More than 2,000 full-time and part-time Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are now studying at the University of Newcastle in NSW, the highest number enrolled at any university in Australia. The university’s Wollotuka Institute has been a haven for Indigenous students for 42 years, making it one of the oldest institutes of this type in Australia. Wollotuka provides students with a sense of “cultural safety”, and there is a council of Indigenous elders to inform governance and elders on staff for students who might want some guidance or comfort, says the institute’s head, Loren Collyer.
“That can make all the difference as to whether you get through the day, the week, your studies, your course,” she says. “It’s just having those aunties or uncles here that students know they can go and talk to and be supported by. They’re just so important to all the other work that we do at Wollotuka.”
Winner of the Equity and Access category in the Australian Financial Review’s Higher Education Awards, the Wollotuka Institute offers students an in-house degree: a Bachelor of Global Indigenous Studies. Wollotuka academics also teach in other degrees, such as teaching an Aboriginal education course in the university’s Bachelor of Education degree.
The Institute is housed in the custom-built, airy and welcoming Birabahn building, which Collyer says is “culturally very respectful but in a celebratory way”. Constructed in the shape of a “birabahn”, the eagle which she says is the totem of the local Awabakal people, the building is open and birds often fly in. In the cold weather, students can gather round a big central fireplace for a chat and a cup of tea.
“We’re really connected to the landscape and the place that we’re in,” Collyer says. “People come in here and don’t want to leave because it’s such a special place. Students feel like they belong here, which has not historically always been the case.”
All the university’s Indigenous students have access to Wollotuka’s one-on-one tutoring in their discipline; they can ask for help to apply for scholarships and other financial support and ask Wollotuka staff for assistance with accommodation and employment. At least partly because of this assistance and security, the retention rate for the university’s Wollotuka students is on par with the university’s overall student retention rate.
In 2024, 5.02 per cent of Newcastle University’s student population identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as compared to 3.8 per cent of the general population (2021). More Indigenous doctors, teachers and speech pathologists have graduated from the University of Newcastle than any other institution in the country.
Many of the university’s Indigenous students come from around Newcastle. Others are from rural NSW, as well as from interstate – one of the university’s linguistics students hails from the Kimberley in far northern West Australia. “She’s one of the amazing students we see every day at Wollotuka,” says Collyer. “It’s a bit of a home away from home for her, being so far off country.”
The Wollotuka Institute community team drives the work that is done in the communities, she adds. “We make sure that whatever we’re doing, we’re actually engaged in that consultation and relationship-building with the communities that we serve. Otherwise, there’s really no point to the work that we do.”
At the same time, a Wollotuka student recruitment team makes sure potential students are aware of opportunities at the university, travelling to schools to take the message to school-students. “They talk about Wollotuka,” Collyer says. “They talk about the university; they let Aboriginal students know that we’re here to support them, that there is absolutely a place for them here, that it is our job to look after them as best we can.”
An Aboriginal woman herself (her grandmother was a Bandjin woman from Hinchinbrook Island), Collyer says she was the first in her extended family to go to university, and she understands how daunting it can be.
Twenty years ago, and fresh out of high school, she came to Newcastle University to study law. “To come to university in the first place can be pretty scary,” she says. “If you’re coming off country, away from your community, it’s a big deal.”
Nearly all Wollotuka staff are Indigenous themselves, and Collyer says the Institute runs face-to-face and compulsory “cultural capability” training for non-Indigenous staff across the university. The training course begins with online modules relevant to the local community and then moves on to a face-to-face workshop with Wollotuka cultural facilitators.
“The vice-chancellor has been through this training; every academic, all professional staff,” Collyer says. “It doesn’t matter what level you are or what your role is. And the feedback we get is just overwhelmingly positive. People say it changed their complete perspective on how they understand our students and how they understand our broader history in this country, how they understand some of those unconscious biases that they didn’t know they had.”