Continuing our exploration of international student experiences, this episode we move to the other side of the world and examine the experience of overseas students in Australia. Beginning in 1948, Australia offered a number of different scholarship programmes targeted at students from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
To guide us through the soup of acronyms and ‘schemes’ is Dr Anna Kent. Anna is a historian of education currently tutoring at Deakin University whose research focuses on international education policy in Australia. Her research looks at the intersections of international education and broader themes like race, decolonisation, and global movement. Prior to graduate school, Anna spent a decade working in policy and management roles in international education.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
Last episode, my conversation with Dr Jodi Burk-it focused one a government’s decision to charge overseas students money. In today’s episode, we’re going to look at the other side of that equation: a government’s decision to spend money on overseas students.
My guest today, Dr Anna Kent, studies scholarships provided by the Australian government for overseas students, focusing on the period from 1948 to the present. Her research looks at the intersections of international education and broader themes like race, decolonisation, and global movement. Prior to graduate school, she spent a decade working in policy and management roles in international education.
Throughout our conversation, Anna makes it clear that, although the policy outcome is very different from Britain in 1967, many of the same geopolitical considerations guided the Australian government’s decision making. Overseas students always seem to be the focus of some messy politics – regardless of whether you are spending money on them or charging them. To find out how and why, let’s jump in.
Hello, Anna, thank you so much for joining us. I’m really excited for our conversation today.
Anna Kent
Thanks, Michael. I’m excited too.
Michael Donnay
Thinking about a historical perspective, going to that date that you pegged as the start of your PhD project – 1948 – could you explain why Australia starts offering international scholarships at that point? And sort of how are they initially thought about both in an Australian context, but then also in the contexts in the South Pacific that they’re aimed at?
Anna Kent
It gets a bit complicated, but this is what I love about my PhD project, I suppose, in this sense. So the first scholarship scheme that the Australian government offered, it was called the Southeast Asian Scholarship Scheme. Lots of acronyms and names for scholarship schemes throughout my PhD. And the reason that they called it that was it was largely offered to Southeast Asian nations. So this was a period of rapid decolonization in Southeast Asia and also a real fear in Australia of communism, and the potential spread of communism throughout Asia and Southeast Asia. The other domestic issue or domestic policy that was playing into this decision making was what was called the White Australia Policy, which had been an immigration policy in Australia since Federation.
There was a realization or a recognition from the Department of External Affairs, which is now called the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, that that White Australia policy or the immigration restrictions that restricted immigration to Australia to largely white people did not play well in the Southeast Asian nations, particularly in the decolonizing ferment of the period. And the Southeast Asian scholarship scheme was in part an effort to placate Southeast Asian Nations, and a sort of an olive branch of sorts to say, “Well, here have a few scholarships, you can just come here to study, you can’t move here permanently. But you can come and study and then return home. And that will be fine.” And so that was in 1948.
And interestingly, the biggest scholarship in Australia’s conception of its history in international education – the Colombo Plan – features as a much bigger program. And it was in numbers much bigger, but it actually started after the Southeast Asian Scholarship Scheme. So first came the Southeast Asian scholarship scheme, and then the Colombo Plan a couple of years later. And the other interesting thing about the Southeast Asian Scholarship Scheme was that it was offered to Pacific island nations who were also going through less of an independence movement, but were keen as mostly colonies of mostly British colonies, to access Australian higher education. There were no universities in the Pacific until the 1960s. And so in that period, the only way to get tertiary education was to leave. And so scholarships offered by Australia, New Zealand, the UK and other colonial powers as well as the United States, (which, you know, are they – were they a colonial power, you know…?) that opportunity for further education could only be served by leaving.
So the scholarships were offered to Pacific Island colonies as well, which was a little bit confusing for those colonies, because they saw the title of Southeast Asian Scholarship Scheme and said, “Hang on a second, we’re not from Southeast Asia.” But the Australian Government said, “No, no, it’s fine. You can still apply.” There weren’t many awards, like it was sort of two or three awards a year for the first couple of years. So it was very small. They actually did change the name quite quickly. After a couple of years, they changed it to the Australian International Awards Scheme, in light of this whole “well, it’s not just Southeast Asia” thing. It also reflected some internal bureaucratic fights about where Australia should be concentrating its diplomatic and development or aid efforts. There was a push to support Pacific island states, there was also a large cohort of people who wish to support or thought that it was most important to support Southeast Asia. There was also the issue of Korea was becoming a big geopolitical issue. But there was also African states who were decolonizing. Ghana features heavily as well. As is a place where many people in the department of External Affairs felt Australia’s should be focusing attention. In part because Ghana was part of the Commonwealth and there was a real view to supporting Commonwealth nations as they pushed into independence.
Michael Donnay
I would love to talk a little bit more about your methods, particularly your use of oral history. But you also mention in various places about using other audio visual resources. So what if you could talk about what those resources were and how they informed how you were able to write the histories that you do?
Anna Kent
I guess I was really fortunate that I worked on my project at a time where students and universities love to collect alumni stories. And I’ve also been the beneficiary of the projects that my PhD supervisor was working on looking at alumni from Papua New Guinea, who came both before and after independence. So I actually didn’t do any oral history interviews myself. I was able to work with existing sources, which as a researcher is a bit of an easy trick. Made my life a little bit more easy, fewer ethics applications to put in. But certainly the open source data that you’re able to access about students and students talking about their experiences is quite phenomenal, both in Australia and around the world. Largely, and particularly in modern times, or in the in the 21st century, with the use of video as a marketing tool, and alumni interviews as a tool of sort of promotion and marketing of universities and of scholarship schemes.
With the caveat that those interviews are often used as marketing, so they’re not going to give you a full picture. But you do get a sense of people’s experiences and their lives. I was also the beneficiary of a larger Australian government program, which is called the Global Tracer Facility, which was a really big project or is a really big project, tracing Australian Government, alumni or alumni from who studied in Australia, mostly sponsored by the Australian Government, tracing them across the world. And it is a huge project, they’ve just done an enormous number of interviews. And they’ve done market research with alumni. And they’ve done focus groups and just a huge variety of different engagements with alumni. And they’ve done some of that as a broad sort of sweeping “What is the purpose of – what has been the outcomes of Australian education or Australian scholarships?” but also some really targeted projects. So one of the sources that I used was looking at scholars who came to Australia to study education-related courses and the impact that they’ve been able to have on return to Fiji. That was a really helpful source.
So the later chapters of my thesis where I moved from accessible archival material into you know, things, I have to rely much more on the grey literature. So government-produced documents or university-produced documents, things that I can’t necessarily read with without skepticism, or cynicism, because they are produced with a particular goal. Except for – I was very fortunate that a source that I use, both in my master’s thesis and my PhD was some internal reports that what was then AUS Aid, the aid part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), produced some quite in depth reviews of scholarships in the late 2000s. And I was able to use that. It had been released through an FOI that a journalist had done so because it had been FOI-ed that was freely available. And thus, I was able to use that as a source, which it created a huge amount of value to my own research. So I’m very thankful to that journalist who was doing that story many years ago.
Michael Donnay
Yeah, I would love to dig down just a little bit. You’ve mentioned a couple of times that like some of these sources are obviously quite pro-scholarships, either because they’re university marketing, or because their government reports about “look at how good we are.” I’m just wondering, in terms of using those to write your stories, how are you thinking about maybe reading against the grain or looking for the not-so-positive aspects within those documents?
Anna Kent
That’s a really great question. And something that I find both as a practitioner and scholar of scholarships. It’s very easy to become very cynical about scholarships, because I look at them often from a policy perspective and looking at them, the human side sometimes gets lost or the human impact. But also not allowing myself to be won over by the human side. “It’s all positive. It’s all wonderful. It was great. This has changed my life and the lives of my children forever.” It’s hard not to get caught up in that. And I do find my cynicism is always tempered when I speak to people who are on scholarship or scholarship alumni who told me all about their experiences. That does usually less than my cynicism somewhat.
But reading against the grain: one of the things I was able to do, and it’s kind of very 21st century is Google is amazing. Reading a name – because I’m working with people who were studying in Australia across the 20th and 21st century, many of them are still alive, and still professionals or have had professional careers. And so if I found a name in the archives, I was often able to trace back to that and find out what that person might be doing now. I found one of my favorite examples was a woman who studied in Australia in the 1960s on a Commonwealth scholarship. So she studied Urban Planning at the University of Sydney – she came here from Fiji – then she went to Hong Kong, then she moved to Canada. And she had a very rich and community-driven life in Canada. And she actually has an archive – documents about her in an archive – in Canada. And I found this all through finding her name in the Fijian archives, and then going sort of just Google search, tracing her story back. And so that, I mean, it’s kind of I always felt like they were a bit of a puzzle to put together these stories. And some of them are positive.
Sometimes the story in its full or these lives in their wholeness are present in the archives. One of the stories of a student that studied in Australia that I use regularly when I’m doing conference papers, and one that seems to resonate really strongly and crosses across a lot of the issues that we talked about earlier about why Australia offered scholarships in the 1940s. So this man was from Papua New Guinea, but his parents were Chinese. And he was born in Papua New Guinea in Rabaul. But he studied for his matriculation so his final years of schooling, in Australia. And then applied to go to the University of Sydney under a Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, which was a domestic scheme offered to Australian students. But this was at a time where Papua New Guinea was a territory of Australia. So it was actually part of Australia, but he was told he was not eligible because he was from Papua New Guinea. Which was not part of Australia, according to the people offering scholarships. It’s very confusing and just an amazing sort of bureaucratic nightmare that this man, Cyril Chan had to kind of negotiate.
He ended up being able to get a Commonwealth scholarship, but it was one of the ones that had been allocated to New South Wales rather than one that had been allocated to Papa New Guinea. There was no allocation to Papa New Guinea given. But he did study. He kept in touch with the minister, the man who had been Minister for Territories at the time, so internal territories rather than external territories, Paul Hasluck. And so there’s letters in the archive between Cyril Chan and Paul Hasluck or Paul Hasluck’s representatives. So you can see his experiences playing out and there’s letters and there’s also newspaper clippings in there. So you can see the different aspects of his story. And it’s just, I mean, his is a story of bureaucratic nightmares, but he does manage to to complete an arts and law degree and he returned home to Papa New Guinea and practiced as a lawyer.
So there is a, I guess, successful outcome but he had to negotiate so many hurdles: the White Australia Policy, his position was complicated because his parents were from China, not from Papua New Guinea, but he had been born in Papua New Guinea and so his citizenship status was unknown. Or not unknown, but sort of uncertain, because even as if he had been a Papua New Guinea resident or he, even if he had been born in Papua New Guinea, the citizenship status of Papua New Guineans, at the time was was complicated by the fact that they were an Australian territory, and yet not really Australian citizens. So his story is one of those amazing elements of my thesis that really intersect across so many of the different aspects that we talked about earlier: the White Australia Policy, Australia’s relationship with Pacific islands, but also in particular Papa New Guinea, and how those played out in the lives of individuals like Cyril Chan.
Michael Donnay
I mean, it’s so interesting to hear those reflections because it makes it really clear why your historical work intersects so well with your practitioner work. And I’m wondering, have you had the opportunity in that work to bring any of these realizations from your historical work about a need to have a more flexible policy or, you know, the understanding of how people’s lives are complicated? Have you seen any opportunities to bring that back into your day to day work?
Anna Kent
One of the outcomes of my thesis was that Australian scholarships between now and 1948, or 2018 and 1948, are essentially the same program. There has been differences. And you know, it is different. But we’ve had scholarships since 1948 and we’ve had iterative change across that period across that 70-something year period. But there has not been too many points along that that timeline where the Australian government has stopped and said, “Hang on a second, let’s have a look at this design, let’s have a look at why we’re doing this and how we’re doing this and how we should could do this better.” And there have been a couple of those points, but not many. And I would argue that the current program that we have now is very similar to a program that was started in the 1990s. And I think that so much has changed in that time, but the idea – I once actually actually said in a meeting with a whole lot of scholarship people from both the Department of Foreign Affairs and other universities, and I was there as sort of non-aligned expert. And I said (you know, this was pre pandemic) realistically, “What we should actually be thinking about doing is like pausing the scholarships for two years and totally redesigning the project and the whole thing and thinking about it differently.” And I was essentially laughed out of the room, they really did not like that idea at all.
So that iterative nature is helpful to governments and has been because they’re always there. They’re always there to be relied upon, they’re always there to be promised in diplomatic or development contexts, you know, “Would you like a couple more scholarships for X or Y?” For that handshake or that treaty or that deal. And scholarships are used in that way, and have been used in that way for more than the period of Australian scholarship history. And they were particularly used like that in the Cold War. And it looks like that’s positively ramping up. Again, I noticed this week in Australia, the Solomon Islands has agreed a treaty with China. It’s a defense treaty of sorts. And Australia has been quite shocked by this announcement. In part of the description from the Solomon Island government, they said, “China is taking students to China to study.” And so that that role of education in that defense, diplomacy, geopolitical conversation is – it was like, the third paragraph of the press release from the Solomon Islands government was about students going to study in China. So it’s huge in the minds of so many countries. And it’s a tool that gets played all the time.
Michael Donnay
And I would love to ask you the reverse question now, which is, how do you see your work in this field influencing how you’ve approached your historical research?
Anna Kent
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think I come to it with – I don’t think I could have written the thesis that I wrote or do the work that I do without the understanding I have of the nuts and bolts of how it actually works. So I’ve worked inside an Australia Awards program, and that gives me a literacy I think that if I hadn’t done that work I wouldn’t have. So I talked earlier about the gray literature. So reading government documents and internal scholarship documents. I don’t think that they would make as much sense to me if I didn’t have that experience. My supervisor, at several stages during my PhD did tell me to stop writing my thesis like it was a report. So sometimes you can fall too far to one side. But I think that experience means thatI have an understanding that I wouldn’t have had if I had just gone straight. If I was just a scholar, you know, an academic looking at it from a more distant position. I don’t think I would have that same engagement or understanding of what I was looking at, and I wouldn’t be able to connect with it on the firm ground that I feel that I’m on.
Michael Donnay
Well, I think that’s a lovely place to end. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It was really great to get to hear more about your research.
Anna Kent
Thanks so much.
Michael Donnay
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay. You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.
Sources
International education is not just important for universities, it has shaped our nation by Anna Kent
What do Australians know about international education in Australia? by Anna Kent
Sponsored Students and the Rise of “the International” in Australian Communities by Anna Kent & David Lowe