Graduating around the globe
PETER GOODYEAR & KATE THOMPSON
Australia
It is probably too soon to say whether the PhD will take root in Australia. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) have lived here, on the world’s largest island, wisely and well, for at least 70,000 years. By contrast, until 40,000 years ago, the only credible candidates for academic positions in the frosty swamps around Oxford, Berlin, Paris, Bologna and Enschede were Homo neanderthalensis. When the British invaded Australia in 1788, their scientists and curious explorers encountered Indigenous Peoples who had worked out how to flourish in every ecological niche,
and whose ways of life had adapted to accommodate changing environmental conditions. Indigenous Peoples knew how to farm with fire, to migrate without maps, to settle disputes without war and to live lightly on the land. Their knowledge of nature ran deep. Indigenous ways of knowing cherish the connections between all forms of life, learning and land, and raise deep questions about some of the claims of Western science. Whether knowledge can be the property of an individual is a case in point.
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