Nicholas Hoare reviews Anna Kent’s Mandates and Missteps: Australian Government Scholarships to the Pacific − 1948 to 2018 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2024).
‘Are Australian universities racist?’ This was one of the main provocations of a recent PhD seminar where the student – a scholarship recipient from the Pacific Islands – expressed their frustration with the bureaucratic obstacles standing in the way of effective doctoral research. To be fair, the student reasoned that Australian universities were not openly racist, but nor were they designed in a way to properly facilitate Pacific research. The term Pacific unfriendliness was evoked and despite the feeling amongst a fair portion of Australian researchers that the systems are not working as they should be, it was clear that this particular term resonated with some attendees more than others. For this historically minded reviewer, the provocation led to questioning whether there ever really was a time when Australian universities were Pacific friendly? Fortunately, Anna Kent’s debut monograph, Mandates and Missteps: Australian Government Scholarships to the Pacific – 1948 to 2018, can shed some light on the matter.
Originating from a Deakin University PhD thesis, Mandates and Misssteps is a thorough examination of the evolution of Australian higher education policy regarding the Pacific region from the post-war rediscovery of the Pacific Islands to the modern ‘Pacific step-up’. Focusing on university scholarships in particular, Kent interrogates key themes in the history of Australian foreign policy such as national security, decolonisation, and importantly, given the opening question, race and racism. Found among the dizzying number of program names, departmental turf wars, and somersaulting government policies, is a clear argument that international education has never really been dictated by the interests of scholarship recipients, but by the Australian national interest. In terms of motivations, diplomacy often trumped aid and just as scholarships were used as ‘as a tool of influence during the Cold War’ (p.12), we can see how Australia continues to use scholarships to its advantage in our present geostrategic moment.
Whereas historians often point to the role of scholarship programs such as the Colombo Plan in dismantling the White Australia Policy from the 1950s onwards, Kent’s focus on the Pacific Islands – technically outside the Colombo Plan’s remit – reminds us that international scholarships were also very much the products of such policies. Thus we hear of concerns in the 1980s, sadly still relevant today, of students using scholarships as ‘a means for back-door immigration’ (p.98). And we learn of the tremendous effort that went into ensuring scholarship programs did not encourage more permanent settlement. Such was the case with several scholarships where success was judged by the number of recipients who returned home after their studies (something that is still seen in Australian Awards Scholarships where holders are required to return home for two years following graduation or risk incurring debts to the government, a hangover from Malcolm Fraser’s time in office). Former immigration minister Sir Hubert Opperman summarised the Australian position well. Speaking to parliament in 1966, he could understand why some recipients ‘who come here and like it desire to remain. But any one with the interests of their country at heart… should submerge those ideas and go back and help their own country’ (p.84). Kent does not fall for the altruistic appearance of these utterances, commenting later ‘that Australia was only prepared to partner with Pacific Island countries to a point, but not further’, and citing Graeme Dobell’s 2003 speech where the influential journalist argued that ‘Australia still sends out the same message to the Pacific, we do not want them’ (p.201).
That said, aside from the clever but limited inclusion of short biographical vignettes from Pacific scholarship holders across the time period, we learn little of the impact of these policies on students themselves. Kent is all too aware of this limitation, stressing at the outset that her book is ‘a history of the policies of the Australian Government, and not a student-tracing project’ (p.7). However, this must be why Nayahamui Rooney’s stirring foreword was included, providing an important counterpoint to the policy focused nature of the rest of the book. The complexity of the choices she faced as a young, bright student, including the choice to take up a scholarship to Australia in the 1990s and then, ultimately, give up Papua New Guinean citizenship two decades later to further employment prospects in Australia, is symbolic of those faced by so many Pacific Islander scholarship recipients. Whereas there are an increasing number of studies on the experiences of current scholarship holders, more historical research targeting the lives of scholarship recipients is also needed, and one hopes that the bureaucratic hurdles mentioned at the opening of this review do not prevent its completion. Kent’s point, ‘that scholarship programs were interpreted differently by different actors’ (p.76) deserves both closer investigation and further elaboration.
Mandates and Missteps makes several significant interventions in policy debates on education and development, broadly considered. While some of these interventions − such as the differences between subsidised education and scholarships − might go over the heads of the non-initiated; for those in the field, it is clearly important. Kent’s conclusions about incremental change are timely for those interested in bureaucracies, but she also makes readers think much more deeply about the purpose of university scholarships, both in the past and today. Critical perspectives such as Kent’s − and those expressed by scholarship recipients we share offices with − should encourage all of us in the education business to think more carefully about the ways we operate. In the face of such provocations, do we recoil at the thought of an ungrateful scholarship holder or do we listen and try to make our workplaces more welcoming to them? Further missteps are unavoidable but hopefully we have moved on from the 1970s where a review into overseas scholarships concluded that: ‘We should not lose sight of the basic objective of the student’s presence in Australia – not primarily his [sic] personal interest but the development of his [sic] home country’ (p.102). In 2024, even the most hard-headed policy makers can surely see how attending to the personal interests of scholarship holders might also benefit both the Australian national interest and broader regional development.
