond, the stratospheric arrogance required for such a proclamation. The audacity! Other people deserve a slice of that! A slice of that money and power, a slice of that audacity. The right to believe in themselves.

•

‘Are you sure this is how you want to spend your time?’ Damian asked as we headed to the movie night he’d invited me to. We were wolfing down some falafel wraps as we walked, since we were running a little late.

It was exactly how I wanted to spend my time. Seeing some random movie I’d never heard of, with a room full of smart people who liked movies, and then talking about the movie with snacks. Heaven.

We met the group of other people there, among them one particularly good friend of Damian. The friend told me how they’d all just come from hearing an art history talk on ‘Faces in Velasquez’, and someone else added that the professor speaking had been the first to bring Marxism into art theory, and a third person said something about John Berger that I didn’t catch, because I was too busy grinning. After the film Damian, his friend, and I went to a pub around the corner. Mostly I listened to the two of them talk about Oxford, and the pros and cons of it being ‘probably the oldest maintained bubble in the world’. The friend was a third-year from what Damian called the ‘funky new gay college’. He said Oxford was such a bubble that ‘one, you to try to leave and it pulls you back’ and ‘two, I think I’d actually get more done in London’. He described a process of being ‘cut down and rebuilt’ that stayed with me on my return to my room that final night.

What exactly, from a person, was being ‘cut down’, and what was ‘built’ in its place? And if the institution was famous for being the oldest maintained bubble, how could one let fresh air into the bubble, so that the oxygen and the nutrients required for minds to grow, to be ‘built’, wasn’t stuck in the past? Unexamined reverence for the bygone is always a roadblock to equality. Woolf writes, ‘As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.’

Perhaps Oxford was such a bubble that actually it was too crowded, too claustrophobic, to allow someone a room of their own? The ‘belatedness’ Damian described could be a dampener on innovation and newness. One can only be late to the game if one considers all, or at least most, of the facets of the game to have been played out. But in the centuries of the institution’s history only a few decades had been begrudgingly offered to ‘others’. That anyone could consider 2018 ‘belated’ in any sense, when we were still so far away from equality of opportunity, and therefore equality of potential contribution to art and thought, betrayed a vision and version of history that was inherently backward. Even Woolf herself, in some of her other writings, betrayed the limitations in her visions for equality. Diary entries record that she resented how noisy her servants were as they cooked and cleaned for her, and that she found the lower classes ‘detestable’. She used anti-Semitic and racist stereotypes in some of her works too.

Woolf quotes Oscar Browning, the well-known British educationalist and author—son of a rich distiller, who went from Eton to King’s College, then ended up as principal of the University of Cambridge Day Training College—who claimed that ‘the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man’. This was a man who was awarded an OBE for his services to education. How could such ignorance be celebrated as intelligence? Only by a system more intent on looking smart than actually being smart; an institution that risked losing too much to allow truth to interfere with long-standing legacies.

•

On my way to the breakfast hall on my final morning, I had to approach a large group of men dressed in high-visibility vests and work boots whose attention was focused on something structural at the side of the narrow hall. When I cleared my throat politely, they sprung back to stand against the wall to allow me passage, apologising profusely, their manner deferential.

I was late to breakfast, catching the last five minutes of the service. A girl to the right of me in sleek activewear and high ponytail remarked to her friend that porridge had been ‘the wrong choice’. She pushed the bowl away from her. I was just finishing my coffee, and most of the other students had left—it was ten past the hour—when the group of workmen entered and started eating what I presumed to be the remains of the breakfast service. Down the other end of the long table, one inhaled an entire croissant in two bites, and another poured sugar on his porridge, enthusiastic. Their accents marked them as foreigners to that hall. Not being from England, my ear wasn’t attuned to the differences in tone and intonation that the English could identify in an instant, but the few times I had heard the voices of the porters, the accents were distinctly different from those students with whom I’d interacted. And of course I never even heard the laundrywoman speak. Silence is the most telling of all accents.

•

I had given Damian a heads-up that I wanted to ask him some questions ‘for an essay or something’, and he suggested we make a trip out to The Perch, a seventeenth-century country inn, for a late lunch. It was a 40-minute walk from his college, across meadows and along the Thames, so on that last afternoon together we rugged up and set off. I had thought that our official sit-down interview would be the most interesting conversation we had over those three days, but of course with hindsight it was all the other talking we did—while walking and hanging out together—that held all the meaning. At the time of my pilgrimage I was enthralled by the competitiveness and prestige of the Rhodes Scholarship program, and so the questions I asked Damian were mostly inane. It was thrilling to hear about how stressful and drawn out the application and interview process had been for him. There were several interviews, each lasting an hour with long waits in anterooms between them. They told people individually if they were successful or not, then put them all in a room together again, and naturally some cried or acted strange. Then there were the cocktail parties and lunches and dinners that were supposedly an opportunity for candidates to meet and chat informally, but which of course were also arenas of judgement.

When he was finally announced as a scholarship recipient, his alma mater—the Catholic boys’ school—rejoiced. It was a tradition there for the entire student body to be given a day off when one of their alumni became either a Rhodes scholar or a priest.

‘I was the first Rhodes scholar who didn’t get a day off,’ he said. Apparently there was a new principal who was intent on changing things up. Damian was invited to speak at an assembly, though, and he was asked to write a piece for a publication all the students were given. He hated that kind of attention and did everything he could to counter it with discretion. I wondered why my high school, the ‘sister’ school to his, had no similar tradition. Was it because a woman becoming a nun didn’t qualify as an achievement in the way a man becoming a priest did? Or because statistically it was so much less likely for any young woman to be offered a Rhodes Scholarship?

It was interesting to hear Damian speak about schooling and learning. He told me that in high school he would teach himself most lessons quickly before classes then just sit at the back of the room quietly reading something else. For his thousand-word application statement for the Rhodes Scholarship he wrote about Winnie-the-Pooh. He told the panel that one of his earliest memories was of his mother reading Winnie-the-Pooh to him, and spoke about ‘literature as being entwined with who I am and education’. He felt that things studied and researched in universities, particularly in the humanities, should be more publicly engaged and have a broader reach. The knowledge and appreciation of the humanities was ‘trapped or caverned within universities, which is exactly where it isn’t—or ought not—to be. It needs to be out’. He didn’t know ‘the exact nature’ of the work he was going to do, but what he pitched to the panel was that he was a person who could make it happen.

When I asked him about the relative calibre of intellect in his classes, he almost shrugged me off. It was the same when I asked about the stimulant-rich Oxford scene. I put my theory to him that the natural conclusion or endpoint of everything we’d been nudged towards and honed for during our entire schooling was something like a Rhodes Scholarship; that it was the apex of intellectual achievement.

‘I don’t think about learning like that, and I don’t think any of the others do either,’ he replied. ‘I would give the panel enough credit to realise that someone who thinks like that is not someone they want for a Rhodes Scholarship.’

I felt chastened by his response but it also made me mad. He seemed to be saying that the best candidates were those who didn’t value the rules of the game but who still happened to find themselves winning it. Righto. Fuck me, then, I guess.

We moved on to talking about schools and universities as institutions or corporations, something we both enjoyed chewing over. Damian said the businesslike and exclusive messaging from universities in general had become far worse in recent decades, and that in Australia in particular they were ‘public companies that have created a kind of intellectual working class, readily exploitable’.

•

On the way back from lunch we walked more slowly and discussed much deeper things. As we crossed the great expanse of wet grass we talked about love and other people. I explained to him a tension I either felt or imagined—I wasn’t sure—in the fact that my love for Vincent made me happy and healthy, but also potentially rendered me less capable of ‘greatness’ because I was no longer so hard on myself or felt I had so much to prove. I also wondered aloud if I even believed in that dichotomy anymore, or if my fear was some kind of internalised diminishment of the domestic or unquantifiable things in life. Damian seemed to have no such troubles. He was rarely compromised by the types of attentions or desires the rest of us mere mortals seemed destined to grapple with. A few things he said to me suggested he was apathetic towards the whole ‘love’ thing, but others suggested something closer to resentment or discomfort—not with regards to his sexuality, but with the entire premise of how humans relate to one another romantically. I suspected my relationship with Vincent might have struck him as plebeian, for example, not just for how traditionally monogamous and heterosexual it was but, more intrinsically, for how it revealed my lack of originality or inability to find meaning beyond the well-trodden path of coupling up.

‘Do you miss people back home?’ I asked him.

‘Not really,’ he replied with a shrug, his hands shoved into his coat pockets.

He enjoyed seeing his family, he said, but being away from them didn’t inhibit his satisfaction in daily life.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the more years Vincent and I spent together, the fewer weeks I seemed able to sustain happiness when apart from him. Love took a lot of time. You could become proficient at a great many things if you reallocated your most precious resource.

The conversation morphed into a consideration of the tension Damian and I both felt between a desire for a kind of pared-back, Spartan lifestyle and the pleasure we took in delicious meals and works of art. He described wanting a plant for his room, but then also knowing, innately, that he did not want something so unnecessary and cluttering. He said even relationships and friendships could feel like this.

•

I sat on the train back to London the next morning, thumbing through A Room of One’s Own, thinking about what I’d been given in life and what I had to show for it. Towards the end of the book, when Woolf is in a sort of summing-up mode, she writes about why she deliberately didn’t make any comments comparing the abilities of men and women writers.

I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter, not even in Cambridge, where they are so adept at putting people into classes and fixing caps on their heads and letters after their names … All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides’, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

I laughed out loud when I read that. I had felt the pull of the pots all my life. For as long as I could remember, the things I thought I should be most proud of were those highly ornamental pots.

What do we do out of genuine desire and drive, in contrast—even contradiction—to what we do in order to be seen to be doing it? I was back to this old loop: do I want to be smart, or am I simply insecure about looking dumb? Am I genuinely seeking intelligence, or do I simply fear being perceived as unintelligent? What would I call ‘brains’ if there were no witnesses? Damian didn’t tell people he was a Rhodes scholar. No way. He just went about his life and went to his classes as though he was a regular Oxford student. You’d like to think you’d do the same, wouldn’t you? Though it’d be easier if the discreet option was ‘regular Oxford student’, I supposed.

Woolf’s father believed that only the boys in the family should be sent to school. She hypothesises, ‘Moreover, in a hundred years … women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied them.’ The 100-year mark would be 2028. Would her prophecy prove true?

There is a more interesting idea she touches on, though, which both can and should be extrapolated as we approach the centennial anniversary of her offering. The essay, broadly, is about the practicalities required for thought and creation; that in order to write women need money and a lockable room of their own. But something deeper she gets at is this: what about when the pageantry of ‘knowledge’ is for the bolstering of money and power, rather than money being spent on the pursuit of knowledge? The patriarchy’s absolute commitment to superiority means it cripples its own strides towards enlightenment. So desperate are some of us to shore up our claims, we cloud our own clarity of vision. A ‘man of letters’, educated in science, publishing a book about the wholesale inferiority of women, reveals his own inability to think clearly. All this infrastructure, the universities, colleges, conferences, journals, texts, posts, and professorships—‘the Academy’, I would call it—what else about the Academy, as a place of supposed learning and knowledge-sharing, is fundamentally compromised by its own blind spots?

Overwhelmingly my life has been good and nice. I consider myself to possess the sort of standard-issue intelligence that benefits greatly from an expensive education; that is, anyone could do what I do if they were given the same resources. But what does that even mean? The more one ponders this question—about what any of us get to take credit for—the more the idea of self-determination appears a mirage. Nature and nurture are not a binary, and even if they were, when one accounts for privilege, one realises they’re both equally about luck versus systems of oppression. ‘They wouldn’t have allowed you here and I’d be in prison,’ Damian had said. Well, the question remains: who still isn’t really ‘allowed’ and who’s now in jail? Who gets to be smart?

2

Kyriarchy

Who gets to be smart? The question seemed huge, insurmountable, yet it was manifesting itself everywhere I looked. My notebooks were filling up with pertinent pieces of the puzzle, but the overall picture was a mess. It wasn’t until a conversation I had almost a year after I left Oxford that I realised how the issues all came together.

Omid Tofighian and I were in the far back seats of a four-wheel drive, bumping along unsealed roads around Ubud, on an hour-long journey to lunch at a remote location. I had come to know Omid over several brief but illuminating encounters in the preceding year. As the translator of Behrouz Boochani’s book No Friend But the Mountains, Omid was the person travelling to awards ceremonies and writers festivals to represent the work, as Behrouz was still imprisoned on Manus Island. I will never forget the ripple that went through the crowd gathered at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in early 2019 when Omid held his mobile phone up to the microphone and we all heard Behrouz’s voice speaking to us from over the water and behind the fences. Our government’s best men—Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull—had been doing everything within their power, including things that, legally, were not actually within their power at all, to stop us from seeing ‘boat people’ as human beings, and now there was one such ‘boat person’ claiming our nation’s richest literary award for a work in which he had vividly depicted that barbarity.

By the time Omid and I were in the back of that four-wheel drive together, it was perhaps the fourth or fifth time we’d met. My mental image of him is one in which he is smiling and asking questions that demonstrate he’s really listening to you. How a man who is constantly confronted with such dismissive and disrespectful people and institutions can have such a consistently generous and grateful countenance is beyond me. As well as a translator, he is also a philosopher, academic, and community advocate. Omid had managed to bring together the two things that most interested and motivated me: writing and change-making. He had just been describing how he was splitting his time between hemispheres, teaching a course in ‘incarceration narratives’ at the American University in Cairo while also an Honorary Research Associate for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His work sat at the exhilarating and critical nexus between thoughts and actions. Naturally, I wanted to pick his brain.

‘Could I ask your advice?’ I asked him, dense forest rushing by in the window behind his head, sporadically opening up into bright green rice paddies.

He shrugged and opened his palms. ‘Of course.’

‘I’m trying to decide whether or not to do a PhD, and if I do, whether it should be in law or writing. What do you think?’

I remember very clearly that he paused. It was the pause specific to a person who does a lot of talking in public and who has learned to consider their words carefully before they answer something sensitive or controversial.

‘I may not be the best person to ask,’ he said.

I was surprised by this. He seemed the perfect person to ask.

‘Please,’ I insisted, ‘I’m looking for some guidance. I’m really feeling like I’m stuck at a crossroads.’

‘I would say that academia—’ he moved his hands as though he were shaping something or holding a package ‘—is second only to Manus prison in terms of being the most violent and cruel institution I have ever encountered.’

His hands dropped back into his lap. I just stared at him, dumbfounded, while the vehicle bumped along the corrugated road.

When I’d gathered the pieces of my exploded brain, he patiently explained to me the concept of ‘kyriarchy’—a way of thinking about and understanding the accumulation and exercise of power, particularly in institutions, which we can call ‘kyriarchal systems’.

Thinking back to this conversation later made me wince, because I was asking him about ideas and concepts articulated throughout No Friend But the Mountains. I am ashamed to admit I’d bought the book but I’d skipped Omid’s introductory translator’s note and had stopped reading just halfway through Boochani’s account of his voyage on the ocean. I did not need convincing that what we had done was abhorrent—we with our ‘boundless plains to share’; nor did I need convincing of the author’s or translator’s ability.

What I underestimated was how much I had to learn about Australian institutions—including educational ones—from the way Australians built and controlled Manus prison. What shocked me when I read the book properly, back home in Sydney, was how right Omid was about the two systems. In his reflections at the end of the book he describes kyriarchy, a term first introduced by radical feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, thus: ‘It purposely encompasses multiple, interlocking kinds of stigmatisation … the term also captures the way that the intersecting systems are perpetually reinforced and replicated.’ In her book Wisdom Ways, first published in 2001, Schüssler Fiorenza explains that the word ‘kyriarchy’ is ‘derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein)’ and ‘is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression’.

Don’t let the academic lingo put you off: kyriarchy can be a simple and powerful lens through which to look at society. I understand it as an addition to what I’ve learned about intersectional feminism, a particularly helpful way of thinking specifically about institutions and systems. Just remember this: it’s all about the pyramid, and the top of the pyramid is about exclusivity. The more people there are in the middle and lower sections of the pyramid, the higher the people at the top are elevated. Our society is shaped in such a way that only a few may ever reach the top. In any given situation, the things that increase or diminish your power may change, but the structure of the pyramid remains essentially the same because of our institutions. In this way, the systems created by some humans legitimise the stratification of all humans.

The other thing Schüssler Fiorenza’s work makes clear is something lots of people will recognise from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s vision of intersectionality: a way of describing how issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and all types of identity overlap. In the same way that ‘feminism’ singularly focused on gender will skip over critical critiques, Schüssler Fiorenza explains how a society or system is kyriarchy, not just patriarchy: ‘The emperor/lord/master/father (kyrios) is the ruler and not just the father (pater), and this idea encompasses more fully the intellectual and cultural framework that exerts social control of one who claims the rule over those not in power.’ It’s not just about domination and submission, but also about profit and exploitation. In this way I believe kyriarchy is especially useful for understanding the legacy of colonisation—a situation in which the powerful are fed by their exploits, which then further fund and legitimise the coloniser’s institutions and machinery.

As a woman and feminist trying to study and work as a theologian, Schüssler Fiorenza met considerable opposition from leaders in the Church and religious academics. She is now the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Her work is a rich seam, running for decades, deep underneath politics and the public sphere. She writes about how religious rhetoric shapes public discourse even though people insist faith is a private matter. She practises a type of teaching style that focuses on equality of participants in the classroom rather than a hierarchical transferring from the knowing to the un-knowing, which is just about as far as you can get from my understanding of the way the Church likes to anoint the few and dominate the masses. In her 2011 book Transforming Vision, Schüssler Fiorenza writes:

In order to function, kyriarchal cultures need a servant class, a servant race, a servant gender, a servant people. Such a servant class is maintained through the ideologies of kyriocentrism, which are internalised through education, socialisation, and brute violence, as well as rationalised by malestream scholarship. Kyriarchy is sustained by the belief that members of a servant class of people are naturally or by divine decree inferior to those whom they serve.

The fact that some people find themselves at the bottom of the pyramid, locked out of wealth and opportunity due to their identity, and their subsequent poverty and stasis there, is proof of the inevitability of their condition and position.

Boochani himself writes in the Saturday Paper, ‘I want to discuss the way in which Manus prison has its own life within Australia, the way in which it exists throughout Western society.’ On the subject of the Academy, Omid had said to me in the car, with a bit of a glint in his eye, ‘They don’t really approve of me, which kind of makes me happy, you know? Because I don’t want to be like them. Sometimes I like making them mad.’ When I asked him more about how his academic work intersected with his advocacy, he replied that sometimes he would know he was on the right track, doing important work for the wider community, precisely because people inside these educational institutions were uncomfortable and pushing back against him. He described a little of the work he did as campaign manager for the Australasian chapter of Why is My Curriculum White? and some of the pieces he’d written in support of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. At its heart, a lot of the work he does is about identifying and elevating the voices of people who’ve been excluded or silenced. When I got home I listened to every podcast in which he had spoken, read all the articles he sent me, and went and found several others in which he wrote about these issues. And I sat down and read No Friend But the Mountains all the way through.

The book begins with Behrouz Boochani in the back of a truck in Indonesia. He and several others, some individuals and some families, are being driven to the coast, where they will board a tiny boat to Australia. They are risking everything for a better life and their journey is made terrifying by both natural forces and the behaviours of some of the people with them. Their boat begins to sink and so they are relieved when the vessel is intercepted by Australian authorities—but the reader knows that what awaits them is nothing to feel grateful for.

Boochani documents all the big and small ways in which the refugees have their dignity and hope stripped from them once they are in custody. The schedules, the architecture, the processes and bureaucracy, even the language—everything is deliberately designed to exacerbate the humiliation and discomfort of the people in detention. For example, when you begin to understand the horror of the place, you can see why it is not only insulting but deeply grotesque that the government should call Manus a ‘processing centre’ instead of what it was: a prison. Boochani sees the ‘medical services system’ on Manus further physically and psychologically punish so many of his peers that he actually considers it a threat to his wellbeing; he chooses to have a friend plunge the red-hot tip of a coathanger into his gum to kill the root of a rotting tooth rather than seek help from a dentist.

As important as this documentation of our treatment of asylum seekers is, the book is a breathtaking literary feat that enables the reader to picture vividly the overflowing sewage blocks and the violence of the guards, and understand how very Australian it all is. It is also compelling on a philosophical level. Boochani describes, for example, the blatant lack of accountability the bureaucratic process allows. ‘Every boss is subordinate to another boss. And the superior boss is also subordinate to another boss. If one investigated this chain it would possibly lead to thousands of other bosses. All of them repeating the one thing: “The Boss has given orders.”’

In Ubud, Omid had spoken of the ways in which the Academy’s bureaucracy and language had been developed to sound ‘civilised’ while actually being brutal in its insistence on the stratification of people, value, and worth. A strict set of values and ideologies were perpetuated as though they represented ‘quality’ and ‘credibility’ rather than simply a particular taste or culture. Later in 2019, in an interview with the University of Technology Sydney’s student magazine, Vertigo, Omid reflects on universities as both institution and ideology, noting that ‘the way refugees, borders, nationhood and citizenship are imagined and employed in society and politics are dependent on the white curriculum’. I was reminded of how in primary school I’d been taught—incorrectly—that Australia was a ‘terra nullius’ when colonised, and then how effectively my undergraduate law degree simply glided over the fact that our whole legal system was built upon this fallacy.

In an episode of the podcast Race Matters, Omid talks more about the connection between these issues and the Academy.

When I think about the university as a project, as an institution, for me, especially after the research that I’ve been doing, I can’t separate it from ideology … Western universities have roots in colonialism, different forms of oppression and domination, and you can see that represented right through all the different elements and aspects and characteristics of the university: the themes, the subjects, the styles, the approaches. For me the university exists in the way that it is now, especially in neoliberalism and capitalism, because it separates itself from the community—it makes this distinction between what is considered ‘intellectual’ or ‘academic’, what is considered to be ‘knowledge’ and how that is produced. It contrasts itself with how knowledge is produced and shared and how meaning is made in other spots, in other locations. So for the university to have this privileged status in our society and in our community and in politics, it needs to ‘other’ other sites of knowledge production.

When I first heard Omid saying these things, sitting at my desk in Sydney, finishing off my master’s thesis, I felt frustrated. Knowledge couldn’t just come from ‘anywhere’, I thought: it had to be tested and recorded and official somehow; there had to be standards and rules. Ha! The mechanism to protect self-interest is so strong it often feels like a ‘gut’ response. I had spent a huge amount of money and multiple years of my life accumulating accreditations based on an invisible but omnipresent ledger of legitimacy that someone I respected and admired had just said he did not really believe in. I used my qualifications as both sword and shield in the public sphere. If my degrees and my gold stars—my highly ornamental pots—were not exclusive and difficult to attain, and knowledge could come from all different places, then how would I know I was special? He had infringed upon my right to believe in myself, and my first response was the defensive spark.

The problem with the Academy not catering for everyone, and why it’s not an answer for entire groups of people to simply go elsewhere, is the stream of gold and silver, and the snowballing. People coming out of these university classes are still stuck in old ways of thinking, and they go on to hold positions of power, and they make donations to the same buildings with the same names and statues, and they ensure that public policy keeps those institutions exclusive for people like them. Moones Mansoubi, another advocate for and translator of Boochani’s work, describes in the translator’s note to No Friend But the Mountains how in Farsi ‘the terms este’mār (colonialism/imperialism) and estemār (economic exploitation) are indispensably connected’. Colonisation is not just about expansion of land; finding and exploiting indigenous peoples is part of the plan. It’s about adding an entirely new bottom layer to the kyriarchal system. Why on earth would a coloniser then turn around and invite that group into their esteemed, exclusive institution? That’s not the way the streams of gold and silver run. Degrees and publications and scholarships and professorships are more valuable when they are rare and selective; every single person refused admission to a lecture elevates the profile of the lecturer.

As a guest on an episode of the podcast Final Draft, Omid says, ‘One of the things I’ve learned through working with Behrouz is that the kyriarchal system actually influences all of us: it’s beyond borders, it’s beyond cultures, it’s even beyond political affiliation … It creates situations where, regardless of what you do, you’re benefiting from a system of oppression and domination and subjugation, rather than trying to promote humanity.’

Divide-and-conquer is an age-old tactic practised by colonisers in particular. Boochani describes the Australian government’s efforts to prevent the asylum seekers from bonding with the Manusian locals. He and the others intercepted at sea were warned about the Manusians when they were being held on Christmas Island before their impending transfer to Manus Island. ‘The information we had access to explained the Manusians are cannibals.’ I’d only recently read Larissa Behrendt’s book, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. Behrendt is an Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman and a Distinguished Professor and the Director of Research at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology Sydney, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2020. Finding Eliza completely eviscerates the old myths that Indigenous Australians were cannibals and shows how, in the 1800s, such stories were strategically cultivated by the government and distributed by the media to bolster the legitimacy of the ‘eradication’ and displacement of Indigenous Australians. Knowledge is power, and when powerful people are allowed to shape knowledge and restrict access to knowledge, they are able to consolidate and strengthen their hold on that power. Manusians are not cannibals. Neither are Indigenous Australians. Yet the terror of those who engage in that most deeply held taboo was rolled out over 100 years ago by our government and newspapers to gain new land, and here it was now being rolled out again, ostensibly to protect that land. A horrifying mirroring of history; nothing learned. Allegations of cannibalism do all the heavy ideological lifting: these people, these ‘others’, are savages, they are not like you and me, and if we don’t get them first, they’ll come in the night and get us. No matter what, the mass of people at the bottom of the kyriarchal pyramid cannot be allowed to join forces. You cannot let them learn about each other, cannot let them communicate or connect.

In the notes I took while listening to one of Omid’s talks, I have written ‘the institution is a neo-colonial experiment’. Which institution did he mean—Manus prison or the Academy? Certainly universities in Australia have emerged as battlegrounds for ideology in the last few years. There is no clearer example of this than the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

•

At a casual dinner party in 2019 I met a nice man who was a professor of classics at a mid-sized regional university. Conversation meandered over to the latest news about the Ramsay Centre proposals. I tensed. His area of expertise fitted within the types of research areas the Ramsay Centre wanted to fund, and he had simply seen an opportunity for increased funding for his struggling humanities department ‘until Tony Abbott had to go and open his mouth about it’. This professor claimed that staff and students hadn’t been too worried about the optics or implications of a partnership with the Ramsay Centre until Abbott ‘made it political’. I realised as he was speaking that I hadn’t actually looked into the matter myself. I’d ingested, second-hand, the information that John Howard and Tony Abbott agreed about something to do with ‘Western culture’ being the best, and universities had responded that they didn’t want their academic integrity or independence compromised. That had been enough information for me to come down on the ‘fuck off’ side of the argument.

So I did some reading. When I first landed on the ‘About Us’ page of the Ramsay Centre’s website there was a big picture of Canterbury Cathedral, for some reason I couldn’t discern. Good start. At that time the blurb read: ‘The Ramsay Centre was established in March 2017 through an extraordinary endowment by the late Mr Paul Ramsay AO … The Centre’s objective, set out in our Board Charter, is “to advance education by promoting studies and discussion associated with the establishment and development of western civilisation, including through establishing scholarship funds and educational courses in partnership with universities”.’ Normally, following the money clears things up quite nicely, so I went looking for information about Ramsay himself. Businessman and philanthropist, chairman of the board of Ramsay Health Care, healthcare magnate, built a bunch of TV stations across Australia, chairman of Sydney FC for a while, owned a lot of luxury real estate, and was awarded an Order of Australia for philanthropy. When he died he was the thirteenth-richest person in Australia and he left the majority of his estate to the Paul Ramsay Foundation, the core value of which is to ‘help break the cycle of disadvantage’. That foundation seems to fund some wonderful work. So what went wrong?

The Australian Financial Review reported that the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was founded in 2017 after a huge bequest from Ramsay, who had ‘wanted a significant part of his personal fortune to be spent on funding an academic centre to revive the liberal arts and humanities’. So far so good, until the initiative was launched by John Howard. In that same piece published by the AFR, their education editor John Bolton quoted Howard saying, ‘I get a little impatient when people are apologetic about Western civilisation.’

In November 2017, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that universities across the country were lining up to get a piece of the Ramsay Centre money because the proposed new degree in ‘Western Civilisation’ would be completely funded. ‘The centre’s chief executive, Simon Haines, who was previously professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the centre “would not be a think tank” and that “this will be a teaching enterprise, not a political one”.’ The article continues: ‘The board of the centre includes notable conservatives, including former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, but to broaden its political reach, the former Labor leader and US ambassador Kim Beazley and the powerful right-wing unionist Joe De Bruyn were recent appointees. The male-dominated board will be boosted by some female appointments, Professor Haines said.’ Haines’s insistence that the program would be ‘elite, but not elitist’ was not exactly reassuring. At least the board ended up with two women. Two is one more than one.

Then, in May 2018, Tony Abbott penned an article for Quadrant on ‘Paul Ramsay’s Vision for Australia’ and his personal shit hit the public fan. He writes that Ramsay understood that ‘Australia worked as well as it did thanks to a set of values handed down from generation to generation’, and that this sentiment was at the heart of the conversations the two of them had been having since 2011. He mentions the New Testament, the Jesuits, and contends that in the current generation, ‘[l]argely missing, even from Catholic schools, was a deep focus on the Christian faith’. He goes on:

The study of history was no longer narrative, starting with the cradle of civilisation and moving through Greece and Rome to the story of England and the birth of the modern world, its triumphs and its travails; but had become episodic. And every element of the curriculum was supposed to be pervaded by Asian, [I]ndigenous and sustainability perspectives. Almost entirely absent from the contemporary educational mindset was any sense that cultures might not all be equal and that truth might not be entirely relative.

Abbott concludes it was bold of him to suggest what Ramsay should do with his own money, but, ‘I was relying on my standing at that time as the leader of the political party that Paul had always supported and believed in. Even so, it was with much trepidation that I first made the suggestion that Paul should devote the bulk of his fortune to something like a Rhodes scholarship based here in Australia.’ Abbott goes on to quote Rhodes and extol his virtues: ‘After all, if Cecil Rhodes, that other philanthropic bachelor, could help to create generations of “men for the world’s fight”, why shouldn’t [Ramsay]?’

His article was even worse than I had anticipated. Really, truly, Abbott loved what Rhodes stood for. He loved the exclusivity of it, the religious fervour of it, and the coloniality. Abbott had found a spectacularly moneyed man to convert to his ultra-conservative cause. Mr Ramsay is no longer around to confirm Abbott’s version of these events, but that’s another matter. I presume that Ramsay’s friends, family or associates would have spoken out by now if Abbott’s use of his name and money stood in contrast to Mr Ramsay’s own worldview. John Newsinger’s 2016 article ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’ cites some of Rhodes’s own writings and philosophies to make his intergenerational intentions abundantly clear: ‘He went on to advocate the establishment of a secret society of superior men who would work to advance the interests of his great Anglo-Saxon Empire: the Rhodes Scholarships were intended as a way of furthering this project.’ Abbott’s actions mean a new generation of powerful people were denying the devastation Rhodes wrought. The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation would be a new and phenomenally financed way to perpetuate Rhodes’s ideals in the motherland’s aspirational convict outpost down south. More ‘superior’ ‘men for the world’s fight’. Fantastic.

In June 2018, after about six months of negotiations, the Australian National University pulled out of the talks, citing, among other reasons, concerns about integrity. The vice-chancellor, Brian Schmidt, released a long statement explaining the centre wanted ‘unprecedented influence’, and that after speaking with John Howard he came to understand that ANU had a ‘fundamentally different vision for the program than the Ramsay Centre, and that there was no prospect of us reaching agreement’. Guardian Australia reported that the president of the ANU branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), Matthew King, was concerned that the degree would

‘pursue a narrow, radically conservative program to demonstrate and promulgate the alleged superiority of Western culture and civilisation’. Howard responded that the negotiations had proceeded well until the unions arrived and the university bowed to their pressure. ANU was criticised in The Australian for accepting $2 million each from Dubai, Iran and Turkey towards a centre for Arab and Islamic studies. Schmidt clarified that in those instances, unlike with the proposed Ramsay Centre, the university retained complete control of both curriculum and staffing decisions.

The Ramsay Centre tried to pivot their public image with a pretty cringeworthy attempt at ‘feminism’ around that time. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted board member Elizabeth Stone, a former Rhodes scholar and principal of a private girls’ school, saying that while progress still needed to be made, Western civilisation was ‘still better [for women] than most other places’. She was ‘frustrated’ by the debate, she went on, as the centre was not intended to be ‘political’. Strange, then, to have a board comprised of so many politicians that one of the ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ on their website was: ‘How can sitting members of Parliament be seated on your board?’ Stone did not see a problem with the degree’s title. ‘The great philosophies and books and thinkers and histories of particular civilisations, in this case the West, are worthy of study, as are Indian civilisations or Asian civilisations … I don’t see how you can coherently say this one civilisation out of all others is not worthy of study. That doesn’t make any sense to me.’ What a flummoxing argument. If no civilisation is more or less worthy of study than any other, why name your centre after one of them specifically, why have the public face of the centre contend it’s the best of them all, and why ignore the criticism from experts in the institutions that you are proposing host your centre?

The Ramsay Centre then approached the University of Sydney but did not receive a warm welcome. Academics labelled the proposed program ‘European supremacism’ and a ‘training institute for a future political cadre’. One senior lecturer, Nick Reimer, made a written submission to a university-wide consultation process. His contribution was mysteriously edited in the gathering and dissemination process to remove the phrase ‘embodying a kind of academic racism’. I read the minutes of a meeting of the Academic Board in August 2018 in which people spoke with optimism about the possibility of remaining independent of the ‘political views of individual members of the Ramsay Centre Board’ but numerous concerns were listed, including, ‘The proposal represents a “kick in the face” for staff loss in non-Western disciplines’, and, ‘The proposal embodies inherent racism and is potentially divisive by introducing stratification of academic disciplines, with scholarships inaccessible to students studying in other discipline areas such as Aboriginal or Arab and Islamic Studies.’

Reimer writes in the Sydney Review of Books around this time that Haines himself couldn’t really articulate or list defining characteristics of ‘Western civilisation’. ‘The Western essence that he can’t define rationally, he pushes back into an intuitively felt aspect of our experience: even though, he says, we “can’t say what it is”, “we all know what it is, we all live with it”. Like religious faith—the Centre’s distinctly Christian ethos is obvious to anyone who explores it—“Western civilisation” is something that is lived, not intellectually grasped.’

In his own essay for Quadrant in December of 2017, Haines writes,

‘Western civilisation’ is a handy phrase referring to a very large and dynamic collection of multifarious but still associated practices, artefacts and ideas … No essence, any more than a long piece of rope has a single thread running all the way through it: but it may have long sequences or patterns of threads of the same colour, and still it’s one rope, and when it takes you all the way to the summit, you will find that the whole point, the meaning, was in the climb.

This may be the dumbest paragraph I’ve ever encountered. The intended meaning of these two sentences eludes me. They sound to me like a verbose variant of ‘we know what we like when we see it’. Or, perhaps more accurately, ‘we know who we don’t like when we see them’. Haines thinks we’ve heard about the bad side of Western civilisation ad nauseam. Agree to disagree.

In 2019, Wollongong University bypassed their own Academic Senate in order to take the Ramsay Centre’s money. So much for respecting the democratic history of ‘Western civilisation’. Guardian Australia reported: ‘Under the terms of the deal announced [with Wollongong University], Ramsay Centre staff would sit on academic and scholarship selection committees, but will not chair the committees or have a majority vote.’ Independence had been officially compromised.

In May 2019, around 500 University of Queensland students attended a meeting called by the student union and approximately 490 voted against the university continuing talks with the Ramsay Centre. The union felt this gave them a ‘clear mandate’ to express the wishes of the student body to the vice-chancellor, but it wasn’t enough. Nor was it enough when 250 Humanities and Social Sciences faculty members—an overwhelming majority—signed a petition against the deal. But the Academic Board, which comprises heads of school and senior management, were allowed a blind vote, and decided in favour of the deal by 44 to 32.

Flying interstate in 2019, I was seated in the middle of the row and to my left was the then vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland. I knew this for sure because the flight attendant referred to him by name and with extraordinary attentiveness. I’m sure we were only seated together because business class was full.

He was working. I took out a book, kept my headphones in my ears, but turned the music off and spent most of the flight reading his documents and emails. Extraordinarily unethical, I know, but incredibly illuminating. Some of what I saw related to international students: the money they brought in and the mix of different nationalities. For obvious moral and legal reasons I cannot repeat what I read. However, I can say that the University of Queensland was run by a man who made over a million a year and still took both armrests, despite having the aisle seat.

In November that year, the University of Queensland signed an agreement with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Their partnership would begin just a few months later, taking students in 2020 for either the Bachelor of Advanced Humanities degree or the Bachelor of Humanities/Bachelor of Laws dual degree. That second option was particularly interesting to me. In all my hours of research online, I couldn’t find a single reference to what must have been multiple stages of meetings and negotiations with my alma mater, the University of Queensland School of Law.

In July 2018 I wrote a story about Professor Patrick Parkinson, then the new dean of the law school, that ended up on the front page of the Saturday Paper. I had been contacted by some students who were worried by his repeated and extreme comments against homosexuality during the marriage equality plebiscite. The interview I did with him was unpleasant. I had uncovered a recording in which he mentioned that, with Jim Wallace, he had co-founded a lobbying organisation called Freedom for Faith. Wallace was the long-time head of the Australian Christian Lobby, and on ANZAC Day 2011 he tweeted: ‘Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for—wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic!’ He also compared homosexuality to smoking in terms of adverse health effects.

No one among the staff and students I spoke to at the University of Queensland had been aware just how deep Parkinson’s lobbyist and conservative connections ran. He does not list his position as co-founder of Freedom for Faith online or on his CV. He received a significant research grant from a conservative organisation in order to produce research about children and families that was then used in the marriage equality debate to suggest that only households with a mother and father could provide for children’s maximal wellbeing. Parkinson insisted his personal views on religion and sexuality had no effect on his ability to do his job as researcher or dean. My problem was the lack of transparency. The Australian Christian Lobby doesn’t pay tax and under a special exemption is not required to disclose the identities of its board members. When you read enough about these groups you start to see the names of religious and conservative politicians and powerbrokers cropping up repeatedly. For example, Lyle Shelton took over leadership of the Australian Christian Lobby from Jim Wallace in 2013. In 2018, Shelton left to join Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives. Also, the position of dean of a law school is more than just an academic post. It is a position of significant power and influence. Parkinson’s predecessor vacated the role when she was appointed to the Federal Court; Justice Sarah Derrington is now also the president of the Australian Law Reform Commission. I was uncomfortable with the possibility that a man who didn’t put all his cards on the table might use his position either to further his extracurricular lobbying activities or trampoline into higher office.

The full text of the philanthropic agreement between the University of Queensland and the Ramsay Centre, like all their agreements with other universities, will not be released due to the commercial-in-confidence information it contains. However, I did learn that the committee in charge of awarding scholarships includes at least one member of the Ramsay Centre’s board. Long story short? Integrity: compromised. Ideals of Cecil Rhodes: alive and well.

Abbott genuinely thought the ANU partnership was a sure thing when he wrote in Quadrant that the centre’s board would have ‘[a] management committee including the Ramsay CEO’ and ‘its academic director will make staffing and curriculum decisions’. In hindsight, the victory-lap tone of the article is embarrassing. My impression is that the Ramsay Centre set out to partner with the top universities, but after ANU’s firm snub and a second, very public, rejection from the University of Sydney, the centre was forced to reassess their courtship strategy with places like Wollongong and UQ. Fifty million bucks can get you into a lot of beds, I suppose, but not necessarily the ones you have the biggest boners for.

The Ramsay Centre has been holding Summer Schools, and I watched a promotional video that appears to have been shot with an assortment of staff and students who attended the one that ran for two and a half days in January 2019. A young man in a striped shirt answers a question about what he had been looking forward to or got out of the day: ‘The interactivity,’ he says, then smiles. ‘And also that, yes, I would be able to have lunch with former prime minister John Howard.’ A camera pans a room with about 30 people eating. Then another little bombshell: ‘Students also met with esteemed members of our board, and attended a session with former New South Wales premier Nick Greiner, who gave his insights on how a liberal arts education could provide transferable skills for a successful business career.’ Greiner was a Liberal Party premier and has been the federal president of the Liberal Party of Australia since June 2017. It’s ironic for Greiner to be waxing lyrical about education, considering that his state government cut the education budget so drastically that teachers went on strike. After leaving politics he went on to spend eight years as the chairman of the board for British American Tobacco Australia. I’d be interested to hear how he thought reading Socrates and Shakespeare might help young people make oodles of money running a company that hid information about its products causing cancer.

At his address to the inaugural Ramsay scholars at Wollongong in 2020, Simon Haines said:

These extraordinary texts, these works of art, literature, philosophy, science, religion and faith, have been chosen, and are considered so extraordinary, for a very good reason—they resist all attempts to pigeonhole them, to say they are about some theme or other, that they represent some specific point of view or position. They are great works because they are, and always were, from when they first appeared, complex, rich, resistant: they can’t be so easily herded into a category.

If that were the case, and that were the true goal of the centre, why not commit fully to the humanities, rather than a particularly thin slice of them? And why was this man being paid so handsomely to lead an institution dedicated to a concept he still couldn’t actually define? He went on to describe the course as ‘radical’ and its students ‘pioneers’, declaring that ‘these books and artworks are your inheritance—they belong to you. So take possession of them for yourselves, by joining a great conversation that has been going on for thousands of years. Own them, own that tradition—make them yours.’

It almost sounds right, doesn’t it? As Abbott reflects in Quadrant, ‘I know my own debt to the mentors I’ve had and to the institutions that have shaped me.’ The shaped go on to shape, the rich go on to earn, and these are the chosen few who get the opportunity to learn.

The latest partnership is the least surprising. The Australian Catholic University welcomed their select handful of Ramsay scholars from 2021. The vice-chancellor at the time the deal was struck was Greg Craven. Craven is a man who, despite not having attended the trial or seen the evidence against George Pell, was one of the ten high-profile individuals, including John Howard, who provided a character reference for the cardinal’s pre-sentencing hearing. In February 2019 Craven wrote an opinion piece for The Australian titled ‘George Pell: A case in which justice never had a fair chance’, and on the same day the article was published, in direct contradiction to his own actions, he sent the rest of the university staff an email saying ‘the university respects the judicial process and will not be making any comment until all legal avenues including any appeal have been concluded’. Apparently there are rules for these men, and the rules for everyone else are different. In April, when Pell’s final appeal to the High Court was successful, Craven went on ABC News and blamed the public broadcaster for the ‘media fracas,’ asking, ‘How much guilt does the ABC feel making sure this victim has gone through years of hell only to be hurled down when the case should never have been brought?’ He has consistently rejected calls for the Australian Catholic University’s Pell Centre in Ballarat to be renamed and a portrait of Pell—who is also an Oxford graduate—to be taken down. Also unsurprisingly, he was publicly dismissive of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and he criticised the commission’s final report.

In 2013, Greg Craven wrote an article for The Conversation titled ‘The Tony Abbott I Know’. He writes: ‘Here we have a Rhodes Scholar—and no, Kevin Rudd never got one of those—who genuinely likes to call people “mate” and hit bushfires with blankets. A deeply religious man, who is massively pragmatic, both philosophically and temperamentally. A social conservative whose rightism does not necessarily extend very far into economics, and who is personally deeply tolerant.’ So fortunate that such good friends could come to such a moneyed ‘commercial-in-confidence’ agreement. I wondered if Craven was offended when his uni wasn’t first on Abbott’s dance card for the Ramsay Centre’s potential partnerships. It is extraordinary what you will find on the internet if you just google the names of two powerful men with the Boolean operator ‘AND’ between them. Librarians taught me that.

I should add that these individuals are neither evil nor blind to nuance. Parkinson wrote an article for the ABC website’s Religion and Ethics portal in which he expresses genuine support and concern for the wellbeing of the surviving complainant in the Pell trial. Craven was in charge when the Australian Catholic University announced that it would offer scholarships to Indonesian students in a program named after the ‘Bali 9’ drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in the wake of the men’s execution. However, the patterns that emerge with just a touch of hindsight are undeniable.

One of the Ramsay Centre’s recent ‘distinguished visiting speakers’ was Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor at the University of Chicago who runs an often-freaky blog celebrating Milo Yiannopoulos. Her articles include such gems as ‘Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men’. In March 2020, during the height of the coronavirus panic, Fulton Brown tweeted a picture of her coffee cup, which was made in China, with the caption: ‘Exercise for the day: Read the “Made in …” labels on everything in your house. Ask yourself whether it was worth it.’ Another Ramsay Centre guest was Rod Dreher, senior editor for The American Conservative, a self-described ‘righty journalist and orthodox Christian’ whose Ramsay Lecture in 2019 articulated why one of the biggest threats to Christianity in the modern world is the ‘religion of social justice’. ‘If you have had to deal with the Social Justice Warriors,’ he said, ‘you know all too well how hysterical and self-righteous they are. The difference between Social Justice Warriors and terrorists is that you can usually negotiate with a terrorist.’ And his rousing finale: ‘Yes, I’m afraid that we are Rome. The Dark Ages are upon us again … You may be losing the straightforward culture war, because the enemies of the West have all the firepower and occupy the high ground. But do not despair! Now is the time to prepare the institutions of Resistance.’ His speech was a little funny until you realised it was frightening.

One of the things that most upsets me, the more I dig into the Ramsay Centre’s inner workings, and its high-powered board members, and their often-secret politics, is that it could have been amazing. At a time when the University of Sydney lost its Chair of Australian Literature, and when arts faculties were being gutted and permanent positions for tutors and academics were growing increasingly scarce, this huge and generous endowment could have kept hundreds of jobs and departments afloat. Instead, it was rolled out like the first life rafts to leave the Titanic: built for a capacity of 65 people, but instead taking about half that many, among them a high ratio of heirs, bankers, businessmen, and a Pomeranian.

•

Just when I caught myself on the umpteenth hour of digging into all this, and when Vincent was tiring of listening to my ramblings about these powerful men and their decades of friendship, and I myself was wondering if I was overstating the importance of the kyriarchal approach to the overlap between politics and the tertiary education system, I went through the list of the Ramsay Centre’s board members published on their website. Of the eleven members of the board of directors at the time, two were Rhodes scholars, another did their undergraduate degree at Oxford, and the CEO received his PhD in English Literature from Oxford. Then I saw Tony Abbott’s bio and felt sure I was on the right track: alongside a picture of him standing in front of the Australian flag he listed one of his main achievements during his time as prime minister: ‘the people smuggling trade from Indonesia to Australia was halted’.

Isn’t it interesting that Abbott, so proud of his status as a Rhodes scholar, wanted the recipients of this money he was helping to give out to be called Ramsay scholars? As Omid Tofighian writes in Australian Book Review, ‘A particular meaning-making and meaning-sharing activity takes place when a name either initiates a tradition or becomes an iconic part of a tradition.’ It brought to mind Behrouz Boochani’s explanation of how critical naming is for institutions and processes. The men standing guard at Manus prison were an ‘army here to protect the nation’ from those who ‘invaded’ by boat. That language valorised and legitimised their work. The students and staff I spoke to who didn’t want the Ramsay Centre on their university’s campus lamented the fact that vice-chancellors were ‘really CEOs now’, which would make the universities ‘corporations’ rather than educational facilities. When I thought of the University of Queensland accepting the Ramsay Centre despite the protests by students and staff, and the exercise of a secret vote rather than a public one, and the undocumented partnership agreement with the law school, I saw a kyriarchal system in action. No individual could be held accountable. A boss hid behind a boss who hid behind a boss. It was remarkably similar to how corporations can shirk responsibility by referring to a sea of anonymous shareholders as the Ultimate Boss. An ethical issue can, with great determination, make it all the way to the top of the boss pipeline, only to explode into a thousand tiny, untraceable bosses whose sole role in the operation is to receive dividends. The protests against the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation could make it all the way to the vice-chancellor, who could then point to the vote of the board, and it was blind.

I know and like and admire many people who do great work within the sandstone walls of these universities, but when I picture the Bosses of the Academy who welcomed the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, I see a gentlemen’s smoking lounge crowded with men who wrote character references for George Pell and visited him in jail. I see men who strategically and repeatedly lied about ‘children overboard’ and made ‘stopping the boats’ a central plank of their election campaign. I see conservatives who do not disclose their powerful lobbying investments. I see shareholders, various men who tune channels of conservative rhetoric via papers and radio waves, and mining company men who get their name on the list because they paid for the whisky.

Kyriarchy helps us to understand that the Rhodes and Ramsay scholarships are not exclusive because they are special, but that they are made special by virtue of their exclusivity. The extremity of this exclusivity is not accidental either. University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence wrote to the Ramsay Centre with a counter-proposal that would see the Ramsay Centre’s $50 million benefit more than 1000 students, rather than giving just 30 students $150,000 each, and in 2020 the Ramsay Centre declined that offer. Making the program accessible is completely contrary to what they want. Giving many people the opportunity to learn is not Rhodes’s legacy, and it’s not the legacy Abbott and his ilk wish to fortify. People who have built power and privilege from the exclusivity of their educational pedigree appear driven to protect that heritage. The most revered educational opportunities and institutions least promote transparency and democracy, yet our political class are rarely alumni of anywhere else. These leaders and organisations claim to care about knowledge-sharing, but their actions reveal their priorities have the inverse effect.

If you accept the very basic and, I think, uncontroversial statement that different cultures might have different knowledges to offer, and you are deliberately avoiding the knowledge of other cultures, I’m not sure you can claim to care about knowledge itself. Answers to complex questions are rarely singular in origin. Even ways to teach and learn and share knowledge can come from different places. Imagine for a moment that you had millions of dollars with which to create a new scholarship program. I think if your goal was really to help educate young people and facilitate learning, you’d take a look at the data and then do the opposite of what the Ramsay Centre did. Kids who finish school with excellent grades typically come from households with higher average incomes. These are the people who least need scholarships.

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation may be an easily identifiable target, but as Omid says, all universities benefit from the same basic premise: they have exclusive access to the only type of ‘credible’ and ‘valuable’ knowledge required if you wish to go on to wield power, either political or financial. They are critical sites for nations, or in our case colonies, to build and maintain identity. That’s why campuses have become boxing rings for political ideologies to do battle. An image of campuses as hotbeds of political protest was formed in the 1960s and 70s. The conservatives hate what they see as the spread of the young, latte-sipping lefties, but when the most moneyed and conservative among them wanted to establish scholarships, they didn’t set up their own think tanks; they attached themselves to the academic institutions with the most prestige. There are so many layers of irony and history to unpack here.

The stream of gold and silver doesn’t look that different now from how it looked when Woolf was being yelled at for walking on the grass. Omer Yezdani, the director of the Office of Planning and Strategic Management at the Australian Catholic University and chair of the Australian Network of University Planners, did the maths and wrote about it for The Conversation. Philanthropists donate around $476 million to Australian universities each year. Information released by the Australian government shows that 73 per cent of that money goes to the same five institutions: the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland, the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, and the University of Western Australia. After those five there’s a steep cliff; the rest receive mostly less than 1 per cent of the pie apiece. The extremity of the donation concentration means it doesn’t correlate to either outcomes or needs. Around 90 per cent of Australia’s ‘equity students’, meaning those who are disadvantaged in some way, do not attend any of those five institutions. The method used by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, which includes things like citations and publications in top journals, still shows that these big five universities are getting over four times as much money as justifiable even if funding was based on ‘merit’ or ‘market’.

I see Woolf’s stream of gold and silver. The precious metals are mined from the bottom of the kyriarchal pyramid and dragged up to be enjoyed by those at the top. My peers and I who are somewhere in the middle keep ourselves busy scrapping over highly ornamental pots. Our toil bolsters the sandstone scaffolding of the empire.

•

Listening to the New York Times podcast Still Processing, I heard Jenna Wortham, one of the co-hosts, relate the experience of being the only African American on a tour of Monticello, the plantation of America’s Founding Father and third president, Thomas Jefferson. Wortham went to the University of Virginia for her undergraduate degree and she describes being ‘fascinated and horrified’ by the university’s history. For a long time the university kept at least 100 people enslaved to serve its staff and student needs. Monticello overlooks the university and was built with slave labour.

‘A few years ago, I read that Monticello was going to start integrating more of the narrative of the enslaved folks that were in bondage,’ Wortham recalls, ‘and in particular they were going to restore the living quarters of Sally Hemings and include them as part of the tour.’ Hemings, a mixed-race woman, was owned by Jefferson, and she gave birth to six of his children. Depending on who is telling the story, Sally has been referred to as Jefferson’s ‘mistress’, but it is widely accepted that she was only fourteen when he decided they would be ‘intimate’. In his 2019 book Thomas Jefferson’s Education Alan Taylor explains: ‘In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratise the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them.’ It was the most expensive college in the country, and rich, slave-owning families rushed to secure for their sons a coveted spot at the elite institution. Once together, these men affirmed and compounded each other’s beliefs in the rightness of their cultural and capital inheritances.

It seems that one of Jefferson’s goals was secularism, with courses studying the works of the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment. He intended for his institution to be a beacon of forward-thinking wisdom, free from the constraints of the Church. What he failed to consider was that his own horrific treatment of women and the people he enslaved might be the stronger source of what tone was set for the students. Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post interviewed Taylor about his book and he described to her the abhorrent behaviour of past students. Natanson chooses one particular story to set the scene. ‘It was September 1826, and the [two] men—both scions of wealthy Southern slaveholding families—were suffering from the same sexually transmitted disease. Conferring, they identified a possible culprit: an enslaved black woman whom both had raped.’ The two students’ solution to this problem was to gather their classmates and together strip and brutally beat the sixteen-year-old woman. When her owner, a local tavern keeper, complained, the two men appeared contrite and voluntarily paid the owner $10, and so were only verbally reprimanded by their university. The abuse of enslaved men, women, and children was normal behaviour at the time for male students of Southern universities, Taylor explains in his book. As recently as 2012 a large number of unnamed graves were found to the north of the university’s official cemetery.

In July 2018 the University of Virginia released a report titled ‘President’s Commission on Slavery and the University’ which was the culmination of a five-year investigation. This was less than a year after the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville descended into violence. Two of the rally’s leaders were alumni of the University of Virginia who felt compelled to defend the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in a park nearby. Hundreds of neo-Nazis and alt-righters marched through the campus holding firearms to the statue of Jefferson where counter-protesters were gathered. A self-identified white supremacist used his car as a weapon, ramming into counter-protestors, killing a woman named Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. Clearly, the founding values of institutions matter. Clearly, statues are symbols of these values and provide opportunities for such values to coalesce and amplify.

In the podcast, Wortham describes the beautifully appointed dining room at Monticello in which Jefferson would host dignitaries and VIPs. The space was rigged with secret doors and hidden passages—even tunnels under the mansion—so that visitors from countries that had already outlawed slavery wouldn’t be upset or offended by the sight of the people Jefferson had enslaved. How often do we hear people warning us not to judge people of the past by the standards of today? These tired refrains, calling for what they define as ‘reasonableness’, often conveniently overlook the fact that people were protesting and organising in the past. In Jefferson’s own original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he described the slave trade as an ‘execrable commerce … this assemblage of horrors’, a ‘cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties’. Yet he owned multiple generations of people. A 2012 article by Henry Wiencek in Smithsonian Magazine recounted Jefferson’s scribblings in his own accounts books wherein what he ‘set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children’. In fact, ‘on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States’. The only thing more valuable was land itself. ‘The date of Jefferson’s calculation aligns with the waning of his emancipationist fervour. Jefferson began to back away from antislavery just around the time he computed the silent profit of the “peculiar institution”.’ Wiencek’s article lists the numerous times Jefferson’s admissions of his own crimes were changed or removed from official documents by historians, as recently as the fifties, and how even now in the 21st century people were still uncovering new evidence about his methods from hidden archives. Students at the University of Virginia considered the rape of enslaved girls and women part of their entitlements. The architecture of the institution, informed by Jefferson’s expertise and experience, was also designed to elevate the masters and hide the people they owned. Certain things can be built into a place. Universities such as Brown, Harvard, and Georgetown have all made efforts to reckon with their legacy of slavery.

•

If you think Australia doesn’t have a history of slavery, or that it wasn’t ‘like that’ or ‘that bad’, you are wrong. Take as a starting point the ‘blackbirding’ trade, for example, as outlined in Alex McKinnon’s article in The Monthly, published in July 2019. Blackbirding, he writes, is a ‘fraught, complex word encompassing a spectrum of exploitation ranging from technically consensual but unethical labour contracts to outright kidnapping and slavery. Many of the men who oversaw and financed the blackbirding trade—Robert Towns, John Mackay—have cities named after them.’

Inspired by pseudoscience race theory, as usual, ‘white overseers routinely worked Islanders to death. Backbreaking labour, heat exhaustion, disease, mistreatment and malnutrition killed Islanders in their thousands.’ Between 55,000 and 62,500 Pacific Islanders were transported to Australia in the mid-1800s to work the cane fields of Queensland and northern New South Wales, and in the 40 years of the operations around 15,000 of them died in those fields. Plenty of them weren’t even paid the little they were due, and if they dared protest, they’d be thrown in jail, or worse. Technically, slavery was illegal, and so ‘contracts’ were ‘signed’ with thumbprints agreeing to the exchange of years of labour for basic food and clothing. Kidnappings occurred, but even as the practice of blackbirding became more regulated, by the end of the century the situation was still not one that could be remotely considered an ethical exchange of labour for compensation. Regulations against the practice ‘proved horribly ineffective, perhaps in part because many Queensland parliamentarians had substantial financial interests in the trade, either as importers of labour or beneficiaries of it on sugarcane and cotton plantations’. They knew their actions ought to have been illegal, but they were happy to enrich themselves and get away with it.

When the government tried to deport these workers and their families en masse between 1906 and 1908, they fought back with petitions and campaigns, but, as McKinnon reports: ‘Samuel Griffith, chief justice of the High Court and a former premier of Queensland, presided over a case in 1906 authorising the Islanders’ expulsion.’ This is the same Samuel Griffith who is commemorated in the name of Griffith University. ‘Griffith classed the Islanders as “aliens”, despite the fact that hundreds of them had married British subjects and had Australian-born children. Griffith was also the national forefather who first proposed inserting Section 51(xxvi), the infamous “race power” clause, into the federal Constitution. Throughout his extensive career, legal niceties such as birthright citizenship and British subjecthood consistently came second to ensuring the racial purity of the colonies and the Commonwealth.’ Griffith University was founded in 1971, so it can’t be claimed that the institution’s founders ‘didn’t know better’ or were ‘a product of their time’. Griffith did some great things and he did some abhorrent things. I’m confident that a little more research could have turned up a candidate who played a significant role in the region’s development but had fewer marks on the ‘abhorrent’ side of history’s spreadsheet.

Some convicts brought to Australia in the early 1800s were held in something close to slavery, arriving and being herded straight into involuntary ‘assigned service’ for landowners. But Indigenous Australians have been forced to work for Europeans for either criminally low or no pay from the start. ‘Pearling’ was a terrible and deadly job performed by Indigenous Australians who had been bought and sold by the Europeans who profited from it. Slavery had been ‘abolished’ in the British Empire and America by then. The Wave Hill walk-off, also known as the Gurindji strike, happened about 100 years later, in 1966. I challenge anyone to say the conditions those workers were kept in was fundamentally different to slavery.

•

The University of Sydney is the oldest university in Australia, founded in 1852 and admitting women for the first time in 1881. They’re proud to mention on their website that Oxford took another 30 years to do the same. They can’t really mean all women, though, because the first Indigenous Australian students weren’t admitted until the 1960s, around the same time Australia finally legislated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were entitled to a minimum wage, and were allowed to vote. According to the University of Sydney website, ‘When William Charles Wentworth proposed the idea of Australia’s first university in 1850, he imagined “the opportunity for the child of every class to become great and useful in the destinies of this country”.’

For his expedition over the Blue Mountains in 1813, Wentworth was rewarded with 405 hectares of land, in a spectacular piece of irony. He was gifted Aboriginal land for ‘discovering’ a pass which Wiradjuri, Gundungura, and Dharug peoples had been walking for thousands of years. That expedition also opened the floodgates for Europeans to pour into central and north-western New South Wales to stake their claims. You don’t get a much more literal representation of colonisation than that. In 2017, Honi Soit, the University of Sydney’s student newspaper, published an article titled ‘Wentworth Must Fall’ in which Andy Mason requests a renaming of the Wentworth Building and the removal of Wentworth’s statue as part of a process of historical recovery. Mason writes:

While some of the colonial elite preferred to feign ignorance and make excuses about their inability to control settlers on the frontier, Wentworth was more brazen in his disdain for Aboriginal people. In 1838, seven white stockmen were convicted of murdering a large number of Gamilaraay people at Myall Creek in north-western NSW. A further four participants were identified by an Aboriginal witness, but the law of the time did not allow Aboriginal people to give testimony in court. To rectify this and allow the white men to be tried, a bill was introduced to the Legislative Council. However, it was defeated after Wentworth gave a speech describing Aboriginal people as ‘wild men’ and comparing their testimony to ‘the chatterings of the orang-utangs’.

In his book A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, published in 1919, Wentworth writes, ‘The aborigines of this country occupy the lowest place in the gradatory scale of the human species. They have neither houses nor clothing; they are entirely unacquainted with the arts of agriculture; and even the arms which the several tribes have … and the hunting and fishing implements with which they administer to their support, are of the rudest contrivance and workmanship.’ It would be both factually and morally wrong to think that Australia’s history and educational institutions are ‘not as bad’ as those examples from the United Kingdom or USA.

In Finding Eliza, Larissa Behrendt explains how false narratives like Wentworth’s didn’t just help to facilitate white invasion but were absolutely necessary for the colonies to promulgate untruths like terra nullius and the requirement that ‘savages’ be ‘Christianised’ or ‘civilised’ by missionaries. Pointing to the intellectual inferiority of the ‘other’ was a shortcut to denying their worth, humanity, and rights. European invaders needed to justify taking land from the Indigenous inhabitants and then forcing them to work it for little or no money while raping the women. The narrative that these people weren’t as ‘developed’ was integral. And this isn’t ancient history. When the Federal Court heard the Yorta Yorta claim for native title in 1998, Behrendt notes, ‘Justice Olney seemed to place a greater emphasis on the writings of pastoralist Edward Curr and missionary Daniel Matthews, who occupied the area during the 1850s, historical accounts written against a background of belief in white racial superiority and the idea that Aboriginal people were a dying race.’ Olney valued such evidence ‘more than the oral evidence of Yorta Yorta people about their cultures’, but these biases were not acknowledged or recognised. The establishment and maintenance of colonial narratives continues to cause serious and real harm. ‘Credibility’ in legal and political settings is a quality still strategically denied to these and other ‘others’.

Wentworth studied at Cambridge, matriculating at Magdalene College. When his father died in 1827, he became one of the wealthiest men in the colony. In 1853, the year after he helped found the University of Sydney, he chaired a committee to draft a new constitution of New South Wales in which he proposed a powerful, unelected Legislative Council and an elected Legislative Assembly with high property-owning qualifications for voting and membership. He recommended new systems of titles and positions from and for the land-owning class. His opposition laughed at him and described his idea as a ‘bunyip aristocracy’. His contributions bought him a 2.4m-high statue at the University of Sydney. One wonders what he would make of the university’s establishment of the Charles Perkins Centre in 2012. This multi-disciplinary institution, devoted to public health, is named for the first Aboriginal man to graduate from university, renowned for his commitment to achieving justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There is also a Charlie Perkins Scholarship to Oxford and Cambridge—the executive director for which is, naturally, a Rhodes scholar. In another article from Honi Soit in 2019, Lara Sonnenschein reports, ‘The University of Sydney’s vice chancellor, Michael Spence, has attracted criticism after quoting an early colonial era racist in a purportedly anti-racist email regarding the Christchurch massacre sent out to students yesterday.’ The vice-chancellor had referenced Wentworth’s ‘vision of a diverse university’, apparently either unaware, indifferent, or opposed to the efforts in recent years to correct this particular rose-tinting of history.

As Behrendt writes in reference to the conversations happening around the time of the National Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples in February 2008, ‘These culture wars were not about Aboriginal history. Aboriginal experience and perspectives remain unchanged by semantic and numerical debates by academics. They were, instead, a battle about white history and, more importantly, white identity. It was a conversation about the kind of country Australia should be and what the dominant national narrative should say about Australians.’ In this same way, a statue of Wentworth tells us much more about the people who want to retain it than the people who want to put it into context or pull it down. Indeed, if the myriad possible responses to a movement such as Wentworth Must Fall are placed on a spectrum, inaction is the most extreme possible response of the conservatives. Only the stasis inherent in the status quo allows any proposed action to be labelled the ‘radical’ option.

A large-scale longitudinal study conducted by the University of Newcastle in 2017 found that high-achieving Aboriginal children are less likely to aspire to go to university and remain vastly underrepresented within higher education. Unsurprising, when one considers what this country’s institutions have taken from their families, and that buildings and statues with the names of men who compared their ancestors to apes are scattered across campuses. If the way our country maps and tracks its brains is by its graduates, then they’re establishing a set of criteria and preventing certain parts of the population from meeting it. The long-term problem with this is that universities continue to receive both private and public funding, and continue to propel the same types of people into higher-power, higher-earning employment positions.

If somebody wants your land or your body, the surest way to get it, and get away with it, is by saying you don’t have a mind—or not a mind as ‘reliable’ or ‘developed’ as theirs, at least. If somebody in power wants your land or your body, you definitely don’t get to be smart.

3

Schools

The public debate around the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation inevitably became, and continues to be, a ‘battleground’ for ‘culture wars’, with the media in both trenches lobbing opinion pieces across the widening divide. In October 2018, Tom Switzer wrote in the Australian Financial Review that ‘opponents of Ramsay issued a statement breathtaking not just in its arrogance, but in its ignorance’. Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), a libertarian think tank somewhat ironically named given its ongoing refusal to disclose its funding sources. Switzer has a spot on the ABC’s Radio National, writes for various newspapers, was opinion editor at The Australian for seven years, and has dabbled in politics, with Howard and Abbott endorsing his run in a 2009 by-election for a federal seat. That bromance endured; in 2016 Switzer wrote in Guardian Australia that ‘there are very few people in public life with finer personal qualities than Abbott’, who was ‘courageous and right to support a tough stance on border protection, which helped boost public confidence in an orderly, large-scale legal immigration policy’. In May 2019 he wrote an opinion piece for the AFR titled ‘Left’s faux fairness puts opportunity society at risk’ and in August 2019 he penned ‘Cash is no answer to failing schools’. The people who shape public debate on education policy are the same people who control the parameters of public debate on border policy, and we don’t really know who pays their salary.

CIS was founded by Greg Lindsay, and while there is no authoritative record of such meetings he appears to have secured funding from the chairman of the Adelaide Advertiser Group, the executive director of Western Mining Corporation, the chief economist at mining company CRA, the chief economist at Shell Australia, and an economist from BHP. Probably safe to say these guys don’t take public transport. CIS is also one of only fourteen organisations mentioned by name in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 entitling people and businesses to claim donations to them as tax deductions. CIS’s own document titled ‘30 Years of Ideas’ mentions that at their 30th anniversary dinner, John Howard gave a keynote in which he ‘noted the impact and influence CIS has had on policy debates in Australia, and praised the Centre for its outstanding achievements of the last three decades’. They don’t disclose all of their funding sources, but previous backers include tobacco giant Philip Morris and a bunch of mining and mining-related companies. Pretty unsurprising, then, that when I appeared on ABC TV’s The Drum in 2018 and sat next to Simon Cowan, the CIS research director, he seemed to be either downplaying or denying human-induced climate change. Cowan defended the non-disclosure of donors to CIS in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018, on the basis that ‘we believe ideas should stand or fall on their merits, not on what tenuous association can be asserted between the speaker and the “wrong” vested interests to discredit them’. He suggests that CIS are brave to publish the research they do, that ‘social media vigilante mobs’ come for those who express their opinions, and that there is ‘little doubt that forced public disclosure of funding would lead quickly to attacks on some of those funders’. According to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, CIS’s reported income at December 2019 was over $4.5 million, and 76.2 per cent of that came from ‘donations and bequests’. More than half of that money goes towards paying their employees, of which there were sixteen full-time, eight part-time, and four casuals at the last reporting date. Deloitte very generously write their annual reports, worth $55,000, ‘pro bono’.

Unfortunately I have to agree with Howard here: the influence and reach of this opaquely run organisation is significant. Of the 29 members of the CIS board in April 2020, there was a bit of Caltex and McKinsey, a few lawyers, a smattering of real estate, and a lot of different types of assets being differently managed. The CIS website lists their research programs as being focused on education, foreign policy, economic policy, something called ‘Culture, Prosperity & Civil Society’, Indigenous affairs, government and politics, health, social policy, and ‘ideas about liberty’. The landing page for the education section of their website declares: ‘A quality school education is vital for individual well-being and for a healthy society. All children should have access to an education that is responsive to their needs as well as upholding high standards of academic rigour. CIS’s focus is on policies that restore the role of parents in education and devolve greater authority and responsibility to schools to meet these goals.’ In other words, children have the right to a certain standard of education, but we don’t really want it to be the government’s responsibility to pay for it or regulate it.

To do my due diligence and pressure-test my ideas, I downloaded two of CIS’s recent education-related documents, the PDFs available from their website which they classify as ‘research reports’. One was titled ‘Overcoming the Odds: A study of Australia’s top-performing disadvantaged schools’ written by Blaise Joseph in March 2019, and the other titled ‘Inquiry into measurement and outcome-based funding in New South Wales schools’, written by Glenn Fahey in August 2019. Fahey argues that ‘how money is spent is more important than how much is spent’. He advocates for performance-based funding and recommends secondary schools be forced to disclosed their graduates’ HSC results so parents can shop around. That reminded me of a story Vincent told me about his and Damian’s very high-scoring high school: ‘I remember on the morning of our final exams, all the kids with bad grades who were going to TAFE anyway got bussed out to Dreamworld for the day.’ It was the school’s way of preventing any lower-achieving students from tainting the overall score of the cohort. Fahey also argues that principals should have far more hiring and firing power, moving towards ‘a more flexible system that rewards the best, and motivates the rest, to strive to lift their performance’. In his view, ‘both rewards and sanctions must be on the table’.

One of Joseph’s key findings after studying and visiting the top-performing disadvantaged schools was that ‘disadvantaged primary schools could potentially improve significantly, without necessarily requiring more taxpayer funding’. What I found most absurd about his report was his methodology for identifying these schools. The ‘top-performing disadvantaged schools’ were those that were in the most disadvantaged quartile but achieved above the national average in literacy and numeracy for three years. Only 21 primary schools out of 1481 and just three secondary schools out of 555 fit the bill. In other words, only the unicorns could help him to prove his point.

Mike Seccombe wrote an insightful piece titled ‘Turnbull’s war on universities’ on the relationship between education and conservative politics for the Saturday Paper back in May 2017; it explains a lot about how we got to the shambles of 2020. ‘In the early days of his prime ministership, John Howard shared with some a private view about universities: don’t spend money on them, the people there don’t vote for us … Ignorance advantages the political right, as John Stuart Mill noted in 1866 when, during a British parliamentary debate with Conservative MP John Pakington, he famously said that while not all conservatives were stupid, “stupid persons are generally Conservative”.’ That might be a funny little quip, but it is born out statistically with devastating results. America’s leading psephologist, Nate Silver, examined the shifts in voter behaviour between the election of Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016 and found that ‘in 48 of the 50 best-educated counties, more people voted for Hillary Clinton than had voted for Obama four years previously. Conversely, she got fewer votes in 47 of the 50 least-educated counties.’ This means it was not economic disadvantage that drove people to vote for Trump, as was so often claimed, but educational disadvantage. ‘It is hardly novel to suggest that conservatives have always been troubled about the consequences of allowing the masses to be educated,’ Seccombe notes. ‘Howard himself enthusiastically endorsed the shift of students from public to private schools because “government schools have become too politically correct and values-neutral”.’ From 1999 to 2006, funding allocated to private schools increased six times as much as funding for public schools.

The OECD’s Equity in Education report released in October 2019 found inequity in Australian schools worsened between 2006 and 2015. In November 2018 the ABC’s analysis, ‘Counting the cost of the education revolution’, quotes from that report that ‘It ranked Australia equal fourth for the most class-stratified education system among OECD nations, with disadvantage twice as concentrated as would be expected if social privilege were evenly distributed across all schools.’

A friend of mine from law school once told me that when he was a student at Brisbane Grammar School he would drive past the students from Brisbane State School on their way to the train and yell out the window, ‘Your dad works for my dad!’ They would ‘go nuts’, he recalled. The tuition fee for Grammar in 2019 was $27,000 a year without extras—just over half the median Australian income for the same year.

Most research I could find reiterated that the biggest determinate of a student’s school results is their parents’ socioeconomic status. Comparing standardised results of a rich school to a poor school can give a false impression of the school’s efficacy. Also, public schools are required to accept anyone and everyone, but private schools can pick and choose potential students by mandating entrance exams and interviews. It’s easier for private schools to expel ‘problem’ students, and Catholic and independent schools likewise don’t need to meet the same freedom-of-information requirements public schools do, which is plainly outrageous. Adrian Piccoli, director of the Gonski Institute for Education at the University of New South Wales and the state education minister from 2011 to 2017, told Guardian Australia in August 2018 that the public only ever hear bad press about private schools ‘if a parent complains about [it] or it goes to court’.

•

The final report of the Review of Funding for Schooling was presented to the Gillard government in 2011 by a panel led by David Gonski. It confirmed that Australia has one of the biggest gaps among developed nations between high- and low-performing students, and that their educational performance was profoundly affected by their socioeconomic background. The report made 41 recommendations and its vision was bold—too bold for Australian politicians to stomach, as it turned out. It adopted the OECD definition of equity in education: that every child should be able to achieve their potential regardless of social, cultural, or economic background or their relationship to property, power, or possession.

The main recommendation was a ‘sector-blind’ funding model that allocated money according to need, regardless of whether the school was public or private. A base rate called a Student Resource Standard, or SRS, would be A$9271 per primary school student and $12,193 per secondary student before taking into account specific or higher needs. Public schools would receive this in full, and private schools would receive it in part, depending on the socioeconomic status of those paying the school fees. Six specific forms of disadvantage were identified by the Gonski report as requiring extra funding. Four were individual: kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds, kids with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids, and kids with low English proficiency; and two were school-specific: rural schools and small schools.

The federal government’s eventual proposal in response to the report was described as ‘Gonski-lite’; it didn’t sufficiently rein in the high spending at rich schools, and the states didn’t like the fact that some of the recommendations increased federal power over a sector that is supposed to be in state control. The proposal was scrapped and a further review was commissioned, dubbed Gonski 2.0 by the media. The resulting legislative changes to school funding were passed in 2017, but they have failed to fix these problems.

The Catholic schools were not happy with the original Gonski report’s recommendations, and they pushed back against Gonski 2.0, too. The lobbies representing the interests of Catholic schools are very loud and powerful, and they are backed by the Church itself. Catholic schools in particular claim a heritage and present-day predisposition to care for the poor, but the data shows otherwise. It may have been true a century or so ago, but these days overall and overwhelmingly the children with the highest needs are enrolled in government schools. In a 2012 article for The Conversation titled ‘Gonski review: Experts weigh in on what the government should do’, Scott Prasser—then the executive director of the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University—argued that not enough attention had been paid to the ‘flaws and limitations’ of the Gonski report. ‘I would like Australians to discuss quality of education and stop focusing on issues of inequality. Only by focusing on issues of quality are we going to address inequality.’ This may be the second-most stupid thing I’ve ever read. I still don’t know what he means. And oh, look, how interesting: Prasser left the university and now works for the Centre for Independent Studies.

What I don’t understand is how small government ‘libertarians’ who favour an open-market approach to such things, whereby parents can choose where to send their kids, justify the government making significant contributions to private schools. If all these fancy schools are really just excelling in the market, why do the public need to subsidise the orchestra lift? Shouldn’t there be a good, free, government-funded education available to all, and if the private sector wants to come along and offer an alternative, that’s for them to manage? That’s how it works in most other OECD countries. I find it hard to believe the conservative Christianity embedded in places like CIS, and the Jesuit-quoting former PMs and Hillsong-praise-singing Prime Minister Morrison, have nothing to do with this. The CIS published a book in 2020 titled Forgotten Freedom No More: Protecting Religious Liberty in Australia, edited by Right Reverend Robert Forsyth, that included an article by Patrick Parkinson titled ‘Protecting Religious Freedom in an Age of Militant Secularism’. Parkinson appeared on Andrew Bolt’s Sky News program back in September 2016 to talk about how ‘the “safe schools” program is a danger to children’ and Tom Switzer appeared on the same episode. Maybe these men would consider me a ‘militant secularist’. I suppose my point is that it’s naive to assume ideology and education funding aren’t connected, and the children who need the most help are currently suffering the most because they are.

This is all before we even hit the thorny problem of transparency. Piccoli told the ABC in 2019 for their ‘Rich School, Poor School: Australia’s great education divide’ report: ‘I was always astounded that we [the New South Wales government] gave the Catholic system $800 million a year and, basically, they filled out a one-page form to verify that they’d spent the money appropriately.’ He wouldn’t be surprised, he added, if plenty of private schools were misusing government funds. In the Catholic system in particular, there is little transparency around how the funds are divided between dioceses and schools, and then how individual schools are spending their share. According to the National Catholic Education Commission’s submission to the 2011 Review of Funding for Schooling, ‘Most Catholic schools (96 per cent) are systemically funded, meaning that the government funding they nominally attract is provided to the relevant state Catholic Education Commission for needs-based distribution.’ Five major reports from official audits each year from 2016 to 2020 flagged this issue. Of course the National Catholic Education Commission and Independent Schools Council of Australia assured them everything was fine and above board. Taxpayers fund about 80 per cent of the cost of educating a child in the Catholic school system.

In September 2020 an ABC News article titled ‘How the Catholic school system takes from the poor to give to the rich’ should have outraged far more people than it did: ‘Leaked documents seen exclusively by the ABC suggest hundreds of NSW Catholic schools are missing out under a scheme that will have diverted more than $300 million in public funding from the system’s poorer to richer primary schools by 2023. Administered by Catholic school authorities and approved by the state’s bishops, the scheme aims to keep fees low for families in wealthy parts of Sydney, according to the documents.’ It makes for pretty shocking reading. Some of the leaked documents are marked ‘confidential’ or ‘commercial-in-confidence’ and include comments from staff. Piccoli described them as ‘explosive’. He must have been repressing an almighty I-told-you-so.

The article went on: ‘Brian Croke, who served as executive director of the Catholic Education Commission NSW for 24 years, confirmed the system had been diverting government funds intended for needier schools to less needy schools for decades. He said the inconsistency between the two distribution models grew starker as time wore on.’

Apparently everybody was aware of the growing problem, but the buck stopped with the bishops, and the bishops didn’t want to change anything. They were afraid that if they stopped subsidising the wealthy inner-city schools, then the parents would have to pay higher fees—and they might decide to send their kids to one of the other highly funded metropolitan schools instead. As a direct result, parents in regional areas and with kids at smaller schools have been paying thousands of dollars more per year, per student, than the New South Wales government calculated they’d be able to afford. Why has nobody been held accountable for this theft? Who is the boss of a bishop?

In Australia, 94 per cent of private schools are religious. That’s about 30 per cent of schools in total, and one of the highest percentages of any OECD country. On the last census there was a sharp increase in the number of people to identify as ‘no religion’, now at almost 29.6 per cent, but Christianity is still sitting at the top with about 57.7 per cent. The state governments mostly fund the state schools and the federal government funds the Catholic and other private schools. The attitude of our federal politicians towards religion and conservatism, therefore, has huge ramifications for disadvantaged kids. The National School Chaplaincy program, established by the Howard government in 2006, is a good example of this. The chaplains aren’t supposed to proselytise, and they often work in public schools, yet in most states a chaplain must be ‘recognised through formal ordination, commissioning, recognised religious qualifications or endorsement by a recognised or accepted religious institution’. The Morrison government committed more than $247 million to the program for 2019–2022. In The End of Certainty, Katharine Murphy’s Quarterly Essay on Morrison and pandemic politics published in 2020, the prime minister’s colleagues acknowledge that the maintenance of the school chaplains program is on his ‘personal preoccupation list’.

An analysis of Productivity Commission data by the Grattan Institute released in mid-2019 found that from 2007 to 2017, accounting for student numbers and teacher wage growth, public school funding increased by 22 per cent while private schools saw an increase of 46 per cent. During that same period, a further 7 per cent of the most disadvantaged quartile of students ‘drifted’ from private to public schools, meaning that 88 per cent of children with the highest needs are still in public schools, with less funding. There is a kind of prevailing ‘wisdom’ that you send your kid to a private school not just for the quality of the education but for the networking opportunities. Children learn to speak and act in ways that allow them to move in certain circles. They graduate with networks of ‘old boys’—and, to a lesser extent, ‘old girls’—who can act as mentors, introductions, and defence barristers or character references. This can only continue if private schools are allowed to define themselves by who they refuse to educate. No organisation receiving taxpayer funding should be able to distinguish itself on the basis of the children it excludes. It’s discrimination, and we need to be actively ashamed of it.

None of this has even touched on early childhood. Lots of people suggest young children should have the right to a preschool education in the same way they have the right to primary and secondary schooling, given how integral it is to intellectual development and the growing body of research demonstrating its importance and value. The Australian Early Development Census from 2018 found one in five kids were not on track developmentally when they started school. And if preschool is not freely accessible, children from disadvantaged families are more likely to start on the back foot.

The ABC’s 2019 interactive news story ‘Rich School, Poor School: Australia’s great education divide’ was the first real openly available report on the country’s school spending, and it used previously unavailable data. It describes an ‘infrastructure arms race’: orchestra pits and on-site baristas for some schools, but ripped carpets and leaking roofs for others. I was shocked but not ultimately surprised to read that ‘Australia’s four richest schools spent more on new facilities and renovations than the poorest 1,800 schools combined’. To put this even more simply and egregiously: ‘The richest 1% of schools spent $3 billion. The poorest 50% spent $2.6 billion combined. The poorest 50% of schools teach nearly five times as many students.’ These millions and billions being spent at private schools are not just sourced from willing parents. ‘Over the past decade, public funding to private schools [per student] has risen nearly twice as fast as public funding to public schools.’ Capital funding is separate to recurrent funding. Part of the problem is that private schools can source capital funding from both state and federal governments, whereas state schools can only source that funding from state governments. There is a Commonwealth Capital Grants Program and one of the Gonski report recommendations that never came to fruition was to make a similar fund available to public schools. While private schools can fundraise for themselves, public schools cannot. According to the ABC report, many of the private schools are using government money to fund recurring operations, allowing them to use private money to fund exorbitant infrastructure projects. And, needless to say, they don’t lower their school fees if the government increases their funding. What all this means, very simply, is that taxes are being spent on exacerbating the nation’s present and future class divide.

My alma mater charges about $12,000 per annum and spent more money on infrastructure than any other school in Queensland. My parents believed they were saving the government money by paying for their child’s education themselves. The ABC’s analyses show that what they actually paid for was a minuscule fraction of the new multi-level arts centre. Also, the ABS data shows that private schools aren’t even taking more students as they spend more money; in the five years to 2018, public schools took 76 per cent of Australia’s enrolment growth. If the way we fund schools doesn’t change, it will continue to entrench already-dire intergenerational inequality.

The 2018 ABC article, ‘Counting the cost of the education revolution’, includes a comparison between a public school where a breakfast program for kids who don’t get fed at home could only afford to run three days a week and a private school that just constructed a two-storey aquatics centre so that students could learn to scuba dive. When public school teachers and principals were asked what they’d do with the kind of money being sent to private schools, they spoke of very basic improvements, like carpeting, windows, and wiring. The Independent Schools Council of Australia spokesman told the ABC that private schools receive recurrent funding ‘due to the shared view of successive Australian Governments that each child is entitled to a government contribution to the cost of their education’. I vehemently disagree. A child is entitled to an education. That means teachers, spaces, and learning resources. A child is not entitled to money. If policy makers are talking about who is entitled to money, then they are not actually considering the learning interests of the child; they are considering the financial interests of the parents. The terms of the debate have effectively distorted the single most important factor: that children must come first. Unfortunately for children, they cannot vote.

A particularly stark example of the disparity in resourcing occurred in May 2020, when Newington College, a private boys’ school in Sydney’s inner west, came to a financial agreement with the local council that meant the Newington boys would have exclusive access to the public park at certain times for 30 years in exchange for contributing to its improvement. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the community were not happy about a private school ‘restricting local use of the fields’. Without disclosing the exact figure, Newington headmaster Michael Parker revealed that the deal was worth ‘several million dollars’. Greens councillor Tom Kiat told the Herald that it was tantamount to ‘semi-privatisation of a public park’. He pointed out: ‘Newington College spent $50 million on its own infrastructure in just three years. Tempe High School is just next door to the park and could spend only $330,000 in the same period.’

Then, in June, a backdown, with Mayor Darcy Byrne conceding that despite the local football club’s ‘strong demand’ for upgrades to the park, ‘I have heard from public education champions who have a philosophical concern about the encroachment of private schools in public facilities.’ He agreed to ‘explore opportunities to make Newington’s facilities accessible to the public before he proceeded with the arrangement’. These facilities included ‘an Olympic standard swimming pool designed for water polo, five turf cricket wickets, twelve synthetic cricket nets, six basketball courts, three rugby fields, eight tennis courts, three volleyball courts, two football fields, rowing facilities and a rifle range’. ‘—I’ll be proposing we press pause on the project and explore additional public benefits,’ the mayor promised. I think it’s fair to say that without the Sydney Morning Herald’s story in May, this deal would have gone through.

Around that time, Vincent and I went to a pub near Bondi to have beers with some friends who were visiting from Brisbane. One of these friends—let’s call her Friend A—was a teacher. She works at what I’d describe as a ‘well-off public school’. Another friend of ours—Friend B—is a teacher at a very prestigious private girls’ school. Friend A has worked her way up to a permanent contract that gives her great job security and decent parental leave should she want it. Friend B heard about a job opening at her fancy school, but on a contract, and asked Friend A if she was interested.

‘I was like, why would I leave a permanent gig for a contract?’ Friend A said, but the fancy school still wanted to speak to her. So when they called, she asked them, ‘Can you offer me a comparable position?’ They said no; they had just presumed that there was no way someone teaching at a public school would turn down an offer to work at a private school. After she gave them a polite refusal, they called a second time, just to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind. Then, a month or so later, they called a third time. This time they offered her a permanent position, more money, guaranteed maternity leave and middle leadership—everything she wanted, in other words.

‘That night I wrote a pros-versus-cons list and decided to take it,’ she told me, ‘because the list didn’t lie. But then I couldn’t sleep. It just didn’t feel right.’

Private schools with buckets of cash can poach like this. Not everyone says ‘no’ out of principle, like my friend did, and it means the ‘drift’ happens in staff as well as students.

•

A question arises: what is the purpose of a school, and therefore what outcomes should funding be informed by? And does the definition you think the state should have for a funding approach match the definition you have for what school you would send your own child to? Kelsey Munro, journalist and former Lowy Institute research fellow, writes in Guardian Australia:

Australia has more school choice than most countries in the world. The idea goes like this: if you don’t confine enrolments to the local public school, and parents are free to move their child into any school they like across the public, private and Catholic sectors, all schools will have to work harder to compete for students by lifting their results. It’s an individualistic, free market approach that was sold as a means of improving the whole system; ideology that captured the policy direction of the Howard government in the 1990s. But instead of competition lifting all boats, parents with the agency to compare schools based on their academic results or other status markers move their kids to ‘better’ schools, effectively leaving concentrations of disadvantage behind them.

Right now about 65 per cent of children are in public schools, but that number drops for high school. In Sydney and Melbourne high schools, the proportion is around half. A society cleaved right down the middle. Forty years ago that national average was almost 80 per cent. By contrast, in places like Canada and the UK only a single-digit percentage of kids attend private or religious schools.

I grew up believing that the real reason the Catholic Church was so involved in education was because they knew they needed to indoctrinate people from youth or else they’d go out of business. ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,’ Aristotle claimed. My father had always repeated the Catholic version of the saying to me, as a warning: ‘Give me a child until he is seven and he will remain a Catholic the rest of his life.’ I didn’t know that in the early days of white Australia, amid the horrors of the ‘goldfields’ and ‘settlements’, the Church was sometimes the only place where a child could be taught to read and write. It was the Education Act 1872 (Victoria) that removed education from its traditionally religious context. Victoria became one of the first places in the world to have free, secular, and compulsory schooling, and the number of schools in the state tripled in the five years after the Act took effect. This reminded me of the trajectory of Eton College and the King’s College scholarships in England. Originally established for the benefit of the most needy, over time they have been allowed to grow into monstrous tools for social stratification. Also, in 1872 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were considered ‘flora and fauna’ and the Church was running ‘missions’ with devastating intents and consequences. There are deeply disturbing stories about the treatment of Indigenous Australian children by the Sisters of Mercy, for example—the same order that currently runs my old high school.

I went to a Catholic primary school and then a Catholic high school, but my older brother started out at the local state school. When we were young, in the late 1980s and early 90s, my family didn’t have oodles of cash. It was the ‘recession we had to have’ according to Keating. My mother and father repeated that line frequently and with venomous resentment. They knew families who had lost their homes. My brother was at the local state school and struggling. The school couldn’t provide him with the specific resources and support he needed. My mother made every effort to understand and support him, but going to school with her son and sitting beside him in class every day wasn’t a realistic option. They weren’t sure what they would do. At the time, my dad ran a local convenience store—bread, eggs, some fruits and vegetables, milkshakes—and the local Catholic priest, Father Conroy, was one of his regular customers. My family has never been religious, but as my dad would tell the story, that didn’t seem to matter to Father Conroy. Somehow the two men started talking about my brother and my dad explained the situation with the school. Father Conroy was the priest for the local Catholic primary school and knew people at some of the Catholic boys’ high schools in Brisbane. There were waiting lists for such places—lists you had to pay to be on—and the Lee family was not on any such list. Something in one father must have spoken to something in the other. Father Conroy helped find a place for my brother at a Catholic boys’ school and my brother was able to get the support he needed.

When my folks tell this story it makes me want to cry. It is as though, when my brother was finally able to learn in a well-resourced and supportive environment, his entire life trajectory was altered. From high school, my brother went to university, and now he is an electrical engineer doing research and development on the kind of technology most of us could never comprehend. He uses his super-brains for good, as well, working in renewable energy-related areas and technologies. When I ask him to explain what he does at work he speaks in another language. He’s amazing.

There is an alternative universe in which my brother’s potential genius, expressed in sometimes different or frustrating ways when he was young, is still mocked and misunderstood. In this universe, some of his teachers would like to help him, but they don’t have the time or training. He might not finish high school in these circumstances, which statistically means he’ll earn much less across his lifetime. He will struggle with low self-confidence his whole life.

This terrifying prospect is the anecdotal evidence my family carries in its backpack and pulls out every time they say ‘you get what you pay for’ when you choose a school for your child. They describe holidays and cars and renovations they went without in order to pay for their children’s private education. They question why on earth other parents would not do the same. If a family in our neighbourhood took an overseas trip but sent their kids to the public school, well then, hadn’t they revealed their priorities. This attitude is shared by many middle-class Australian families: if you actually care about your kids’ prospects, you’ll try your hardest to find a way to get them into a private school. I’m not saying this is ‘right’; I’m saying that the gradual drift of students from public to private schools proves it.

By the time I started school, six years after my brother, private school was the norm and I had the kind of carefree access to it that allowed me to resent it. With hindsight, I’d say most of the kids in my year seven class were quite bright. When it came time to choose secondary schools, the majority of us split like well-behaved forks and went either to a Catholic girls’ school or a Catholic boys’ school. Almost all of us went on from those high schools to university. We were little fish thinking we were swimming, but really we were all just being carried along happily by the well-established socioeconomic currents.

When I contrast my experience of the education system to my brother’s near-miss, or my parents’ frankly upsetting stories of boarding school, I feel ashamed of the negative feelings I harbour. It has been more than a decade since I finished high school but I still flinch when I see its silhouette across the Brisbane River. I have always been grateful for my education, absolutely; it has given me the life and lifestyle I now cherish. But that place also made me hate myself with a passion. Perhaps I would have hated myself at any school, and perhaps everyone struggles through puberty and other people manage to stop licking their wounds long enough to let them heal, but I remember once I wept and begged my father not to make me go through the school gates. What an ungrateful little shit he must have thought me—he and my mother worked so hard for this expensive education and all his average-achieving daughter could do was whine about it.

In my school we were all on ladders, always aware of how we were doing compared to one another. Points for this, badges for that, captains of this, commendations for that. Everything monitored for slippage! All improvements to be displayed at all times! I was always on a ‘cusp’, and if my grades dipped below it a teacher would hold me back after class to talk about it. Now I see that level of attention and care as an immense privilege, but at the time I felt like I was under surveillance, that my teachers saw me as a disappointment. A few of us found out the hard way that the school counsellor was not an objective third party. High school was where I learned, both explicitly and by a powerful osmosis, one of the core teachings I’ve been trying to unlearn since: that some people are better than others.

For a few years I had a particular friend, whom I’ll call Jane; we did debating together. She was a straight-A student but she had a creative bent, too. She enjoyed going with her family to the theatre, and she liked reading. She played sports and volunteered. When we were given an assignment, she was able to identify instantly what the teacher wanted and she would give it to them. I couldn’t seem to do this. She knew the names of cool old movies. She’d been to Europe. She understood international and state politics. She was the whole package, a bit like Damian.

I just couldn’t keep up. Where she was unfailingly polite, I couldn’t conceal how much I hated most of the adults around me. My skin was terrible no matter what I washed it with and I was tired all the time, falling asleep in most classes, yet continued to throw myself into more and varied extracurricular activities. School plays, the clarinet, soccer—everything. At least that way when my results weren’t good I could explain that it was because I had other priorities rather than confessing my terrible truth: that I simply did not measure up. That rigid, conservative, religious system did not like me and I did not like it. It was like I was the wrong blood type to be injected into their system. Rejected! I craved independence. As soon as I was old enough I went and got a job at Subway, and I worked there after school and on weekends. Jane seemed a bit disappointed—or maybe she was confused—by this.

‘Why do you want money so badly?’ she asked. ‘You’ve got the whole rest of your life to make money.’

The first time I ever went to her home for a sleepover I found out that both her parents were doctors. Jane had pyjamas with a map of the London tube on them and she explained about that special type of cartography. She ate dark chocolate. In the morning, as I was leaving, I walked past a hall table upon which sat copies of magazines: The Economist, the New Yorker, and, on top, New Scientist.

‘Whoa,’ I said, stopping to touch them. ‘These are so expensive.’ The words just fell out of my mouth. I was being paid $6.42 an hour at Subway. One copy of New Scientist represented two hours of sandwich artistry.

‘Mum and dad have subscriptions,’ Jane replied, shrugging.

Her mother must have seen something happening in me.

‘Take it,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘Take a few. We’ve read them—or if we haven’t yet, we won’t.’ She was so encouraging, almost insistent. ‘Please, just grab whatever you want.’

I declined politely. Made some excuse, kept walking out the door, face flushing red. What was the point in reading a couple of months of these, when I was up against people like Jane, who used tickets to the British Museum as bookmarks? I might not even really be able to read them. There was no point even trying. The feeling I had was shame: that it was already too late for me. I was sixteen.

That memory burns in me. It’s absurd how physically warm it makes me feel to recall such indignity, and what I’m describing is a tiny interaction, essentially between someone (me) in the middle of middle class and someone (Jane) at the top of the middle class. That marginal difference, and yet such an inferiority complex! I had plenty of other friends with homes and families more like mine: with the dog hair on the couch and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. It was easier and more enjoyable to hang out with those friends, but I kept flinging myself back at people like Jane, hoping some of what they had might stick. It is so clear in hindsight: the aspiration, the internalisation of what I claimed to rebel against, the pathetic way I sniffed out the slightest striations within my peer group.

There was a restaurant my family and I would go to as a special treat when I got a good report card. When I found out, years later, that Vincent and his friends would sometimes get takeaway from that place, just on a regular night, it wounded something small and special in my heart. When would I be able to get over this shit?

My parents would have loved the opportunity to go to university, and I believe they both would have excelled. Their only real directive for my brother and I, in terms of careers and life trajectories, was to go and ‘get that piece of paper’, meaning a degree, any degree. It didn’t matter what we did, so long as we got that piece of paper. My mother and father had both hit roadblocks in their own careers for lack of such a piece of paper. A friend of mine who also studied law has one sibling who did medicine and their family is similar to mine in many ways, except one of his parents went to uni. I asked him about his and his sibling’s choice of degrees and their parents’ opinions about them. My friend replied that it was implicit, growing up, that his parents would have discouraged either of their children from doing an arts or business degree. That would have been a little disappointing.

Such small shifts in perspective, such giant leaps in trajectory. In one generation, middle middle-class incomes move to upper middle-class incomes. What is a ‘fine’ report card? What is $6.42 worth? What is a ‘worthwhile’ degree? Finishing my master’s presentation was doing my head in. Why did I have so much and always want more? Why did I learn so much and always feel stupid? Would this pathetic little inferiority complex ever leave me? Why did I feel more myself and relaxed with certain people but constantly seek out and try to surround myself with others? Better better better, richer richer richer, smarter smarter smarter. I wanted to reach back in time, clasp the slumped shoulders of my adolescent self, shake them hard: Chill the fuck out! I wanted to shake my own shoulders right then: Just think for yourself!

Even a decade later, as I sat with the knowledge that schools are also corporations, that they advertise how many students get top graduating scores so that they can charge higher fees, it still stung to remember some of my interactions with teachers and staff. The class that opened my mind in a truly formative way was English Extension. That was where I was first taught to engage critically with a text and also to critique others’ interpretations and judgements of texts. It was where I had my first taste of philosophy and first heard the ‘canon’ being challenged. I adored that class, I could spend all day in the readings and conversations, and yet I was the second-worst student. At the end of the year, when our results were posted alongside our student numbers so everyone could see how they’d done compared to their classmates, I remember crying, crying, crying, wishing I was dead. If the psychoanalysts are to be believed, and our young experiences set us up with insecurities we will forever be trying to overcome, then my journey into the Academy and authorship is almost pathetically predictable.

Every single year since I have left school my quality of life has increased. And yet I would not have my current quality of life without the education and institutional privilege I took from that place. I fancy myself an escapee, but really I am a product.

I was watching a story on the news one evening about education funding and saw a clip of some little schoolchildren being spoken to at their desks. As soon as the teacher finished asking them a question three of them flung their hands into the air, panicking and excited to prove they knew the answer. Their little bodies writhed with uncontainable energy. I detested these three. They didn’t want knowledge; they wanted people to think they were smart. They wanted the gold star. We teach kids to perform their brains like this from such a young age. And of course I hate this behaviour because as a child I did precisely this, with the same panicky wriggling desperation. And now I do this for a living. I watch myself do it as though it’s a monster I can’t control; new book, apply for PhD, this speech, that fellowship. I write when I should read. I speak when I should listen. But ooh and aah when the acknowledgements come—a compliment from a superior mind, a nod in the paper—how my child’s heart sings.

We know that girls do better in academic environments than boys. It would be difficult to ever prove ‘why’ this is, but my theory is that it comes down to a learned, ingrained attention to obedience. We are raised to please and to earn approval. Even now, at almost 30 years old, I have to actively fight the urge to seek positive reinforcement from elders and the establishment. Last Christmas I sat with my father and grandfather doing a puzzle, and when I placed a tricky piece I said, ‘Aha!’ and my grandfather said, ‘Great work!’ and my brain lit up like the plastic pine tree in the corner of the room. I am a dog that cannot help but wag its tail when it hears ‘good girl’ in the right tone of voice. My reward centres ping. I don’t like this in myself. It makes fighting for change and what I believe in very difficult. It makes it harder to shape and create the life I want for myself, independent of the expectations of the status quo. Privately, when I feel I have not been a ‘good girl’, it’s hard not to crumble under the weight of the guilt. There is a way Damian is smart, and it seems similar to the way Vincent is smart. They knew well enough how to dot the i’s and cross the t’s for their grades at school, but they also didn’t feel that school was actually measuring their intelligence. They didn’t respect the system the way I did: with a blind and eager curtsy.

Then there is the evidence that, while boys thrive in coeducational settings, girls do better at single-sex schools. Not only do they achieve more academically, they also graduate with higher self-esteem and are more able to perceive their own strengths accurately. There are a whole lot of uncomfortable conclusions we can come to when we look at this type of data to do with the differing treatment of girls and boys in educational settings by peers, teachers, and institutional structures.

Should I bother discussing the terrifying stories that come out of some of this country’s richest boys’ schools? The rapey and racist things that have always gone on but are only more recently being caught on camera? In the same month in mid-2020 that the Sydney Morning Herald ran an editorial titled ‘The teenage brain is a work-in-progress. Remember that when blaming the Shore students’, this country also refused to raise the age of criminal culpability, meaning ten-year-olds could be arrested by police, held in custody, convicted, and imprisoned. Around 65 per cent of the children under fourteen on court orders or in jail in Australia are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. According to a 2017 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, three in five children aged ten at the time of their first youth justice supervision were also in child protection, and the rates of pre-existing trauma are high. So it would seem that rich sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who think it’s funny to spit on homeless people and assault women are just ‘naughty’ but eleven- and twelve-year-olds coming through institutionalised care, who are poor, who have already been catastrophically let down, are ‘criminals’.

•

As is so often the case, Australia’s treatment of its most marginalised groups reveals the misplaced priorities and deep fissures within our systems. The treatment of children with disability in Australian schools is nowhere near good enough. In 2019, a survey of 500 young people with disability, and families of students with disability, was published by Children and Young People with Disability Australia. Its results showed 12 per cent of students with a disability were being refused school enrolment. Discrimination like this is illegal. Only in extreme cases—when it threatens an ‘undue burden’ or ‘unjustifiable hardship’—can a child be refused access to a school. Research I’ve seen consistently shows that students who both do and do not have disabilities benefit from an ‘inclusive education’ approach rather than segregation. Trends in Australia, however, seem to be moving further away from this, with private and religious schools perpetuating ‘selective’ entrance criteria and increasing attendance rates at separate ‘special schools’. Article 24 of the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognises the right of people with disability to access education without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity. Teaching children with special needs in a mixed-ability class is normally part of a teacher’s training, but in Australia teachers often report feeling unprepared and under-resourced to do so.

The seventh public hearing in the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability started in October 2020 and was focused on schooling. The public hearing would ‘explore the barriers experienced by students with disability in accessing and obtaining a safe, quality and inclusive school education and the resulting impacts on the life course of those students, and their families, when these barriers prevent access to equitable education’. It is a sad thing, to read all the words in the title of the commission itself—Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation—and to know that those things are being experienced by children at schools. During that week, the commission heard from more than twenty witnesses describing barriers to education for children with disability in what are usually described as ‘mainstream’ or general schools. In 2019, 95 per cent of students with disability—which is over 745,000 kids—attended mainstream schools. Another disturbing theme that emerged was children being given psychotropic drugs to control or reduce what are perceived as behavioural issues.

In his opening statement, the chair, Ronald Sackville AO QC, said:

Dr Armstrong, from whom we shall hear today, explains that what he calls the ‘manage and discipline model’ does not work for children with disability. He argues that this model needs to be replaced with one that provides positive behavioural support for students with disability who are perceived to be creating behavioural difficulties. Other witnesses, including children with disability, their families, and advocates, will refer to evidence demonstrating the adverse and sometimes catastrophic effects of repeated suspensions or expulsions on children subjected to punitive or disciplinary regimes.

In her opening address, the counsel assisting, Dr Kerri Mellifont QC, described children ‘whose needs are not being met, who become disengaged, frustrated or anxious’, and how this causes behaviours which are perceived as ‘challenging’ or ‘disruptive’. Mellifont said, ‘The evidence of witnesses and public data suggests that the use of suspensions is disproportionately employed against students with disability in Australia.’

A woman identified only as Amy spoke about the experience of her son, Sam, who had just turned ten. ‘Two days into Sam’s second term of kindergarten, aged only 5 years, he was suspended for the first time. During his third term of kindergarten, he spent almost half the school term, or 24 days, suspended. In that term he attended only 16 days of school.’ This is a kid in kindergarten. The parents tried to persuade the school to offer supports instead of suspensions, but things only grew worse. The school routinely used a fence to segregate Sam from his peers. ‘He was being sent to a locked playground,’ Amy said, and the school was ‘trying to clock up the suspensions to get the expulsion’.

Sam’s autism meant he displayed emotions differently from others. When he became afraid, for example, he would laugh or try to run away. Some of the teachers insisted he ‘knew what he was doing’. Commissioner Sackville noted that Sam’s behaviour was described by school authorities as ‘deliberately’ aggressive, but ‘[u]nder the general law, a child under the age of 10, and people say that should be 14, can’t be responsible by way of criminal law and here is a five year old, six year old, characterised as deliberately kicking and deliberately engaging in aggressive behaviour.’

The commission heard from Maria Scharnke, a cognitively gifted year twelve student with autism and other disabilities, that students with disability were being ‘locked out’ of tertiary education, because they weren’t supported to obtain ATAR scores. After years of testing as a young child, Scharnke was diagnosed with autism at the age of six, but her teacher simply refused to believe it. ‘She refused to believe that autism existed and claimed I was just a naughty child who needed to be disciplined.’

A woman with disability referred to only as Alice told the commission:

Still, this inequality is far less when compared to the blatant injustice that many of us still experience even before school starts—the struggle that is the process of enrolment. It was shown in a Senate inquiry completed in 2016 that many schools refuse or subtly try to turn away students with 40 disabilities on the grounds that they cannot provide the student appropriate education because of the ‘special needs’ or any ‘challenges’ that might occur with that student.

In an article published on The Conversation in 2016, academics Linda Graham, Helen Proctor, and Roselyn Dixon write about how schools avoid enrolling children with disabilities despite anti-discrimination laws and standards.

While all schools must adhere to these standards, due to a lack of knowledge about their responsibilities under the legislation, some schools have developed ways to get around this. As part of their enrolment application process, some private schools request copies of prospective students’ NAPLAN (literacy and numeracy) results. The reason given is often innocuous, such as using the results to determine class placements and support availability, but there is also a high likelihood that a child with a poor NAPLAN record will not be offered a place.

Parents have no recourse when it comes to private schools in particular, because there is no transparency or oversight of their admissions processes. Private schools can require student interviews and admission exams, then simply decline based on whatever grounds they choose. Graham et al write: ‘These are all formal processes, advertised on websites and school prospectuses. But there are many more informal practices designed to present barriers to the enrolment of particular students.’ The informal practices are even more insidious. School personnel will ‘quietly inform’ parents that their child would be ‘better supported’ elsewhere. Or the child will be suspended frequently or for long periods, essentially forcing them out. Some schools even pressure parents to make individual financial payments to cover the cost of extra support services, or limit the days on which the child with disability can attend school to the days on which support services are paid for with disability allowances. How can some schools have rifle ranges and scuba tanks while others refuse to provide a child with five days of lessons because it’s ‘too expensive’?

‘Reasonable adjustments’ expected of schools might include things like changing seating arrangements in a classroom so that a student with a wheelchair can move around independently, or using videos with captions for Deaf students. An education provider has to show why making an adjustment for a student would be ‘unjustifiably hard’ in order to explicitly refuse to teach the child.

•

In the middle of this research I was asked to explain to a small group of people what this book was going to be about, and I did my best. A woman had a question. ‘Are you going to talk about how there are actually many different types of intelligences?’ This woman had two children and she said that they did ‘fine’ at school, but they weren’t excelling, and that this was because the school did not recognise the ways in which her children were intelligent. The school only privileged ‘this one very narrow idea of intelligence’. I held my tongue, but I was thinking, of course schools only encourage what is testable. The more top-percentile scores their students attain, the better placed they are to promote themselves as a results-driven institution—meaning they can charge more and select the cream of the crop of kids. Later, I thought about the woman’s kids. They must come home with report cards that their mother thinks are ‘fine’. She seemed disappointed with ‘fine’. I wondered if her kids sensed that disappointment.

A couple of months later I met another woman, also a mother, and a conversation with her gave me pause. Her kid, now in his twenties, was gifted and dyslexic. The woman told me that they’d had the child’s IQ tested and his score was incredibly high, yet his schools wouldn’t recognise the type of teaching and guidance people with dyslexia required, and so they were essentially calling her kid ‘stupid’. When she tried to communicate with his first school they brushed her off, and she could tell what they were thinking: ‘Oh, here’s another mum who thinks her kid is special and needs special treatment.’ But the thing is, this woman literally did have a special kid who needed special treatment. As I listened to her story I thought about how prejudiced a system it must be that didn’t want a super-smart kid who was just a bit different. All these schools I’d been reading about—didn’t they want super-smart kids? And then I thought about the first, defensive mum, and about how she’d worded her complaint. Perhaps I had been harsh or narrow-minded.

Talking to these women was how I found out about Green School in Bali. I approached it with scepticism. A large and richly-coloured coffee-table book called Grow, produced by people from the school, introduced me to several of the families whose children attended Green School. It seemed a bit hippy-dippy to me. The educational plan combined approaches from Australia and Singapore, but was also derived from Steiner schooling, which prioritises creativity and imagination, allowing the learning process to be student-led. I’d heard plenty of stories about kids flourishing in these systems but also horror stories about kids not meeting basic literacy and numeracy milestones because they preferred finger painting. Steiner theories are easy to criticise, and waves of ‘vaccine hesitancy’ among the parents doesn’t help their public image, but the self-directed style allows bright and supported kids to excel.

Green School was established in 2008 by John and Cynthia Hardy with principles founded on sustainability. The school doesn’t have walls. Comments on their site such as, ‘We want children to develop spiritual awareness and emotional intuition, and to encourage them to be in awe of life’s possibilities,’ make me nervous. The kids do pretty amazing conservation and environmental work, which is awesome, but I wanted to know whether this ‘freedom’ the adults kept talking about extended to the children’s ‘freedom’ to be accepted into a good university if they wanted. In the school’s 2017–2018 annual report they write: ‘The unique Green School Diploma has grown in recognition and our graduating class of 18 students were sought after by over 60 visiting universities during the year.’ What did that mean? At least their curriculum had been approved by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and their Alumni page featured students who’d gone on to UCLA and Cornell.

I found the most compelling testament to the efficacy of Green School in the book Grow. A woman named Daniela writes about her family’s experience with mainstream schooling:

… I was almost in tears stuck in front of an email. The school the boys went to informed us that Guido, like his brother, should move from his classroom into a small group for special needs students because of his learning delays. We had spent the previous four years researching the fields of learning, motor and speech disorders, exposing the boys to all sorts of assessments, therapies, and special education programs in Singapore. We wondered who was wrong: the system or our family? … After just a couple of months at Green School, Guido was able to read and copy with assigned homework. The light of joy and curiosity was back in the boys’ eyes, and they could not be more enthusiastic about their life and friends.

So what are we looking at here? A school that’s both a bit hippy and incredibly effective? How do teachers and principals at mainstream schools in Australia—the ones that are stretched thin looking after all the disadvantaged kids with less money—know whether a parent frustrated because their child is only doing ‘fine’, or maybe less than ‘fine’, has a ‘valid’ or ‘invalid’ complaint? Is it possible to simultaneously communicate to children that they are not defined by their academic results, that being in a special needs classroom doesn’t make them ‘lesser’, and yet have parents fighting hard for their children to get exclusive experiences and treatment that allows them to achieve better grades? Not every child can be super-smart, and that’s a-okay, but every child has the right to try to be. That’s the philosophy, but what does it look like in practice?

In a 2013 essay for The Monthly called ‘The secret life of them’, Alice Pung wrote about the aspirations of one family and what it takes to shift classes upwards in Australia:

At age ten, Tina was enrolled at a popular coaching college, one with more than 40 branches across Australia. Every Thursday after school, Tina would take a three-hour scholarship-preparation class. ‘I sat in a classroom and did a maths and an English test, followed by two writing pieces,’ Tina explains. ‘For an extra $25 you could also do an abstract-reasoning test. They run the tests through a machine and tah-dah, you have your results and self-worth all summed up in a pretty blue graph.’

Pung went along to one of the tutor company’s information sessions:

The woman who gave the presentation (and ran the company) had the demeanour of the kind of old-fashioned school mistress who would post the results of every student on the board at the end of each week. She spoke as if addressing a much larger audience and urged parents to find schools that filtered the brightest students from the rest … Finally, the presenter reminded parents that before a student embarked on this month-long program of practice tests, her company offered a three-and-a-half-hour pre-practice test—at a cost of $150—to judge whether the child should even bother.

Tina described her scholarship classes as ‘soul-crushing’. Is this what we are doing to our children? Where does our care about them end and our harming of them begin? The overlap is too large. Pung writes: ‘Over the six months I spend getting to know her, Tina’s self-esteem seems precariously balanced between soaring confidence and debilitating anxiety. This is the price paid by a constantly coached student: underneath all that stoicism, there is a quiet resentment at being forced into a system that judges you by very narrow parameters.’ Tina’s younger sister ends up getting a bigger, better scholarship. ‘“She did better than me,” says Tina with a half-laugh, half-sigh.’

Pung’s essay explores and explains the experiences of many first-generation migrant families. But the use of private tutors and the aspirational class are true of many families in Australia. ‘Indeed, when Julia Gillard declared that the Asian Century begins in the classroom, coaching colleges were hardly what she meant. Amy Chua’s controversial book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, raised an unsettling question about education: is giftedness inherent, or is it all about the hard slog?’

There is still a simmering resentment towards so-called ‘tiger mums’ in this country, driven by a fear that ‘regular Aussie kids’ will be elbowed out of good school spots by migrant kids with pushy parents. It’s extraordinary that this resentment is directed at people trying to win a rigged lottery, rather than Australians being more willing to scrutinise the system itself. It can cost a lot of money for these tutors and programs. Is it ‘unfair’ if kids who do those programs, sink all those after-school and weekend hours into extra studies, get the scholarship spots? Surely it’s no less fair than kids with rich folks and ‘old boys’ surnames getting the spots without having to study at all.

Pung writes about Box Hill High previously being a working-class college, ‘But its SEAL program has done more than just revitalise the school; it has helped change the demographics of a suburb. In 1996, the median house price in Box Hill was $150,000. Yet as more and more parents moved to be within the school zone, property prices soared. In 2001 the median house price was $280,000. Ten years later it was $960,000.’

This connection between real estate and schooling cannot be overstated. Even if schools’ current discrimination practices were stamped out, we would still be leaning on the catchment-zone eligibility process, which of course is just a different type of capital-specific social stratification. Australians are obsessed by real estate and postcodes. Special research by the International Monetary Fund from 2019 showed that of the 22 ‘most developed’ nations in the world, Australia has the fourth-biggest gap between rich and poor regions. It’s no coincidence that the two types of schools the Gonski report showed needed extra funding were small and regional schools.

A 2019 study from the University of Canberra titled ‘Still Winning? Social inequity in the NSW senior secondary curriculum hierarchy’, by Philip Roberts, Jenny Dean, and Garrett Lommatsch, found that students at high schools in New South Wales choose subjects that correlate to their socioeconomic status, and the result is that rich kids do ‘smarter’ subjects which get them better ATAR scores.

‘This system increasingly funnels low socio-economic status, and non-metropolitan, students into subjects with lower average achievement levels and into vocational education subjects. To improve equity, we need to ensure all students have access to higher-status powerful subjects or ensure all subjects are valued equally.’

The school’s location and the student’s gender also play a powerful role in determining what subjects they choose.

Each year’s HSC exam is drafted by a committee and reviewed by a specialist team with mixed roles, and it goes through several stages before it is put before a cohort. Googling around this stuff is pretty depressing. Forums are packed with anxious young people, and companies make big money from tutoring specifically for the exam. Richard Chua, the founder of a tutoring company called Talent 100, who himself got a perfect score, says the HSC doesn’t just measure intelligence; rather, ‘It’s a test of competitiveness—an ability to combine natural talent with preparedness, hard work and the ability to perform under pressure.’

A dude from Art of Smart writes, ‘Research shows that performance has got nothing to do with IQ. There’s no correlation between IQ and performance at school.’ I’m not sure what research he was referring to.

The most frustrating thing to read is how many people insist that ‘effort’ is what matters most. How many times do we hear this? People telling themselves they could have done better but they just didn’t put the ‘effort’ in? That exams scores are more about ‘effort’ than intelligence? When I see the word ‘effort’ I just think privilege. Some children get home from school and go straight to work; some get home late because they live a long way from their school; some get home from school and care for siblings or parents. Of course we should reward hard workers, but we can’t just replace ‘exams measure intelligence’ with ‘exams measure effort’. Neither is entirely true. Some countries don’t give kids homework at all because they know it can exacerbate disadvantage. At Talent 100 you can take courses to help prepare for the HSC as early as year seven, provided you have $595 for English and $595 for maths. Once you get to year twelve, annual fees are about $5000 per subject. Is that what we call ‘effort’ these days? I shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve always conflated money with ‘merit’.

•

I wonder, is it possible to level education out, rather than up or down? So much of Australia’s identity is about ‘battlers’ and ‘hard yakka’ and the dream that holds upward mobility to its heart. The ‘drift’ reveals this in all its ugly ramifications. If you believe that the education system, from preschool through to postgrad, should be a free market with higher pay for higher services and healthy competition, then you believe that children, as consumers, should be winners and losers. Given the state of the system, I’m not sure it’s as simple as declaring that a conscientious parent who sends their child to a private school is a hypocrite. In so much of my reading, the defensiveness of many middle-class Australian parents is coming from somewhere close to the right place: they want to be able to use all the resources at their disposal to give their kids the best start in life. That’s wonderful—but the government shouldn’t be making national or state-wide policy decisions with the same logic or language as a wealthy parent with a wealthy child. A parent feels a duty to put their child above others; the state has a duty to treat all children equally.

Many parents want to be able to use their money to give their child an advantage. They feel they have worked hard to earn enough for tutors and catchment zones, expecting that when they purchase private schooling they are buying and bolstering privilege. Of course they push back against suggestions that things should change in order to help more people. They understood the system was a competition and they were going to make their children the winners. If your goal is for your children to remain in the same class as you or move up into a higher class and you think you may achieve it, then why would you want to flatten the class system? You cannot climb the kyriarchal pyramid while you dismantle it.

A 2018 report by the OECD found that it took a poor person in Denmark two generations to reach average income, a poor person in Sweden three generations, and a poor person in England at least five, or 150 years. Australia sits at around four generations. ‘Social mobility’ is one of our nation’s great creation myths. If we keep telling ourselves this story—that there is a simple, causative relationship between effort in education and upward mobility—we will never understand that there are people who spend their whole lives working hard and never get a shot at real power or privilege. Kids at small and regional schools are the ‘losers’ whose parents couldn’t figure out their finances. Of course they won’t go on to study law or medicine. Of course the policies that govern their lives need to be managed for them by men in Canberra who know better. Not only all this, but the men in Canberra are in charge because they deserve to be. It is right that they are. They arrived at their positions by hard work and merit, having passed many expensive milestones and placed each subsequent ornamental pot on their mantle. The fact that they are up there, and you are down here, is as it should be.

4

Science

I had only recently moved from Brisbane to Sydney when, in May 2019, I attended the Australian Book Industry Awards. I was enjoying flutes of bubbles when an early category winner, ‘Picture Book of the Year (Ages 0–6)’, was announced. All the Ways to be Smart, written by Davina Bell and illustrated by Allison Colpoys, was a beautiful book I had seen prominently displayed in bookshops in the preceding months. Bell took the stage to accept the award, and spoke about the huge number of positive responses the book had received from both parents and children. What made me lower my flute was when she mentioned that the book was inspired by the theories of a man called Howard Gardner, and I swear she said that ‘his theory has kind of been disproved now’, but that it nonetheless was an important perspective that clearly resonated with people.

How breathtakingly ironic. If I understood correctly, this author had just said that her book for children, a book teaching them about different ways to be smart, was based on faulty research findings. My mind blossomed into derisive thoughts. It was my defensive spark diverting attention from a personal truth. I had seen the title and been delighted by its premise. Naturally, I would relish a big, bright book full of pictures reassuring me that I was not dumb or stupid or unintelligent, just a ‘different kind of smart’.

After that night, I went and did a bit of reading about Gardner. His 1983 book Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences outlines eight kinds of intelligence, including the rather exciting-sounding musical-rhythmic intelligence as well as the more familiar verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical. Gardner theorised that there were only weak correlations among them. It seemed as though he’d created his own complex taxonomy of skills, adapting the old ‘everybody is good at different things’ to the very appealing ‘everybody is smart in different ways’. His approach has been widely celebrated—birthing countless other theories and a booming industry of psychological-sounding self-help and life-hacking books—but it’s also been quite comprehensively criticised. Those who appreciate his work seem relieved to see a possibility of widening the types of brains we celebrate and reward. Others maintain that these kinds of ‘intelligence’ are really just describing a range of talents, abilities, and skills. Is someone with high ‘bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence’ who has excellent hand-eye coordination and motor control best understood as ‘smart’? Gardner’s lack of empirical evidence and inability to test for what he calls ‘intelligences’ has also been condemned, and plenty of people suggest that they could pick almost any competency or ability and then create their own definition and theory of ‘intelligence’ to fit it. Gardner writes, ‘I balk at the unwarranted assumption that certain human abilities can be arbitrarily singled out as intelligence.’ It would seem he is doing that very thing, but casting a wider net.

History offers us a veritable cornucopia of Men of Science developing novel taxonomies of all kinds of phenomena. They like making categories and labels for things, ordering things and grouping things, then giving their theories exciting new names—often their own names. How could any of us have known our needs were arranged in a hierarchy until Maslow came along? Thank goodness his extraordinary objectivity across cultures has given us the universal ‘Maslow Hierarchy of Needs’.

If I had to name my own taxonomy, for the record, it would be Lee’s Ode to Often Overlooked Intelligences. The first would be sense of humour. Not all smart people are funny, bless their souls, but most funny people are smart. They ‘get’ things. They know what we’re afraid of, and they know how to subvert our expectations. They understand important things like humiliation and belonging, and they know timing is everything.

The second of the Often Overlooked Intelligences is being good with money. Being good with money isn’t about how much money you start with, it’s about understanding the difference between your desires and your needs, and having the ability to think for both the now and the then and the just-in-case. It’s about planning for the rest of the family unit or whoever is relying on you and understanding how your part of the financial world fits into the bigger world of real estate, policy, and banking. ‘Thrifty’ saves families. ‘Prudent’ can help secure the future. Understanding yourself and the people around you well enough to know when money does, and doesn’t, correspond to happiness is vital.

I’m not sure how you could think ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’ is a type of intelligence but ‘funny’ and ‘thrifty’ aren’t. I think it’s illuminating that none of the various Men of Science who’ve developed new taxonomies of intelligences seem to care as much as I do about such things.

All the Ways to be Smart is a wonderful book, and I wish I believed its message. ‘Smart is kindness when there’s crying,’ one page reads, with an illustration of a boy holding a flower, his arm around a weepy green dinosaur. It’s full of beautiful and encouraging sentiments, but the problem I have with this book and with theories like Gardner’s is that they contribute to our society’s prioritising of ‘smarts’ above all other traits. We ascribe moral value to brains. I do not believe kindness and generosity are actually ‘ways to be smart’, and I think it’s sad that we need to re-categorise interpersonal skills and acts of humanity as ‘smarts’ in order to get people to value them. When I was a child—and to be honest probably even now—an adult could have called me selfish, unaware of the natural world or bad at sports and music, and it would never have had the same fundamental sting as if they’d said I was stupid. We ascribe an intrinsic sense of worth and goodness to intelligence, yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if we were all a little more giving and a little less ‘smart’. I do believe that Gardner and I ‘balk’ at a similar thing: the allocation of worth to a human being based on one, narrow metric. But we disagree on the way forward from this.

According to Gardner, an intelligence is ‘a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture’. If I disagreed with that, what would I suggest in its place? What did all the scientists who disagreed with Gardner offer as an alternative? This was how I came to learn about ‘g’.

Put very simply, the ‘general intelligence factor’, expressed as g, describes, with a truckload of successfully replicated studies, how most people do have a level of capability that is similar across different intellectual tasks and exercises. It is a variable. Behavioural genetics research suggests g is an inheritable trait—at least in part, as with most things—and can have huge ramifications for people’s education, employment, and social prospects. You can find out your g factor through a range of cognitive ability tests: memory, spatial reasoning and awareness, vocabulary, response and reaction time etc. Most properly administered IQ tests these days are a combination of these different areas of cognitive ability, and so a real IQ test (not the ones you do for free on the internet) will also indicate your likely g. While the existence of g is now relatively uncontroversial, we know a whole lot less about how or why we are like this.

Importantly, there are also two schools of thought about what g actually is and how we should speak about it. I like the way Eric Turkheimer, the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, explains it in a 2017 episode of The Psychology Podcast:

What the g factor definitely is—and I think the question is whether it’s more than this—but what I think it indisputably is, is a statistical construct that describes the fact that ability tests, very broadly, are positively correlated with each other … There comes a theoretical fork in the road in the history of thinking about intelligence. One school of thought about intelligence—and I think probably it’s safe to say the ‘dominant’ school of thought about intelligence that goes back to Charles Spearman—says that this statistical g thing that describes the positive correlation among a whole bunch of ability tests must represent some kind of actual thing inside human beings that causes those tests to go together—something in our brain that represents g, something in our genes that represents g. I don’t agree with that conclusion. I think it’s much better to think of g as a descriptive thing, rather than a causal thing. G is a way of describing the way mental tests go together, not a way of explaining why mental tests go together.

Turkheimer expresses some healthy scepticism that g could be a quality inside us, given the strong correlations between g and socioeconomic status. When children are adopted from poor homes and taken into rich homes, for example, their IQ scores go up. Whereas the people Turkheimer disagrees with—the ones who believe that g is this one true fundamental type of ‘intelligence’—suggest that people with higher g go on to have richer and longer lives because of their superior abilities.

When I started reading about g and IQ testing, I came across a podcast called G produced by Radiolab and New York Public Radio. It’s a six-part exploration of ‘one of the most dangerous ideas of the past century: the concept of intelligence’. It confirmed what I’d been afraid of—both within myself and in our society: that as soon as we see the opportunity to rate people’s ‘intelligence’, we categorise and make judgements about the worth of the human beings themselves. Hindsight shows that at every single historical stage of the development of intelligence testing, eugenicists appear. White supremacy shivers with excitement at the possibility of ‘empirical’ evidence to support its claim to the top of the pyramid.

Picture this: France, 1904. Church and state were separating, the government was taking over control of the schools, and the number of students spiked as attendance was made mandatory. Within a short time, the schools noticed some children falling behind. They brought in Alfred Binet, the director of experimental psychology at the University of Paris, and asked him to help identify which students were struggling so they could better allocate resources to those who needed more help. The podcast hosts use the phrase ‘benign intentions’ to describe what followed. This was the first time anyone had tried to find and place a numerical value on the intelligence of a human. Binet came up with a scoring system—essentially the world’s first IQ test—that quantified a child’s abilities according to their age. He urged authorities to refrain from using the score to define the children, maintaining that to do so would be a ‘brutal pessimism’ and that our intelligence is more malleable than fixed.

In 1908, Henry Goddard, an American psychologist and eugenicist, translated Binet’s test and work into English. The results were as catastrophic as you could imagine. Forced sterilisation for the ‘feeble-minded’, for a start. Then—inevitably—it became about borders. In 1913, Goddard ran an intelligence-testing program on Ellis Island, the nation’s busiest immigration inspection station, through which approximately 12 million people arrived between 1892 and 1954. His work was one important part in a large movement to ‘control the border’. Intellectuals and officials were worried about the contamination of ‘White American blood’. Newspaper clippings from the time show that many of these Men of Science and society, most of them attached to prestigious institutions and some facet of the Academy, claimed to have the best interests of their nation at heart when they pointed to the ‘provable’ inferiority of others. When Goddard published the results of his Ellis Island work in 1917, he noted that his findings only applied to immigrants in steerage, not those travelling in first or second class. The conflation of money and intelligence, of knowledge and power, of class and meritocracy, has always been with us. Professors from Stanford University spoke about poverty ‘in the blood’.

By the 1960s and 70s, people in the US were pointing out that the IQ tests being administered at schools were demonstrably ‘culturally specific’—i.e. racist—and had devastating results for the civil rights movement and the fight against segregation. For years African Americans were scoring about 15 per cent lower than white Americans. An example cited on G was that children would be asked what they should do if they found a wallet on the floor in the supermarket. White kids knew the ‘right’ answer was to hand it to the manager or police; plenty of Black kids had been taught that they’d probably get arrested if they went to any authority figure holding a wallet that wasn’t theirs, so their answer was to just leave it where they saw it. These tests had significant ramifications for kids’ lives from the 1930s to the 1980s. It’s easy to imagine how these ‘quantitative’ and ‘scientific’ results of their ‘inferiority’ fuelled the racist policies that white supremacists in government were itching to implement.

The best resource for understanding the ongoing fight against eugenicists, and how that fight continues even now, is Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini. First and foremost it always bears repeating: ‘race’ is a cultural construct, not a biological fact. No matter how you try to carve up the world’s people, by ‘region’ or ‘country’, there are always more genetic differences between people within these groups than between the groups themselves; racial categories are not scientific. As Saini writes, ‘Race is at its heart the belief that we are born different, deep inside our bodies, perhaps even in character and intellect, as well as in outward appearance.’ And to be absolutely clear, ‘There is no gene or variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another.’ That eugenicists in successive generations keep trying to find some ‘proof’ that the cognitive abilities of one ‘race’ might differ from another proves the extent to which we equate an individual’s worth with their ‘intelligence’. I doubt the Academy would have spent so much money or spilled so much blood in a competition to ascertain, once and for all, which ‘race’ was more patient or affectionate.

Saini also writes about how history shows us that ‘it’s only a small leap from believing in cultural superiority to believing in biological superiority, that a group’s achievements are due to their innate capacities’. Tony Abbott really nailed his Southern Cross flag to that mast with his observation in Quadrant that ‘cultures might not all be equal’. More than 100 scientists and diplomats gathered in Paris in 1949 and, together with UNESCO, redefined ‘race’ with a complete statement about there being ‘no proof that groups of people differed in their innate mental characteristics, including intelligence and temperament’.

The initial idea that race was some kind of fixed fact about a person gradually emerged from the same time and place as the Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is famous for his taxonomies of the natural world, but in his 1758 work Systema Naturae he went one step further and put humans into four categories he invented: Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, which corresponded to the colours red, white, yellow, and black. After that, Saini notes, ‘categorising humans became a never-ending business’, and for Men of Science and the Academy, business boomed. Some theorised there were two races, others more than a dozen. Whoever wanted to could make up his own new taxonomy and name it whatever he pleased, maybe his own name. As Saini adds, ‘If it’s possible to categorise, we assume, there must be something to the categories.’ It’s not just an unfortunate coincidence that the birth of race science was happening in ‘the heyday of European colonialism, when those in power had already decided on their superiority’. Governments and powerful colonialists encouraged it. Sometimes the scientists were the colonisers. Their relationship was, as it were, symbiotic. Captain James Cook’s infamous Endeavour voyage was originally commissioned by the Royal Society of London as a scientific mission. ‘Time and time again, science provided the intellectual authority for racism, just as it had helped define race to begin with.’

Most people hear the word ‘eugenics’ and think ‘Nazis’, for good reason, but it’s important to acknowledge not just how Nazism encouraged eugenics, but how eugenicists encouraged Nazism. The ‘bigger truth’ Saini documents is how ‘the well of scientific ideas from which Hitler and others in his regime drew their plans for “racial hygiene”, leading ultimately to genocide, didn’t originate in Germany alone’. It was a worldwide well, filled by scientists from around the globe, supported by governments, the aristocracy, and the Academy. One of the most influential thinkers was biologist Francis Galton. ‘He coined the term [eugenics] in 1883 from the Greek prefix “eu” for “well” or “good”, to describe the idea of using social control to improve the health and intelligence of future generations … he dreamed of a “utopia” of highly bred super people, and he made creating one his lifelong mission.’ The Academy backed him to the hilt: in 1904, the University of London established the world’s first Eugenics Records Office. He was supported by University College London, and—oh, look: the department was known as the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. Unsurprisingly, before he got into science, Galton’s father’s lavish estates had funded his work as an ‘explorer’.

In the years leading up to the rise of Nazism, eugenics was pretty popular. Attitudes towards the categorisation of people, and goals for better breeding, were applied to undesirables of many kinds: the feeble-minded, criminals, and homosexuals included. Winston Churchill was a vice-president at the first International Eugenics Congress at the University of London. And the race scientists didn’t just disappear after World War II. They airbrushed their CVs and pivoted to genetics or renamed their departments. If anyone wanted to continue studying race they moved from ‘science’ to ‘social science’, and began using words such as ‘populations’ or ‘ethnic groups’ or ‘human biodiversity’. A Eugenic Protection Law established in Japan in 1948 ‘to sterilise those with mental illness and physical disabilities’ was only repealed in 1996. Journalist Corey Johnson discovered that doctors at the California Department of Corrections were sterilising inmates, possibly by coercion, until 2010.

One man who refused to pivot sufficiently or get with the lingo after the war was Reginald Ruggles Gates, who complained his area of expertise was being ‘politicised’. In 1960, he and a few others who considered themselves ‘the defenders of truth’ founded the journal Mankind Quarterly, which continues—even now—to publish and elevate the opinions of race scientists. It’s an example of how different elements of the Academy, even fringe elements, bolster each other. In 1966 one of the editors argued that Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans being ‘wiped out’ by European colonisers was a ‘natural outcome of biology’. Financial support for the publication came from powerful and secretive people, including a multi-millionaire called Wickliffe Draper who had vested financial interests in segregation. Draper also founded the Pioneer Society, which actively sought out scientists and academics to provide them with research grants and publication opportunities. This isn’t ‘history’. Between 1982 and 2000 the Pioneer Fund gave USD$1.5 million to lobbying groups fighting for immigration reform, and in 2018 tax records showed they’d disbursed nearly $7.8 million between 1998 and 2016.

These shady channels of financing are reminiscent of the Centre for Independent Studies’ operations in terms of the opacity of who is funding the ‘research reports’ that then influence or excuse policies favourable to silent donors. Saini notes ‘the Pioneer Fund has been mostly silent of late’, referring to the last couple of years, however there exists a ‘cadre of researchers, some with very few academic credentials, who are still publishing and citing each other’s research’ through various publications and institutions. These people reside on the margins, kept at an effective simmer by generous bequests from racist businessmen who know that when the time is right, the government will be more likely to listen to their lobbying if they have some ‘research’ backing them. Saini explains:

Mankind Quarterly was never designed to be read by scientists or shape the future of research. It was always a platform for those seeking intellectual ballast for their political views. What is of concern, then, is what it represents. As a publication, it’s a barometer for intellectual racism. Should it or its contributors become popular, then we will know that something is wrong. And in the last ten years, its impact factor has been on average higher than it was in the preceding decade.

A 2018 investigation by London Student revealed that the two editors of Mankind Quarterly at the time, Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg, had been hosting invitation-only conferences at University College London since 2014. Scientific American noted that Charles Murray, one of the authors of the infamously racist book Bell Curve, was enjoying ‘an unfortunate resurgence’. Bell Curve cites numerous articles from Mankind Quarterly. In 2016, far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos told a Bloomberg reporter, ‘Behind every racist joke is a scientific fact.’ The way these people have gathered power and influence in the last few years is testament not only to their strengths, but to the weaknesses of politicians, the media, and the Academy in combating them. In 2018, the New York Times reported that the latest craze among white supremacists was ‘milk chugging’, apparently ‘to demonstrate a genetic adaptation shared by many Europeans that allows adults to digest milk’. These people are so thrilled when they think they’ve found a scientific fact to justify their ideology. For the record, digesting milk is a trait shared by various non-white populations who also kept dairy cattle. These milk chuggers call themselves ‘race realists’. They believe they are the ones defending science.

Saini offers the gradual knowledge-gathering about our ancestors the Neanderthals as an interesting example of modern and insidious prejudice within the Academy. ‘For more than a century the word “Neanderthal” had been synonymous with low intelligence,’ she explains, citing a number of cruel comparisons drawn between Indigenous Australians and Neanderthals. Then, when in 2010 genetic testing revealed that ‘Europeans’ had more shared ancestry with Neanderthals than most other population groups, ‘there was a flurry of excitement’ in scientific circles and the media. Within a decade, scientists were using words like ‘sophisticated’ to describe Neanderthals, and the New York Times asked: ‘Why did science get them so wrong?’ Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, people are using the platforms and the language of science and the Academy to justify their beliefs in their intellectual superiority.

•

In his 2020 book, The Idea of the Brain, biologist Matthew Cobb argues that our reliance on metaphor to explain the brain actually hinders our ability to understand it. Throughout history, scientists and philosophers have leaned on the latest technological advancements—hydraulics, clocks, telegraphs, computers—to find terminology and points of reference with which people are familiar. Currently, we often refer to the brain as akin to a computer, but we’ve almost outgrown this metaphor too.

Cobb is wary of overstating our progress in understanding the organ. We don’t really know what is happening when we remember, we only know a little about what’s going on when we see, and our knowledge of how antidepressants work is ‘virtually non-existent’. His book examines some of the ways in which morality and ideology have always filled the vast gaps in our knowledge about the brain. Descartes’s ideas were clouded by imaginings of the divine in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, Julien Offray de La Mettrie took a more secular approach with comparisons to machines. The nineteenth century was all jumbled up with the pseudoscience of phrenology and the collective hysteria of ‘suppressed’ memories and desires. Cobb’s most interesting contribution is an explanation of how our limited use of language and metaphor about the brain affects what experiments and inquiries scientists choose to undertake—decisions which, in turn, affect understandings. Language and culture skew science. Researchers who aren’t careful with their words not only risk exacerbating a wide spectrum of prejudices, but they risk expanding or limiting the imaginations of future researchers.

In the second episode of the podcast G, Indian-American physician and author Siddhartha Mukherjee describes how the words we use for science and medicine affect the way the concepts are understood by the general population, noting:

the word ‘intelligence’ is a colloquial word. It has been defined through social and cultural practice. There is something captured on the IQ test called g. I don’t have a problem with g. Maybe it sends a shiver down my spine because of human history. I don’t have a problem with it fundamentally. It’s a fact. But I do have an argument [against] making a simple one-to-one translation between that idea and this thing, this word that carries so much value and meaning. The word being ‘intelligence’.

To describe what g is, Mukherjee uses the example of the ability to navigate in problem space. ‘Sometimes an analogy helps, which is, you meet a person who is a good general athlete … they have a particular way of manipulating themselves through space, because they understand physical space.’ Now translate that to mental space: how quickly and accurately can you create and move ideas, pictures, and numbers around in your mind?

I thought the analogy Mukherjee made between g and physical fitness was the best articulation of g until I heard Eric Turkheimer’s on the Psychology Today podcast.

Turkheimer’s contention—that g is a descriptive word rather than a quality inside us—is easy to understand when compared to health.

Let’s say you took a whole bunch of medical measurements [lung capacity, blood pressure etc.] from people and got correlations among all of those things; they would be, I would imagine, positively correlated. Maybe not quite as positively correlated as mental tests are, but you’d still be able to take a first-principle component out of them that describes the way all of these various health measures go together, and you can call it ‘health’, and some people at any given moment are ‘healthier’ than others … But it wouldn’t occur to us to think of ‘health’ as this special inner quality that people carry around. And it wouldn’t occur to us to start looking for the ‘health centre’ in people’s brains or bodies, or start to ask what are the specific genes that cause people to be ‘healthier’ than each other … ‘health’ is a way of describing a certain domain of covariation in a very complicated network of things, but it’s not a cause of those things, it’s a description of those things.

The podcast, G, finishes by looking to the future: genome sequencing, IVF, and a man called Stephen Hsu. Our best evidence at the moment is that genes are between 20 and 50 per cent responsible for g. Hsu wants to be at the forefront of genome sequencing research as its ability to ‘predict intelligence’ increases. Hsu’s start-up is called Genomic Prediction. They are starting to use this technology at their IVF centre’s clinics around the world. The landing page of the Genomic Prediction website claims: ‘Our approach reduces disease risk and improves newborn health outcomes by identifying candidate embryos for implantation which are not at elevated genetic risk for known disorders.’ Hsu says in the podcast, ‘I think intellectual disability is probably something like IQ of 75 or something like this. And it would mean that the IVF physician will get a report saying, “Embryo number four has a very unusually large number of the variants that depress intelligence.” And I think that’s a reasonable thing to want to know.’

People grow understandably nervous at the prospect of ‘playing God’ with genetic testing. Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re ten years in the future and Hsu’s genome sequencing technology can ensure you run no risk of having a child with a less-than-average IQ. It costs $60,000—the same cost as five years’ tuition at my old high school. If genes have a 20 to 50 per cent influence on our brains, then the other 80 to 50 per cent is post-birth development. What is the difference in morality or ethics between a parent ‘investing’ this money into their child’s ‘intelligence’ pre- versus post-birth? What laws and policies should follow those moral and ethical implications? Parents feel an obligation to put their child first, while the state has an obligation to make sure all children are treated equally. Should the state spend $60,000 on the genetic testing of every child or should they try to ban the testing for all? Or should they allow the rich and powerful to take full advantage of the free and open market of technology, the way they currently do with the free and open market of education? What will happen in the decades after, when the children of the rich are the ones at the universities, developing the science and drafting the public policy? Currently, thousands of parents are spending more than their nation’s average annual wage on their child’s annual school fees; why doesn’t our nervous ethical hand-wringing apply to them? What does the future look like if only the very rich people can afford to control the intellectual destiny of their child?

I’d say it looks a lot like contemporary Australia. I’d say those at the top of our kyriarchal pyramid have been ‘playing God’ for a long time.

•

The term ‘neurodiverse’ was coined by Australian sociologist Judy Singer to generate the positivity we feel about concepts like biodiversity and cultural diversity, and understand that people with diagnoses such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are not ‘deficient’ but different. The problems they encounter in their lives don’t arise from their differences but from a society that rejects and diminishes their differences. Adults with autism often struggle to find employment in respectful workplaces that make the best use of their abilities. Evidence presented at the disability royal commission about the bullying, discrimination, and exclusion experienced by neurodivergent children suggested that it was often at the hands of teachers. Whether or not autism spectrum disorder should be classified as a disability is the subject of heated, often-unpleasant debate, made worse by people disseminating factually incorrect fears about vaccines. For example, Amy Harmon, writing for the New York Times in 2004, quoted several teenagers with autism. One said, ‘People don’t suffer from Asperger’s. They suffer because they’re depressed from being left out and beat up all the time.’ Autism isn’t a ‘disease’ to be ‘cured’, another offered. Harmon writes:

It is a view supported by an increasingly vocal group of adult autistics, including some who cannot use speech to communicate and have been institutionalized because of their condition. But it is causing consternation among many parents whose greatest hope is to avoid that very future for their children. Many believe that intensive behavioural therapy offers the only rescue from the task of caring for unpredictable, sometimes aggressive children, whose condition can take a toll on the entire family.

Many parents argue that ‘it is only those whose diagnosis describes them as “high functioning” or having Asperger’s syndrome … who are opposed to a cure’. Adult advocates with autism say efforts to ‘cure’ them are reminiscent of when people thought left-handedness needed to be ‘cured’. ‘Some worry that in addition to troublesome interventions, the ultimate cure will be a genetic test to prevent autistic children from being born.’

Autism can appear in people of all levels of intelligence, but some studies suggest that different types of IQ tests produce different results. The most common IQ test, the Wechsler, relies on language in parts, and some studies have shown that the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, more focused on abstract reasoning, is better suited in some cases. Neurotypical children score about equally on both types of test, but autistic children who score very low on the Wechsler can score higher on the RPM. By contrast, for very high-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who present with superior language skills, such as those with Asperger’s syndrome, the RPM can lead to an underestimation of their abilities, and the Wechsler is preferable.

According to Steve Silberman in an article in Wired, ‘We owe many of the wonders of modern life to innovators who were brilliant in non-neurotypical ways. Herman Hollerith, who helped launch the age of computing by inventing a machine to tabulate and sort punch cards, once leaped out of a school window to escape his spelling lessons because he was dyslexic.’ This sounds uncannily like a story a mother I spoke to told me when describing the benefits of Green School. Hollerith founded the company that would go on to become IBM. As Bob Buckley, convenor of Autism Aspergers Advocacy Australia (A4), told ABC News in 2020, ‘People with autism are eminently employable, if you provide the right support … Twenty to thirty years ago autism was a rare disorder; it’s now the number one condition in the NDIS and nobody has made any effort to develop a workforce, or to develop services that actually meet these needs.’

One of the silver linings of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic was that companies were forced to allow their employees to work from home. I read numerous articles online written by people with disabilities who had been trying to get permission to work from home, or who had tried to find jobs in which they could work remotely, only to be rejected. The radical shift in workplace relations and the radical shift in thinking we saw in 2020 could present an opportunity for progress on this, but only if people are willing to let or make change happen. ABC News reported in August: ‘The Federal Government’s emergency response plan to COVID-19 made no mention of people living with a disability.’

When the disability royal commission was hearing evidence about the use of psychotropic drugs which affect people’s minds, emotions, and behaviours, Paula McGowan spoke about her son Oliver, who was a school prefect and training to be a Paralympian. Oliver had autism, focal partial epilepsy, and an intellectual disability, but according to a neurologist he had full life expectancy and would eventually be able to live independently. ABC News reported that Oliver’s quality of life rapidly deteriorated after he was prescribed a drug he and his parents had begged doctors not to give him. Despite not having been diagnosed with psychosis or a mental illness, he was given the drug after suffering from some seizures, and he died soon after due to a combination of pneumonia and hypoxic brain injury. Paula described the effects of the drug as ‘catastrophic’. The commission heard evidence that 177,000 reports of unauthorised use of chemical restraints on NDIS participants were made in the single year of 2019–2020. What that means is that a psychotropic drug was administered in an emergency without the prior approval of the patient.

The way we value ‘intelligence’, the way we test it, label and describe it, attach a moral value to it, define and limit it, the way we name differences and disabilities and neurodivergences, are all informed by a long history of eugenics being used against people with disabilities—and this history continues to inform both research directions and policy outcomes.

•

The more reading I do, the more context I gather and gain, the less I trust humanity with certain kinds of knowledge. It is a relief to read that while there are lots of things we know about the brain, we are miles away from understanding most of the hows and whys. While people like Stephen Hsu want to minimise how many people with low IQs are born, we’re nowhere near being able to isolate or understand the genes responsible for higher IQs or ‘intelligence’ generally. There are at least 700 genes involved in determining a person’s height—imagine how complex brain-related stuff is. So far we know of more than 1000 genes that have some effect. As Eric Turkheimer says, ‘We know, basically, absolutely nothing about the biology of why some people are smarter than others from a genetic point of view.’

In his book Unique: The new science of human individuality, David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, explains that the old ‘nature-versus-nurture’ debate is infuriatingly misleading.

Genes are built to be modified by experience. That experience is not just the obvious stuff, like how your parents raised you, but more complicated and fascinating things like the diseases you’ve had (or those that your mother had while she was carrying you in utero), the foods you’ve eaten, the bacteria that reside inside your body, the weather during your early development, and the long reach of culture and technology.

I also learned from reading his book that sheer randomness has a huge effect too; there are just so many variables and components going on within the body and affecting the body that, really, our personalities and intellects are shaped by three overarching forces: ‘heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development’. He adds that ‘a portion of your individuality results from each cell in your body rolling the dice over and over again as you develop, grow, and change’.

Something I found astonishing was learning about all the things we do, and don’t know, about how we develop. For example, ‘children who don’t receive regular loving touch in the first two years of life tend to have a broad array of lifelong neuropsychiatric problems, such as anxiety, depression, and intellectual disability.’ How extraordinary, that affection, or the lack thereof, affects the brain in such foundational ways. Linden writes, ‘We are built to be changed by experience.’

It is not till near the end of his book that Linden raises IQ. As he acknowledges, ‘there is almost no topic that is more contentious, either in terms of individuals or populations, than intelligence.’ He explains that some psychologists split ‘intelligence’ into two types—crystallised (e.g. memory, etc.) and fluid (e.g. problem-solving using the memory)—but he himself doesn’t appear to commit to these, nor any others. He is similarly reticent to fully endorse IQ tests. ‘There are some who believe that intelligence tests are meaningless, but the weight of evidence is against this view.’ He recognises that some testing is culture-specific, but points out that IQ tests continue to have strong predictive correlations to education levels, advancement in career, and life span. ‘An IQ test score does not reflect everything that one would like to know about human intelligence, but in truth no measure could ever meet such a challenge.’

Also interesting is Linden’s observation that the degree to which general intelligence is heritable changes depending on the socioeconomic profile of the people being tested. ‘Heredity is lower for poor populations than for those whose basic needs have been met.’ This means that people who grow up without access to good nutrition and safe, stimulating environments aren’t able to fulfil the potential of their genes. Any lingering gaps in IQ testing achievements between self-identified Black versus self-identified white Americans, for example, correlate to ‘profound economic and social inequities’, and the findings of numerous studies ‘argue against the genetic hypothesis for IQ group differences’. Linden, like Saini, is at pains to point out that ‘there is no evidence for racial group differences in genes that have been linked to any behavioural or cognitive trait’.

•

The Report of the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, chaired by Larissa Behrendt, was published in September 2012. It found that ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are significantly underrepresented in the higher education system, contributing to the high levels of social and economic disadvantage they often experience’. The panel found that many teachers have low expectations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ academic skill and potential, which can affect how students are taught and the options presented to them, and may affect their aspirations to pursue higher education. A survey the report cites found that ‘even students in Years 11 or 12 who are consistently getting high marks consider leaving school early and securing menial employment’. The important milestones, such as the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander student to receive a degree from an Australian university or the graduation of the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander doctor, came nearly a century after other countries with similar colonial histories, such as the United States, Canada, and New Zealand.

Alison Whittaker is a Gomeroi poet, author, and legal researcher, and was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Law School. I learned from reading some of her articles in academic journals that Aboriginal Australians are some of the most ‘researched’ people in the world—‘[d]riven first by the curious scrutiny of anthropological Darwinism on a “dying race”, then as deficient policy subjects, increasingly refined by government and non-government actors in Indigenous affairs. More recently, Indigenous cultural knowledges and practices are under the microscope of cultural appropriation and knowledge theft.’

From Whittaker’s work I turned to Amy Thunig and Tiffany Jones’s 2020 article, ‘“Don’t make me play house-n***er”: Indigenous academic women treated as “black performer” within higher education’. Thunig is a Gamilaroi woman and associate lecturer at Macquarie University, and Jones is a sociologist and associate professor at Macquarie University. They write: ‘In recent decades, the ongoing disparity in outcomes and disadvantage experienced by the sovereign peoples of this continent have seen Indigenous people identified as a “targeted equity group” within University metrics and policy and has become a focus within the Federal Government’s “Closing the Gap” campaign.’ A huge problem arises, however, when institutions seeking to Indigenise curriculums, for the benefit of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, don’t make it clear that this is a shared responsibility. When universities ask academic staff to do this work, non-Indigenous staff turn to their Indigenous colleagues ‘for support, service and advice’, and ‘the responsibility of non-Indigenous staff to engage respectfully with Indigenous communities, research, knowledges, programs and histories shifts from a potentially transformative practice, to an additional burden placed on Indigenous academics’. The Indigenous workforce comprises less than 1 per cent of higher education staffing in Australia. Participants in Thunig and Jones’s study said they worked at universities that wanted the ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘all those things’ but didn’t want the ‘disruption’. ‘Can’t you just add in a slide?’ they ask. ‘We just want you as a slide, that’s what you are. You’re a slide in OUR narrative.’

Thunig and Jones note that the word ‘research’ is ‘probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many Indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that Indigenous people even write poetry about it.’

Thunig and Jones’s article led me to Maggie Walters’ work on data sovereignty. One of Thunig and Jones’s interviewees says ‘when we first heard Maggie Walters talk about um data sovereignty and all that … yeah, the white academics didn’t react to that very well, at all.’ Walters is the pro vice-chancellor (Aboriginal research and leadership) and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Tasmania. In an October 2020 article published on The Conversation, she and colleague Michael Guerzoni outline how the university is Indigenising its curriculum. Actual, proper integration of Indigenous knowledge and practice, that is, not just ‘a slide’. ‘Indigenous knowledge systems,’ they note, ‘like Western knowledge systems, are complex and sophisticated.’ They explain the use of Traditional Knowledge labels on curriculum material: ‘Traditional Knowledge labels are electronic tags that allow Indigenous protocols and educative and culturally relevant information to be attached to resources. This information might include the significance to the local community and any restrictions on use.’ Innovations such as these provide a glimmer of hope in the face of the cancerous spread of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Walters’ approach has inclusion and partnership built into it, rather than the Ramsay way of establishing hierarchy.

Data sovereignty is a fascinating and exciting concept. The Maiam nayri Wingara Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective was formed in early 2017 to develop data sovereignty principles and to identify strategic data assets. Their website states:

Data is a cultural, strategic, and economic asset for Indigenous peoples. Indigenous Australians have always been active in what is now known as ‘data’. Yet in modern times we have been isolated from the language, control and production of data at community, state and national levels. This has resulted in data that are overly focused on Indigenous peoples as the problem. Existing data and data infrastructure does not recognise or privilege our knowledges and worldviews nor meet our current and future needs.

The collective plans to develop Indigenous data governance protocols establishing the rights of Indigenous peoples to decide what, how, and why their data is collected, accessed, and used. Its goals are to ensure that data on or about them reflects their ‘priorities, values, cultures, worldviews and diversity’. As we know, data is never ‘neutral’ and statistics, depending on how they’re collected and then presented, can tell many different stories. As Saini explains in Superior, ‘The habit of collecting data by racial or ethnic group has the unintended consequence of driving researchers to use it, hunting for gaps and trying any means possible to explain those gaps.’ History offers us ample examples of non-Indigenous groups doing vast damage with data either wilfully or wilfully ignorantly.

It is interesting, and not particularly surprising, that non-Indigenous academics might bristle upon hearing about data sovereignty and Indigenous data governance principles and procedures. Many are used to being able to do whatever they want and go wherever they please in search of something to name after themselves, and are given free rein and funding, so long as their work serves the dual purposes of the Academy and the state. And while Indigenous cultures have myriad ways of data collection and preservation, many of the methods and practices aren’t recognised or respected by the Academy. Thunig and Jones’s article, for example, uses Indigenous research methodologies and poetic transcription to record the perspectives of multiple participants, presenting their findings and testimonies while protecting anonymity. I am reminded here of Omid Tofighian’s observation that the Academy can only flourish because it so effectively ‘others’ different types of knowledge and knowledge acquisition. For people whose identities and privileges are inextricably attached to the status quo, to the supremacy of the Academy, these ideas must be quite frightening indeed.

•

These conflicting approaches go back even further, to the period known as the Enlightenment. It was a movement of mostly European thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who questioned the long-standing pronouncements of the monarchy and Church. I love ‘reason’ as much as anyone. I, too, shoot for the moon in trying to achieve some semblance of ‘objectivity’ and land among the stars of perhaps slightly-clearer-but-still-inevitable subjectivity. But, like all movements and -isms, Enlightenment ideals can do real harm if not interrogated. As Saini puts it: ‘Because of the narrow way Europeans had set the parameters of what constituted a human being, placing themselves as the paradigm, people of other cultures were almost guaranteed not to fit … In universalising humanity, Enlightenment thinkers had inadvertently laid the foundations for dividing it.’

Indigenous author and activist Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a professor and Indigenous Elder Scholar in Residence at RMIT and a Goenpul woman from Quandamooka country, writes about how Enlightenment principles are often invisibilised by the Academy, just as whiteness is. It’s ironic that, in claiming and attempting pure ‘reason’, the Enlightenment thinker often blinds himself to the different approaches and knowledges of others. In her 2013 article ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’, Moreton-Robinson writes about Indigenous women’s communal responsibilities and accountabilities. So much of what she describes is inherently agitating to the individualist, exceptionalist image of the person who has a building named after them. If a central concern of the Academy is the goal of objectivity, then surely a person being held accountable from several sources and directions can only be a good thing. I may not believe in any particular god—or what Moreton-Robinson describes as ‘ancestral creator beings’—but it’s pretty obvious that the standard-issue Christian idea of God isn’t deemed as ‘clouding’ or ‘compromising’ to the logic of a thinker as much as other belief systems are. So much work by Indigenous scholars is treated as lesser-than, as being compromised by identity somehow; ‘subjectivity’ is a dirty word and the enemy of the Enlightened Man.

‘This conception of self, whose humanness is disconnected from the earth, values itself above every other living thing, is a form of strategic essentialism that can silence and dismiss non-Western constructions, which do not define the self in the same way,’ Moreton-Robinson writes. ‘Such silencing is enabled by the power of patriarchal knowledge and its ability to be the definitive measure of what it means to be human and what does and what does not constitute knowledge. Questions about the integrity and legitimacy of Indigenous ways of knowing, and being, have more to do with who has the power to be a knower than the validity of non-Western knowledges.’

This is the crux of the problem, really: who has the power to be a knower? In the Australian context it’s not always true to say ‘knowledge is power’. What’s much more true is to acknowledge that whoever has the power shapes the ‘knowledge’.

History offers us this repeating trifecta: the Academy, eugenics, and conservative governments. The idea at the heart of eugenics—that there is ‘biological’ or ‘scientific’ proof of the superiority of some people over others, be they a difference race, ability or sexuality—needs Men of Science and the prestige and publications of the Academy to sustain its veneer of legitimacy. Politicians are able to point to the legitimacy of the Academy and its products to enact policy it aligns with ideologically. The Academy’s findings are bolstered by the uptake of their ideas in politics and among the public. Extremist rhetoric flourishes; ideas about ‘inherent differences’ between groups are normalised. Think tanks and foundations funnel money through secret, tax-free channels to fund research that helps during elections and plebiscites. Ministers talk about ‘cultural differences’. Rifts between people are aggravated. The lower levels of the kyriarchal pyramid remain divided—conquered by the conservative who is assured of the essential rightness of his position in charge.

The fact that both major parties now support ‘offshore processing’ for asylum seekers is not without precedent; racism and fear of being ‘overrun’ often hits critical mass. During World War II it was Labor Prime Minister John Curtin who reinforced the White Australia Policy, saying ‘This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.’ This recurring concern among politicians about the composition of their countries, and the perceived ‘dilution’ of whiteness—often thinly veiled as a ‘way of life’ ‘being lost’—remains a core part of Australian political discourse. Eugenics at Ellis Island, an Aryan vision of the future, and countless other historical examples reveal ongoing governmental obsession with certain ‘qualities’ belonging to certain quantities of their populations. For a person terrified by the spectre of the loss of White Australia, there are only two options: more white women having babies, or fewer ‘others’ coming in.

Abbott and his ilk double-park. He’s ‘tough on borders’ and dismayed that women like me aren’t having more kids. Peter Costello called for a ‘baby-led recovery’ back in 2004, when he was treasurer, but it had no effect. The current treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, said something similar to the National Press Club in July 2020. Launching a friend’s book on the economy at a CIS event in early 2020, Abbott claimed: ‘That is a real problem in every Western country: middle-class women do not have enough kids. Women in the welfare system have lots of kids.’ To be fair, he sort of tried to get a paid parental leave scheme through Parliament when he was in government, but it didn’t work, and he’s since said it just wasn’t great timing. ‘Having got illegal migration under control,’ he said to the CIS crowd, ‘legal migration is virtually out of control.’ Fascinating that, with all those billions he could ‘stop the boats’ but he couldn’t start the child care.

Demographer Liz Allen explains in her book The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover, ‘They haven’t always been given a warm welcome by politicians or the public, but from the mid-1970s to the 1990s those seeking refuge found it in Australia, figuratively and literally.’ This country’s anxiety about refugees and asylum seekers doesn’t even make much sense, given they comprise a relatively insignificant proportion of overall migration. Australian-born Australians have not been having enough babies to replace themselves for a long, long time, and we take thousands of ‘skilled migrants’ each year to help aid in economic growth. Without bringing more young people in we face the financial problems that come with the ageing population package: not enough people working to support those who’ve earned their retirement.

Pauline Hanson’s 2018 motion in the Senate, ‘It’s okay to be white’, was defeated 31 to 28, but that means 28 people in the Senate actually agreed with a sentiment common to white supremacists. And make no mistake, when people say, ‘It’s okay to be white,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘It’s more than okay to be white.’ At the same time Hanson moved another motion—also defeated—proposing a plebiscite to consider the size of Australia’s immigration program. Hanson may have ‘returned’ to politics in 2013, but her politics have always been with us, and the populist ideology she represents is still growing in influence. Allen writes:

At a demographic conference in Budapest attended by representatives of far-right organisations and high-profile opponents of immigration, Tony Abbott advocated for a higher local birth rate yet greater control over immigration. Abbott told his audience that the ‘real extinction rebellion’ movement needed is ‘not against our failure to reduce emissions … but against our failure to produce more children’. Further, Abbott stated that the greatest threat to the Western world was ‘sustained decline in the birth rate’.

This combined fear—less of ‘us’ and more ‘them’—is sometimes referred to as a fear of ‘the great replacement’. It comes from the same deep-down place as eugenics. It results in the same defensive spark and ‘gut reaction’. It is white supremacy articulated in language just palatable enough for use in the Academy and Academy-adjacent settings. As Saini notes, ‘Intellectual racism has always existed, and indeed for a chunk of history, it thrived. I believe it is still the toxic little seed at the heart of academia. However dead you might think it is, it needs only a little water, and now it’s raining.’

•

Learning about the concept of g is still confronting for a lot of people. I can’t remember ever taking an IQ test, but when I was reading about g I was afraid that, if I did, it would confirm my middling abilities not just in a niche, academic sense but in a g-for-generally sense. I was confident that both Damian and Vincent would have higher g scores than me. I pictured a friend of mine who I’m quite sure I’m ‘smarter’ than, but then thought of one who I’m probably on par with. On what basis do we make such assessments?

I know that one of my somewhat irrational predispositions is to judge harshly people who don’t read the news and keep abreast of national and global goings-on. Also, I am rarely impressed by people who don’t have at least a basic sense of curiosity about how other people do things differently. What I value in a mind becomes most clear in my resentment of its opposite: ignorance. It is necessary to ask oneself what one considers the opposite to ‘intelligent’. Options of varying severity include: stupid, dumb, naive, foolish, idiotic, slow, thick, moronic, vacuous, and dim-witted. There are others, of course, as well as the safe and simple option of simply saying ‘unintelligent’. If Vincent ever called me ‘stupid’ I’d be crushed. If he called me ‘naive’, perhaps less so? Naivety is not a permanent disposition. One can cure naivety with a daily dose of the ABC, BBC, and New York Times. When I think of ignorance, the image of an anti-vaxxer springs to mind. Their belief that they have special knowledge the rest of us don’t, and their rejection of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is both spectacularly arrogant and harmful. But ignorance, too, is a disposition that can be improved upon, ameliorated.

Having a low g is different. Being slow to move or navigate problem space is terrifying to me. Why? If I’m really, truly honest, here’s what I’m afraid of: if I’m not smart, if brains and words are not my contribution, then I should have to be nice or generous or kind or patient or loving or funny, and these traits do not come naturally to me. And, importantly, those traits do not offer me rewards of money or power. Generosity, kindness, and patience are the traits we desire in a parent or carer. We don’t want to pay for them. We do not celebrate them for ‘the advancement of society’. We like coming home to them once we’ve finished work for the day. We’re not giving the generous people statues, we’re not naming buildings and mountain ranges and coves after the patient. You’re not going to climb the kyriarchal pyramid with kindness.

I adore efficacy. The inverse, whether it presents in a person, a system or an object, infuriates me. Vincent told me the angriest he has ever seen me was when I was trying to use our very old microwave; it wouldn’t heat my meal, the door wasn’t closing properly, and the glass plate kept getting bumped off its track.

‘You have one job!’ I yelled at it, slamming the door shut.

This is something I say when I am extremely frustrated. I have said it to a washing machine that left streaks on our clothes, a blunt knife that was mashing instead of cutting the tomatoes, and to the prime minister when he was holidaying in Hawaii while our country was on fire. Nothing gets me riled up quite like incompetence. A good reason for me not to have a child is that children are foolish and I’m notoriously impatient when faced with inefficiency. This is something I’m trying to work on. But since getting to know some adults and growing closer to becoming one myself, I’ve learned that adults are stupid in much more profound ways than children. Adults don’t shut up about trying to be happy, we can’t get happy, we spend all our money trying to get happiness back. But a kid can be doing something that makes it happy and we say, ‘No, not like that.’ We put them in little suits and skirts, and give them expensive straw hats which we make them feel bad about losing, as they inevitably do. We tell them which of them is doing things better than the others. In our envy of them we try to spoil them and make them like us. They come home to us with report cards and we say they are ‘fine’. They demonstrate kindness, curiosity, laughter, and we say to them, unprovoked, ‘Don’t worry, those are different ways to be smart.’ Why can’t there just be different ways to be?

Theories of multiple types of intelligences, like Gardner’s, are best understood as philosophies. They are not scientific concepts or results from research that can be further tested, with findings extrapolated. They are value systems and conceptual frameworks. Different life philosophies suit different people. That’s great! It takes all sorts. In my experience, people who subscribe to these philosophies are made very uncomfortable by discussions about g. I believe there are two key reasons for this, and they are both illuminating. First, it upsets the stories we like to tell ourselves about self-determination. It doesn’t feel nice to think about how your g isn’t totally up to you. If g mostly stays static through our lives, which we know it does, and it’s at least partially heritable, then people whose belief systems are steeped in aspiration will reject the possibility that there are some fundamental things about themselves they can’t choose to change. And second, I think people are not always aware of the extent to which they conflate a person’s value with their perceived ‘intelligence’; if you can actually test for someone’s g then it becomes frightening to consider the ramifications for the value placed on that person’s life. Firmly held beliefs conflating ‘intelligence’ with ‘worth’ affect the way we treat each other. The only good reason to be afraid of g is a variation on the second reason: eugenics and supremacists are forever sitting in our rear-view mirrors. Without extreme vigilance, they pop up beside the driver’s door and reach in for the wheel.

•

Do I want to know my own g? Fuck no. Why not? Because I’m afraid. What am I afraid of? That it will define me. To whom? I am afraid that if I do the test I will have to tell people the result, and if the result is low, they will think less of me. Who is ‘people’, whose opinions do you actually value? Damian’s and Vincent’s. Is that all? I am afraid that if the result is low I will think I can’t be a good writer. I am afraid that I will go spend the rest of my life meeting people and secretly wondering how I compare. I am afraid that if the result is high I will turn into a cunt.

Irrational, scared little brain! Timid organ! It felt like fronting up to a fortune teller who somehow was legit, and them offering to tell me precisely when I’d die. After sitting with these fears for a while I felt an old familiar feeling returning. A lesson I’d learned in life was that some things could not be manoeuvred around; some things were best gone through. I may not be able to control my g, but I couldn’t go around talking about how ‘intelligence isn’t everything’ if I was too afraid to look my own cognitive capacity in the mirror. I didn’t want to be the type of person who chooses comfortable unknowing. So I searched Sydney for IQ testing centres. The first one I found cost $650. Then I stumbled onto the website of Australian Mensa.

‘Mensa is a not-for-profit society. Its purposes are to identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity, encourage research into the nature, characteristics and uses of intelligence, and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members.’

The actual special thing about Mensa is that it’s an international society ‘with only one criterion for membership: a score on a standardised IQ test higher than that of 98 per cent of the general population’. It’s wild. Of course something like this exists.

‘If you like to discuss world problems or the latest in science and technology, you’re sure to find like-minded people at a Mensa event. Perhaps you just want to relax and exchange repartee with others who’ll get your jokes and add their own quips. Many find Mensa a welcome relief.’ A welcome relief from what? Dullards? The rest of us mere mortals! I was laughing, but then I stopped and thought about it and, actually, being smarter than almost every other person you encountered might be excruciating.

The reason I’d landed on their site was because they did group testing in major cities for people who wanted to see if they qualified for membership. They clearly took this stuff seriously enough that I could trust their methods and results. There was no chance I was in the top 2 per cent of brains, but there was a 100 per cent chance I’d rather pay $75 than $650 to find out just how far I fell short. The next testing date was in late November. If I had to put money on my own score results, I’d guess slightly above average, which is funny, because I knew that’s precisely what the average person would say. Also, if I had to put money on it, I’d guess that Vincent’s g was higher than mine. Certainly Damian’s was. I told a friend this, and she offered an intriguing would-you-rather proposition: Would you rather take 30 IQ points off yourself or your partner? A cruel question, to be sure. I was unable to answer. I couldn’t imagine being in love with someone who I didn’t believe was smarter than me.

This is the human I want to be: if there is a fear or an idea, a person or a problem, lurking somewhere just out of sight, I will turn my torch upon it. I may not be able to control my g, but I can live by my principles. I’d already learned this lesson: if you’re afraid of someone knowing something about you, you can just tell the whole world at once, and you feel much better. So I booked the test.

5

Language

In late 2019 Vincent had a new job and it was proving extremely taxing. Ten hours at the office was the new normal. A very fine but ugly sliver of me liked watching how hard he had to work. See? I wanted to say. This is what it’s like for those of us who don’t have your gifts. It was an illogical and irrational urge. The thoughts came from that birthplace of the defensive spark: a grotto of insecurity deep in the stinky folds of the usually-hidden psyche. I would always be trying to impress him, but I could never go back in time to make myself bilingual or get his good grades. Our g was likely static. Whenever I won an award or was quoted by someone, I would turn to him and say faux-jokingly, ‘Now do you think I’m smart?’ He always got irritated at this, denying that he’d ever said or done anything to give me a basis for my insecurity. If he ever came out and said it, ‘stupid’, I would have to leave him. No, I couldn’t leave him, I love him too much, but certainly I would die inside somehow. It would be a finger in a bullet hole.

I fantasised about getting a dog and training it. I taught the last family dog we had before I left home a cool trick: when I made a gun out of my thumb and forefinger and said, ‘Bang!’, he would fall down and play dead. If Vincent and I ever got a dog of our own, I wanted to train it to walk on my left side and to sit, stop, and heel. We would understand each other. I would help the dog reach its full potential. When Vincent and I talked about what type of dog we would like we discussed ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ breeds. Working dog breeds typically require more interaction, as they are ‘sharp’ and ‘bright’ and get bored easily. The opposite are not described as ‘stupid’, as people prefer to use the word ‘dumb’ for dogs. We call Cavalier King Charles Spaniels ‘googly-eyed morons’, having now received five first-hand accounts of this tendency. Something ‘stupid’ is a little bit dangerous and resented, but something ‘dumb’ can be cute. I used to worry that this was how Vincent thought of me—just a little bit dumb, but in a lovable way.

His being bilingual was one difference underpinning so much. People who work with words and ideas can be experts at something, but if their worldview is so narrow that they aren’t curious about and respectful of other languages—especially if their one language is English—I’m less likely to be impressed. As Goethe writes, ‘He who does not know foreign languages knows nothing about his own.’ If they are not open to learning about other languages, how could someone possibly develop a questioning of context, or an ability to really see other perspectives? And if you cannot see other perspectives, you can never see anything clearly. The embarrassment I feel about my own baseline monolingualism is the cousin of how I feel about my we-speak-English-here country; a lack of intellectual effort demonstrably connected to an essential arrogance. The majority of the world’s population speaks more than one language.

Of course I understand and appreciate that for people born in English-only households, the opportunity to learn another language is often prohibitively expensive. But what is also true is that tons of migrant families in Australia speak one or two different languages at home, the parents learn at least enough English to get by in their jobs, then their children go out into schools and society and learn English from scratch, and none of this phenomenal multilingualism is appreciated nearly as much as the kids in private schools who return from a semester in Paris with a slightly improved accent in which to say cwoissant.

The fact is, throughout recorded history people have been trying to prove that some languages are ‘better’ or ‘more important’ than others. King James IV of Scotland and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II both had the same ‘bright’ idea centuries apart: send small children into the middle of nowhere and see what language they speak when they come back. That’s how you’d prove, once and for all, whose language was the ‘real’ or ‘original’ one. James sent two babies off to the island of Inchkeith with only a mute nanny to care for them. Records are sketchy and some claimed they returned speaking perfect Hebrew, but it seems as if the children came back with clapping and gestures as their predominant form of communication. Fred had similarly poor results: the children grunted and clicked. The Greek historian Herodotus recorded an Egyptian king conducting a similar experiment. You can imagine how disappointed they all were. The moral of these stories is a simple reminder of how many lives powerful people are happy to ruin in order to confirm their intellectual or linguistic superiority.

In the excellent New York Times podcast Nice White Parents, there’s an excruciating scene between two women at a fundraising event in Manhattan. The podcast’s host, Chana Joffe-Walt, has been following the students and parents of a low-income school in Brooklyn which has recently seen an influx of ‘nice white parents’ in an otherwise very segregated system. The program asks and unpacks many chewy and uncomfortable questions, and one of them is about where money and curriculum meet. To get more white students, and therefore white parents, and therefore white money, into the school, a few white parents band together and instigate a French language program for which they need big donors. A fancy fundraiser is held over in Manhattan, and the parents of the school’s original students, who are overwhelmingly people of colour, are growing uneasy with the way money ‘changes things’. The clash between those parents and the rich philanthropists who turn up to the event—the ones who pop over to Paris each year—is painful.

Joffe-Walt narrates: ‘Barbara from Gramercy Park, the woman who loves fall in Paris, wanders across the marble floor toward the raffle table, beside where Imee is sitting. And I thought, oh, no.’

Imee Hernandez: It’s a pleasure to meet you.

Barbara: Hi, how are you?

Imee Hernandez: Good, thank you.

Barbara: You’re one of the parents of a bilingual student?

Imee Hernandez: She’s not bilingual, but she does go to the school. [laughs]

Barbara: She will be bilingual, eventually.

Imee Hernandez: Oh, she will be, yes, eventually.

Barbara: What a wonderful thing. Are you pleased with the program?

Imee Hernandez: Yes, I love the school.

Barbara: It’s so important to learn another language. It opens the world for you.

Joffe-Walt explains: ‘Imee starts looking around. Maurice moves closer and leans in to hear why his wife is doing that nervous laugh, as Barbara explains to Imee, a Puerto Rican woman, that being bilingual makes a person more sophisticated. Imee is exceedingly polite … That entire conversation, Imee never mentioned to Barbara that she does speak another language—Spanish. Later, I ask her why. She shrugs it off.’

Nice white parents think they will move heaven and earth to give their kids an opportunity to learn a second language, but often their value judgements about different languages reveal that what is being actioned is just another opportunity for the communication of class and privilege. Plenty of kids at that Brooklyn high school were already bilingual Spanish/English, but that wasn’t the specific type of bilingualism that would attract the moneyed parents. A Puerto Rican kid speaking both Spanish and English isn’t ‘sophisticated’ in the way a woman like Barbara has in mind. The new French/English language program was started, and mostly the white kids did it, and they loved it and did great in it, and the nice white parents were happy.

•

I spent 2011 living in China. I’d been learning Mandarin at university for several years by then, and the trip was an incredible opportunity, but I was not very happy during that time. Fully depressed, actually. Lessons were held Monday to Friday, all day, and we would be embarrassed in front of the class if we couldn’t keep up or hadn’t done our exercises. The amount of homework was overwhelming. I struggled the entire year and felt like a comprehensive failure. Proficiencies I’d spent years building receded like a time-lapsed tide when I took a single month off to travel between semesters. The experience obliterated what little self-confidence I’d developed since emerging from puberty. When I returned to Australia I was absolutely convinced I was bad at languages and also fundamentally unintelligent.

My anxieties about learning a second language were no less pathetic and debilitating seven years later, when Vincent and I decided to travel to France together for the first time. I would be meeting his extended family, and I knew it would be fantastic if I could speak at least enough French to show I cared. I was so afraid of him thinking I was a slow learner that I paid for a tutor for several months and kept it a secret. One would think that living with a person who spoke the language you were trying to learn would be a great asset. Normally that would be correct, but insecurity and immaturity engulfed logic.

I got nervous sweats every time I stepped into the small building in Brisbane where the expensive lessons were held. The teachers were lovely and the other students were lovely, but I found every millisecond of the exercise, week after week, utterly humiliating. I walked home from one lesson in tears. It was so painful to be reminded of how little I knew! So destabilising! If I didn’t remember some vocabulary from the previous week and could no longer make the sentences I thought I could, I would feel like the backs of my knees had been hit with a cricket bat. Every lesson was filled with countless moments in which I was unable to articulate myself. A million separate milliseconds of paralysed terror and idiocy. Learning a language means endless hours of supplicating oneself this way; bowing your head, praying for admission to this alternative universe in which things are similar but different, where a world of other people live and work and love. The enormity of the task is overwhelming. Finally telling Vincent about the lessons was exciting then mortifying. The exciting part was the prospect I might be able to speak French with him. The mortifying part, which came immediately after, was him seeing how many exercise books I’d gone through and hearing how many lessons I had attended, and then the two of us realising how little I knew.

When I met Vincent’s family in France I could only speak in the present tense. Everything I said became a joke. Past lives and selves collided: Yesterday I am happy. Last year we move in together. Three years ago I am lawyer. Six years ago when we meet I am anxious. And for my future, the distant desires and fears clack-clacked together like an accordion compressing: I am writing next year. I don’t know if I am having a baby. For breakfast tomorrow, yes, a croissant, please. It was an entirely new breed of humiliation to the one I’d encountered in China. In China I only ever met strangers, and outside of the classroom I was praised for speaking even a tiny amount of broken Mandarin. In France I wanted to impress the people I was meeting, I wanted them to like me, and I was supposed to be ‘good with words’. In situations like these you end up standing there, smiling and trying to be easy-going, knowing that you cannot control whether or not they think you’re stupid; all you can do is assure them you’re not a bitch. My disappointment in my own inability was deep.

•

I’m not totally sure how to explain this now, but something I truly believed, for the first eight years of my relationship with Vincent, was that people who were raised bilingual, let alone multilingual, had experienced fundamentally different brain development in their younger years, and that once the opportunity of childhood had passed, it was too late for a simple monolinguist to ever really bother trying to catch up. I would use the term ‘fused synapses’, thinking I’d read it somewhere—perhaps I had—and it became shorthand for my belief that I would be on the back foot forever. His parents had given him a gift that mine couldn’t have given me: an intellectual inheritance. This belief might have been an amalgamation of a few things. We know that past a certain age most people are physiologically unable to get their mouths and tongues to make certain sounds—guttural or rolling r’s, for example—that appear in languages not their own. It’s also commonly said that learning a language is ‘much harder’ as an adult. People say children have elastic, absorbent sponge brains for a few years before we all dry up into something else—crackly, porous sponges, I suppose.

It wasn’t until I read The Bilingual Brain: And what it tells us about the science of language, by Albert Costa, that I realised how hyperbolic I’d been about it all. The book came out in 2020 and until he passed away in early 2021 Costa was Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and director of the Speech Production and Bilingualism Group at the Centre for Brain and Cognition. Costa’s research focuses on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language processing. In the first chapter he explores how babies just a few months old are able to differentiate between languages, especially the ones spoken near them when they were in the womb. Four- to six-month-olds can even tell the difference between two languages by seeing mouths speaking without sound. Babies exposed to more than one language can do this for up to eight months. The ability to recognise phonological contrasts is reduced as babies grow older. Almost two decades ago, Costa was involved in one of the first studies ever to show digital images comparing peoples’ brains depending on language acquisition and use. It investigated the effect of the age of acquisition of a second language on cortical representation. He had been pursuing this area of research since. ‘At a general level,’ he explains in his book, ‘we can say that the areas of the brain involved in the representation and processing of a bilingual’s two languages are the same. It’s as if the brain were somehow prepared to handle any language signal in the same manner regardless of the language or languages to which it is exposed.’ However, as with all things related to the brain, it’s all very complex and interconnected. Depending on both your proficiency and your age of acquisition, slightly different parts of your brain light up. He cannot say decisively whether the age of acquisition or the level of proficiency has the greater effect on cortical representation, partly because the two are so entwined. Overall, for example, ‘processing a second language in which one is not very competent is costlier and, consequently, the processing of a second language requires a more extensive brain network.’ I didn’t need Costa to tell me the first bit. Anyone who’s tried to learn and speak another language knows the exhaustion it brings. The second bit gave me pause: a more extensive brain network sounded good.

By chapter 3 we get the meaty stuff. ‘In many parts of the world bilingualism has an inevitable sociological and political dimension because it is often linked to other factors such as emigration and national identity. This leads to interested, and not entirely objective, claims about the dangers or advantages that the bilingual experience can bring.’ He goes on to discuss the shifting trends he’s seen in society and the media, from bilingualism ‘causing problems for linguistic development’ through to a New York Times article he was interviewed for with the title ‘Why are bilinguals smarter?’ Obviously this type of developmental science is how I came to my own generalised, extrapolated conclusions about it being ‘too late’ for me as a young adult.

He writes: ‘To avoid confusion, let’s start by stating a truism: the bilingual experience does not seem to have dramatic effects on the linguistic capacity or any other cognitive domain of individuals … bilingual speakers do not appear to be “smarter” than monolinguals, and there seems to be no remarkable difference between their cognitive abilities.’ Some studies suggest unique characteristics of bilinguals, others show no real differences. Honestly, the impression I get from reading all these books is that we still know almost nothing about what brains do and even less about why, let alone how. Sometimes monolingual kids perform better on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, but typically they know more words used in the domestic sphere, and the difference between the two groups for vocab learned at school is non-existent. ‘The fact that there was no difference in school vocabulary would suggest that bilingual children would not be affected in their school performance,’ Costa says. However, later we learn that ‘it seems likely that the knowledge of two languages helps to develop certain mechanisms that are put into play during the acquisition of words from a subsequent language’. So, here we are: yet another situation in which two people’s brains are not ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than each other, simply ‘different’ and ‘it’s complicated’.

Something that has been noted is the effect of bilingualism on what is called the ‘egocentric bias’, which is essentially our tendency to think that other people have the same knowledge and think the same way as we do. ‘As it turns out,’ Costa writes, ‘the bilingual experience seems to help develop the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes.’ An experiment is conducted with children facing an interlocutor. Between them is a sort of walled grid, with small objects in the grid. Some of the objects are visible only to the child, not the interlocutor. If the interlocutor asks for ‘the smallest car’, some children will take a moment to consider which is the smallest car visible to the interlocutor, not just themselves. ‘Monolingual children between four and six years old choose the wrong object about 50 per cent of the time, whereas those children who have grown up in a bilingual environment do so about 20 per cent of the time.’ That’s a significant statistical difference. Even more striking than this, the study mapped the gaze of the children, regardless of their final choices, and found monolingual children even looked more often at the objects that were correct according to their own egocentric bias.

An interesting question to pause and ponder here is whether this ability—to overcome our implicit egocentric bias—is a part of what we’d describe as ‘intelligence’, or if what we’re looking at is better understood in the realm of interpersonal skills. Languages, by their nature, form a bridge between ‘academic’ and dynamic, or interpersonal, abilities. They’re not mutually exclusive, of course, but when schools encourage children to ‘put themselves in someone else’s shoes’, that’s taught as a value, not as something on the final exam. Learning another language is a very specific skill set that might make your kid more likely to be empathetic. But if what you want is an empathetic child, you’re still better off just teaching them the value of empathy in and of itself, regardless of its presence or absence in a report card.

Is any of this relevant to me personally anymore, now that I’m an ‘adult’? Actually yes, according to Costa, ‘in more complex tasks about false beliefs, bilingualism seems to have an effect in adulthood by reducing the egocentric bias’. There’s surely a bit of correlation-not-causation here, given people inclined to want to learn second and third languages are probably more interested in other people. What’s even more fascinating is that as you age, the benefits of thinking and speaking in a second language are rich and varied, regardless of the age of acquisition. Putting a complex thing very simply, Costa writes, ‘grey matter is that which computes information and white matter is the cable that is responsible for transmitting that information from one place to another. It turns out that the density of grey and white matter can be altered by learning a new skill.’ Not just any new skill, though. Juggling is one oft-studied activity that sees the newbie juggler get bonus white matter after just a week, as ‘learning modifies the brain’. With language, the left inferior parietal lobe in particular ‘had a greater density of grey matter in bilinguals than monolinguals’ and the results were regardless of whether the second language was learned in childhood or later on. Costa tempers our excitement, though, with a necessary reminder that correlation isn’t causation. Initial results could have simply indicated that people with more grey matter were more likely to go learn and use a second language. But then they did a study to control for that, to try to prove causation, and they did!

The brain measurements related to learning the second language were taken at the beginning of their stay in a German-speaking environment and once again five months later. A correlation was observed between how much they had learned from the starting point and the change in grey matter density in an area of the brain related to language, the left inferior frontal gyrus. Individuals who learned more German showed a greater change in the density of grey matter in this area.

In short: it didn’t matter how good the participant’s German was at the end of the five months, it mattered how much they’d improved over the five months. Intellectual effort was rewarded with physiological response.

The interaction of second language use, and grey and white matter, becomes particularly valuable as we age. When white matter, ‘the cables’, deteriorate, we no longer circulate information as efficiently, and it affects our cognitive functions. This is where ‘cognitive reserve’ comes in. Imagine two elderly people with the same normal type of brain deterioration, biologically speaking, in the grey and white matter. ‘If cognitive decline were determined only by such deterioration, then the two people should have the same problems.’ But they don’t. We don’t fully understand how or why, but ‘what we can say is that educational level and leading a rich and stimulating social and intellectual life seem to be beneficial in maintaining cognitive reserve’. It doesn’t prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s, but healthy cognitive reserve means that you can live to an older age before the biological fact of Alzheimer’s affects your behaviours and abilities. Typically, people with robust cognitive reserve will go downhill very quickly when the symptoms of such degenerative diseases do hit. Some studies have shown as much as a four-year delay in the onset of dementia symptoms between monolinguals and bilinguals. I know which way I’d rather go.

The ‘rich and stimulating’ part does make me suspicious, though. It sounds like people who are already better off find ageing easier, just like the rest of their whole lives have been easier. How could you ever tell what was privilege and what was biological? Well, get a load of this: in June 1947, all 71,000 Scottish children who were born in 1936 had their intellectual capacity measured by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. No kidding. They’re called the Lothian Birth Cohort. Their abilities were measured again when they were 73 years old, and the results were similar, ‘suggesting that intelligence is a relatively stable feature’—however, Costa continues, ‘individuals who had learned a language after age 11 showed better cognitive performance than expected.’ Costa is careful to remind us that all kinds of other factors, including socioeconomic levels, can impact the causes and effects of these and other, similar findings, but to see such results over such vast numbers is certainly remarkable.

Something reassuring I took from his book, overall, is that it is never ‘too late’ to start learning a second language. In fact, some research shows that if you start learning a language later in life it stretches you more and you’re less emotional with it. In our first or primary language we take all kinds of heuristic shortcuts, but in a later-learned second language the brain forces us to stop and think and assess situations more rationally. If we’re asked a question of logic our answer will likely be similar in our native tongue to our acquired second language, but if the question involves emotional, economic, or value-laden judgements, our thinking tends to be clearer in the second language. This is most likely because the second language is devoid of the emotional triggers we’ve learned in young life. Our moral judgements, in particular, change according to language. So, if I stick with it, I might be ‘smarter’ in French than in English. How’s that for irony?

Something particularly shocking, however, is how biased against other people we are depending on their language use and accent. I’m typically suspicious of social science experiments that haven’t been sufficiently replicated, but Costa writes about a few different studies in which children’s choice of socialising partners are monitored according to the skin colour, language, and accent. ‘The result was surprising. The children preferred to interact with those who have the same skin colour and accent. But what happened when these two properties were at odds? Did they choose a child with the same skin colour and foreign accent, or a child with a different skin colour and no foreign accent? It turns out that accent was the determining factor.’ It’s difficult to extrapolate what this means, other than it being a broad-strokes reminder of just how deeply ingrained in us it is to look for differences in languages and accents. As Mikki Kendall writes in Hood Feminism, ‘a Black girl who speaks with a “blaccent” is judged as less valuable and less intelligent.’ Elders might tell Black girls to use their ‘best white girl voice’ on the phone, but for those who can’t make the switch there are real punishments.

Studies have shown that we have less trust in facts presented to us by someone with a foreign accent. This does not change even when participants are told that the person relaying facts to them is simply reading from a script. Even worse, Costa writes, ‘we believe someone who sounds like a native speaker more than someone who speaks with an accent.’ What does this mean for migrants and displaced peoples? I thought back to my previous experiences in the legal profession; what does this mean for all kinds of professional and high-stakes settings in which we’re assessing people’s believability or credibility? I recalled the tradies at Oxford eating the students’ leftover breakfast; what does it mean for admissions interviews? There is such a convoluted overlap between how believable, reliable, rational, and intelligent we think people are, and the places we expect or allow them to take in society.

•

Reflecting on what we know about languages, it becomes clear just how narrow-minded our education system is to see ‘ESL kids’ as a drain rather than a resource. In an interview with The Pin, Omid Tofighian said, ‘I grew up interpreting for my parents from a very early age. I never realised this was a skill that could develop into other skills. I owe a lot of my ability to interpret and translate to the role and responsibility I had growing up.’ How extraordinarily blinkered it is that rich Australian schools are not clamouring for these children. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if translation and conflict resolution were on the HSC curriculum? I couldn’t imagine how Vincent had spent his life thinking and working in two worlds. Was there a world of him I didn’t know? Of course there was. There are countless worlds English-only speakers don’t even deign to recognise. English specifically, as it sets its rattan chair on the centre of the compass and points to ‘others’.

The colonisers who came to Australia knew it was critical to ban Indigenous Australians from not only practising their cultures but also from speaking their languages. In her book Rooted, about Australia’s history of bad language, lexicographer Amanda Laugesen tracks how the language brought over during invasion was further weaponised: ‘A drive for land and resources had profound effects and was underpinned by a language and science of race and difference. Racialised language, insults, and slurs became more common and prominent features of the English vocabulary, reinforcing and communicating ideologies of white supremacy and colonialism.’ The names Europeans used to describe the Indigenous people they encountered were shaped by the rationales of eugenics, and then the widespread use of those words and terms further legitimised the ideologies. European arrivals in Australia were suffering from major inferiority complexes. As they tried to gain some semblance of legitimacy they became ‘preoccupied with respectability’. Language was a critical marker of this. Speaking ‘proper English’ was a marker of the ‘civilised’ man, and ‘the policing and disciplining of language—for example, through forcing Indigenous people to speak English—played a key role in exerting power over the Indigenous population’.

Laugesen shares an extremely upsetting episode recorded in the journal of missionary George Augustus Robinson in 1841. Two girls, Pinggumyere and Narracort, had been ‘held by some hut-keepers in the neighbourhood for the purposes of providing sexual and other services’. The raping of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women by white men was widespread and often these same women were forced to provide domestic and other labour for little or no pay. When Robinson interacted with these two girls, he was disturbed not by what had been done to them, but by their use of profanities—like ‘fuckumall’—which they had clearly learned from their abusers. His concern about this bad language led him to call for ‘the benefits of Christian education’. In an extraordinary display of race-based selective reasoning, he seemed to care about the effect of swearing on their souls, but not so much about the effects of crimes against their persons.

Language was shaped by, then continued to shape, the perceived worth of different types of humans. Even now, most official mechanisms of state and society refuse to recognise Aboriginal English as at least a valid dialect. Languages are created, dynamic, evolving expressions of groups of people. The insecurity Laugesen documents—that Australian fear of inferiority to Europe and Britain—has manifested in white Australians doing whatever we can to prop up our sense of selves. Our ‘preoccupation with respectability’ is still strong.

Learning about languages, accents, and perceptions also made me think about the man who was assigned to be my prosecutor in 2017 when a complaint I made went to trial. He had a speech impediment. I thought at the time, and my opinion has solidified with hindsight, that he was a fantastic prosecutor. He was professional but empathetic with me, he was stern and firm in cross-examination of the defendant, and he was clear and concise with the jury. Whenever I hear anyone with any kind of difference in their speech style, I think of him, and I wonder how many people told him either explicitly or implicitly, when he was growing up, to find a job in which he didn’t have to speak too much. He decided to choose a professional role in which his ability to orate had colossal ramifications for the hurt and hurtful people involved, and he nailed it. As the American author and educator Henry van Dyke says, ‘Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very quiet if only those birds sing there that sang best.’

•

In early 2020, I had only just handed in my master’s thesis and it was still being considered by examiners when I started seriously trying to decide whether or not to apply to do a PhD. I felt the call of the Academy, like a siren song pulling me back, like people who aren’t sure what they believe but find themselves on their knees praying again. It promised me: approval. It whispered: legitimacy. I wondered if I got the extra letters, stamps, seals—my highly ornamental pots—then would I feel smart? Probably not. I was beginning to see, though, that this was what the system wanted. Precisely people like me, a good little middle-class girl, to be so aspirational, so committed to bettering myself in the eyes of the system, that I would not cast a critical eye upon that system.

Damian was travelling to Sydney for a few nights and would be sleeping on our couch. When I saw him come up the stairs of our apartment building with one small bag slung over his shoulder and a stack of books squished against his bulging biceps, I smiled. It was as though a memory not of him, but of how he made me feel, came rushing back: There he is, in a rocket to the moon. Vincent and I welcomed him in and we all sat down, settling into the same speech and storytelling patterns we’d established years earlier over beers in Brisbane. Being together again felt a little like home somehow. I asked Damian how he was liking Oxford, if his feelings towards it had changed at all.

‘I could leave 90 or 95 per cent of conversations I have there,’ he replied with a shrug, then seemed exasperated. ‘It’s such a pressure-cooker. Life is intense. My day is six to eleven, Monday to Friday.’

He told us about one of his friends, a woman I’ll call Liz. Every year there are about 100 finalists for a position at All Souls College—the ironically named college that only takes two or three new students each year. Over an agonising multi-month process, Liz had applied, was shortlisted and interviewed, and then didn’t get a spot. ‘She completely spiralled out for two or three months,’ Damian told us. A kind of a nervous breakdown or life crisis. Such is the pressure-cooker. Damian, meanwhile, had finished his master’s and enrolled to do a PhD in literature.

‘I couldn’t have gotten into the philosophy program even if I tried,’ he said.

I wasn’t sure I believed that, but what I believed was irrelevant. His thesis focused on Henry James and ‘the fragility of goodness’. He explained to me what that meant, but I couldn’t possibly repeat it without butchering it.

While we were sitting there, sipping champagne, I checked my phone and found an email from the secondary supervisor of my master’s thesis. It was wonderfully positive feedback on the final draft. I shared the news with the others, elated, and as we clinked glasses again I felt a surge of pride and relief flooding through me. The moment was much sweeter than it would have been were I alone, and so there it was again: the proving, the spectacle, betraying the legitimacy of the purported goals of the work. It was as though Damian’s presence was making me revert to some less secure self, in the same way that we become our childhood selves again when we return home to families for Christmas. I was wiggling in my seat with my hand up in the air. Why was I doing that? I had grown and changed in the year since I saw him.

The three of us spoke about Brexit. Damian said he felt confident that ‘every porter in Oxford would have voted for Brexit’ while the student and academic staff population mostly would have voted to remain in the EU. Such was the class divide.

‘What an absurd place,’ I commented.

Damian nodded. ‘Yep.’

I thought I could detect a new gentleness in him. He seemed more expressive. He mentioned how much he admired one of his friends’ ‘emotional intelligence’. Perhaps he was simply smiling more because he was on holidays. It made me feel, more than ever, excited to see the man he was growing into.

Damian wanted to visit the Golden Age Cinema in Surry Hills, so the three of us went to see The Big Lebowski. It was a funny film to watch sitting beside Damian, because he’s essentially the polar opposite of the character ‘the Dude’. I loathed The Big Lebowski when I first saw it, and it has taken me years to come around to it. I’m not a fan of these stoner protagonists. A variant of the Dude is Homer Simpson, a character I detest with a passion that grows every time I hear his whiny, idiotic pleas for special treatment. The world is full of negligent men who never get punished for the harm they cause; why would I want to spend my free time being reminded of how we constantly reward their mediocrity? I’ll never forget the way I cringed and pulled away from the screen when I first saw the Dude’s bumbling, jelly-sandalled apathy. Visceral repulsion is not an overstatement. He doesn’t ‘do’ anything. He makes stupid mistakes. He has ignorant friends whose terrible views he simply ‘abides’. Ambivalence towards the challenges others face can be incredibly harmful. I was taught that putting effort into things was how you showed people respect and love. Lots of people in this world don’t have the luxury of being Homer Simpson or the Dude. Sitting between Damian and Vincent, listening to them laugh at the Dude’s antics, I thought perhaps I had found the Dude infuriating precisely because I was insecure about the shared aspects of our personalities. Someone like Damian was able to relax and laugh about it, unthreatened with the possibility of seeing himself in that mediocrity. I was growing a little, gradually able to laugh too.

When I emerged from my bedroom the next morning, rubbing my eyes and yawning, I found him reading de Beauvoir in French. I had forgotten how he needed less sleep than I did.

‘How long have you been learning French?’ I asked him.

‘About a year,’ he replied.

I still couldn’t even manage Bob le Bricoleur. My greatest achievement in French was a 100-day streak in the Duolingo language app. I thought to myself as I washed my face that any time before brunch was too early to have one’s pride be wounded so barbarously; surely one needed to wake up fully before one could commence the ritual self-loathing procedures. He was further than me by so very, very far. Since I saw him last he’d travelled around France and been to somewhere in South America I couldn’t remember. Some park in Chile, maybe, with some conservation program set up by other Rhodes scholars. Then he was flossing. Damian flossed. Flossing in one’s own home is one thing, but flossing on a short trip while staying at someone else’s house is just showing off. He went for a run and covered about four times the distance of my usual route. When he returned, he was dripping with sweat. It pooled on the floor beneath him as he stretched to warm down. I was incredibly moved by this. It was like a sign, or something more than a metaphor: This was how much you must exert yourself in all things; the sweat should be pooling under you when you pause to rest.

I was wretchedly hungover on the day he left, having had too good a time at a pool party the night before while he was out with other friends. I would be in London for a week in March, so we made plans to meet again then. The day after he left I realised the avocados he had bought were still there on the kitchen bench. I’ve never had much luck with avocados, but when I cut into one of Damian’s a perfectly soft green opened up before my eyes, free of bruises, firm to scoop out, but weak under my fork.

‘Even the avocados he picks are perfect!’ I said out loud to the empty apartment. When would this madness end?

Not long after, I sat down and transcribed the audio recording of the long conversation we’d had in Oxford in 2018. I’d been putting it off. It was painful to listen to. All journalists share the loathing—of hearing their voices on audio files they have to transcribe—but this was different. I embarrassed myself. Very few sentences or questions were actually complete. Every second word was ‘like’. If my speech were an action, it would be a fumbled, ungracious curtsy. I could hear myself grovelling. At the time, I believed we had all been playing the same game, of life itself, and that Damian had won and I had lost; I was a loser.

Something was changing, though. It used to be that I would spend time with Damian and come up with a dozen new resolutions for how I would change and improve myself. Now, instead, I had taken the ornamental pots off the shelf and was really looking at them, turning them over in my hands. When had I agreed to pray at that altar? When had I chosen those gods? Life felt a little too short, and the system a little too stacked, to stick with that same well-trodden pilgrimage.

It wasn’t that his wasn’t a worthy choice of work. It was just that the work I’d found myself gravitating towards—the business of reading and writing, trying to tell the right stories, make some change—was proving deeply gratifying. What talents did I possess? Not the ones Damian did, but that didn’t mean I had none. I cared a little less about singing best. Things like ‘better’ and ‘best’ were feeling less and less relevant to me. The world was proving itself to be much too full of rights and wrongs. I wanted to follow my nose. The deep inner well of energy and resolve inside me was motivated more by curiosity rather than pride. I was only just starting to see it all a little more clearly: youthful, panicky grabbing at the answers gradually maturing into a delight in the questions.

Then I remembered that in high school one of my friends tutored refugees in English and I felt like an egg had cracked over my head. I opened my laptop and googled ‘refugee tutoring Sydney’, and the first result was the Refugee Language Program run through the University of Sydney. ‘Refugees often arrive with nothing—no friends, family or the language skills they need to find work and accommodation. Our program helps refugees learn English and build social networks in the Australian community.’

For fuck’s sake, I thought to myself. How many times would I have to relearn this lesson? That I spend all my time on get get get. How do I get better and more? Who is getting something I’m not? Who got what, and what do I have to do to catch up? And it leads me around and around and around into a tighter and tighter knot, scrambling to see the top of something, clawing at some imaginary apex. What I needed to do was shift my focus from the get to the give. Everything became suddenly obvious: my ‘worth’ and my ‘value’, my ‘intelligence’, my linguistic abilities, my brains—these things don’t move from the conceptual to the actual unless I come into contact with others. That’s what I’d been getting so wrong for so long. That’s why the ornamental pots felt so empty. The brains aren’t the ends; they’re the means.

I did value brains, or whatever this thing called ‘intelligence’ was, but the Academy seemed more intent on defining intelligence than trying to act on it or embody it. I loved learning, but I was uninterested in grading that learning—and I was incredibly interested in applying that learning outside of the bubble. So why was I judging my brains according to the grade instead of the outcome? What did it matter if I was reading Bob le Bricoleur instead of de Beauvoir in French, if I was deriving meaning and enjoyment from both or neither? And besides, I didn’t need to be extraordinary in a second language to make an extraordinary contribution simply by sharing my first.

6

Western civilisation

My flights to and from the UK for the 2020 London Book Fair had been booked at a time when ‘coronavirus’ was just a source of obscure internet memes and jokes about the beer with the same name. I arrived in London in March, just as Italy went into lockdown. On the Wednesday my friend and I cancelled our plans to pop over to Paris for the weekend, and by the Friday France had ordered everything shut too.

In my emails to Damian I had offered to meet him in Oxford, but he’d leaped at the chance to get out of Oxford and come to London. We bought tickets for a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and planned dinner and drinks on either side. Of course he had to cancel. He told me on the Thursday that things in Oxford were ‘not great’. Lots of students were unsure of whether to try to get back home or to bunker down in their share houses. The book fair was cancelled too. So instead of meetings and a day with Damian I spent my time alone in museums and galleries, having a look at some of the stepping stones of ‘Western civilisation’.

In the Victoria and Albert Museum I read an exhibition label about rich young men undertaking a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe as a physical and intellectual rite of passage into adulthood, and the narrow focus of their studies:

From the 16th century onwards, a knowledge of ancient Roman and Greek history, philosophy, and literature was considered an integral part of a gentleman’s education. Such classical learning was thought to encourage the ideals of heroism and public service. By the 18th century the Grand Tour gave wealthy young men the opportunity to test, demonstrate, and improve their knowledge of classical languages, literature, and art. They translated Latin inscriptions on buildings and identified scenes from classic mythology shown in paintings or sculptures.

It was easy to imagine how those guys got such big heads. Their myopic vision of the past would always affirm them. Their lessons would confirm the rightness of their wealth and power. Yes, this version of history says to them, you belong to this long line of thinkers and makers, and this torch of knowledge is now being passed to you. You are special. You deserve this. It reminded me of Simon Haines’s speech to the inaugural Ramsay scholars, in which he’d told them that Western civilisation’s greatest hits were their intellectual inheritance. The right of such people to believe in themselves was never challenged. No wonder they were so hypersensitive to questions and criticisms.

At the British Museum, I started on the ground floor, paying my respects to the Rosetta Stone on my way to the Greeks. One of the first labels I saw was on a cabinet full of ceramics and it read:

Athens was a metropolis inhabited by a community that was socially and ethnically diverse. It was, however, dominated by men, who regarded the male, free-born citizen and his values as the norm. Such men as Perikles, whose marble portrait is displayed in this room, were the model. He was the ideal warrior statesman, ‘fair of face and sound of heart’ (kalos kai agathos). Those who did not share in the status of the ruling class included women, children, the old, slaves, and resident foreigners.

In other words, the ‘excluded’ list was much longer than the list of those ‘included’.

Then, in the label to the right, next to a bronze of an ‘African shoe-shine boy’ who was ‘probably a slave’:

The Mediterranean sea washes the shores of north Africa where Greek colonists came into contact with the native peoples of the African continent. Ethiopia (the land of burnt faces) held a special fascination for Greeks as a fabled land, favoured by the gods and the presumed source of the Nile. Africans enter Greek art as figures in myth or as studies in human physical type. African residents in fifth-century Athens will have been mostly slaves.

Aristotle laid a heavy and powerful foundation when he wrote: ‘From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.’

I’ve been told so many times not to judge people in the past by today’s standards, but it’s absurd to ask us to admire their ‘reason’ and ‘philosophy’ if that ‘reason’ and ‘philosophy’ kept them mega rich and justified their keeping humans as property. I reserve my right to judge slave owners, no matter the year in which they were born. If you want to look to the past with gratitude, surely you must also look back in anger. Hindsight is a gift. Aren’t we mature enough to hold competing ideas in our minds simultaneously? Looking back with shame and embarrassment is how we learn to do better. I read that Athena was named the ‘patron goddess of democratic Athens’ after beating Poseidon in a competition. So a woman was the figurehead of a place in which women were prohibited from voting. One of the most important things the concept of kyriarchy has helped me to see and understand is a system’s ability to self-extend and self-perpetuate if not checked. It highlights how integral exclusion is to the pyramid of power. When the Greeks first drafted their ideas of ‘democracy’ in the fifth century, the exclusion of entire groups of people wasn’t just incidental; it was a necessary precondition. When the giant lump of ‘women and slaves’ were shafted to the middle and bottom of the pyramid and denied suffrage, it increased the power of those at the top. To consolidate and bolster their power, the voting men built institutions, and through those institutions flowed rules and practices. When followed, those dictates both prescribed and accrued legitimacy. The rich and powerful in ancient Greece often used their own money to fund the building of public spaces and monuments, and they’d put their names on them. We have inherited those systems. That’s part of ‘Western civilisation’.

In reading around Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work, I found an article by Chris de Wet titled ‘The Didactics of Kyriarchy: Slavery, education, and the formation of masculinity’. In it, de Wet writes: ‘The education and discipline of children were central to their formation as future men and women of the Roman Empire. But these children also had to be taught how to be future slaveholders—a process called kyriarchization.’ This is from the teachings of an early Archbishop of Constantinople: ‘Along with becoming a good husband and father, Chrysostom wants the young male adolescent to become a good master of his future slaves.’ History is comprised of complex and hypocritical approaches to knowledge, de Wet notes: ‘It is ironic that despite the view that they were incompetent and degenerate, slaves played a major role in the rearing and education of elite children in the Roman household.’ He cites elementary school exercises in which ‘a small child is taught to read a text in which he threatens a slave with crucifixion’. That same child’s wet nurse would likely have been an enslaved woman. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. People at the top of the pyramid carry on without needing to justify themselves; they look across and out over their dominion and see the fact of their thrones as the proof of their deserving. Rich people continue to believe the poor simply don’t work hard enough. Men insist women are just good at, and choose, different pursuits. Europeans arrived in Australia and took what they wanted, and their democratically elected descendants still talk about their inherent cultural superiority. And all the while, the people at the top dictate what legitimate knowledge looks and sounds like. I saw a depiction of Plato and felt a strong desire to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. How could he claim to want to ask big questions about what it means to be human while still buying and selling humans?! And those men who thought themselves his powerful progeny, they had the whole world in their hands! Why did they continue to just stand there masturbating into them?!

In Transforming Vision, Schüssler Fiorenza explains how the Greeks such as Aristotle and Plato managed to apply different rationale to the rulers from the women and people enslaved:

These people were not fit to govern, the philosophers argued, because of their deficient natural powers of reasoning. Such explicit ideological justifications need always to be developed at a point in history when it becomes increasingly obvious that those who are excluded from the political life of the polis, such as freeborn wo/men, educated slaves, wealthy metics (alien residents), and traveling mercenaries, are actually indispensable to it. Philosophical rationalizations of the exclusion of diverse people from citizenship and government are engendered by the contradiction between the democratic vision of the city-state and its actual practices.

It is telling what you can observe when people look to the past, to somewhere like Athens as the ‘birth’ of ‘democracy’, and then reflect on their admiration for what they imagine it was like. Perhaps for people like Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, John Howard, and Simon Haines, who believe themselves to be the Platos and Perikles of the world, it is reasonable to spend millions worshipping this legacy. But while I’m certainly grateful for the Greeks’ contribution, and am glad they wrested the concept of political power away from divinity, to me the Athenian system of rule resembles not so much a democracy as a thousands-strong oligarchy. Forgoing academic definitions for a moment, can you call a system a ‘democracy’ if it denies suffrage to far more people than it includes? Are a smattering of voting mechanisms really enough? I read a dozen articles from scholars of Greece who write things such as: ‘To both ancient and modern democrats, for example, freedom and equality are of the essence—they are core political values,’ and then go on to suggest that, given the greater inequality of wealth now, the Athenians even did democracy better than us here in the 21st century. When slavery is listed as one of the unfortunate by-products of a political system that was otherwise ‘the birth place of equality’, some questions and criticisms must be raised. Looking at societies and systems as kyriarchal allows us to see what is required of those at the bottom so that those on top might flourish. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf writes, ‘We may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’

Australia only achieved a true democracy in the 1960s when Aboriginal Australians were finally allowed to vote. Indeed, as white women in Australia saw an opportunity to climb to the next rung in the pyramid at the turn of the century, they threw Indigenous Australian women under the bus in the process. Waves of white suffragettes fighting for white suffrage is kyriarchy in action; when one is somewhere in the middle of the pyramid one is both oppressed and oppressor.

From the British Museum I walked to the nearby London Review of Books bookshop, and I thought of Mary Beard’s small book, Women & Power: A manifesto. There was something about the repeating heroic image of the ‘warrior statesman’ and the pairing of ‘heroism and public service’ that rubbed me the wrong way. In 2014 Beard, prolific author and professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, gave a talk called ‘Oh Do Shut Up, Dear!’ as part of the London Review of Books conversation series held at the British Museum. She reflected on the connection between the vitriol she was subjected to online because of her gender and the fact that history books repeatedly silenced women. In 2017 she did a kind of a follow-up, ‘Women in Power’, from Medusa to Merkel, looking at the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is embedded in our culture. The legacy of ‘Western civilisation’ is that men are orators and women in power make a mess of things. Beard’s two talks form the basis of Women & Power.

Beard prefaces her work with the reflection that her mother was born before women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections in Britain; she’s well aware of what we’ve won, but Women & Power is about what we’ve yet to win.

I wanted to work out how I would explain to her—as much as to myself, as well as to the millions of other women who still share some of the same frustrations—just how deeply embedded in Western culture are the mechanisms that silence women, that refuse to take them seriously, and that sever them (sometimes quite literally, as we shall see) from the centres of power. This is one place where the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans can help to throw light on our own. When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

The first recorded example in Western literature of a man telling a woman to shut up is in Homer’s Odyssey. Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, hears his mother speak in the great hall, and tells her to go back to her quarters, return to the loom, because ‘speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household’. Beard explains that in Homeric Greek the word Telemachus uses, muthos, signifies ‘authoritative speech’, as distinct from the chatting or gossiping that anyone (i.e. women) engaged in. It’s a significant distinction, because this example of silencing is representative of many others. For me it especially highlights the false dichotomy of ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, and which is for whom. Neither a woman’s speech, nor her mind, are considered fit for public purpose. Beard argues that not only is the silencing of women important but also that men should ‘parade that exclusion’. It is not enough for the woman to be barred from power; the world must watch and see the woman silenced, and he who does the silencing shall be rewarded.

In a well-known story from the early history of Rome, a woman of virtue, Lucretia, is raped, and announces her suicide after denouncing her attacker. The man’s problem—of a woman speaking out after he attacks her—is solved in Ovid’s Metamorphoses wherein the princess Philomela is raped and the rapist cuts out her tongue. Beard writes that Shakespeare ‘picked up’ this idea for the character of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. Thus, another stepping-stone along the continuum of ‘Western civilisation’ is placed. Over ten years ago I saw Titus Andronicus performed in Queensland by the Bell Shakespeare Company. Widely acknowledged as the most violent of Shakespeare’s plays, the production I saw cast men in the women’s roles—not just because it was customary to do so in Shakespeare’s time, but because there were scenes when Lavinia was subjected to such horrific sexual and physical violence the theatre-makers knew audiences would be too uncomfortable if it were an actual woman on the stage. In the original Roman story, Philomela weaved a tapestry to tell her family of her rape. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia has both her tongue cut out and her hands cut off so that no such justice will ever be possible. Henry James specifically wrote about the ‘polluting, contagious, and socially destructive effect of women’s voices’ at the turn of the century. Picasso’s 1930 work portraying the rape of Philomela is much less palatable now we all know a little more about him as a predator and misogynist. An interview with John Bell about the Bell Shakespeare Company features on the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation’s website alongside their praise for Shakespeare’s works. Step, step, step, layer, layer, layer.

The bigger point Beard makes is that ‘public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender’. A well-known Roman saying was vir bonus dicendi peritus, which Beard translates to ‘a good man, skilled in public speaking’. Perikles was the ‘ideal warrior statesman’. In the Western tradition, ‘statesman’ is as much a man’s identity territory as ‘warrior’. There aren’t many examples of women speaking in public, but when they do appear, either in stories or recorded histories, they are represented as distinctly androgynous. In other words, even when women do speak, people do not hear muthos.

In much the same way as Margaret Thatcher took lessons to lower the pitch of her voice, and Obama’s speech writers explicitly adopted the techniques of Cicero, Beard illustrates the ways in which we inherit, either explicitly or implicitly, these ideas about ‘rhetoric’ and ‘persuasion’ and therefore power. She adds that ‘those nineteenth-century gentlemen who devised, or enshrined, most of the parliamentary rules and procedures in the House of Commons were brought up on exactly those classical theories, slogans, and prejudices that I have been quoting’. Is it any wonder that so many politicians in the UK were educated at Oxford, or that the most vocal advocates for the Ramsay Centre have been politicians? They believe the public forum calls to them. They have inherited the statesman’s righteous path to reason and power. The Oxford Union debating club attracts orators from around the world. Saini writes in Superior that the enormous colonnade at the entrance to the British Museum ‘mimics the architecture of ancient Athens,’ because ‘the British saw themselves as the cultural and intellectual successors of the Greeks and Romans’. Sandstone is a sedimentary rock. It takes centuries to form, deposit after deposit, minerals pressed together, made hard with layers and years. The people in the sandstone places are the same. Everything they choose to see in the past affirms them and their right to shape the future. They were raised on the racist milk of the Empire, and long before that they suckled at the sexist teat of Western civilisation. Beard’s writing on this also demonstrates the narrow-mindedness of attempts to defend the Ramsay Centre’s presence at universities by citing the feminist credentials of Western civilisation; the Greeks and Romans have given us wonderful things, but they are also the ‘well-springs of Western misogyny’.

Oration has always been the defining competency we seek in leadership. Even now that the fallibility of the ‘strong man’ leader has been proven so many times over, we are often incapable of seeing competency presented in an alternative package. A rallying speech does not signify either the intelligence or effort required for high-level management. It does not hint at interpersonal skills, or the humility required to listen to advisers you have chosen because they’re smarter than you are. Communication skills are an area of competency, sure, but they’re so bound up in this package of identity and muthos we keep conflating them with intelligence and leadership. More than this, we think only a certain type of man is capable of muthos, and that the minds and abilities of others must be naturally inferior somehow. And all these great minds must pass through the halls of the Academy. After all, can you imagine a prime minister of Australia whose highest qualification was a Certificate II from TAFE? No. What about an MP, or a mayor? Unlikely. Nine out of the ten former prime ministers had at least one university degree. Seven of the degrees were from the University of Sydney, five from Oxford, and four from the University of Melbourne, with the vast majority being in arts or law. Keating is the outlier. Even at the more local end of the political leadership spectrum, the mayors and lord mayors of every single major city in each state of Australia in 2021 all had at least one undergraduate degree. Money flows into, out of, and around universities; power follows that money and is followed by it. The campus is the physical and metaphorical nexus of control over the ‘intellectual’ state of the nation, and one cannot be considered fit for control or power without having passed through that nexus. It was that way in Thomas Jefferson’s slave-owning America, it was that way in Cecil Rhodes’s vision for his namesake scholarships, it continues to be this way when a student has to learn in a building named after George Pell, William Wentworth, or Samuel Griffith. These men are the heroes of the versions of the stories their institutions continue to tell. If any of these organisations want to prioritise actual knowledge-sharing over power-hoarding, things will need to change. Systems—both historical and contemporary—must be acknowledged as immediately suspicious if they exclude people more powerfully than they include them. If they are unwilling to look clearly, and with ‘reason’, at their own histories, then they are more akin to carbon copies of the Enlightenment than even they realise. The only thing worse than a man convinced of his superiority is the man who says his belief in himself is ‘objective’.

The fact that certain Australians find themselves wielding greater success, power, and wealth than others does not ‘prove’ that they are any more deserving. Plenty of people work damn hard and reap no similar rewards, but to suggest this to someone who enjoys their spot atop the pyramid guarantees a defensive spark; it is too troubling for them to think their riches are not the result of some manifest rightness or that their luxuries are not simply the fruits of their superior intellectual labouring. As journalist and author Rick Morton writes in his potent but short essay On Money:

Without money ever changing hands, it can make you confident. The very idea of your access to it, if needed, is performance-enhancing. Because we attach worth to income or wealth, people who are not raised with the insulation of money can come to see their own ideas as being without value … this phenomenon becomes worse the more you move into a world that wasn’t meant for you. University was just the start. Later, the media. Or law. Or politics. Medicine. Some people have a head start in the contest of ideas. They are just better at voicing them, forcefully at times, and defending them.

If you have an idea, and you look like the men whom previous ideas came from, and you speak like men who had ideas before you spoke, and you are leading with the confidence and strength of previous leaders, then you will likely never experience the frictions of prejudices that grind down everyone else as they travel through life. Something Angela Saini writes in Superior applies here too: ‘Every society that happens to be dominant comes to think of itself as being the best, deep down. The more powerful we become, the more our power begins to be framed as not only cultural but natural.’ She is writing about race specifically, but this sentiment—that the very fact of the superior power is proof of the superiority—is applicable to all cross-sections of identity.

•

I read in Women in Higher Education: An encyclopedia the term ‘the higher, the fewer’, which describes how American universities perceived to be of a higher calibre have fewer women on staff, and especially fewer women in positions of power. The pattern extends to schools; in Australia there are more male principals and female teachers, and far more male teachers at secondary schools than in primary schools. This is despite decades of equal access to schooling and universities. The encyclopaedia asserts that this is ‘a direct legacy of America’s historical antagonism towards women’s higher learning’. Harvard University was founded in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 by deeply religious men from Oxford and Cambridge with the primary goal of training new men to fill positions in the ministry and colonial government. In the years that followed, the arguments rolled out to exclude everyone else from university were ‘religious, intellectual, biological, and social’, but the ‘Judeo-Christian heritage on which the country was founded was the cornerstone of resistance to women’s higher education’. Women were to serve first a father, then a husband, and at all times God.

In the early 1800s women were begrudgingly allowed to study ‘finishing’ subjects, such as French, sewing, and science. Only in the nineteenth century, when science had grown into a rigorous and economically viable pursuit were women deemed incapable of, or simply unsuited to, science and maths. All through these developments, of course, white women were still upholding standards of purity and morality that ensured true equality for women of colour or women in colonised nations could only ever be a pipe dream. In 1873, Dr Edward Clarke, a former member of Harvard’s medical school faculty, published a book of his ‘findings’ that women’s brains were less developed, and that if they taxed themselves too much mentally at university it would compromise their ‘reproductive apparatus’. Clarke’s book had a catastrophic effect on the fight for access. Never underestimate the danger of a Man of Science. Social arguments warned against the ‘masculating’ and ‘unsexing’ effects of education which might make women unfit for marriage. When Annie Meyer, the founder of Barnard—a college for women—told her father she wanted to go to university, he replied, ‘You will never be married, men hate intelligent wives.’ Where it gets even more interesting is at the turn of the nineteenth century, when women students were doing well but having fewer babies. We know now that all over the world one of the strongest correlating factors with the increased education levels of women is the lower birth rates of those women. This was cause for great alarm and, true to colonial form, it was described as ‘race suicide’. White women who went to college were getting married less, or later, and having fewer or no children. As racism and anti-immigration sentiments abounded, these women were held to be responsible for the risk that the whites in power might be overrun. The president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, and Theodore Roosevelt, the actual POTUS at the time, expressed concern that the ‘best classes’ weren’t replenishing themselves. Don’t ever call Tony Abbott an original. He and the ‘statesmen’ like him are just tapping into one of the oldest, most irrational fears in the book.

Women in Higher Education demonstrates how the departmentalisation of universities was a response to the fear that women were becoming ‘masculinised’ and men were becoming ‘feminised’. Medicine, law, business, and divinity departments were separated from others and prided themselves on their hostility towards women. It was around this time that women started outperforming men, and some universities placed limits on the number of honours women were eligible to earn and denied them scholarships or access to facilities on campus. By 1920, most colleges in America had reached gender parity in student enrolments. This dropped to a low of approximately 30 per cent from the 1930s to the 50s. The situation only began to improve in the 1970s and 80s when equal opportunity legislation was enacted.

In a paper titled ‘A Long-Run View of the University Gender Gap in Australia’, Alison L. Booth and Hiau Joo Kee show how Australian history follows a similar trajectory following the establishment of universities in the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria in the 1850s. Australia was much more secular in its approach to higher education, with less focus on feeding young men into the clergy than in Britain. White women were admitted into the University of Melbourne from 1879 and into the University of Sydney from 1881, which had the flow-on effect of stimulating more enrolments and better results for girls at secondary schools. In 1911, about 20 per cent of students were women, and by 1921 it was almost 30 per cent. World War II was the catalyst for an increased interest and involvement by the government in universities and technical education. When Japan entered the war in December 1941, Australian manpower and production became problems, and enrolments dropped. In 1942, a Universities’ Commission was established which classified certain disciplines such as medicine, science, and engineering, as being exempt from military service. The Commonwealth Financial Assistance Scheme was introduced at the start of 1943 to encourage enrolments in those areas, and it was to be retained and extended to all faculties once the war ended. Then, in 1944, the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme offered full tuition and living stipends to those who’d served in the armed forces—which was, of course, almost exclusively men. The Australian National University was established in 1946 by federal legislation as part of the post-war nation-building exercise. Women’s participation dropped to 24 per cent and steadily declined. There wasn’t a significant improvement until contraception and the civil rights movements in the 1960s, including the 1966 removal of the marriage bar which saw women forced out of work when they got married. Finally, the real jump in women enrolling occurred with the election of the Whitlam government in the 1970s.

And where are we now? In 2018, Frank Larkins, professor emeritus and former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, published a report titled, ‘Male students remain underrepresented in Australian universities. Should we be concerned?’ He himself seemed concerned by the fact that 58 per cent of enrolled students were women:

There has been much commentary in Australia recently about the underrepresentation of females in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Initiatives by the Australian Government in this area are to be welcomed; however, the broader issues of male gender imbalance and the dominance of females in most fields of education are not receiving sufficient attention. Are there national strategic implications arising from the gender gap? The underachievement by males in schools needs attention before we can expect any significant increase in male participation in universities.

In 2007, Booth and Kee reported that ‘in Australia girls are doing better than boys at reading, as well as boys at science, and slightly worse than boys at numeracy’. In 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 89 per cent of girls finished year twelve compared to 81 per cent of boys. In 2019, preliminary HSC results showed that girls achieved a higher average Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) than boys, at 71.10 compared to 67.80, but that they were still doing different subjects. Boys accounted for 76 per cent of physics students and 93 per cent of engineering students at high school, and these trends haven’t changed much in the last two decades. Over 90 per cent of the dance and textiles students were girls, as were around 72 per cent of the English Extension students.

Professor of educational psychology at the University of Sydney Helen Watt told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018, ‘People say “if boys and girls do just have different interests, what’s the problem if they follow those interests?”, and if that was the full story I’d agree, but it’s not.’ Girls think less of themselves in STEM classrooms than boys do, despite similar average results, and girls report most stress and anxiety in maths classes. Watt’s studies of Australian and Canadian students through high school found: ‘Boys also have this slightly overestimated self-concept that spirals into benefits, they actually do rate their self-concept in maths higher than girls despite similar levels of achievement.’ The problem has never been about the girls’ brains or abilities. The problem is how the world keeps making them feel like shit.

Watt’s research reminded me of a Guardian news story revealing that several medical schools in Japan had been manipulating entrance exam results in order to give men an unfair advantage. The dean of one school, at Juntendo University, tried to justify the practice by arguing that male applicants needed the extra help because women matured faster than men and had better communication skills. Another medical school claimed to be concerned that women would leave the profession to have children, resulting in a shortage of doctors. Juntendo decided to abolish the practice and in 2019 announced that women had performed slightly better than men for the first time in seven years. In 2016, only 21 per cent of doctors in Japan were women. At Tokyo medical school, where the final year of the discriminatory marking practice was still in place, the pass rate was 2.9 per cent for women and 9 per cent for men. When the university stopped altering the results, women did slightly better than men overall. People, even supposedly ‘rational’ and ‘evidence-based’ people, from ‘academic’ and ‘empirical’ professions, will do the darndest things to confirm their own unfounded beliefs in biological determinism. If powerful people were truly concerned that women were exiting the profession to have children, then that would be the problem they’d focus on solving: women leaving the profession. You solve that through reducing workplace harassment, providing affordable and accessible childcare, and by encouraging men to step properly into the domestic sphere. But people don’t like that version of progress.

If you think something like that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, happen in Australia, then I’d love a passport to wherever you think you live. I read on the website of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) about Dr Hans Peter Dietz, a senior obstetrician and professor at Sydney University who sits on the leadership committee of the Australian Salaried Medical Officers’ Federation (ASMOF). Emails written by Dietz in 2018 to a group of recipients who were also committee members show him writing that the ‘increasingly female’ medical workforce has made it ‘increasingly vulnerable’ to problems such as inability to cope with adversity and suicide. When a female colleague challenged him, he doubled down, writing: ‘Women are more likely to drop out during the year, and they’re more likely to fall ill, which is why it’s harder to staff departments these days … They’re more expensive to train in the sense that their lifetime work years will be less.’ He also took issue with universities being ‘safe spaces’. What makes such sexist views even worse is that Dietz is an obstetrician and gynaecologist. A subsequent uardian Australia article lists half-a-dozen occasions on which he reportedly made incorrect and misogynist comments—for example, that midwives are ‘incompetent’. This is a man with great power, both within the university and within his profession. He sits on influential committees, publishes research, and attends conferences. His prejudices have real-world consequences.

Several other allegations of misogyny and unprofessionalism have subsequently been made against Dietz, all of which he is refuting or disagreeing with in some way. A major hospital where he worked banned him from practising there, but his professional associations are representing him in opposition to that ban, and he’s still a professor. People, including women, have also come out in support of his work, including his co-founding the Australasian Birth Trauma Association and his research into pelvic floor damage—an issue that brings shame and trauma to many mothers. The missing link here, between Dietz’s sexist comments and his work, is that it has always been possible for people to love and protect and respect mothers while not necessarily loving and respecting and protecting women at work. Someone like Dietz could provide me with excellent prenatal, birth, and postnatal care, and still not support anti-discrimination legislation that lets me return to my job after I’ve recovered. The thing that struck me about both the Japanese medical schools and the comments made by Dietz is that they resent or fear the increase of women in that specialised, traditionally male profession. Medicine continues to be an arena in which people refuse to hear muthos when women speak. Their ideas and contributions are minimised. The low numbers of women participating in high levels of these professions continue to be interpreted as inevitable or natural rather than a result of men barring their entry or forcing them out. In 2019, the Medical Journal of Australia posed the question: ‘Is there gender equity in Australian medicine?’ 35 doctors co-authored a frustrated response: ‘No.’ Women have had parity as medical students for more than three decades, but the Australian Medical Association’s gender equity summit found ‘the pipeline theory hasn’t worked’. Women comprise 40 per cent of the medical workforce and 53 per cent of early career practitioners, but only 28 per cent of medical deans and 12.5 per cent of hospital CEOs are women. Across the board, ‘the higher, the fewer’. Surgery is a notoriously misogynistic specialisation. An analysis published in Annals of Surgery in 2020 found that women were so often allocated fewer and less complex operations to complete that, even when adjusting for specialties and seniority, it amounted to women surgeons essentially being ‘underemployed’. These rates hadn’t improved in twenty years.

In 2018, findings reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the efficacy of women doctors made international headlines. ‘Scientists in the US reviewed nearly 582,000 heart attack cases in Florida over a period of 19 years. They found that female patients admitted to a hospital emergency room had a significantly higher chance of survival when another woman was in charge of their treatment.’ These results accounted for both medical conditions and severity of illnesses. Studies from Australia and Sweden have also shown that women are more likely to die from heart attacks and are more frequently misdiagnosed, but this new research specifically demonstrated improved outcomes for patients—particularly women patients—if the treating professionals were women. One of the likeliest causes of this higher standard of medical care from female doctors is that they have to be better than their male peers just to survive in the industry, let alone to get ahead.

It’s not just politics and medicine; there are still whole areas and arenas that just aren’t ‘for’ women. Often, actually, they’re against us. And these are the areas that still do so much heavy lifting in terms of how we envisage power and intelligence.

7

2020

When I returned from London I quarantined myself for the mandatory two weeks. It was eerie to see how the public mood in my home city had shifted within ten days. People weren’t joking around anymore; they were picking fights in supermarkets. I was rereading No Friend But the Mountains, paying more attention, looking anew at the kyriarchy. The only time I recognised anyone like myself in the book was when Boochani describes the prim young women lawyers for the Department of Immigration, who arrived offering the men a fresh round of bureaucratic hell. I wouldn’t have dared to write about the two settings—Manus prison and the Academy—in a connected way if Omid hadn’t drawn the comparison, but since he had, I could not unsee it. Boochani was transferred to Manus prison one month after the September 2013 election Tony Abbott won in a ‘landslide’, having campaigned with a strong anti-asylum-seeker message. The theme proved so successful that Labor adopted the same message in the weeks before voting opened. As soon as he was elected, Abbott announced Operation Sovereign Borders. What I was hearing from Prime Minister Scott Morrison in March 2020 was only a slight pivot in the conversation, this time focused on universities and borders and what kinds of people were priorities.

As the early months of 2020 rolled on, COVID-19 acted like an acidic agent in Australia, burning through veneers, revealing the colonial bones beneath the ‘civilised’ flesh. As Tim Soutphommasane, professor and former race discrimination commissioner, writes in his essay for Upturn: A Better Normal After COVID-19, ‘Minorities rarely fare well during pandemics.’ He saw a dangerous return of the ‘Fortress Australia mentality’ accompanying the necessary closing of international borders. ‘It was no accident that, when the federal parliament sat for the first time after the pandemic hit, Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke of the government’s response as being about “defending and protecting Australia’s national sovereignty”.’

As March turned into April it became clear that people already struggling with socioeconomic inequality were being worst hit by the layoffs, precarious employment, lack of child care, and pre-existing health issues. Then the schools and universities became renewed battlegrounds for ideological and funding battles. In April, in the middle of the first COVID-19 lockdown, The Age reported: ‘Private schools who fear they will lose students in droves as the country enters recession have asked education minister Dan Tehan for a taxpayer bailout to prevent mass job cuts … Catholic Education Melbourne is also believed to be pushing for emergency funding to minimise the financial effects of COVID-19.’

Blaise Joseph’s position as education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies would see him invited onto Sunrise and offered space in the newspapers to discuss school closures during lockdown. An article published in the Daily Telegraph purported to be about school closures exacerbating student disadvantage but ended up being about how many jobs would be lost and how it was frustrating that Morrison ‘couldn’t force states and territories to keep government schools open’. Glenn Fahey from CIS was also quoted as an expert in a Sydney Morning Herald front-page article about school closures and disadvantage. This story appeared simultaneously in the Herald:

A $123 million ‘vertical’ school will be built at the centre of a residential and retail hub in north-west Sydney … The commission, which handles some of the state’s most complex and contentious projects, is also in the process of determining a proposal for a $49 million redevelopment of SCEGGS Darlinghurst. Last year, the commission approved The Scots College’s $29 million plan to revamp its library to resemble a Scottish castle amid debate over the extent of taxpayer funding for private schools.

The great tussle as to whether or not schools should reopen would continue for months. The federal government wanted them open again to try to avoid the economy grinding to a halt, but many of the states were advised by their respective health officials to take a more cautious approach. The federal government’s response was to offer private schools a $3.3 billion ‘sweetener’—a 25 per cent advance on their funding for the following year—if they reopened in June. Writer and lecturer Jane Caro wrote that it would be ‘naive’ to think these schools wouldn’t still receive their normal full funding in 2021 as well, and no similar incentive was on offer for public schools. Tehan and others publicly lamented the suffering of less-advantaged students during lockdown, but did not acknowledge that the schools they were offering financial incentives to overwhelmingly did not teach those students. I remembered reading that Turkheimer and his colleagues had researched learning progress in children from low socioeconomic backgrounds and found that they tended to lose IQ points over summer holidays whereas rich kids gained knowledge and skills. The Grattan Institute’s findings, published a few months into lockdown in June 2020, were that for every two-month period of remote learning, disadvantaged students lost about a month of learning.

•

As one ‘senior official’ told Katharine Murphy for The End of Certainty, her Quarterly Essay on Scott Morrison and pandemic politics, ‘all hell broke loose’ once it became clear what the Australian government intended to do. ‘It was the weekend before university was going back, school was going back. The vice-chancellors just completely lost it when they realised they weren’t going to get their international students back.’

Most of the universities relied on international students as their second-highest source of annual income, and that rather new stream of gold and silver was about to dry up. Guardian Australia reported: ‘The University of NSW, which has one of the largest exposures to international students, has estimated its losses at up to $600m in 2020 (from a budget of $2bn), with possible losses of $450m in 2021 and again in 2022.’ It wasn’t an outlier. Universities Australia estimated 21,000 jobs would be lost across the sector. The federal government tweaked the JobKeeper requirements three times specifically to ensure that universities would be ineligible for the income support program. By comparison, the ABC reported that after lobbying from the Archbishop of Sydney and his archdiocese, priests would be eligible for JobKeeper despite not actually being ‘employees’ and the Church not paying tax. In 2019, almost a quarter of total university revenue came from international students, and 37.3 per cent of those were from China. Meanwhile, the federal government announced that the coronavirus supplement payments for students were only available to domestic, not international, students. The prime minister advised people on student visas to ‘go home’ if they couldn’t support themselves, but thousands were stuck here. Essentially, the Academy wanted their money, but when circumstances changed nobody wanted to help them and nobody really fought for them. SBS reported international students being refused casual and part-time job interviews because rare employment spots were offered to Australian citizens first. A report from the University of New South Wales and the University of Technology Sydney found that international students were some of the country’s most exploited workers, with nearly half of the 6000 students interviewed receiving less than minimum wage. The exact same report done four years earlier showed that there had been no improvement in these statistics since 2016.

China issued a warning to potential students that racist incidents were increasing. Some claimed this was the Communist Party retaliating against Australia pushing for an inquiry into China’s responsibility for COVID-19, but the Australian Human Rights Commission and Anti-Discrimination NSW confirmed COVID-19 was being used as an opportunity for an exacerbation of ever-present xenophobia. Some MPs used the renewed fear of ‘weak borders’ to start talking about lowering migration, as though these arrivals cost the country anything, when all the data shows they enrich Australia both economically and otherwise. White supremacy had been gaining in numbers, volume, and most frighteningly, acceptability.

Around this time, Patrick Parkinson made the papers again. Bernard Lane wrote in The Australian: ‘University of Queensland law dean Patrick Parkinson, speaking in a personal capacity, conceded authorities would be worried and busy with the coronavirus but said the explosion in transgender teenagers, chiefly girls, was “another epidemic”—one that had “so far escaped public attention”.’ Parkinson was the latest to take up this particular historical mantel: a man of the Academy comparing people whose identities he didn’t like to diseases or viruses. It was as unoriginal as it is abhorrent.

There seemed to be a sort of wretchedness everywhere I looked. Education policy had always been ideological and partisan, but soon health policy was being politicised in unprecedented ways as well. Commentators openly discussed ‘sacrificing’ certain groups and types of people for the good of the economy. The virus certainly wasn’t uniting the population against a common enemy.

•

The video of George Floyd being killed in Minneapolis on 25 May sparked worldwide protests. The Black Lives Matter movement had been snowballing with each new recording of state-sanctioned police violence, and by June it was rolling even faster against the backdrop of racial inequality exacerbated by COVID-19. Australia’s own tally of Black deaths in custody had reached 432 since 1991 with not a single law enforcement individual ever being held accountable. The momentum from the US protests saw Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians planning marches protesting systemic racism and renewing calls for certain monuments to be taken down and places to be renamed.

In June, Tom Switzer co-authored an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald with CIS colleague Jacinta Nampijinpa Price in which they likened people from the Black Lives Matter movement to totalitarians such as Pol Pot and Mao Zedong because they all ‘wish to change the past’. They homed in on universities and curriculums as sources of the push for change: ‘In university history departments across the Western world in the last decade or so, there has been a determination to “decolonise the curriculum”. This is an approach that politicises the subject by imposing a Marxist slant on it. Far from paying attention to the main facts of history, it concentrates on imposing the “woke” values of a noisy, self-advertising minority on a very different past.’ They go on: ‘Australia has certainly had distasteful episodes in its treatment of our Indigenous people, especially in the 19th century. But our nation, admirable by almost every international standard, only exists because of James Cook … Colonisation of Australia’s land mass was inevitable, and as Howard has all too often argued, British settlement was a far better outcome than other possibilities.’

I hadn’t read anything so rank since Tony Abbott’s Quadrant article on ‘Paul Ramsay’s Vision for Australia’. Their use of the word ‘inevitable’ was particularly illuminating. To describe a crime as ‘inevitable’ is to absolve the criminal of culpability. To describe an event as ‘inevitable’ is to suggest it was fated, or natural. Cook arrived with orders which included: to ‘make discovery of the continent’ and ‘with consent of the natives take possession’. Don’t dare suggest that was a different time with different morals. James Douglas, the president of the Royal Society of London, urged Cook and the others to acknowledge the humanity of the Indigenous people they met and acknowledge the lands as already occupied. ‘Check the petulance of the sailors and restrain the wanton use of firearms,’ Douglas urged, for ‘shedding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature’. Cook did not listen. He knew which choices would bring him most reward, and he knew what he could get away with.

•

Requests for name changes and statue removals were being raised all over the country with varying success. Ben Wyatt, Western Australia’s Minister for Finance, Aboriginal Affairs, and Lands, told the ABC that King Leopold II was an evil tyrant who should not be honoured, and so the ‘King Leopold Ranges’ would be renamed. The former king of Belgium’s violent reign of the Congo Free State led to up to 10 million deaths and he’d never even been to W.A. The chair of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, Michael Mansell, called for Batman Bridge to be renamed. The grazier and explorer John Batman was responsible for the massacre of Indigenous Australians in Tasmania in the 1820s, and Victoria had changed the name of the federal seat of Batman to Cooper in 2018. Wangaratta academic Wendy Mitchell wanted Faithfull Street in Victoria renamed due to pioneer George Faithfull’s violent history towards Aboriginal people. Thousands of people signed a petition demanding the removal of a statue of Australia’s first prime minister, Sir Edmund Barton, from a traditional burial site in New South Wales. Port Macquarie woman Arlene Mehan, of the Mid North Coast’s Birpai people, told the ABC: ‘You wouldn’t put a statue of Hitler in a Jewish space, so it’s been a bit of a thorn.’ Wellington Shire Council in Victoria’s Central Gippsland voted by a margin of one to keep historical markers honouring explorer Angus McMillan, who has been linked to mass murders of Gunaikurnai people, despite the fact that the majority of the community wanted them removed. A man was charged after a statue of Western Australia’s first governor was found with red paint marks on its hands and neck on the eve of a Black Lives Matter rally in Perth. In the Ballarat Botanical Gardens’ Prime Minister’s Avenue, the busts of Tony Abbott and John Howard were spray-painted with obscene words. A statue of Robert Towns, one of the founders of the city in Far North Queensland, had its hands painted red overnight; the ABC reported: ‘Prominent Aboriginal and South Sea Islander women have disputed research that claimed Robert Towns was not involved in “blackbirding”.’ The requests for new names and removals—whether successful or unsuccessful—incensed people, and the vandalism gave them something they could rail righteously against. The country was a powder keg of defensive sparks. This unprecedented public interrogation of Australian history was deeply destabilising to the national identity.

On 7 June, protesters gathered in Bristol, UK, and brought down a long-loathed statue of slave trader Edward Colston, throwing the figure into the harbour nearby. English Heritage, the organisation responsible for commemorative markers and monuments, said they would reassess 950 plaques in London alone for their ‘problematic connotations’. Guards were posted around a statue of Winston Churchill in London. Boris Johnson—who wrote a biography of Churchill in 2014—came out in the former PM’s defence: ‘Yes, he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.’ It was reminiscent of what John Howard told the Sydney Morning Herald when people were celebrating Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013: ‘In my view she along with US President Ronald Reagan have been the two great conservative figures of the post World War II period. She was the best British PM since Winston Churchill.’

In that same busy month of June, Tony Abbott was made a companion of the Order of Australia for, among other things, his contributions to Australia’s Indigenous community and border control efforts. I will never get over the irony of that. The invader is now the paternalistic protector of the land against yet another ‘other’. Just two weeks later, in scolding anti-racism protesters, he incorrectly claimed that there was ‘no evidence’ that the justice system discriminated against Indigenous Australians. Ignoring the way police target areas and individuals, and the disproportionate rates at which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are prosecuted for offences compared to non-Indigenous people, he claimed they simply had a ‘higher offending rate’. Perhaps he thought criminality was also ‘cultural’ and that it was ‘inevitable’ that his people would lock up and kill those other people.

•

I went to the Black Lives Matter protest on 6 June. It was the most calm and considerate mass gathering I’d ever seen. More than 20,000 people in Sydney alone went to Town Hall when we thought it was illegal due to COVID-19 restrictions, but by the time we arrived that decision had been overturned. Various MPs and officials called us ‘insane’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘selfish’, but organisers handed out free masks and stood at regular intervals along the route offering hand sanitiser. The only people I saw without face coverings were police officers. Most of the mainstream media tried, frustratingly, to pit the two concerns—COVID-19 and BLM—against each other, but two, three, then four weeks passed after the marches, and still no spike in transmissions could be traced back to them. During the first wave of COVID, in March, Morrison allowed a Hillsong Conference with hundreds of interstate and international attendees to continue, fully aware of transmission risks. In June, when cases were under control, he called for Black Lives Matter protestors to be charged.

When approximately 300 people gathered for a different Black Lives Matter protest on Friday, 12 June in Sydney’s CBD, about 600 police officers were stationed in the area. At one stage several of them stood around the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park to protect it. Over the weekend of 13–14 June, two statues of Captain Cook were vandalised, and his statue in Hyde Park was again watched by police officers overnight. New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian decried protesters’ actions as ‘un-Australian’. That was the level of the rhetoric we were hearing from certain leaders. The prime minister called people panic-buying toilet paper un-Australian while all the essential service-providers still doing their jobs were ‘real Australians’. People who fled the cities to their country or coastal investment properties were ‘un-Australian’ while the term ‘common sense’ was held out to be something that ‘real’ or ‘quiet’ or ‘regular’ Australians would implicitly have or understand.

The response to the pandemic was cultural, but because the culture was white and masculine, it was invisible. Masks continued to be seen as strange or restrictive until late July, and for some reason the benchmark for whether a state opened or closed was whether or not people could go to the pub or the footy. Programs funding building and renovation incentives were spectacularly generous, asset write-offs saw thousands of tradies buying new utes, while the tap of support for child care was turned off nice and early. Katharine Murphy wrote in The End of Certainty that there was ‘significant internal disquiet about the government’s decision to provide free childcare’ in the package unveiled at the beginning of April. Some ministers were ‘utterly bewildered’ that a centre-right government would do that, and it turned out to be one of the very first measures to be wound back just a few months later. That’s despite modelling from the Australia Institute showing ‘increased public funding for child care is nearly 20 times more effective at creating jobs than a tax cut of the same size’. The treasurer admitted publicly that after the government’s decisions and responses, the economic impact of COVID-19 was going to be gendered.

While all these statues were being pulled down or painted on, the internet was both a fantastic and terrifying place to be. All the racism constantly bubbling away was then splattering its hot, fetid oil up and into faces. The humour was a source of solidarity. People in parks held signs: If pulling down a statue of a slave trader ‘ruins your way of life’ you are either a) racist b) a pigeon. Twitter threads showed companies virtue-signalling and sometimes being called out for hollow shows of support, but also sometimes doubling down and telling their racist customers to go elsewhere. I hadn’t felt a movement so full of potential since the first #MeToo wave.

In June the prime minister had gone on radio station 2GB to defend the legacy of Captain Cook and said Australia was not founded as a slave colony and that ‘there was no slavery in Australia’. I’ll bet he wished fewer people had those silly history degrees when they fact-checked him and pointed to the numerous ways in which that statement was objectively incorrect. By July there had been at least 600 forced redundancies at universities across the country. Between March and September, the National Tertiary Education Union calculated more than 12,400 confirmed job cuts.

The strategic and specific exclusion of universities from the JobKeeper scheme revealed the colossal schism between the way the federal government conceptualised universities and the way the universities defined themselves. Are these organisations an extension of the Department of Education, or are they more like private companies that happen to receive government funding? Vice-chancellors at large universities earn over a million dollars a year—far more than the MPs they go to for funding. Every time someone asked education minister Dan Tehan if there was any chance universities would be helped, he responded by saying, essentially, that the universities had accrued a mighty surplus of resources with which they should be able to figure things out. The annual reports of the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, and the Australian National University, for example, showed they were sitting on billions of dollars’ worth of assets. Theoretically, accruing assets should be impossible if an organisation is both charging, and making, the real amount of money they need to offer an educational service. That’s what would be expected of a public-facing, public-serving entity. But vice-chancellors justify their exorbitant incomes by comparing the work they do with other massive private companies, which involves the amassing of profits and assets. The impression I got was that universities couldn’t come together in agreement on this, to present a united identity or raison d’être, to their detriment. But should they have had to? Nobody does asset amassment like the Church, and the Church had been guaranteed government support.

The disconnect goes deeper: it’s a safe generalisation to say that the ideas of most academics as to the ‘purpose’ and ‘goals’ of a university differ from many of the ministers and policy advisers. Is it the role of classrooms and campuses to prepare the young public for the inevitable income-earning stage of their lives? As Damian called it, ‘a new intellectual working class.’ Or are they places and spaces with intrinsic value that need not answer to the market in order to validate their need for funding?

Never was this ideological discord made clearer than in Tehan’s announcement on 19 July that the way university courses were to be funded and organised was changing. Humanities degrees would cost students double what they had before. Various STEM courses and vocational courses like nursing were going to be made more affordable. According to the education minister, the new prices were explicitly designed to steer prospective students away from degrees that weren’t ‘job-relevant’. In my social media feeds the response to this was immediate and loud and outraged. But that was my algorithm and my bubble. What I was more curious to know was what the majority of the population without degrees thought. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) records that 35 per cent of Australians aged 20–64 years have a bachelor’s degree or above; maybe the other 65 per cent didn’t want to pay for kids like Damian and me to read all day. In May, a ‘university leader’ who wouldn’t be named told the Saturday Paper: ‘University managements cop it from both sides in the culture wars. Some in the right wing of the Liberal Party believe the country should return to the days when university education was “only for very smart people, plus them”.’ That was a different time when university was a different place. ‘A little more than half—$18 billion—of $34 billion in university revenue now comes from the Commonwealth, a departure from 30 years ago, when a small minority of people went to university and government picked up almost all of the bill.’ It was not a coincidence that the nation’s identity, and the Academy’s, were failing simultaneously.

In the ‘Better university funding arrangements’ document, which I downloaded from the website of the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, the government explained their rationale: ‘These changes will better align Commonwealth funding to emerging labour market priorities.’ I was distracted by the name of the department. I had assumed that Education and Employment were discrete portfolios, but no: in February 2020, the Department of Education, whose secretary reported to Tehan, merged with the Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business. It may be just a name, but I think it’s fair to say that the implications of ideological alignment are clear: education and employment are intrinsically connected, to the point that they should be overseen as one set of issues and managed by one team. That’s how you get an education funding overhaul focused on ‘job-relevance’.

I feel torn at these points. I abhor the elitism of certain facets of the Academy and I do not believe the ‘intrinsic value of inquiry’ is enough to justify taxpayer support for the creation of a restricted-access journal article that is read by six people, three of whom were involved in its creation. I want more disadvantaged young people to go to university and I don’t think the way to ensure that happens is by suggesting their three or four years there will be spent studying ideas for ideas’ sake. Consider someone from a working-class background who, if they went to uni, would be the first in their family to do so and would need to relocate. They face so many barriers to entry. Intellectual elitism is not automatically appealing to many of the people whom we need to encourage to pursue higher education. Universities know that their demonstrable ‘graduate outcomes’ are a huge selling point for regional students and first-in-family students. If you’re a young person who doesn’t need to worry about ‘graduate outcomes’, then you’re probably not the young person who needs extra help and encouragement. Tehan’s proposal came with grants for first-in-family students and for people who had to relocate, but the message of his funding reallocation wasn’t one of equality. It would be absurd to argue there was no ideological correlation between the government’s anti-humanities stance and all the statues coming down, the landmarks being renamed, and the mass protests. Tehan was one step away from saying that an engineering student was ‘Australian’ while an arts student was ‘un-Australian’. The country’s future was being damaged by its inability to discuss and understand its past. Our nation’s capacity for remembrance and identity was limited to such a shallow and false binary.

Marcia Langton, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Associate Provost at University of Melbourne, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for her impact on tertiary education and as an advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the same 2020 ceremony that recognised Tony Abbott. She told ABC News it was important to communicate academic work to the public ‘in a clear and precise way so people know why taxpayers are funding universities’. I think she’s right. A large part of this country regards with deep suspicion the inner-city softies who think they know best just because they’ve read a lot of books. I have met plenty of people from the Academy who seem to do very little to make their work accessible to the wider public but who are then outraged at ‘bogans’ who don’t understand the value of tertiary education. Bridges must be built. The wellbeing of both groups is at stake. As well as this, and perhaps even more importantly, as bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, ‘any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public.’

In late September, Tehan had to add an extra $326 million to the budget for universities to get people on side with his plans. A ripple of surprise went through those watching when Jacqui Lambie released her statement about it on 30 September. ‘I come at the debate on the university funding package from a pretty simple premise,’ her statement began. ‘I want everyone to get a chance at being what they want to be.’ She went on to articulate how ‘the discounts that One Nation have negotiated only go to people with enough money to pay upfront in the first place’, and

the only ones who are getting bullied into doing the course that wasn’t their first choice are the kids who are scared off by having to shoulder a massive debt. If money is no object, it doesn’t matter what the price tag is … the ones who get pushed out of their preferred courses based on price are the ones who are watching every dollar, knowing they might need that money down the track. They’re the ones we should be looking out for. Instead, we’re telling them, no matter how talented, no matter how determined, to dream a little cheaper.

She listed the statistics about the students most in need of support—such as those who had to work to support themselves, those struggling with failing subjects, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students—being further harmed by rules proposing that students be kicked out if they fail subjects in first year. ‘Focusing on first-year failures just bakes in disadvantage … we’re just indulging these weird and obscene culture wars where the universities are the enemy and the working class are collateral damage … I can’t support a bill that reserves its harshest hits for our poorest kids … We aren’t living in the land of opportunity yet, and it seems to get further and further away.’ She said she’d never sell out any Australian kid when it comes to their education.

In 2019, 34.9 per cent of Australians aged 55 to 64 had degrees, whereas the rate among 25- to 34-year-olds was 52.5 per cent. This demonstrates that more young people are going to university, which is great, but it also reflects a trend of degrees being required, rather than preferable, for many types of work. When I was a young law graduate there were older barristers practising law who didn’t actually have law degrees. They’d come up through alternative career pathways, either through the public sector or via old-school clerkships that were no longer available. Across many fields there have been significant changes made in efforts to standardise professional pathways. The number of people getting degrees is increasing, but for those still locked out, it bakes-in disadvantage far more than it used to.

I asked Liz Allen, who wrote The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover, about the HECS-HELP versus fee-free university debate. Allen had a pretty rough start in life—that’s her story to tell, which she does at the beginning of her excellent book—and is passionate about making Australia a more equal place. That’s why, when I saw her tweet something about HECS-HELP being better than free university due to ‘opportunity costs’ around the time of Lambie’s speech, I emailed her. She explained in her response: ‘HECS was introduced because it was found that free education was benefiting those who would’ve gone to university anyway—forgone wages and university-associated costs weren’t something people from working class or poorer families could typically sacrifice. These are the opportunity costs. So free university education was merely (on average) entrenching privilege.’ HECS has had monumentally positive impacts on the number of Australians going to universities. ‘In fact, recent developments and initiatives among the higher education sector show there’s now more people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and so-called non-traditional backgrounds participating in tertiary education than ever before.’

That corresponded with what I found in the OECD reports from 2020. We’re doing well compared to a lot of other countries, but it’s still the case that, compared to those whose highest academic completion is high school, people with bachelor degrees make 27 per cent more money, and people with a master’s or PhD make 47 per cent more. The Economic Society of Australia found that for each extra year of schooling a person receives, their future income increases by about 10 per cent.

In recent years, the earning threshold at which student loan repayments commence has been lowered in ways that obviously disproportionately prevent younger people from saving for a home. The more you earn, the higher your repayment percentage will be—which, like tax rates, I agree with. But the compulsory repayment threshold for the 2020/21 financial year was $46,620, compared to $55,814 for the 2017/18 financial year. A report into housing inequality by the Grattan Institute from 2018 notes:

Low-income households have always spent more of their income on housing than others. But their spending on housing as a share of income has increased much more than other households over the past decade … In the early 1990s it took around six years to save a 20 per cent deposit for a typical dwelling for an average household. It now takes around nine to ten years … The median deposit for first home buyers increased from about $42,000 in 2008 to almost $70,000 in 2014. In addition, many young households are finding it harder to save for a deposit because they face larger HELP debts and are now forced to save more of their income into superannuation than their parents did 25 years ago.

There exists a healthy tension between various elements here. The HECS-HELP program stops the already-rich from getting something for free which they could, and therefore should, pay for, compared to people for whom opportunity costs are too high. Also, young people who have the opportunity to go to university typically need less financial and structural support from the government than those who are still excluded from the system. However, graduates are emerging with huge debts, wage growth has been stagnant since about 2008, and successive conservative governments have lowered the threshold for repayment, which makes asset acquisition ever more difficult.

The biggest determinate of whether you can buy your own first home at 30, 40 or 50 is still the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’. Which brings us back to Lambie’s speech, and the shafting of young people who have effectively been told to ‘dream a little cheaper’.

Tehan’s legislative changes were passed. Pauline Hanson and One Nation’s vote helped to decide the outcome, and in exchange for her support, the Morrison government promised Hanson that a new legal definition of ‘academic freedom’ would be inserted into the Higher Education Act. A group of seven universities argued the change would make it harder to discipline teachers who said discriminatory things about their students. The class stuff, the racism, the national identity—it all came together on campus.

The government’s economic and education policy responses to COVID-19 had immediate and demonstrable gendered effects. The ABS announced that there had been a 7 per cent drop in the number of women enrolled at universities and some vocational courses, compared to just a 2 per cent drop in men enrolled. That meant 86,000 fewer women earning their qualifications. According to Guardian Australia, ‘Overall, this decline in female participation was also the largest decrease since ABS records began in 2004,’ and ‘while there were fewer young men, young women and older women at university, there was [an] increase in the number of older men, which Shirley Jackson, an economist at Per Capita, said reflected the nature of the coronavirus recession’. The ‘pink recession’ had officially hit. ‘Usually recessions saw an increase in university enrolments,’ Jackson observed, ‘but social and political factors meant women were actually dropping out.’

•

All the activism was still panicking the hand-wringers months later. Our old mate Glenn Fahey from CIS wrote a piece for The Australian in October 2020 headlined ‘While our schools coach kids in social activism, literacy takes a back seat’, in which he cites a new OECD report that supposedly ‘shows that Australia’s school system has an excess focus on students developing “awareness of global issues”.’ His take: ‘School students are being groomed for social activism while too many are still functionally illiterate as they leave the classroom.’ Fahey writes of his concern for the one-in-five fifteen-year-olds who don’t have appropriate levels of literacy or numeracy, while failing to mention that those struggling are the ones who already experience socioeconomic disadvantage—the ones who could really use the funding that his shady employer urges the government not to provide.

Fahey’s concern is thinly veiled nationalism. It’s not a coincidence, though, that the people asked to write about education policy are yet again the people pushing agendas based on mistaken nostalgia. White Australia policy, rhetoric, and ideals all need to take root in the classroom in order to blossom out in the world. He explains:

The second problem is that, while the curriculum has embraced global issues, it has resisted any effort to reinforce Australian ones. Our students are unfamiliar with our own history, how our democracy works, and have decreasing (or little) national pride. They’re encouraged to identify as global citizens, rather than as Australians—witness the constant undermining of our national holidays and traditions. Students are often misled to believe our country is racist, sexist, and a selfish polluter. Our school system should educate away foolish misconceptions, rather than promote them in the name of postmodernism and critical theory.

It was around this time that I read on the ABC News website that the government was planning to introduce strict new English-language requirements for people applying for partner visas. Acting immigration minister Alan Tudge announced funding for the change in the federal budget. ‘What this will mean is that we will require an applicant and a sponsor to have met functional level English or to have at least made reasonable efforts to learn English … And by reasonable efforts we mean for most people that would be doing about 500 hours of free English language classes.’

Free was fantastic. That suggested accessibility. But it was pretty easy to imagine how hard 500 hours of lessons would be for someone trying to set up their new life here with limited resources, low pay, and kids to look after. Tudge made comments about some husbands deliberately preventing their wives from learning English, as a method of control and coercion. Morrison claimed the tests were about preventing risk of abuse in the home and workplace exploitation. These excuses made me mad. I didn’t believe for a millisecond that either Tudge or Morrison had committed themselves to improving situations of domestic and family violence in migrant communities. Nor did I believe they’d gone out of their way to find out how to address the rampant issues of migrant worker exploitation. If they had looked into either of those issues, it’s hard to believe that placing further restrictions and pressures on the most at-risk individuals involved would present itself as the answer.

Australian partnership visas are already some of the most expensive in the world. What these men were doing was providing an image of ‘others’ that made sense to ‘quiet Australians’. It was the age-old ‘assimilation’ argument; ‘we speak English here’. Why did they announce strict new measures when people in Australia who had ties to other countries were already so stressed and stretched thin with the pandemic? In an interview on 2GB radio Morrison said, ‘They don’t have to pass the test before they come into Australia, but once they get here they have to make a reasonable effort to learn the language at a basic level. It’s not stopping anyone from coming. It’s saying that once you’re here we will support you.’ If it was about ‘support’, why did it have to be punitive? A program intended to ‘support’ would provide the classes and incentivise those classes.

In August the government had announced that it would be making big changes to the Adult Migrant English Program. Under the old system, migrants could access 510 hours of free English-language training and they had five years in which to complete them. Under the new system there would be no caps on hours or time limits; they’d simply be able to attend for free until they were deemed to have developed ‘functional English’ which was defined as having proficiency enough to participate in society. That sounded great. What sounded less great was the simultaneously announced ‘Australian values’ that would be included in the citizenship test. According to Tudge, these would be ‘an important part of helping protect our social cohesion into the future’. If the goal was for migrants to understand their rights and feel like they could take part in life and society here, I wasn’t convinced the threat of exclusion or expulsion was the best way to achieve that.

I still really, truly believe that if Russia invaded France, and 20,000 refugees who spoke French but not English got on boats and came to Australia, we would take them. The only real issue I can see occurring in that hypothetical is when the ‘quiet Australians’ realise that some French people are Black and Brown. The 2016 census data showed that over 70 per cent of Australian homes were monolingual English-speaking. We are in the very bottom group, compared to other OECD countries, for percentage of students learning second languages in schools. As a nation we cannot seem to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.

I went to a friend’s wedding in New Zealand several years ago and couldn’t believe how much Indigenous language there was visible. Even in the supermarket, aisles were labelled in te reo—‘the language’ in Maori—as well as English. New Zealand’s prime minister named her firstborn daughter Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford. Can you imagine, for a millisecond, Scott Morrison choosing a Dharug or Ngunnawal middle name for his child? Or even Julia Gillard, if she’d had children? We just don’t do that here. It’s too fraught. If you pay respect to the First Peoples now, you are indicting the First Fleet. If you recognise the humanity and language now, you risk undermining the shared farce of terra nullius. To look back with clarity would undermine the very foundations of this good little colony.

In July 2020, Behrouz Boochani was granted refugee status in New Zealand. For a person there to have a successful refugee claim, they must demonstrate ‘that they fear being seriously harmed or tortured or that they risk inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment if they return to a country’. By my assessment, that means Boochani could theoretically have claimed asylum from the country that threatened him with inhumane, indefinite, illegal detention: Australia. Scott Morrison was the minister in charge of Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013, when the Immigration portfolio became Immigration and Border Protection. He was the one refusing to release information about arrivals by sea; he is proud of ‘stopping the boats’. Interviewed by Katharine Murphy for The End of Certainty, he said that before 2013 turn-backs weren’t universally popular with Australians, but ‘you can’t let politics stop you from coming up with the right answer, because if you don’t get the right answer, you will fail, and the worst thing in politics is failing’. That both major political parties in this country endorsed Operation Sovereign Borders was only possible because of our nationwide, colonial, primary-to-postgraduate curriculum, bound up in a concern that our ‘Australian-ness’—code, often, for white and Christian and comprising nuclear families—was under threat. A nation-wide defensive spark. Murphy contends that ‘Morrison’s conservatism is extreme pragmatism in defence of what he regards as the core of the nation’. What is that core? Australia’s ability to believe in itself? Who teaches us this? Control of classrooms and control over syllabus and learning is everything. An asylum seeker coming to this land challenges a European’s ability to believe in himself and his ‘settlement’ story. If the average Australian appreciated what the arrival of the British really looked like for Indigenous people, really cared about the wage theft and intergenerational indentured servitude, about the missions and massacres, we might feel a little less entitled. We would perhaps be a little more generous with our ‘boundless plains to share’. After all, whose boundless plains are we talking about?

Boochani writes about the feeling of triumph when a previously strong man on their boat of refugees is incapacitated: ‘Seeing how low he has come, famished and terrified, the others grow bolder and more confident—a wicked disposition. The weak always consider themselves powerful when they see others suffering. But the collapse of others appeals to the oppressor in all of us. The collapse of others becomes a cause to celebrate our own state.’ Of course there is an oppressor in all of us. What 2020 revealed was how so many of us will seize any opportunity to lord ourselves over others. It made white Australians feel so much better about themselves to call COVID the ‘China Virus’. It solved all our problems to remember our island nation has a natural border that we could control. We felt powerful telling foreigners studying here that if they didn’t have rich parents to send them money when they got fired, well, then weren’t they silly to dream big. One doesn’t even need to be particularly powerful; if one feels as though one may or might one day be able to seize that power, they will happily add their aspirational efforts to bolster the scaffolds of the kyriarchal pyramid.

•

Nation-building happens in the Academy. The campus continues to be a contested space. You need a degree to be a minister and yet, once you’ve got one and have become a minister, it’s completely against your interests—if you’re conservative—for other people to get theirs, because then they won’t vote for you. Bringing statues down, or relabelling them, is rewriting history—so quick, defund and dismantle the history departments. Replace them with mega-rich departments of Western civilisation full of your friends. That’s one way to tranquilise these feral hippy outposts.

In October, I found out the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was also offering postgraduate scholarships worth up to $85,000 a year for students to study overseas ‘at the world’s best universities’, including Oxford and Cambridge. However, ‘students applying for the scholarship will need to have secured a place in a graduate program abroad before finalising their application’. In other words, unless you can afford to study at Oxbridge anyway, you’re not eligible for a Ramsay scholarship. I thought about applying, as a bit of a lark, but then I read a question that must be addressed in your application: ‘How have your studies to date deepened your appreciation of Western civilisation broadly defined?’ and/or: ‘Identify how your proposed course of study or research will help you gain and advance a deeper appreciation of some aspect of Western civilisation.’ Should you be awarded a scholarship, your obligations would include: ‘Raising and where possible making contributions to a Future Scholars Fund.’ The banks of the stream of gold and silver were rising.

A big bombshell landed in my lap in November. I received a message from one of the former University of Queensland students who had spoken to me for my investigations into the dean of law, Patrick Parkinson: Parkinson was stepping down from his position as dean, despite being a long way off the standard five year headship, to work for the Western civilisation course, meaning the majority of his pay packet would be coming from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation—although details of the remuneration package were covered by the commercial-in-confidence agreement. This announcement followed on from more negative press about his latest round of anti-trans comments. A paper he’d written about transgender people and the law was rejected by the University of Tasmania Law Review and he’d complained. The university investigated and sided with the two reviewers from the journal. Someone emailed me a copy of the letter Parkinson wrote to the University of Queensland Law School staff announcing his departure as dean. In it, he claims that his move would be saving the law school money, since he’d now be on Ramsay’s books. I spoke to some people in the know who disputed this, given that the position of dean would need to be filled regardless. It had been precisely twelve months since the commercial-in-confidence agreement between the university and the Ramsay Centre was signed—a deal that explicitly included a partnership with the law school.

Things were going precisely as Rhodes had planned. A ‘secret society of superior men who would work to advance the interests of his great Anglo-Saxon Empire’ was growing in the colony.

Epilogue

I finished the master’s and applied for the PhD. My research needed to have some benefits that might reach outside of the bubble, so my proposed doctoral thesis advocated for a strong ‘public interest’ defence to defamation proceedings for responsible journalism. In July 2020, the Council of Attorneys-General had announced the draft legislation they’d be introducing to make it happen, but then nothing really happened. Audre Lorde argues that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’, but if I could use the legitimacy of the Academy to help fight for the kind of press freedom that might hold powerful men accountable, then I’d savour the whiff of irony. Such is the chimera of the campus. The conservatives fear it is full of terrible Marxist hippies, the poor think it’s the playground of the rich, some consider it a right, and others a privilege. The researchers at some universities may be responsible for discovering the vaccine for COVID-19 while the government refuses to offer them financial assistance to stem the flood of forced redundancies. The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation has revealed those vice-chancellors who still have some vertebrae, but what good is a spine if you can’t pay your professors?

Regardless of these competing ideas, what is undeniable is that our most moneyed and powerful educational institutions—from primary through to tertiary—can only maintain their power by practising exclusion and discrimination. Where we each sit inside the kyriarchal pyramid might shift depending on context but the structure stays the same. The point isn’t to forensically examine people’s identities and pin them to a place within the pyramid; the point is to learn the behaviours we all exhibit that help to keep the pyramid strong. People in the middle of the pyramid still benefit from the larger layers below them. People at very low levels may even be so aspirational that they support the current structure because they identify so strongly with a future self who will reach a higher level—or maybe the belief that their hard work will allow their children to ascend is strong enough to blind them to their real enemy. There is no single king of this castle, no single kyriarch. No boss can ever be held accountable because the structure itself is in charge and the structure self-protects through stasis and inertia. The Academy, as a part of the state, is an oligarchy best imagined as a dinner table, with people like Rupert Murdoch and Tony Abbott and whoever funds the Centre for ‘Independent’ Studies shovelling caviar into their mouths and occasionally vomiting so they can fit more in. The challenge for me will be to figure out how to live my life in a way that doesn’t feed them. The challenge is to prevent the kyriarchal system from self-perpetuating. Get the knowledge out of the bubble, always take responsibility for my actions, practise compassion.

In June 2020 when the BLM protests were at their height, the calls for Cecil Rhodes’s statue at Oriel College to be removed were raised again, and a commission was set up to take submissions on the matter. A decision should have been delivered in January 2021 but was ‘delayed’ and no new dates were given. Damian described this ‘slowwalking’ as a classic Oxford strategy. When I last checked in March, Oriel College had decided to take the statue down and put it in a museum, but a number of powerful and angry people had sworn to stop that plan being realised. By the time I saw the photo of a group of police officers guarding the statue of James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park, taken in June 2020, it had been almost two years since I stood at the top of the tower in Oxford, looking over Oriel College, thinking about Cecil Rhodes looking down upon those who dared to enter his space. Of course the Shore School boys got away with behaviour Indigenous kids would be locked up for. Of course the Catholic School system had been doing whatever they wanted with public money. Of course Australia wanted to maintain ‘a certain way of life’ which involved speaking English, because of course we continue to conflate communication ability and muthos with ‘intelligence’ and therefore worth. It all comes together. It all connects. Some of it is correlation, some of it is causation. Some of it we know about and a lot of it, like our actual brains, we don’t.

•

On the afternoon in November when I was supposed to take my IQ test, I was struck down by a powerful migraine. Unfortunately migraines are another area of the human brain we know very little about, and I get them once every few months. It starts with my eyes—there’s a kind of static or interference, and then the ‘aura’ appears: a sort of blurring and spotted blindness that is a prelude to the real horror. I have about ten minutes to get myself to a dark, quiet space and ingest as many painkillers as possible. After that, all I can do is lie there humming Ennio Morricone’s ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’, for I am preparing to head into the unknown, I am fundamentally alone, it will be excruciating, and I don’t know how long it will last. It can be deeply destabilising if a migraine hits when I’m out and about, especially if I’m on my own. Once I was charged over $40 for a fifteen-minute cab ride home because the driver could tell I’d be incapable of dispute. I definitely cannot read or write, cannot really even listen or hear properly. Clear thoughts might arrive with extreme effort, but they are fleeting.

On that particular afternoon in November, I was working at my computer when it hit. Vincent was out at the shops. When I realised it was going to be ‘a bad one’, I became frightened. Couldn’t find the paracetamol. Couldn’t afford to lose a whole day of work. While I could still bear to look at my phone screen and dial the numbers, I managed to call Vincent and ask him to come home. As the heat licked across my mind, as the blindness settled in to stay, I was filled with terror: What if it doesn’t go away this time? What if I start getting migraines every week or every day? What if I can’t work anymore? What if I lose that zing-zing-zing feeling of my mind functioning like normal? I lost all sight in my left eye. The way my brain faltered was extraordinary. It is was as though someone took a small face washer, dipped it into scalding acidic solution, and then applied it to different parts of the inside of my skull. It burned, yes, but more than that, it seemed to stop thought processes. Whole areas of memory and vocabulary were lost to me. Speaking a full sentence was impossible. On a very fundamental level I was aware of my needs—to urinate, or to vomit—but the consciousness which I thought of as ‘me’ was gone.

Vincent arrived, planted a gentle kiss on my forehead. ‘Have you taken all three kinds of painkillers?’

‘Have two.’

‘What’s the third? Aspirin?’

‘P—P—’

‘Paracetamol?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Okay.’

I was an infant again. Pathetic and helpless. I could face this trial alone if I had to. I had before, many times, of course. But to have someone care for me instead was halfway to deliverance. Not just for the practicalities of closing the blinds, helping me to the bathroom; it was because the greatest fear—that the state of agony was not temporary, that my mind would be forever wrecked—was tempered by trusting love. Even if I were to face that foe each day or week, I believed Vincent would stay with me.

Hours later, when I started to come out the other side, sipping some tap water, swallowing more pills, I reflected on the person I thought I wanted to be. A few weeks earlier, having plunged down a particularly fascinating hole of research for this book, when I’d thought I could feel my frontal lobe stretching and expanding, when I was learning about brains and revelling in mine, I forgot my only brother’s birthday. It was three days before I realised. It doesn’t matter that neither he nor I care too much about birthdays. When you’ve got just one sibling, it’s not that hard to not be a dick. But I was in a vortex of learning. I was buried deep within the ripples of space between others’ words and my own. I had failed in the promise I had made myself in that bedroom in Oxford—that I would do better by the people I loved. Perhaps I was just a little bit like this. A little bit like Damian like this. Reptilian?

•

And what of Damian, my Renaissance man? And that faraway, glittering world of ornamental pots? What about this looming question of what I personally would need to exclude in order to make space for some kind of genius or greatness?

Damian and I had kept in touch, speaking every few months. We agreed that we were still somewhat ‘cold’ in the way we decided whether or not to give our time to others. But he also said, ‘I have a clearer sense that I find some relationships exceptionally important.’ I knew this from our previous conversations. Some of his friends had gone through extreme difficulties during COVID-19 and Damian had truly stepped up. ‘There are a small number of people,’ he said, ‘and I will go to the ends of the earth for those people. But I do not value being around people just for the sake of it. One of my friends said to me, “Oh, Damian, you’re not a cunt, you’re just picky,” and I think that’s probably accurate.’ We laughed. He had dated some people but, for the usual reasons, nothing had stuck.

It was so great to hear about the reading groups he was starting, about what he was reading and working on. After intense study and a stint in Berlin he added German to the list of languages in which he was conversational. He still had not donated a book to the Scholars’ Library. He described a seminar he’d been to recently on ‘race, modernity, and politics’ in which the panellists spoke about South Africa and James Baldwin as ‘meagre and emaciated’. They were all ‘pawing around this thing’ which none of them seemed to really feel. He did not feel that the inside of the bubble was where the best or most exciting conversations were happening, but he felt more than ever that talking about literature and ideas was extremely important. I asked him at the end of 2020 if he felt himself significantly changed since I’d been there to visit in 2018.

‘I think so,’ he replied with a surprising decisiveness. ‘I feel somehow more equipped or prepared to deal with the questions that have always been with me.’

‘What questions?’

‘How to bear life? Why do I desire in this way? What should I be doing?’

‘Existential questions.’

‘Yes. And that change is beyond the accumulation of books that I’ve read. I’m not saying I have the answers to those questions, but I feel more convinced that I need to be sitting with those questions, and more able to sit with them.’

We discussed at length the obligations he believed he had as a Rhodes Scholarship recipient; he felt that debt keenly. He believed most of the pasty old white men of previous generations felt that debt too, they just acted on it in ways that perpetuated the legacy rather than revolutionised it. They made large amounts of money for themselves then made large donations. They found other men like themselves to give the opportunities to. Former High Court justice Dyson Heydon had selected Tony Abbott for the Rhodes Scholarship. That was how such people fulfilled their obligation to Rhodes. Damian still wasn’t entirely sure what form his future would take.

‘I am, at least in the last three or so years, the only Rhodes scholar from Australia whose work is firmly situated in the humanities,’ he said, explaining how for those scholars in medicine, science, business, and law the pathways for ‘repaying’ the debt were a little clearer. He was halfway through his doctorate, so there was plenty of time for him to decide. When I asked him what he wanted to do, his answer warmed my heart. He described, essentially, the life of a writer, but it seemed he couldn’t bring himself to say it plainly. He’d be happy working in a cheese shop or walking dogs or gardening, and spending his life reading and thinking and writing. His supervisors told him his style of writing was lovely and unique but that he needed to take a more detached and analytical approach.

‘This is something I refuse to forfeit,’ he said.

Significantly changed indeed.

•

Perhaps the pandemic was the final bucket of cold water to my hot head. I had so much to be grateful for, yes, but more importantly, I had so many to be grateful for. If I asked myself what I was most proud of in life, the first image that came to mind was the home I shared with my partner. I was not as driven when I was around him, but I chose him again every day, and maybe that meant I’d die without ever having achieved ‘greatness’, but I would have lived an entire life in love, and what could be greater than that? It didn’t even feel like a choice; when the heart has made a decision the head can only kneel before it. There were so many things I valued that not only could not be measured, but were precious precisely because they lacked ‘utility’. My imagination had never been more active than in those months of lockdown when gyms were closed and I would walk outside every morning for almost two hours. Learning French at my own pace let me revel in shared etymologies and the shapes and sounds of the words themselves. The first time I gave an English lesson to a refugee I was startled by how much it reminded me of the first time I’d given blood: I’d been walking around for 30 years with something inside me which I could give for free that could change someone else’s life. Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got until you give.

Since finishing my first undergraduate degree, and particularly in these last few years, I’ve met too many kind and intelligent people who would not be valued or exalted by the systems to which I had previously outsourced my priorities. Until a few years ago I was terrified by how much I didn’t know, but something was slowly changing. When I first went to visit Damian I thought that life was a game of ‘brains’ that he had won and I had lost. I thought my work would be coming to terms with that scoreboard. After all, our insecurities shape us as much as our strengths do. Now I just wanted to be his friend. Now, as I live and read more widely, I see that languages are oceans and that I like being a tiny fish swimming in them. Only a fool would ignore the joy in learning forever, and only a fool wouldn’t recognise that un-learning can be as important a process. These days I greet sandstone buildings and busts with scepticism rather than deference. I try harder to understand and control my defensive spark. A person’s ability to communicate is not an accurate measure of their cognitive ability, and a person’s cognitive ability is not an accurate measure of their worth. My hand need not shoot up into the air at every opportunity, for there are no more teachers. I take responsibility for the development of my own internal compass, and its north is not ‘good girl’.

I was staying in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales for a week and spring was confident in nature around me. I went for a long walk in the late afternoon and thought about all I’d seen, heard, and read about brains since 2018. My g may have been stable throughout that time, but I felt my personhood radically altered. I thought back to the girl crying in her room after going to dinner with all those Rhodes scholars; so embarrassed, so ashamed. If I could attend that dinner again I would eat more, drink more, ask more questions, be more interested, and sleep more soundly. They could have their dreaming spires but it cost them their anxiety spirals. We’re all good for different things, capable of making different contributions, and our differing abilities to ‘move through problem space’ are a part of that. I used to find a super-smart person admirable regardless of where they channelled that energy, but, rather ironically, I’m much more judgemental now. I’d rather be friends with a kind fool than a genius who lends their talents to an oil company. There was a time in my life when I would churn and churn to prove something, anything, about my intellectual prowess, but these days I’d rather be able to create a stable home for my family and make my friends laugh. I used to look up to schools and universities as one wayfinds with the stars—mighty, everlasting powers that guide your way. Now their ornamental pots engender suspicion. Do I now think my commitment to, and adoration of, brains is akin to worshipping a false god? Not quite. Perhaps it would be better to say I’m no longer monotheistic about it. Perhaps that’s something I can take from the Greeks.

On my walk the cold wind picked up. A fog was rolling in fast and as the horizon line disappeared over a field I was filled with a sense of peace, perhaps even freedom. My feet on the gravel track felt nice and heavy. Never had I been more aware of how very little I knew about anything, and yet never had I felt more calm. The safety of institutional harbour was gone. How could one feel so unmoored yet assured? I had cast away from so many posts now: first justice, then the body, and now the mind. As though it was only by untying those knots I could go out to sea and drop my own anchor.

Perhaps burning these jetties has been my bildungsroman. As David Linden writes: ‘We are built to be changed by experience.’

Acknowledgements

I live and work on what always was and always will be Gadigal land. I acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and there is still no treaty.

Thank you to my wonderful mum and dad for the constancy and warmth of your love. It was very hard to be apart from you for so long, but I take you with me everywhere I go. Arron, I’m really sorry I forgot your birthday. I promise I won’t forget it (at least until we’re even) again.

To my friend and agent Grace Heifetz, I can’t tell you how much it means to me knowing you’re always at the other end of the line. Walkies forever please.

Huge thanks to the entire Allen & Unwin team, led by the inimitable Jane Palfreyman. You saw what this book could have and should have been when I first turned it in, and you knew to push me that bit further, and to encourage me to take up this space and do it properly. I’m so grateful that you keep putting this faith in me. It’s a real privilege to be on your list. My copyeditor Ali Lavau is the best in the biz! Your eagle eye and insight is so very appreciated. And thank you to my editor Tessa Feggans for all your hard work on this manuscript. Publicist extraordinaire Isabelle O’Brien—nobody I’d rather tour with. Honestly. Love your work.

Many of the ideas in this book began taking shape during my MPhil at the University of Queensland, so thank you to my supervisor Bronwyn Lea for being a generous and insightful sounding board. This book was completed during the year I was supposed to be writing a novel as the Copyright Agency x UTS New Writer-in-Residence. The pandemic meant I wrote Who Gets to be Smart instead and the financial and moral support of that position was phenomenal. I also received a Create NSW ‘Small Project Grants (Quick Response)’ grant which helped when a lot of my interstate work dried up. A residency at Life at Springfield came at precisely the right time and allowed me to work through some huge roadblocks with this manuscript; thank you to Kinchem and Peter for your gracious hospitality.

Big hugs to you, Omid, I am always inspired by your work and generosity of spirit.

Dearest Damian, I treasure our friendship and wish you every satisfaction in life.

And to the love of my life, Vincent, onze sur dix.

References

A note on the names and titles of people quoted in this book

Authors of books have been referred to by the names and titles that appear on their book jackets. Then, where relevant, their positions and qualifications at the time of publication, such as ‘professor’, are noted after. Where a news report has been written for a major outlet such as the ABC or Sydney Morning Herald, the name of the individual reporter is available in the bibliography below. Individual writers for large outlets are mentioned by name where the work is a piece of analysis or opinion. Some journalists feature repeatedly in this bibliography, and I thank them profusely for their tireless efforts in making sure the first draft of history itself is so meticulously recorded.

Where specific sources are referred to or quoted from multiple times, they are listed here the first time they appear in each chapter.

Epigraphs
p. xiGalbraith, John Kenneth, March 1964, ‘Let Us Begin: An invitation to action on poverty’, Harper’s Magazine, <https://harpers.org/archive/1964/03/let-us-begin/>
p. xiSaini, Angela, 2019, Superior: The Return of Race Science, London: HarperCollins Publishers
p. xiCoen, Ethan and Coen, Joel, 1998, The Big Lebowski, USA: Polygram Filmed Entertainment and Working Title Films

Chapter 1: Oxford
p. 10Woolf, Virginia, 1928, A Room of One’s Own, London: Penguin
p. 15Olivarius, Ann, 2010, ‘Second-Class Citizens? How women became Rhodes Scholars’, <http://rhodesproject.com/scholar-contributions>
p. 15Ziegler, Philip, 2008, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships, New Haven: Yale University Press
p. 16>Woods, Elizabeth; Spencer, Vicki, and Lindquist, Anthea from the Rhodes Scholarships in Australia booklet, ‘Forty Years of Rhodes Women: Australian Reflections’

p. 20Newsinger, John, 2016, ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’, Race & Class, Vol. 58 No. 2
p. 20Srinivasan, Amia, 31 March 2016, ‘Under Rhodes’, London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 7
p. 21Beard, Mary, 2015, ‘Cecil Rhodes and Oriel College, Oxford’, Times Literary Supplement, <www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/cecil-rhodes-and-oriel-college-oxford/>
p. 21Qwabe, Ntokozo in Rea, Ailbhe, 11 June 2020, ‘“It was intensely painful”: The Story of Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford’, New Statesman, <www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/06/rhodes-must-fall-oxford-slavery-statue-oxford-university-oriel-black-lives-matter>
p. 25Brown, Donald, 28 October 2015, ‘“Are you a construction worker?” Life as a black Rhodes scholar’, Times Higher Education, <www.timeshighereducation.com/features/life-as-a-black-rhodes-scholar-are-you-a-construction-worker>

Chapter 2: Kyriarchy
p. 44Boochani, Behrouz and Tofighian, Omid (translator), 2018, No Friend But the Mountains, Sydney: Picador
p. 47Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 2001, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation, New York: Orbis Books
p. 49Shüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 2011, Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist The*logy, Minneapolis: Fortress Press
p. 49Boochani, Behrouz, 11 August 2018, ‘Manus Prison Theory’, Saturday Paper, <www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2018/08/11/manus-prison-theory/15339096006690#hrd>
p. 52Luong, Louisa, 20 October 2019, ‘In Conversation with Omid Tofighian’, Vertigo <https://utsvertigo.com.au/non-fiction/omid-tofighian/>
p. 52Race Matters podcast, 15 July 2019, ‘Episode 24: Why is my curriculum white? (with Dixie Crawford and Omid Tofighian)’, FBi Radio, <https://d27rxetjl76nhc.cloudfront.net/podcasts/173/audio/1563877171288.mp3>
p. 54Final Draft podcast, 12 August 2018, ‘Bonus—Dr Omid Tofighian on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But The Mountains’, 2SER.com
p. 55Behrendt, Larissa, 2016, Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press
p. 57Bolton, Robert, 19 November 2017, ‘Paul Ramsay donation paves way for new centre to study Western civilisation’, Australian Financial Review, <www.afr.com/politics/federal/paul-ramsay-donation-paves-way-for-new-centre-to-study-western-civilisation-20171117-gznuba#ixzz58mKBbstE>
p. 58Smith, Alexandra, 17 November 2017, ‘Universities line up for new Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/education/universities-line-up-for-new-3-billion-ramsey-centre-for-western-civilisation-20171113-gzk22r.html>
p. 58Abbott, Tony, 24 May 2018, ‘Paul Ramsay’s Vision for Australia’, Quadrant, <https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/04/paul-ramsays-vision-australia/>
p. 60Newsinger, John, 2016, ‘Why Rhodes Must Fall’, Race & Class, Vol. 58 No. 2
p. 60McGowan, Michael, 6 June 2018, ‘University explains why it walked away from western civilisation degree’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/06/university-explains-why-it-walked-away-from-grant-for-western-civilisation-degree>
p. 61Urban, Rebecca, 5 June 2018, ‘ANU banks Mid-East millions’, The Australian, <www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/mideast-countries-give-anu-funding/news-story/e030ba981b3c711f9984092fc1b773ce>
p. 61Baker, Jordan, 15 June 2018, ‘Queenwood principal backs Ramsay Centre vision’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/education/queenwood-principal-backs-ramsay-centre-vision-20180615-p4zlrb.html>
p. 62McGowan, Michael, 15 October 2018, ‘Staff-led campaign against University of Sydney’s Ramsay Centre deal escalates’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/15/staff-led-campaign-against-university-of-sydneys-ramsay-centre-deal-escalates>
p. 62Reimer, Nick, 12 June 2018, ‘Weaponising Learning’, Sydney Review of Books, <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/weaponising-learning/>
p. 63Haines, Simon, 23 December 2017, ‘An Education Manifesto for Western Civ’, Quadrant, <https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2017/12/education-manifesto-western-civilisation/>
p. 63McGowan, Michael, 24 June 2019, ‘Wollongong University intervenes to approve Ramsay Centre western civilisation degree’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/24/wollongong-university-intervenes-to-approve-ramsay-centre-western-civilisation-degree Michael McGowan>
p. 65Lee, Bri, 21 July 2018, ‘Exclusive: Christian lobby academic heads law school’, Saturday Paper, <www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/education/2018/07/21/exclusive-christian-lobby-academic-heads-law-school/15320952006588#hrd>
p. 68Simon Haines, 4 March 2020, speech to inaugural Ramsay scholars, <www.ramsaycentre.org/news-and-media/give-your-teachers-a-hard-time-professor-simon-haines-delivers-speech-to-inaugural-ramsay-scholars/>
p. 69Craven, Greg, 27 February 2019, ‘George Pell: A case in which justice never had a fair chance’, The Australian, <www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/inquirer/george-pell-a-case-in-which-justice-never-had-a-fair-chance/news-story/7511475687c011524b623c61e65a6f50>
p. 70Craven, Greg, 7 September 2013, ‘The Tony Abbott I Know’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/the-tony-abbott-i-know-17783>
p. 70Parkinson, Patrick, 21 August 2019, ‘After the appeal: The tragedy of Cardinal George Pell’, ABC Religion & Ethics, <www.abc.net.au/religion/after-the-appeal-the-tragedy-of-cardinal-george-pell/11435998>
p. 71Dreher, Rod, 21 May 2020, ‘Recovering and Sustaining Cultural Memory’, Ramsay Lectures, <www.ramsaycentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Dreher-Transcript.pdf>
p. 73Tofighian, Omid, August 2019, ‘Behrouz Boochani and the politics of naming’, Australian Book Review, <www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2019/371-august-2019-no-413/5688-behrouzboochani-and-the-politics-of-naming-by-omid-tofighian>
p. 74Baker, Jordan, 4 October 2019, ‘Ramsay Centre rejects Sydney Uni’s revised proposal’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/education/ramsay-centre-rejects-sydney-uni-s-revised-proposal-20191003-p52xdn.html>
p. 76Yezdani, Omer, 26 February 2020, ‘Five Australian universities get the bulk of philanthropic donations’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/five-australian-universities-get-the-bulk-of-philanthropic-donations-104001>
p. 77Morris, Wesley, and Wortham, Jenna, 7 November 2019, ‘Wake’, Still Processing podcast, <www.nytimes.com/2019/11/07/podcasts/still-processing-parasite-watchmen-bong-joon-ho.html>
p. 78Taylor, Alan, 2019, Thomas Jefferson’s Education, New York: W. W. Norton & Company
p. 78Natanson, Hannah, 6 October 2019, ‘Two centuries ago, University of Virginia students beat and raped enslaved servants, historians say’, Washington Post, <www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/06/two-centuries-ago-university-virginia-students-beat-raped-enslaved-servants-historians-say/>
p. 79University of Virginia, July 2018, ‘President’s Commission on Slavery and the University’, <https://vpdiversity.virginia.edu/sites/vpdiversity.virginia.edu/files/PCSU%20Report%20FINAL_July%202018.pdf>
p. 80Wiencek, Henry, October 2012, ‘The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson’, Smithsonian Magazine, <www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/>
p. 81McKinnon, Alex, July 2019, ‘Blackbirds: Australia’s hidden slave trade history’, The Monthly, <www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/july/1561989600/alex-mckinnon/blackbirds-australia-s-hidden-slave-trade-history#mtr>
p. 84Mason, Andy, 13 March 2017, ‘Wentworth Must Fall’, Honi Soit, <https://honisoit.com/2017/03/wentworth-must-fall/>
p. 85Wentworth, W., 1919 (republished 2011), A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land: With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration, and their Superiority in Many Respects over Those Possessed by the United States of America, Cambridge Library Collection—History of Oceania, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

p. 87Sonnenschein, Lara, 22 March 2019, ‘Vice Chancellor quotes early colonial era racist in email to students about Christchurch terrorist attack’, Honi Soit, <https://honisoit.com/2019/03/vice-chancellor-quotes-early-colonial-era-racist-in-email-to-students-about-christchurch-terrorist-attack/>
p. 88Gore, Jenny, 27 June 2017, ‘Why many high-achieving Indigenous students are shunning university’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/why-many-high-achieving-indigenous-students-are-shunning-university-79749>

Chapter 3: Schools
p. 89Switzer, Tom, 31 October 2018, ‘Sydney Uni’s theatre of the absurd’, Australian Financial Review, <www.afr.com/opinion/sydney-unis-theatre-of-the-absurd-20181031-h17bjz>
p. 90Switzer, Tom, 25 January 2016, ‘Sneered at, patronised, and condemned, Abbott battles on. And that’s a good thing’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/25/sneered-at-patronised-and-condemned-abbott-battles-on-and-thats-a-good-thing>
p. 90Switzer, Tom, 12 May 2019, ‘Left’s faux fairness puts opportunity society at risk’, Australian Financial Review, <www.afr.com/politics/federal/left-s-faux-fairness-puts-opportunity-society-at-risk-20190512-p51mg9>
p. 90Switzer, Tom, 9 August 2019, ‘Cash is no answer to failing schools’, Australian Financial Review, <www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/cash-is-no-answer-to-failing-schools-20190808-p52f1g>
p. 90The Centre for Independent Studies, 1 July 2006, ‘30 Years of Ideas’, PréCIS, Vol. 16. No. 1, <www.cis.org.au/app/uploads/2017/01/2006-Vol16-No1.pdf>
p. 91Cowan, Simon, 4 August 2018, ‘Should think tanks be forced to disclose their funders?’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/should-think-tanks-be-forced-to-disclose-their-funders-20180802-p4zv4g.html>
p. 92Joseph, Blaise, 18 March 2019, ‘Overcoming the Odds: A study of Australia’s top-performing disadvantaged schools’, Centre for Independent Studies, <www.cis.org.au/publications/research-reports/overcoming-the-odds-a-study-of-australias-top-performing-disadvantaged-schools/>
p. 92Fahey, Glenn, 31 August 2019, ‘Inquiry into measurement and outcome-based funding in New South Wales schools’, Centre for Independent Studies, <www.cis.org.au/publications/submissions/inquiry-into-measurement-and-outcome-based-funding-in-new-south-wales-schools/>
p. 93Seccombe, Mike, 6 May 2017, ‘Turnbull’s war on universities’, Saturday Paper, <www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/education/2017/05/06/turnbulls-war-universities/14939928004602>
p. 94Ting, Inga; Liu, Ri, and Scott, Nathanael, 22 November 2018, ‘Counting the cost of the education revolution’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-22/counting-the-cost-of-the-education-revolution/10495756?nw=0>
p. 95Munro, Kelsey, 18 August 2018, ‘“Bespoke education”: are Australia’s private schools worth the price tag?’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/18/bespoke-education-are-australias-private-schools-worth-the-price-tag>
p. 97Prasser, Scott, 21 August 2012, ‘Gonski review: Experts weigh in on what the government should do’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/gonski-review-experts-weigh-in-on-what-the-government-should-do-8947>
p. 98Forsyth, Robert, and Kurti, Peter (eds), 2020, Forgotten Freedom No More—Protecting Religious Liberty in Australia, Cleveland, QLD: Connor Court Publishing with The Centre for Independent Studies
p. 98Ting, Inga; Palmer, Alex, and Scott, Nathanael, 13 August 2019, ‘Rich school, poor school: Australia’s great education divide’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-13/rich-school-poor-school-australias-great-education-divide/11383384?nw=0>
p. 99Ting, Inga; Shatoba, Katia, and Palmer, Alex, 4 September 2020, ‘How the Catholic school system takes from the poor to give to the rich’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-02/how-the-catholic-school-system-takes-from-the-poor/12588920?nw=0>
p. 101Murphy, Katharine, September 2020, Quarterly Essay 79: The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics, Melbourne: Black Inc.

p. 103Baker, Jordan, 15 May 2019, ‘Private school funding growth outstrips public schools’ despite Gonski’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/education/private-school-funding-growth-outstrips-public-schools-despite-gonski-20190514-p51naa.html>
p. 104Chrysanthos, Natassia, 7 May 2020, ‘Inner west school to spend millions on public park upgrade under council deal’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/inner-west-school-to-spend-millions-on-public-park-upgrade-under-council-deal-20200504-p54ppe.html>
p. 105Chrysanthos, Natassia, 4 June 2020, ‘Inner West Council to press pause on controversial private school park deal’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/inner-west-council-to-press-pause-on-controversial-private-school-park-deal-20200527-p54wvs.html>
p. 107Munro, Kelsey, 19 August 2018, ‘School choice: some parents are prepared to pay, but is society?’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/19/school-choice-some-parents-are-prepared-to-pay-but-is-society>
p. 118Cunneen, Chris, 23 July 2020, ‘Ten-year-olds do not belong in detention. Why Australia must raise the age of criminal responsibility’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/ten-year-olds-do-not-belong-in-detention-why-australia-must-raise-theage-of-criminal-responsibility-142483>
p. 118Editorial team, 28 September 2020, ‘The teenage brain is a work-in-progress. Remember that when blaming the Shore students’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-teenage-brain-is-a-work-in-progress-remember-that-when-blaming-the-shore-students-20200927-p55zmh.html>
p. 119Cologon, Kathy, 28 October 2019, ‘Excluded and refused enrolment: report shows illegal practices against students with disabilities in Australian schools’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/excluded-and-refused-enrolment-report-shows-illegal-practices-against-students-with-disabilities-in-australian-schools-125812>
p. 119Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, October 2020, ‘Public hearing 7: Barriers to accessing a safe, quality and inclusive school education and life course impacts’ <https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/transcript>
p. 122Graham, Linda; Proctor, Helen, and Dixon, Roselyn, 28 January 2016, ‘How schools avoid enrolling children with disabilities’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/how-schools-avoid-enrolling-children-with-disabilities-53494>
p. 125Lluch Herbert, Lisi, and Dale, Beatriz, 2020, Grow: Green School’s Re-evolutionary Family, published by Green School, Bali
p. 128Pung, Alice, February 2013, ‘The secret life of them’, The Monthly, <www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/february/1363325509/alice-pung/secret-life-them#mtr>
p. 130Roberts, Philip; Dean, Jenny and Lommatsch, Garrett, 13 December 2019, ‘Still Winning? Social inequity in the NSW senior secondary curriculum hierarchy’, University of Canberra Centre for Sustainable Communities, <https://researchprofiles.canberra.edu.au/en/publications/still-winning-social-inequity-in-the-nsw-senior-secondary-curricu>
p. 133Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2018, A Broken Social Elevator? How to Promote Social Mobility, Paris: OECD Publishing, <www.oecd.org/social/broken-elevator-how-to-promote-social-mobility-9789264301085-en.htm>

Chapter 4: Science
p. 135Bell, Davina, and Colpoys, Allison (illustrator), 2018, All the Ways to be Smart, Melbourne: Scribe
p. 136Gardner, Howard, 1983, Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences, New York: Basic Books
p. 140Kaufman, Barry, 1 June 2017, ‘Eric Turkheimer on Intelligence, Genes, Race, and Poverty’, The Psychology Podcast, <https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/eric-turkheimer-intelligence-genes-race-poverty/>
p. 141‘G’ series, 2019, Radiolab, <www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/projects/radiolab-presents-g>
p. 143Saini, Angela, 2019, Superior: The Return of Race Science, London: HarperCollins Publishers
p. 144Abbott, Tony, 24 May 2018, ‘Paul Ramsay’s Vision for Australia’, Quadrant, <https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/04/paul-ramsays-vision-australia/>
p. 146Van der Merwe, Ben, 2018, ‘Exposed: London’s eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links’, London Student, <https://londonstudent.coop/exposed-london-eugenics-conferences-neo-nazi-links/>
p. 148Siegel, Eric, 12 April 2017, ‘The Real Problem with Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve”’, Scientific American, <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/>
p. 148Stein, Joel, 15 September 2016, ‘Milo Yiannopoulos Is the Pretty, Monstrous Face of the Alt-Right’, Bloomberg Business, www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-america-divided/milo-yiannopoulos/
p. 148Harmon, Amy, 17 October 2018, ‘Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)’, New York Times, <www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/white-supremacists-science-dna.html>
p. 149Cobb, Matthew, 2020, The Idea of the Brain, London: Profile Books
p. 154Singer, Judy, 1998, Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autism Spectrum: A personal exploration of a New Social Movement based on Neurological Diversity, an Honours thesis presented to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, the University of Technology, Sydney
p. 154Singer, Judy, ‘Why can’t you be normal for once in your life?’ in Mairian Corker and Sally French (eds), 1999, Disability Discourse, Philadelphia: Open University Press
p. 154Harmon, Amy, 20 December 2004, ‘How About Not “Curing” Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading’, New York Times, <www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/health/how-about-not-curing-us-some-autistics-are-pleading.html>
p. 156Silberman, Steve, 16 April 2013, ‘Neurodiversity Rewires Conventional Thinking About Brains’, Wired, <www.wired.com/2013/04/neurodiversity/>
p. 156Martin, Melissa, 23 October 2020, ‘Adult autism diagnosis leaves Josh McKeiver relieved but facing work and study hurdles’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-23/autistic-adult-josh-mckeiver-cant-find-a-job/12703848>
p. 156Collins, Antonette, 21 August 2020, ‘Health bureaucrat tells royal commission people with disabilities not mentioned in coronavirus plan’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-21/people-with-disability-not-mentioned-government-covid-19-plan/12581858>
p. 158Linden, David J., 2020, Unique: The new science of human individuality, New York: Basic Books
p. 160Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment, September 2012, ‘The Report of the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People’, chaired by Larissa Behrendt, <www.dese.gov.au/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-higher-education/review-higher-education-access-and-outcomes-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people>
p. 161Whittaker, Alison, 2018, ‘The Unbearable Witness, Seeing: A case for Indigenous methodologies in Australian soft law’, Pandora’s Box: Journal of Justice and the Law Society at the University of Queensland; and Whittaker, Alison, 2016, ‘Observing Aboriginality, Aboriginality Observing: Epistemic and methodological paths to an Indigenous student jurisprudence from within’, Ngiya: Talk the Law
p. 161Thunig, Amy, and Jones, Tiffany, 2020, ‘“Don’t make me play house-n***er”: Indigenous academic women treated as “black performer” within higher education’, The Australian Educational Researcher
p. 163Walters, Maggie, and Guerzoni, Michael, 16 October 2020, ‘How a university can embed Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum and why it matters’, The Conversation <https://theconversation.com/how-a-university-can-embed-indigenous-knowledge-into-the-curriculum-and-why-it-matters-147456>
p. 163Maiam nayri Wingara Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective, 2017, <www.maiamnayriwingara.org/about-us>
p. 166Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 2013, ‘Towards an Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 28 No. 78
p. 169Bonyhady, Nick, 28 January 2020, ‘Abbott calls for middle class women to have more children’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/abbott-calls-for-middle-class-women-to-have-more-children-20200128-p53vkx.html>
p. 169Allen, Liz, 2020, The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover, Sydney: NewSouth Publishing
p. 175Australian Mensa, 2021, <www.mensa.org.au/about-us/our-association>

Chapter 5: Language
p. 180Nice White Parents podcast, 2020, Serial and New York Times, <www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html>
p. 185Costa, Albert, 2020, The Bilingual Brain: And what it tells us about the science of language, London: Penguin Books
p. 193Kendall, Mikki, 2020, Hood Feminism, London: Bloomsbury Publishing
p. 194‘OMID TOFIGHIAN: Being Australian … it all comes down to chance’, June 2019, The Pin, <www.thepin.org/meet/omid-tofighian>
p. 194Laugesen, Amanda, 2020, Rooted: an Australian history of bad language, Sydney: NewSouth Publishing

Chapter 6: Western civilisation
p. 208de Wet, Chris, 2015, ‘The Didactics of Kyriarchy: Slavery, education, and the formation of masculinity’, in Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity, Oakland: University of California Press
p. 209Shüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 2011, Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist The*logy, Minneapolis: Fortress Press
p. 210Woolf, Virginia, 1928, A Room of One’s Own, London: Penguin
p. 211Beard, Mary, 2017, Women & Power: A manifesto, London: Profile Books
p. 215Saini, Angela, 2019, Superior: The Return of Race Science, London: HarperCollins Publishers
p. 217Morton, Rick, 2020, On Money, Sydney: Hachette Australia
p. 218Renn, Kristen A. and Martínez Alemán, Ana M. (eds), 2002, Women in Higher Education: An encyclopedia, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO
p. 221Booth, Alison, and Joo Kee, Hiau, 2011, ‘A Long-Run View of the University Gender Gap in Australia’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 51 No. 3
p. 222Larkins, Frank, 2 October 2018, ‘Male students remain underrepresented in Australian universities. Should we be concerned?’, University of Melbourne, <https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/lh-martin-institute/insights/gender-enrolment-trends-flarkins>
p. 223Singhal, Pallavi, 15 October 2018, ‘“Concerning”: HSC gender trends have not changed over 20 years’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/education/hsc-gender-stem-subjects-trends-education-20181009-p508jl.html>
p. 224McCurry, Justin, 12 December 2018, ‘Two more Japanese medical schools admit discriminating against women’, Guardian, <theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/12/two-more-japanese-medical-schools-admit-discriminating-against-women>
p. 224McCurry, Justin, 19 June 2019, ‘Women outperform men after Japan medical school stops rigging exam scores’, Guardian, <www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/19/women-outperform-men-after-japan-medical-school-stops-rigging-exam-scores>
p. 224McCurry, Justin, 8 August 2018, ‘Tokyo medical school admits changing results to exclude women, Guardian, <www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/08/tokyo-medical-school-admits-changing-results-to-exclude-women>
p. 225Davey, Melissa, 8 November 2018, ‘Sydney obstetrician said women should sign a consent form for vaginal births’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/08/sydney-obstetrician-said-women-should-sign-a-consent-form-for-vaginal-births>
p. 225Evlin, Lin, 31 October 2019, ‘Australian doctor slammed for saying more women make workforce more vulnerable’, SBS News Online, <www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-doctor-slammed-for-saying-more-women-make-workforce-more-vulnerable>
p. 226AMA Gender Equity Summit Report, 16 August 2019, The Australian Medical Association, <https://ama.com.au/articles/ama-gender-equity-summit-report-2019>
p. 226Aubusson, Kate, 18 November 2019, ‘The question female doctors never want to hear again’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/the-question-female-doctors-never-want-to-hear-again-20191115-p53azs.html>
p. 227Chen, Ya-Wen; Westfal, Maggie L; Chang, David C, and Kelleher, Cassandra M, February 2021, ‘Underemployment of female surgeons?’, Annals of Surgery, Vol. 273 No. 2
p. 227Editorial team, 7 August 2018, ‘Study finds female doctors better for heart patients’, SBS News Online, <www.sbs.com.au/news/study-finds-female-doctors-better-for-heart-patients>
p. 227Greenwood, Brad N.; Carnahan, Seth and Huang, Laura, August 2018, ‘Patient–physician gender concordance and increased mortality among female heart attack patients’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 115 No. 34, <www.pnas.org/content/115/34/8569>

Chapter 7: 2020
p. 229Boochani, Behrouz, and Tofighian, Omid (translator), 2018, No Friend But the Mountains, Sydney: Picador
p. 230Plibersek, Tanya (ed), 2020, Upturn: A Better Normal After COVID-19, Sydney: NewSouth Publishing
p. 230Heffernan, Madeleine, 22 April 2020, ‘Private schools seek taxpayer bailout to stave off job cuts’, The Age, <www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/private-schools-seek-taxpayer-bailout-to-stave-off-job-cuts-20200419-p54l9f.html>
p. 231Joseph, Blaise, 25 May 2020, ‘What have we learnt from school closures? Absolutely nothing’, Daily Telegraph, <www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/school-closures-student-learning-has-been-damaged/news-story/9c6347d93761ecd8a2543829d2918d61>
p. 231Baker, Jordan, 25 May 2020, ‘Disadvantaged kids “fell further in maths, reading due to COVID”’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/disadvantaged-kids-fell-further-in-maths-reading-due-to-covid-20200522-p54vmr.html>
p. 231Gorrey, Megan, 22 April 2020, ‘$123 million “vertical” Sydney school to be built in town centre’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/123-million-vertical-sydney-school-to-be-built-in-town-centre-20200422-p54m4o.html>
p. 232Caro, Jane, 2 May 2020, ‘How schools have become political pawns’, Saturday Paper, <www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2020/05/02/how-schools-have-become-political-pawns/15883416009757#hrd>
p. 232Sonnemann, Julie, and Goss, Peter, 15 June 2020, ‘Disadvantaged students may have lost 1 month of learning during COVID-19 shutdown. But the government can fix it’, The Conversation, <https://theconversation.com/disadvantaged-students-may-have-lost-1-month-of-learning-during-covid-19-shutdown-but-the-government-can-fix-it-140540>
p. 232Murphy, Katharine, September 2020, Quarterly Essay 79: The End of Certainty: Scott Morrison and Pandemic Politics, Melbourne: Black Inc.

p. 233Davies, Anne, 5 June 2020, ‘Australian universities to close campuses and shed thousands of jobs as revenue plummets due to Covid-19 crisis’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/04/australian-universities-to-close-campuses-and-shed-thousands-of-jobs-as-revenue-plummets-due-to-covid-19-crisis#:~:text=The%20University%20of%20NSW%2C%20which,2021%20and%20again%20in%202022>
p. 233McGrath, Pat, and McClymont, Alison, 17 June 2020, ‘Priests eligible for JobKeeper asked to donate the extra allowance to their Catholic diocese’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-17/catholic-church-asks-priests-getting-jobkeeper-to-donate-back/12359600>
p. 234Farbenblum, Bassina, and Berg, Laurie, 2020, International Students and Wage Theft in Australia report, Migrant Worker Justice Initiative,<www.mwji.org/iswagetheft>
p. 234Lane, Bernard, 14 February 2020, ‘Health chiefs can’t ignore “global epidemic” of transgender teens’, The Australian, <www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/health-chiefs-cant-ignore-global-epidemic-of-transgender-teens/news-story/5849a55ba47884befdc9eb72d25d32d7>
p. 235Switzer, Tom, and Nampijinpa Price, Jacinta, 15 June 2020, ‘Censoring history makes the past impossible to grasp’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/national/censoring-history-makes-the-past-impossible-to-grasp-20200615-p552pn.html>
p. 237Kagi, Jacob; Mills, Vanessa, and Barry, Hannah, 12 June 2020, ‘King Leopold Ranges renamed by WA Government amid global Black Lives Matter protests’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-12/king-leopold-ranges-renamed-amid-black-lives-matter-protests/12349532#:~:text=The%20King%20Leopold%20Ranges%20are,the%20site%20named%20after%20him>
p. 237Rubbo, Luisa, 11 June 2020, ‘Campaign grows against statue of first Australian PM Edmund Barton at Aboriginal burial site in NSW’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-11/push-to-remove-statue-of-australias-first-pm/12340492>
p. 238Chomicki, Chloe, and Wainwright, Sofie, 22 June 2020, ‘Townsville statue of Robert Towns vandalised with red paint’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-22/robert-towns-statue-vandalised-in-townsville/12378622>
p. 239Gridneff, Ilya, 9 April 2013, ‘You don’t celebrate the death of someone who didn’t matter’, Sydney Morning Herald, <www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/you-dont-celebrate-the-death-of-someone-who-didnt-matter-20130409-2hj0j.html>
p. 244Simons, Margaret, 23 May 2020, ‘The end of the university boom’, Saturday Paper, <www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/economy/2020/05/23/the-end-the-university-boom/15901560009865#hrd>
p. 246Kontominas, Bellinda, and Terzon, Emilia, 7 June 2020, ‘Queen’s Birthday honours recognises high-profile Australians including Tony Abbott, Bronwyn Bishop and Marcia Langton’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-07/tony-abbott-scores-queens-birthday-top-honour/12330492>
p. 247hooks, bell, 2014, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom, New York: Routledge
p. 247Lambie, Jacqui, 1 October 2020, in ‘“Uni Bill Deserves to Fail”—Lambie’, Tasmanian Times, <www.tasmaniantimes.com/2020/10/uni-bill-deserves-to-fail-lambie/>
p. 248Allen, Liz, 2020, The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover, Sydney: NewSouth Publishing
p. 250Coates, Brendan and Daley, John, March 2018, ‘Housing Affordability: Re-imagining the Australian Dream’, Grattan Institute, <https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2018-03/apo-nid135151_0.pdf>
p. 251Zhou, Naaman, 12 November 2020, ‘Female enrolment at Australian universities dropped by 86,000 in 2020 as “pink recession” hit’, Guardian Australia, <www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/nov/12/female-enrolment-at-australian-universities-dropped-by-86000-in-2020-as-pink-recession-hit>
p. 252Fahey, Glenn, 28 October 2020, ‘While our schools coach kids in social activism, literacy takes a back seat’, The Australian, <www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/while-our-schools-coach-kids-in-social-activism-literacy-takes-a-back-seat/news-story/f1ad98394a2a8043cbcdabc00e41e319>
p. 253Macmillan, Jade, 8 October 2020, ‘Migrants to Australia required to learn English to a “functional level” under new rules’, ABC News, <www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-08/500-hours-of-english-classes-required-under-partner-visa-changes/12741714>

Bri Lee is an author and freelance writer. Her journalism has appeared in publications such as The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Guardian Australia and Crikey. Her first book, Eggshell Skull, won Biography of the Year at the ABIA Awards, the People’s Choice Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and was longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize. She is also a non-practicing lawyer and continues to engage in legal research and issues-based advocacy.

Also by Bri Lee