Education unlocked doors of opportunity for historian and activist Jacqueline Huggins, new deputy director of the University of Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit.
Ms Huggins said she hoped that her new role in education would provide similar opportunities for others.
Ms Huggins, a member of the Australian Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and a co-commissioner for the Stolen Generation Inquiry, said she hoped to use her national profile to benefit the University.
'Institutions like the University of Queensland have a very important role to play in eradicating racism in the community, so I'm eager to use this opportunity to educate others,' she said.
'I'm interested in indigenous studies and education so I thought there was no better way to focus my work than at a university where I had studied and where I had many lifelong friends.'
Ms Huggins graduated bachelor of arts from the University in 1987 before completing a diploma of education and honours in history and women's studies from Flinders University.
'Indigenous issues are global issues that have to be worked on at the local level,' Ms Huggins said.
'More interaction between countries on indigenous issues is also needed.
'I'd like to see more indigenous students studying law, medicine and other disciplines where they're not heavily represented.
'However I'm optimistic because indigenous people are coming to the University, getting degrees and becoming professionals.'
She is currently working on her second book, A Collection of Essays on History, Racism, Colonialism and Women's Issues, to be published by University of Queensland Press in 1998.
It follows the success of her first book Auntie Rita, 'a living, breathing testimony' of her mother's life, shortlisted for the 1995 Nita Kibble Award for Australian women writers.
Ms Huggins said that while her mother's life story was not atypical of other Aboriginal women, it was important to record it for her family and her late mother, who died last year.
'We have many of our elders leaving us without giving us their stories and recording their history and I feel blessed that my mother left us with such a record of her presence here in this world,' Ms Huggins said.
'Auntie Rita records the moment my mother first saw a white man, her experience on an Aboriginal reserve, moving to Brisbane and starting Aboriginal organisations, and having a family.'
Her mother was often referred to affectionately as 'Auntie' by many black and white Australians known to her, Ms Huggins said.
Born in Ayr, Ms Huggins moved with her family to Inala in the late 1950s as part of an urban drift by Aborigines.
'We were one of the first Aboriginal families in Inala at the time so our family is very well known by the Aboriginal community in Brisbane,' she said.
Ms Huggins also attended Inala High School - the former State premier Wayne Goss' high school.
'Whilst I recall minimum racism when I was young it certainly wasn't on economic grounds. We were all so poor that there seemed to be commonality with white kids,' she said.
'Now it's a different kettle of fish. People resent so-called handouts because in the 1980s there wasn't enough information about why land rights and other issues are vital to Aboriginal society.'
This year, Ms Huggins received the ATSIS Unit Stanner Award for indigenous literature.
In September, at the invitation of the Royal Society of National Maritime Museum, she will present a paper about Captain James Cook.
For more information, contact Ms Huggins (telephone 07 3365 6709).
