Popular Education Pedagogy And South-South Solidarity: An Asia Pacific Perspective

Abstract

Australia, our homeland, is a colonial settler state, created as a nation in 1901 from six separate colonial territories illegally claimed by Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. This massive land theft dispossessed over 500 separate Indigenous nations, numbering perhaps one million people, who had occupied the continent and associated islands for over 50,000 years. Today, 220 years since the invasion began, the descendants of those peoples are still not recognised constitutionally as the country's original owners, nor have they been able to negotiate any treaty relationships with the settler population. To live in Australia as we do, as nonIndigenous people, then, is to live as part of an occupation force. For this reason, 'decolonising solidarity' is a fundamental principle of progressive 'settler' politics in Australia (Land, 2015).