In his booklet Our Right to Take Responsibility, Australia’s leading Aboriginal intellectual Noel Pearson (2000: 63) wrote that prescriptive identity politics has Cape York Aborigines ‘dress up anti-intellectualism and apathy as Aboriginal culture and “the blackfella way”’ and so constitute an impediment to their own education, development and potential to engage effectively with the world beyond their Aboriginal communities. The counter-productive attitudes and behaviours that politics produces have been noted elsewhere in Aboriginal education (Hollinsworth, 1995; Folds, 1987; Keeffe, 1988) and are complemented by similar attitudes and behaviours in respect of health (where Aborigines resist some health promotion efforts that require lifestyle change).
This paper uses the author’s doctoral research to explain the counter- productive behaviours to which Pearson refers as partly the outcome of the progressive policy frameworks that have dominated Aboriginal education for the past thirty-odd years, in which the performance of the many actors