Geelong Grammar School keeps a record of the names and home locations of every Aboriginal student who has attended the school since 2007, the year that it began to accept students from remote and regional communities on Indigenous scholarships.
“In those early years, they [Geelong Grammar] were going into it with all of the best intentions, but they just didn’t have the support structures set up and the understanding that the initial students that they took were from fairly remote communities,” says Sandra Brogden, whom the school hired as its Indigenous consultant several years ago in an attempt to improve its retention rate.
Brogden, a Minang Noongar, Karajarri and Bardi woman from Western Australia, says she has seen a real change over time in the school supporting its Indigenous students, rather than putting the onus on the students to fit into the school’s dominant culture. The school’s attempts to accommodate Indigenous perspectives within its broader curriculum produce moments of tension that are caught in the documentary: two Indigenous girls refuse to participate in a class rendition of the national anthem, for example, a stance the teachers readily accept.
While MITS celebrated its first two year 12 graduates last year from its inaugural intake in 2016, there were 20 other students from the cohort of 2016 who left Melbourne’s private school system before completing school, whose situations today are less known.