Cathie Oates: To the National Library of Australia. I'm Cathie Oates, the Director of Reader Services. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and pay my respects to the elders past and present and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Thank you for attending this event. Coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I'd also like to just briefly pause and ask you to check your mobile phones to make sure that they're on silent and I might have to do the same with my own.

Thank you. This afternoon's presentation on international students and the Australian community is by Dr Anna Kent, our 2025 National Library of Australia Fellow. Our Distinguished Fellowships programme supports researchers to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collections through residencies of three months. National Library of Australia fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support. Anna's Fellowship this year has been supported by the Stokes family. Dr Anna Kent is a historian and international education expert. Her research interests include international education, international development, foreign policy, decolonisation, and the intersections between these things.

Anna is executive coordinator of the Centre for Contemporary Histories at Deakin University. In her presentation today, Anna will examine the social licence of international education in Australia. Currently, international students are made out to be the villains in the debates around migration and university funding. In focusing on the period from 1960 to 1990 Anna's research asks if Australian community groups such as Rotary and the Country Women's Association helped to grow the community engagement and social licence of international education in Australia and how their support was understood and received by the students themselves. Please join me in welcoming Dr Anna Kent. Thank you.

Anna Kent: Thank you very much for the introduction and I'd also like to acknowledge that the work that I've been doing on this project has been completed on Ngunnawal country here in the Library, but also in my home in Naarm in Melbourne on Wurundjeri country. I would like to thank the donors to the Library, particularly the Stokes family for the support of this fellowship. My time at the Library this year has been a fabulous experience and I know that the other fellows and scholars I've met while I've been here have also enjoyed the unique privilege that this fellowship offers. And thanks also to the staff of the Library, Simone, Kelly and Sharyn in the Fellowships team, the Reader Services teams, the philanthropic team, Philanthropy team, and all those that I've come across in other places. These people and this institution and other libraries around Australia do so do hugely valuable work that is often unseen and regularly underestimated and especially this week, I think we need to recognise that the contribution of libraries to the communities of Australia is something that we should not be taking for granted.

I'd also like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Histories at Deacon who have been extremely supportive of my fellowship and my research, and thank you to the IEAA, especially the research manager, Kick Hughes, who has taken so many opportunities to boost the profile of this project and to colleagues around Australia and the world who have sent suggestions, ideas, and listened to and critiqued my ideas. I'm doing all the thank yous at the start, so I have time and very importantly, a huge thank you to my family, especially my husband Peter and my kids Adele and Quinn, for tolerating my very long absences this year. It's been hard, but I truly appreciate the support to do something so intellectually enriching and a shout out to my sister Ellie and her family for having me as a housemate and to my parents who are actually in the room as well.

So to the presentation, proper researching international education is certainly a passion of mine, perhaps stretching into obsession, but while I was at the library doing this research, I came across a quote from 1972 from a book by [unclear] that really boiled down why I have this obsession. And the quote is, the ramifications of international education exchange are extremely complex impinging as they do on all the major social issues of our time, race relations, international friendship and goodwill, nation building and development, westernisation modernization and industrial growth.

In fact, all the processes to get that together contribute to the social changes that are rapidly transforming the world. I hope all of these intersecting concepts and problems and ideas will become obvious today across my presentation and I have to thank Kerry Ramirez for this slide that he so generously allowed me to use, but it'll become clear as to why it's important.

When I walked into the Library in May this year, I came in a hypothesis, although one that was less firmly in my head than it was when I first applied for this Fellowship in 2024. I've worked in the international education sector for 20 years, so I've seen it weather a number of crises across those years from rorting of the visa system in 2008 and 2009, the concurrent racism crisis in Victoria, the global financial crisis and other various skirmishes along the way. In 2020, however, the biggest crisis to hit the sector came with the COVID border closures.

The then Prime Minister Scott Morrison told international students to go home. I remember saying to my husband, I know that I'm a historian of international education, but I really didn't think I was going to become a historian of something that was finished. What I did notice though through that crisis was the recognition within universities of the role that international students were playing on campus and on university finances, academics who I had heard either ignore or complain about international students were suddenly realising how much international students were crucial to the university experience.

People also noticed the shortages of workers who were also students. Perhaps this was a demonstration that parts of the community appreciated international education and international students given their absence was noted and rude. The recovery from that crisis, a rapid rebound in student numbers. You can see that big tick was at the beginning of a more existential crisis.

Inflation and broader stresses on infrastructure were clear in communities around Australia, and an easy target to blame was the increasing number of international students. And as I watched this happen, as the media and politicians blamed the ills of society on international students, I waited for universities to ban together through universities Australia and other university groupings, organising the community into action. I talked to my colleagues and friends and family about why international education was important to Australia. I pointed to my own research and the research of others into the way in which international education had been important to and perhaps fundamental to Australia's development.

But on the whole, I didn't see a groundswell of action. The sector did not respond to this threat in the way that the mining sector responded to the proposed super profit tax all those years ago. Sure, there are billions of dollars behind those mining ads, but the education sector employs way more people and certainly has a huge influence on the economy, and one could argue a significant influence on our society. So the sector found itself somewhere alone, no community groundswell of support, no influential individuals fighting for the rights of the students and the role of international education in Australia. I had many ideas about why that was.

I know for many years the sector has had a small target approach quietly go about their business while trying not to attract the attention of more racist elements of Australia's political scene. But what that meant is that when we needed the Australian community to understand the role and the benefits of international education, they didn't.

I started to wonder when or if Australia had a broad social licence or community consensus about international education and having undertaken some research for an article I wrote just before the pandemic, I knew that the community was heavily involved in student support and welfare in the early years of international education in Australia. So I started there.

My hypothesis became that when pastoral care and welfare support for international students was undertaken by the community through what were known as coordinating committees for overseas students, there's lots of really great titles for organisations in this paper. There was a level of social licence or at least community engagement with international education that was broken when the government moved responsibility for pastoral care into educational institutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I perhaps naively felt that getting a better sense of what that looked like for the coordinating committees and for the students might help me and the international education community more broadly think about how we go about building or rebuilding the social licence of international education.

Now, what will not surprise you to find out that it didn't turn out as I expected, I have unfortunately not found the magic silver bullet to regain the social licence of international education, but I have found perhaps ways we can think about the social licence of international education into the future, and I have learned a lot about international education in Australia over the second half of the 20th century in trying to work out how best to prepare this presentation and avoid the inevitable compulsion to put everything into it.

I have taken refuge in the simplicity of thinking about things along a timeline decade by decade. So we will start not in the 1960s, but actually in the 1940s, in the late 1940s, part of the parts of the Australian government were keen to encourage international students then known as overseas students or Asian students, and you'll hear me use those terms interchangeably throughout this paper.

This had several motivations. They saw this as beneficial for Australia's diplomatic standing in the region. Look at us helping out the less fortunate newly independent countries get on their feet. It was also understood to be of benefit to Australian students. Having international students in university classrooms would open up these students to international ideas and broaden their understanding of the world. It was also an influence operation. Students who studied in Australia would surely be won over to our non-communist way of life and expound that on their return to their home country. Students began coming to Australia more readily in this post-war period, Australia signalled to the region that it was developing scholarships with a tour to Southeast Asia by William McMahon Ball in 1948.

Part of his remit was to sell the Southeast Asian scholarship scheme that had recently been approved by cabinet countries, especially the UK and the USA were showing the role that scholarships could play in developing influence and goodwill. Soon after in 1950, Australia became a founding member of the Colombo plan again signalling to the region that development through education, although with strict parameters was a priority.

So in the 1950s, the students sponsored by the Australian government, either through the Colombo plan or other schemes were always in the minority of overseas students, but there was little differentiation between these students when it came to pastoral care and welfare support. Some organisations were providing support from the beginning such as Rotary, Apex and student representative councils at universities. But as the numbers of students grew, the organisation required grew.

So with leadership and direction coming from people like May Casey, the Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey's wife, the Melbourne Coordinating Committee for overseas students was established. And then in 1956, and this is a quote under the patronage of the then Minister for External Affairs, the Right Honourable RG Casey, and under the chairmanship of our distinguished Rotarian, Sir Richard Boyer, an organisation was formed by representatives from 40 Australian organisations with the aim of helping Asian students and making them feel truly welcome in Australia.

Thus, the Australian Organisations Coordinating Committee for Overseas Students in New South Wales was born. They really didn't workshop that title enough. May Casey and Richard Boyer, after whom the ABC Boyer Lectures are named, will not be the last high profile individuals I mention in this talk as one of the findings of my research has been that a number of high profile individuals were involved in supporting international students over the decades up to the 1990s.

However, like many of the other people I will mention, Boyer's role in supporting international students does not feature in his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry and is not a commonly understood part of his CV. As an aside, I'd also like to note that Boyer was also involved in Papua New Guinea during Australia's administration of the territories before independence, another common feature of many of those involved in international education in the 20th century. We can talk about that more in questions if we have time.

Lady May Casey was really a driving force here. She drew attention and got press coverage and was quoted in the Argus in Melbourne in 1955 in a request for people to offer rooms. You can see that article up there on the slide asking for people to offer accommodation to students stating that many will be leading members of their communities when they return home, and it's important to give them a real insight into the way Australians think and live.

These coordinating committees for overseas students were established all over the country, firstly in Melbourne and Sydney and then in other capital cities and later in regional centres. Coordinating committees were made up of volunteer organisations, student groups such as Malaysian student groups or Chinese student groups. And up on the slide is the attendance list for the preliminary meeting of the A-O-C-C-O-S in New South Wales held on the 26th of June in 1956.

You can see from the list that a wide variety of organisations were involved from the beginning, including Rotary student groups, the League of Women's Voters, the Country Women's Association, the YMCA, the Legion of Catholic Women and two airlines, ANA and TAA. These organisations were involved to support students, their efforts, including picking students up from the airport, supporting them to find accommodation, arranging social activities such as barn dances and organising country holidays, and also connecting them to legal and health services when necessary.

As the 1950s progressed and the number of overseas students increased, another organisation was discussing how to address this segment of its own membership. The National Union of Australian University students, the NUAUS had in the early 1950s a limited interest in overseas students. They did have an interest in international activity and engagement with the issues of development in the region, but there appears to be little connection seen between the growing number of overseas students and these broader international concerns.

International activities are seen as part of the core work of the union, but it takes some convincing that a specialised group supporting the overseas students on campus is required. Nevertheless, students on campus were beginning to organise on national lines. These groups were becoming involved with the aforementioned coordinating committees and also began federating themselves, Vivian Fleming argues in an excellent honours thesis from the mid 1980s.

It was the creation of the Asian Students Council of New South Wales, which formed in September, 1955 that forced the NUAUS's hand recognising that overseas students were a distinct group within the broader student group that required special attention. Chev Kidson who went on to become a leading research scientist became the first overseas student service director, OSSD.

You may have noticed his name and the previous slide as attending the first ACCOSS meeting in New South Wales. He was not an overseas student himself and was given limited funds and fairly vague instructions. This letter is pretty much the instructions for the OSS. Fleming described the OSS as largely a toothless tiger at this time, but the OSS provided a framework and into the 1960s, the focus and determination of subsequent OSS directors pushed the organisation to become more active. And what I hear you ask is the Australian government doing well?

From the very beginning of the overseas student programme in Australia, there has been an internal debate, perhaps we could call it a battle as to who is in charge of this element of Australian's Australia's foreign and education policy during this period and well into the 1980s. The key department holding the pen is the Department of External Affairs who later become the Department of Foreign Affairs, but the Department of Immigration is also a key player and the Department of Education also has a seat at the table.

Prime Minister and Cabinet like to get involved, and Treasury is of course always there too. Squabbles between the departments are visible in various ways in the documents and files that I've seen in the Library, but they're more obvious in files in the National Archives. Not surprisingly, once you understand the politics, however you can see things that might not be as clear when you don't.

For example, what to make of these three forwards each written for a book designed to be given to students before they arrive in Australia, it's called Australia for the Student. Each foreward is signed by the Minister of External Affairs at the time, Casey in 1957, Menzies in 1960 and then Hasluck in 1966. A 1972 issue of this book doesn't have a foreward, so it doesn't feature on this slide.

What I see in these however, is a few paragraphs, particularly the first two editions written in an effort to appease all those departments at the table. So you can see from the first two, the presence of many Asians or overseas students has become a familiar feature of Australian universities and education or training institutions. Generally, this is good for Australia and, we hope, good for the overseas students. The third paragraph, however, stresses to the students that this puts heavy demands on Australian educational facilities. A clear statement to the student that this book is intended to welcome that you are welcome, but just remember that we're doing you a favour by having you here. So by the end of the 1950s, we have an increasing number of students and a number of different organisations established to provide support and care for them while they're in Australia. The coordinating committees are growing and the OSS is offering a limited service.

The number of students arriving continued to grow into the 1960s, and the coordination of student support also evolved, but politics in Australia and in the home countries of the students was also changing. These external influences played an important role. As the years progressed, the role that students wish to play in advocating for themselves became problematic to officials. Much of the political speech that officials found so challenging and that earned them official rebukes was in relation to the White Australia policy, and you can see on the slide, speaking publicly about these issues could lead to official reprimands.

In fact, in the Colombo plan, there was a rule that you weren't allowed to speak publicly about political issues. The topic of the White Australia policy also began to appear in the records of meetings and OSS conferences over the 1960s at the 1961 OSS conference.

One Speaker [unclear] noted that, and I quote, "most Asian students studying in Australia hesitate to make friends with the Australians because they're in doubt whether at all they are welcomed in this country. There is the White Australia policy and other unjust discriminations against coloured people in general in the world. Today, the conference went on to pass a motion. We strongly recommend that the NUAUS should support and consider our disapproval of the White Australia policy and take definite steps to reform the policy."

A press release after the conference noted that the White Australia policy might heighten international tension and it harms the efforts of Australians to create better relationships with Asians. The next year at the OSS conference, the first motion on political issues reiterates the same stand taken the year before.

The students used the OSS and other forums to make their positions known. This was challenging both for the coordinating committees who were generally more conservative and the NUAUS who had tried to be as apolitical as possible. The NUAUS executives do back up their colleagues. Often. There's one incident where the deputy director of the OSS irritated the Minister for Immigration with a very forthright letter asking why students were being threatened with deportation after they failed their subjects, but the relationship also involves blunders.

In 1967, the president of the NUAUS, Tony McMichael sent a letter to all the residential colleges around universities in Australia asking if there were, and I quote, delicate and hither, two undiscussed problems that frequently if not invariably arise in university colleges and often predisposed to a definite prejudice towards Asian students on the part of the Australian students. He was very discreetly asking if the Asian students are annoying and have terrible personal habits.

There are many entertaining responses in the file for this, but one of my favourites is from a senior student at the Women's College in the University of Sydney. She writes that she responded to the request with sarcasm and disbelief and ends by suggesting that McMichael had formed a rather distorted view of a non-existent problem. What I think this series of letters shows us that even into the 1960s, the NUAUS executive had an uneasy relationship with the OSS and with international students more broadly, which often didn't reflect its broader membership.

This period was also challenging for elements of the Australian government. Remembering again those interdepartmental battles, the White Australia policy was generally a thorn in the side of the Department of External Affairs, especially around this overseas student programme because the programme was a way they were trying to work against the poor reputation that the White Australia policy gave them.

The coordinating committees were nevertheless growing in size and number over the 1960s. The West Australian Organisation, which was known as the coordinating committee for overseas students in Western Australia, was established in 1963. One of the driving forces behind the West Australian Coordinating Committee was a woman named Mary Hodgkin. Hodgkin had studied botany at the University of Manchester where she met her husband Ernest. They travelled to Malaya where Ernest was a medical entomologist. After the Japanese invaded during World War II, Mary and her children escaped to Perth.

In Perth she taught at schools and in 1956 she returned to study and became one of the first students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia. Her honours thesis was published, and you can see it up on the screen there, the Asian student in the University of Western Australia in 1958. Her research and experience led to her being appointed by the government of Malaya as a liaison officer for Malaysian students at UWA and in 1965, she was appointed to a similar role by the government of Singapore.

Hodgkin was also the inaugural vice president of the coordinating committee of the overseas students in Western Australia, and she went on to write many more publications about overseas students in Australia, many of which I have read during my time at the Library, and you can see some of those up on the screen there.

Other coordinating committees and their member groups were trying to work out how best to support the students. The Rotary Club of Sydney's international service committee had a subcommittee working to understand the needs of Asian students. The subcommittee spoke to student representatives, Australian organisations, working with students and other Rotarians who had engaged with overseas students. The report includes quotes from the consultations and gives us an interesting insight into the problems that the Australian contributors felt were issues and those that the students felt were concerns, they were not usually the same things.

One of the most interesting conclusions in the report, I think, notes that "we feel that members of Sydney Rotary as a whole have failed in applying the personal touch to their relations with Asian students. It is evident that more personal contacts between Asian students and Australian families would be very desirable." There are many more items that I could show you from the 1960s, but instead I'm going to introduce you to yet another high profile Australian who was involved in the welfare of overseas students.

Dame Marie Breen was, importantly from my perspective, president of the Overseas Students Coordinating Committee of Victoria in 1967. Dame Marie had in 1961 been elected to the federal Senate. She was a Liberal Party senator. She speaks of her work with students in an oral history held in the Library's collection. We had an overseas student coordinating committee at the time, and Lady Casey had been the first president and helped to establish that particular body. "When I, through being a senator had contacts there, she asked me would I take over that particular job and so I did. So for a number of years the brains also hosted students in their home and the quote up on the slide there, I had close contact with two Asian students from the Northern Shan states and my husband and I were guardians of those two boys while they were here at school.

Then later on when we went around the Asian countries, we had six days with the family in Burma. I still hold them in very great affection and still hear from one of the boys. The other died tragically, but I still hear from the elder one who still calls me mum. I'm always very delighted to hear from him and learn of the wellbeing of the family. So all these things I think have bought me a great deal of interest and a great deal of comfort, and I feel that I have been very privileged across the late 1960s."

The Department of External Affairs had begun holding a conference every year standby for another great name. The Interstate Conference of Coordinating Committees and welfare officers was held in Canberra every year and the DEA and then the DFA supported many of the delegates to travel to Canberra for the conferences.

The records of these conferences are in the Library collection and provide such a rich resource to help us understand who was involved with supporting students across Australia, what the government's policy thinking was and what issues were being dealt with by coordinating committees and others across the international education community. The role of Ric Throssell is key here. Throssell was it is said shunted into the training area of the Department of External Affairs. Following his implication in the Petrov affair, he ran the area for 13 years playing an enormous role in driving policies for students sponsored by the Australian government such as the Colombo plan, but also in the private student programme.

He chaired these interstate conferences for many years. Now, you might think that a man who spent 13 years working on a huge programme of aid and development, a programme that changed the face of Australia and education might have a lot to say about it, but in an oral history here at the Library, I was very disappointed to find that Throssell speaks about his role only briefly, he does talk a little bit about it in his memoir. Admittedly, he did have a rich and varied career, but I do wonder if he hadn't internalised the punishment that his appointment signified and therefore didn't really place value in the role itself.

But psychoanalysis aside, I've mentioned that the seventies is a decade where students began to find their voice often in ways that challenged ideas about what the Australian community felt it was doing with students here. They were able to share the difficulty of their experiences, the reasons they had for coming to Australia and sometimes their ambivalence about their time in Australia. Daniel Kwok was a psychology student at the UNSW and he wrote a chapter in this book, overseas Students in Australia. The book is almost like a time capsule of international education in 1972 with chapters written by students, academics, counsellors, and others including Rick Throssell and Mary Hodgkin who I told you about earlier.

Kwok's chapter outlines his decision making about coming to study in Australia, but interestingly, he also includes a poem. You can see it up there on the slide. The lines do give you a sense of the issues that the students were facing in Australia. One that stuck out to me "and sometimes shallow boarding boys will want me to be white". I don't want to over egg this and I'm not a particularly good reader of poetry, but the role of race and the presence of the White Australia policy is really fundamental to the experiences of these students and the experiences that they're having in Australia. It's really hard to get away from throughout all of the resources that I've looked at.

Other political changes, changes shaped and changed interactions between the students and organisations tasked with their support. In 1973, a policy submission by the OSS notes that they wish to abolish the existing coordinating committee system and seeks the introduction of new committees, and you can see that there on the slide with the explicit purpose of serving the welfare of foreign students. This is reflecting some dissatisfaction with the coordinating committees.

Reading through the OSS files and the records of the Canberra conferences, there is a sense that the coordinating committees are more focused on implementing the policies of the government even when that conflicts with the welfare or best interests of the students themselves. This was especially acute when it came to interactions between students and the Department of Immigration. Like the example I gave earlier about the letter from James Tan, many students felt the inflexibility of the rules about returning home, the impost of reporting and concerns around students being deported for failing subjects, disadvantaged them.

The activities of the OSS are discussed at the interstate conferences. They attended the conferences as well, and you can see here from the 1975 conference, the OSS report noted that the wellbeing of overseas students has for too long been viewed in terms of selfish needs and attempts have been made to provide for the same, so they're quite dissatisfied.

It is in these records where we see the collapse of the relationship between the OSS and what is now the Australian Union of students. They changed their name. There are many factors that feed into this collapse, and to be completely honest, I could spend an entire hour talking to you about this fracture. I initially found it very difficult to try and fit the pieces of the puzzle of this breakdown together.

From the files, there are accusations from each side and reports of violence, stealing office equipment, vandalism, and the reported presence of many factions, Maoists, Trotskyists, liberal party stooges, and everything else in between. It involves arguments about money and the sense from the OSS believed that the AUS did not support them or the causes that they wished to champion. I found reading Vivian Fleming's thesis quite useful on this, but there is certainly more research to done.

A brief summary is that the breakdown in the relationship makes neither side look good and the big losers are international students who lose a respected voice and advocate over the decade. In the last few months, a new international student representative body has been formed in Australia, the International Student Representative Council. What my research shows pretty clearly is the difficulties with creating and sustaining international student bodies with strong voices capable of advocacy in the space.

Throughout the files are stories of representatives returning home for the holidays and never coming back. One example includes a letter to the OSS director Madeline Coe from the ANU International Club, and I quote, "our club secretary for 1963 unfortunately failed to return home from his trip to Malaya during the last long vacation, and this happens all the time".

The corporate memory is lost, the momentum is lost, and this has long-term consequences and not just that OSS directors had to prioritise their study to the detriment of their student advocacy work. Remember that the academic performance of a student was then, and is now tied to their visa standing. Taking on a volunteer advocacy role can jeopardise your immigration status. There are clear lessons from history for this new organisation who I wish the best of luck to, but the sector needs to value their presence and support them in ways that they have not done before.

And so we come to the final decade in our quick run through the years, this I would argue is the decade that changes everything. Up until the 1980s, there has been a general acceptance both within the coordinating committees and the federal government that the support should be offered to all overseas students and should be offered in the community. The coordinating committees did not differentiate between sponsored students and privately funded students when they came for help.

The 1980s was a turbulent time for international education policy. There were two reviews, the Gold Ring Review, which is titled Mutual Advantage. You can see that up on the slide and the Jackson review also on the slide, which was focused on aid, but given the significant investment via student subsidies, it was a big element of the aid programme, so had a big section on students.

The government was pretty desperate to wind back the Whitlam era free,and then subsidised, education for overseas students and because many people I meet are unaware of this, perhaps it's helpful to make explicit that when Whitlam abolished university fees in the 1970s, he did so both for domestic and overseas students.

Fraser's government introduced an overseas student charge in 1977, which was between zero and 25% of your fees depending on where you came from. But the remainder was subsidised by the Australian government, which is why they were termed subsidised students. Goldring felt his report Mutual Advantage was sidelined for political reasons because it advocated for continuing with an aid focused approach and refuted the possibility of a market-based approach in international education.

The article on the slide there on the left includes Goldring, noting that the free market advocates in the treasury appeared to be the most against his recommendations, and I'll refer you back to the battles, the interdepartmental battles that have plagued international education. Dawkins, the Minister for Education was also keen to introduce fees for domestic students as well. The introduction of fees was all part of a bigger suite

of reforms, the Dawkins reforms that completely reshaped the tertiary sector in Australia.
Others far more knowledgeable than me debate the success or failure of those reforms, and it does of course depend on how you are measuring them, but there is some evidence to suggest that some of the blame for the current perilous state of affairs for universities and international education specifically stems from this period.

Part of the change that the government introduced in this suite of reforms was a new category of student, a full fee paying international student. This was different from sponsored students and subsidised students.

The two other categories that had existed, this third category of students was different and represented a significant change. Australian universities were tasked with going out and finding these students and the students themselves would be charged international student fees, which were more than those charged of domestic students and certainly more than those of subsidised students.

Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this presentation, full fee students were not to be supported like the other two categories of overseas students. They were to have their welfare and pastoral care needs provided by their educational institution who were now responsible for employing specific staff for this purpose, the writing was on the wall for coordinating committees, the Melbourne Council for Overseas Students, which was by the 1980s.

The Melbourne Coordinating Committee and other similar groups around the country realised that this represented a fundamental shift in their approach to student welfare support. They also recognised that this was likely to be part of broader and sweeping changes when it came to international students in Australia.

In 1988, the MELCOS executive discussed what this duplication of services meant, how long would it be before this same view is adopted towards supply of these services to subsidised students. Also, the council was also worried about the future of the sector more broadly, noting the possibility that by 1990 the subsidised student programme will be terminated and that all overseas students will be paying full fees. And we know now they were right. And by the early 1990s, after the final subsidised students washed out of the system, we returned back to two categories of students sponsored students and full fee paying students.

The government wanted student support to occur in the community until it didn't. And there are plenty of reasons why the coordinating committee approach could not have supported the growing number of students that marketization of education led to. And perhaps this limits the lessons we can learn from this model of student support. Asking volunteers to support vulnerable students to navigate an entirely confusing bureaucratic and social situation is a lot to ask and certainly there is more work I need to do to situate the coordinating committees within a broader history of volunteering and welfare in Australia.

But I'm also really interested in the types of people who were choosing to engage with international students, particularly in the early years of the programme. My sense is that these were often people, especially women who were keen to be engaged with the international, especially when Australia was incredibly isolated from the rest of the world physically and often intellectually.

People like Mary Hodgkin came to her work with an international experience and there are others who wanted an international connection. Another name includes Rosalie McCutchen up on the slide who worked with international students for years, including time with International House in Sydney. It is no mistake that the Graduate Women's Association are involved in coordinating committees across the country from the very beginning.

This element of my project is a place where I see great scope for further research. Oral histories, family histories, and the experiences of those who hosted, supported and engaged international students can give us a greatest understanding of this really important element to the lives of Australian women in the 20th century. Some of these are international students themselves, including a powerhouse overseas students service director, Madeline Lowe, who's on the photo on the right there. What was the impact of the work that these women had on international students and the impact that the students had on these women?

There is more for us to know, but I do want to finish on something that I think is perhaps more of an insight into the current crisis we have with the social licence of international education government policies about international education frame the way that Australians view international education and international students if they think about it at all.

Between 1948 and the early 1970s, international education was framed as aid and engagement with these students was seen as a form of support for the region. The coordinating committees are evidence that the community accepted this as a public good and supported the government's programme. In the 1970s and eighties, students develop a stronger voice and with the election of the Whitlam government, the focus is aid but also becomes cultural exchange. Students challenge some of the existing orthodoxies, but the coordinating committees continue their work and in the case of MELCOS advocate and lobby the government not to introduce fees for international students.

Interestingly, during my PhD research, I came across some of those lobbying efforts from the then president of MELCOS, Edward Weary Dunlop, another high profile Australian with a volunteer role in international education.

In the 1980s with the more neo-liberal approach to education being a key policy plank of the Hawke government, the language moves to that of the market and you can see on the slide, the language of the market is what comes from the government and it is pressed upon and oftentimes willingly accepted by universities.
One telling quote from a Peter Hartcher piece in 1988 with the headline, "Our tertiary export drive is netting big dollars", says "a refreshing lesson from the past two years is that an Australian education is not really so different from a barrow full of stuffed koalas. Both can be sold profitably overseas."

I'm not living in a fantasy land where we can return to a world of student support being offered by well-meaning volunteers. But it is clear to me that if governments and educational institutions treat education as a financial commodity, the community will see it as that as well. The discussion of international students of cash cows did not start this decade. It started in earnest in the 1980s. So perhaps the challenge we actually face is to change the frame.

Now this is difficult given that we are no closer to resolving the challenge of DFAT, Education, Immigration and Treasury, all having a seat at the table and their own particular interests when it comes to international education. And that's not even considering the roles of states and territories and changing course on a sector and industry that has at times been Australia's third largest export industry is a difficult thing to do. But I do think we need to be clear-eyed about what we want to be and that means looking more carefully at where we have come from. Thank you.

Cathie Oates: Well, thank you Anna. We now have time for some questions, so just you can see some people around the room coming with microphones. If you'd like to ask a question, just raise your hand and we are recording, so please wait for the microphone to come you to ask your questions so those online can hear you as well. Does anyone have any questions here? We have here?

Audience member 1: My name's Dennis Ply. I was involved in the international education programme in the late 1970s throughout the 1980s and a bit of the 1990s. I was a foreign affairs officer, but I moved over to a DA and then to IDP. First a personal point, I enjoyed my university studies and one of the things I remember most is meeting foreign students. It changed my life. Now, I might be a rare species, but I got on extremely well with the international students and I joined foreign affairs in a sense because of my exposure to foreign students. So that's a general philosophical point. I'm very pleased with what I did.

I do dispute the argument about the impact of the full fee overseas student programme. I think it was exceptionally good impact on overseas students. It meant that they were required to meet the full cost of their studies, that if that not have been the case, the community reaction would be far worse than it is now. Now we could argue at IDP look, these overseas students are shopping in our shops, buying our houses and so on, and they're making a big contribution to the economy as well as gaining a good education. So I see that as a positive change and whilst the coordinating committees were important, they were pretty amateurish. And I know the two of the individuals who named quite well, and of course Ric Throssell was a friend of mine and I agree with you that he never really promoted the benefit of international study in Australia to Australia.

Anna Kent: Thanks Dennis, and as a fellow ex IDP-er, solidarity, but I agree that it couldn't continue the way it was. One of the interesting things I found in my PhD research was that the Jackson Review was actually, whilst recommending a move to the more trade side of things, did recommend a hundred thousand scholarships over the course of several years, an element that never was introduced, but if we had seen more of that, there may have been a different, the way the industry was shaped would've been different. I think thinking about education as a financial commodity only, I think has created some of the problems that we see in the education sector at the moment.

Audience member 1: It solved some.

Anna Kent: Yeah, it solved some and it also created some, so nothing would be perfect, but I'm a historian. I don't have to provide answers for the future. I just get to talk about the past. It's one of the benefits.

Cathie Oates: So now I get to ask my much more philosophical question. From the study you've done with the groups like Rotary, what do you think we can learn from how these initial grassroots initiatives fostered a sense of belonging between the international students and local communities, and how might similar approaches strengthened community cohesion around international education today?

Anna Kent: I think there's a lot of work still going on. Rotary still works in this space. I know that, and a lot of institutions and organisations are doing a lot of work to support international students in the community. I've worked at several universities who've had programmes with sporting clubs and other organisations to try and I guess link students into the culture and life of Australia.

It's, I think one of the things that I didn't talk about in the presentation, but I think struck me during the research is the question of volunteerism as well. The role or the reduction in volunteerism as women joined the workforce in greater numbers meant that having those interactions based on a service or a need was difficult. But I think if it's based on a cultural exchange, it's probably a little bit more easy to facilitate. And there are the West Australian Coordinating Committee, which is now not called that, but still exists in a different form, and there are organisations like that, volunteer organisations that still exist around the country that do support international students.

So I guess it, it's not a there or not there answer. There are things that are happening, but I do think that the general understanding of international education in the Australian community is fairly low. It's a fairly kind of niche area. Even there's not many people studying it from the historical perspective. So there's a lot of work that we could be doing kind of championing it, championing it, and also showing the great benefits that it has for the Australian community. Like what Dennis said, it helped guide his career choices. Those are things that I think we could perhaps be telling those stories a bit better as well as supporting the students that are here and now through those community connections.

Audience member 2: Thanks, Anna. It was a really interesting presentation. You mentioned in your lecture that a couple of times the impact of the White Australia policy, and given that, I noticed also in the forwards that in, I think it was Casey's foreword, the incoming students were just going to Queensland, like he referenced them coming to Queensland. It got me thinking about, obviously some states in Australia were more or less progressive in terms of their attitude to the White Australia policy, and I wondered if you'd had any sense of being able to map the attitudes towards international students against state-based attitudes towards the immigration policy. Was there a correlation between those in terms of acceptance in numbers or demographics of students coming in, or were they not related?

Anna Kent: Oh, you've just created a new research project for me there, Jillian. The reason that Casey talks about Queensland is the first edition, the 1957 edition of that book, Australia for the Student had state-based versions. So each book was tailored to the state by the next edition, they just had one book and then there was a section on each state within it. So that's why that's there. But that's a really interesting question. The way that the coordinating committees develop is really, as you would imagine, is Melbourne and Sydney, and then there's West Australia and Adelaide and Brisbane develop their versions, and then you start getting the regional centres. There's a long conversation about Townsville getting a coordinating committee, and Geelong has its own version, and those regional centres also develop these groups as well.

Bendigo appears in the conference attendees, so I think that you could do an interesting piece of research looking at the connections between general attitudes towards race and the White Australia policy and the presence of students. But it's certainly something that a lot of students are, many of them talk about having wonderful experiences with Australians, but they also talk about terrible experiences. And I guess that's the point, is that the overarching policy being there, they all know it's there. They all understand we're kind of here through a loophole, and that shapes the way they interact with the community as much as anything else.

Cathie Oates: Well, thank you very much. A few quick messages before we finish for today. I do hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, keeping the peace of the realm, which will be delivered by the 2025 National Library Fellow Dr Samuel White at 12:30 on Thursday, the 5th of February, 2026, so a date for your diaries. If you do want to find out more about what's going on at the national library, please visit our website and you'll find recordings of all our recent talks there as well. And also visit our YouTube channel to see those. Thank you very, very much for attending today. Please join me once again in congratulating Dr Anna Kent for today's fascinating presentation. Thank you very much.