THE OLDEST QUESTION IN A YOUNG INSTITUTION.

The University of Queensland opened its doors in 1910, in a colony that had federated into a nation only nine years before, on land that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had occupied, cultivated, and governed for tens of thousands of years. That foundational disjunction — between the brevity of European institutional history in Queensland and the depth of the civilisations that preceded it — has never fully resolved itself. What it has done, over more than a century of fitful reckoning, is generate a set of obligations that every large Queensland institution must eventually confront: obligations of recognition, of knowledge, of structural change, and of accountability.

For the University of Queensland, that confrontation has accelerated in recent decades into something more systematic than goodwill gestures and more demanding than ceremonial acknowledgement. The university’s Indigenous Engagement Division seeks to engage and activate UQ leadership and the broader campus community in a commitment to reconciliation and to the achievement of the university’s strategic goals. That language — “activate,” “strategic goals” — is deliberately institutional. It reflects the understanding, hard-won through decades of advocacy by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students, and community members, that durable change requires structural embedding, not just cultural sentiment.

This article is concerned with that structural work: the units, the strategies, the research programs, and the institutional frameworks through which UQ has sought to become not merely a university that admits First Nations students but one that recognises, supports, and is genuinely shaped by First Nations knowledge, presence, and leadership. It sits alongside a companion piece in this series examining the Kuril Dhagun collection and questions of cultural heritage repatriation — a dimension of institutional responsibility that warrants its own dedicated treatment.

THE ATSIS UNIT: FORTY YEARS OF PRESENCE.

The most enduring structural expression of UQ’s commitment to First Nations students is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit — known as the ATSIS Unit. The ATSIS Unit provides a focus for community outreach, student support, research, and teaching and learning, including coordination of the Indigenous Studies Major. It is the institutional anchor around which much of UQ’s First Nations engagement is organised, and its history stretches back further than many assume.

Established in 1984 and officially launched in 1985 with an inaugural cohort of 50 students, the ATSIS Unit has continued to support and celebrate Indigenous cultures and recognise the significant contributions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples make to UQ. The unit’s founding in the mid-1980s places it within a broader national moment — a period in which Australian universities began, however tentatively, to recognise that their predominantly Anglo-European institutional cultures were not neutral but particular, and that their obligations to First Nations communities were substantive rather than optional.

In 2025, the ATSIS Unit celebrated 40 years as a place of belonging and the heart of Indigenous excellence at UQ, with events and stories that honour the past and continue to shape the future. Four decades is a significant institutional lifespan. It means the unit has survived multiple changes in university leadership, shifts in federal and state funding priorities, debates about the appropriate scope of Indigenous higher education programs, and the recurring pressure — common to all specialist units within large universities — to be absorbed, downsized, or restructured into administrative irrelevance. That it has not only survived but developed over those four decades says something both about the tenacity of its staff and community and about the gradual deepening of UQ’s institutional commitment.

From pre-enrolment through to graduation, the ATSIS Unit can provide assistance with admission to UQ, including information on UQ’s range of programs, pre-enrolment preparation programs and alternative entry pathways. This broad remit — spanning the entire student lifecycle, from the moment before enrolment to the ceremony of graduation — reflects a recognition that access alone is insufficient. The barriers facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are not confined to the admissions process; they extend through every stage of university life: financial, cultural, geographic, academic, and relational. A support unit that addresses only one of these moments is structurally inadequate. The ATSIS Unit’s design, encompassing orientation, academic support, scholarship advice, tutorial assistance, and community connection, reflects a more complete understanding of what genuine institutional support requires.

THE INDIGENOUS ENGAGEMENT DIVISION: STRUCTURAL AUTHORITY.

The ATSIS Unit operates within a broader organisational structure: UQ’s Indigenous Engagement Division. The Division encompasses the many research opportunities available, as well as the output and impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers leading the Division. The ATSIS Unit supports and encourages the celebration of Indigenous cultures and recognises the enormous contributions that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people bring to UQ.

What distinguishes the Indigenous Engagement Division from earlier arrangements at UQ is its position in the university’s executive structure. The Division is led at the Deputy Vice-Chancellor level — the senior tier of university leadership — with specific and exclusive responsibility for Indigenous engagement. The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Engagement), Professor Bronwyn Fredericks, has over 30 years of experience working in and with the tertiary sector, state and federal governments, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-based organisations. This is not a ceremonial appointment. Prior to joining the University of Queensland, Fredericks was Professor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Engagement) at Central Queensland University, where she also served as Chairperson of the CQU Academic Board and held the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance Chair in Indigenous Engagement.

The presence of Indigenous engagement at Deputy Vice-Chancellor level matters institutionally. Universities are, by their governance structures, hierarchical places — and where a function sits in that hierarchy signals how seriously it is taken, how many resources it can access, and how much authority it holds when it encounters resistance from other parts of the institution. Placing Indigenous engagement in the senior executive team communicates that this work is not peripheral welfare provision but a core strategic function of the university as a whole.

The Director of the ATSIS Unit leads the Indigenous Major and coordinates the Indigenising the Curriculum initiative. That latter phrase — “Indigenising the Curriculum” — represents a significant conceptual and practical ambition. It does not mean simply adding a module on Aboriginal history to existing courses or including a token reading by an Indigenous author. It means reviewing the foundational assumptions of disciplinary knowledge across the entire institution — in law, medicine, engineering, science, social science, and the arts — and asking where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, methods, and knowledge systems belong not as addenda but as constitutive elements. This is work that is both intellectually serious and institutionally difficult.

THE RECONCILIATION ACTION PLAN: FROM WORDS TO PERFORMANCE INDICATORS.

The formal framework within which much of UQ’s First Nations work is organised and evaluated is the Reconciliation Action Plan — a structure overseen nationally by Reconciliation Australia, the independent organisation established in 2001 to advance reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. A RAP is more than a policy document; at its more developed stages, it is a set of institutional commitments with named actions, timelines, and accountability mechanisms.

In 2024, UQ launched its new ‘Stretch’ RAP to expand and develop its initiatives. The plan seeks to enable Indigenous excellence by crafting strategies that last and introducing performance indicators that matter, including Indigenous employment, research, procurement, cultural education, Indigenising the curriculum, and RAP governance. The term ‘Stretch’ is Reconciliation Australia’s designation for the third tier of RAP development — beyond the initial “Reflect” and “Innovate” stages — and it signals an institution that has moved past rhetorical commitment into measurable, ambitious target-setting.

The suite of associated instruments includes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment Strategy, a RAP Terminology Guide, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Learning Plan, an Indigenous Procurement Strategy for 2022–2025, and an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Design Framework. Each of these instruments addresses a different dimension of the institution’s relationship with First Nations peoples: employment pipelines, shared language, cultural education for non-Indigenous staff, economic participation through procurement, and the physical design of spaces on campus. Together they constitute something closer to an institutional ecosystem than a single policy.

UQ proudly launched the UQ Reconciliation Action Plan Network to help ensure a culturally respectful workplace and study environment, with membership open to all UQ staff and students. Members can join as a RAP Friend, RAP Partner, or RAP Agent of Change, depending on their capacity and stage of engagement with reconciliation. This network structure — distributed, participatory, and tiered by commitment level — reflects an understanding that reconciliation cannot be delivered solely from the top of an institutional hierarchy. It requires the active engagement of the people who populate that institution daily: the lecturers who design courses, the administrators who set procurement standards, the researchers who choose their methodologies, the students who elect their representatives.

"Reconciliation must be lived and breathed in our institutions, not just stated in our policies. It requires structural change, not symbolic gesture."

This sentiment — expressed in various forms by scholars and practitioners across the reconciliation movement — captures the essential distinction between performative and substantive institutional change. UQ’s institutional record on this distinction is mixed, as any honest account must acknowledge. The university, like all Australian universities, carries the weight of decisions made during the assimilation era: the exclusion of Aboriginal students from full participation in civic and academic life, the collection of cultural objects under colonial conditions, the production of research about Indigenous peoples without meaningful community involvement or benefit. Some of those legacies remain unresolved. The value of the current institutional framework is not that it erases that history but that it takes it seriously as a condition for present and future action.

RESEARCH: FROM STUDY SUBJECT TO RESEARCH LEADERSHIP.

The most consequential shift in the history of Australian universities’ relationship with First Nations peoples has been the slow, ongoing transition from research about those peoples to research led by and genuinely accountable to them. For most of the twentieth century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities were primarily objects of research — studied by anthropologists, linguists, historians, public health researchers, and social scientists whose methods, frameworks, and institutional affiliations were overwhelmingly non-Indigenous. The knowledge produced in this mode was often extractive: it left communities without meaningful benefit and sometimes caused direct harm.

The UQ Indigenous Engagement Division documents the research opportunities available and the output and impact of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers who lead the Division itself. That final phrase is important: researchers who lead the Division, not researchers who are studied by it. This reflects a structural commitment to Indigenous research leadership rather than inclusion as an afterthought.

With more than 370 million Indigenous people worldwide, and Indigenous politics featuring as a prominent and crucial debate in the Australian polity, UQ’s School of Political Science and International Studies has committed to increasing Indigenous engagement. Since 2010 the School has led a range of initiatives from provocative academic fora to recent commitments to include more Indigenous issues and perspectives in the curriculum. The discipline of political science presents a particularly interesting case, because it is the discipline most directly engaged with questions of sovereignty, governance, and political legitimacy — questions that lie at the heart of Australia’s unresolved relationship with its First Nations peoples. Aboriginal peoples of Australia have engaged in socio-political ordering for tens of thousands of years. Engagement with their political concepts, ideology and peoples is a high priority focus for political science at UQ.

The research output of UQ’s Indigenous-focused scholars spans health, law, education, anthropology, political science, environmental science, and the humanities. Across these fields, the methodological question of how research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities should be conducted — with what protocols, with what degree of community ownership over data and findings, with what obligations of return and benefit-sharing — has become a central concern. UQ has, over time, developed ethical frameworks for Indigenous research engagement that go beyond the generic requirements of the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, though the ongoing challenge is ensuring those frameworks are applied consistently across a large and decentralised institution.

CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL LEARNING: WHAT THE INSTITUTION TEACHES ABOUT ITSELF.

A university’s curriculum is, in a sense, the institution’s account of what knowledge matters and who has produced it. The Indigenous Studies Major coordinated through the ATSIS Unit represents UQ’s explicit commitment to making Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge, history, and culture a named and resourced field of undergraduate study. But the deeper ambition — reflected in the Indigenising the Curriculum initiative — extends beyond a single major to the question of how every discipline at UQ accounts for its relationship to First Nations knowledge.

This question is not merely a matter of equity or representation, though it is certainly both of those things. It is also an epistemological question: what does it mean for a university in Queensland to teach ecology without engaging with the fire management practices that Aboriginal peoples refined over millennia? What does it mean to teach law without grappling with the legal traditions and governance structures that existed on this continent before common law arrived? What does it mean to teach public health without incorporating the community-controlled models of health delivery that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have developed, sometimes in direct response to the failure of mainstream institutional health systems?

These are not rhetorical questions in the pejorative sense — they are genuinely open and difficult questions that the university is in the process of working through. UQ’s Reconciliation Action Plan reflects the institution’s commitment to respecting, recognising and celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights, cultures and success in the research and education landscape and in Australian society. That formulation — “in Australian society” — is a reminder that the work of a university does not terminate at its campus boundaries. What UQ teaches its graduates about First Nations history, governance, and knowledge will shape how those graduates — doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, public servants, educators — engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities throughout their professional lives.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Learning Plan is among the suite of instruments UQ has developed to support this broader institutional education. Cultural learning for non-Indigenous staff and students is not a luxury program or a gesture toward inclusion. It is a substantive investment in institutional capability — the capacity of UQ’s entire community to engage with First Nations peoples in ways that are informed, respectful, and genuinely useful.

EMPLOYMENT, PROCUREMENT AND DESIGN: THE MATERIAL DIMENSIONS OF RESPONSIBILITY.

Institutional responsibility for First Nations engagement is not exhausted by what a university teaches or researches. It extends to the material conditions it creates: who it employs, from whom it purchases goods and services, and how it designs the physical environments in which learning and research occur.

UQ’s Stretch RAP introduces performance indicators for Indigenous employment alongside indicators for research, procurement, cultural education, Indigenising the curriculum, and RAP governance. Employment is a particularly significant dimension, because it addresses the structural underrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people within the university as an institution — not merely as students passing through, but as permanent members of the academic and professional workforce who shape the institution’s culture from within. An employment strategy without targets is an aspiration; an employment strategy with measurable performance indicators is a mechanism of accountability.

The Indigenous Procurement Strategy reflects a recognition that a large institution with significant purchasing power has leverage over the economic opportunities available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander enterprises. Directing purchasing toward Indigenous-owned suppliers does not merely generate economic activity; it builds the institutional relationships, the commercial capabilities, and the community wealth that support self-determination more broadly. The Design Framework, meanwhile, addresses the physical campus — the question of how the buildings, spaces, and landscaping of UQ’s campuses acknowledge, reflect, and incorporate the cultural and aesthetic traditions of the peoples on whose land the university stands.

These material dimensions of reconciliation work are sometimes dismissed as bureaucratic or tokenistic. That assessment misunderstands the nature of institutional change. Large organisations change through the accumulation of practices — through the gradual revision of the assumptions embedded in procurement policies, employment criteria, curriculum frameworks, and design guidelines. The symbolic and the structural are not opposites; the symbolic matters precisely because it shapes the taken-for-granted norms by which institutional actors make daily decisions.

THE LAND BENEATH THE CAMPUS: RECOGNITION AND ONGOING OBLIGATION.

The University of Queensland acknowledges the Traditional Owners and their custodianship of the lands on which UQ operates. This acknowledgement — standard at the opening of university events, meetings, and publications — is both a civic ritual and an ongoing reminder of a specific geographic reality. UQ’s St Lucia campus occupies land of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples. Its Gatton campus sits on Yugarapul and Ugarapul country. Its Herston precinct is within the broader country of the Turrbal. These are not historical abstractions. They are living connections, maintained by communities that continue to exist, to govern themselves where possible, and to hold relationships with country that predate and survive the institution’s presence.

The question of how a university appropriately inhabits and acknowledges that reality is one that has no simple or permanent answer. Acknowledgement of Country is one gesture; Welcome to Country — offered by Traditional Custodians themselves — is a more substantial recognition of ongoing sovereignty. The physical embedding of country-specific design, language, and cultural elements in campus environments is another layer. The governance question — whether and how Traditional Owners have any formal standing in the university’s decision-making about land use, development, and environmental management — is among the more difficult and less resolved dimensions of the institution’s obligations.

What is clear is that the framing of First Nations engagement as purely an equity or support issue — a matter of helping disadvantaged students succeed in a pre-existing institution — is insufficient. The more demanding framing is one of institutional transformation: a university that is genuinely shaped by its location on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land, that understands its knowledge-making as partial without the integration of First Nations perspectives, and that holds itself accountable to the communities whose sovereignty it occupies.

PERMANENCE, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND THE CIVIC RECORD.

Institutions change. Policies are revised, units are restructured, strategic plans expire and are replaced. The history of Australian universities’ engagement with First Nations peoples is, in part, a history of commitments made and then walked back — programs established and then defunded, positions created and then eliminated, rhetoric advanced and then abandoned when political or financial winds shifted. One of the ongoing challenges of this institutional domain is precisely its vulnerability to reversion — to the dilution of commitments under administrative pressure, budget cycles, or changes in leadership.

This is one reason why the civic permanence of institutional identity matters beyond any single strategic plan. The work that UQ has undertaken through its Indigenous Engagement Division, its ATSIS Unit, its Stretch Reconciliation Action Plan, and its suite of employment, procurement, and curriculum strategies needs to be understood not as a collection of discrete programs but as the accumulation of an institutional character — a record of what this university has committed to, and against which its future conduct can be measured.

In the broader project of anchoring Queensland’s institutions onto a permanent civic identity layer — one that outlasts any single administration or policy cycle — the question of First Nations engagement is not incidental. It is central. The namespace uq.queensland designates not merely a university’s address in an onchain infrastructure but a civic identity that carries the full weight of the institution’s history and obligations — including its obligations to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Queensland, obligations that are among the oldest and most serious that any Queensland institution bears.

Forty years after its establishment, the ATSIS Unit continues to support and celebrate Indigenous cultures and recognise the significant contributions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples make to UQ. The 2024 Stretch RAP represents UQ’s most ambitious institutional commitment to date, seeking to enable Indigenous excellence through strategies that last and performance indicators that measure Indigenous employment, research, procurement, cultural education, curriculum change, and governance. These are not small ambitions. They are the ambitions of an institution that has begun to understand that its civic purpose is inseparable from its relationship with the First Nations of the country it inhabits.

A civic identity layer that is genuinely permanent — that endures across governments, across administrative cycles, and across the inevitable disruptions of institutional life — needs to carry within it the traces of this long, still-unfinished work. The onchain address uq.queensland is, in this framing, not merely a technical namespace. It is a marker of civic standing that holds the institution’s record: its research achievements, its teaching mission, its global reach, and the obligations it owes to the peoples whose country gave it a place to stand. Those obligations do not expire with any particular strategic plan. They endure, as the country itself endures, beyond the administrative timelines of any single institution.