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This interpretive study explores the relationship between spatial qualities and school-parent engagement in three primary schools which serve low income periurban Indigenous families in north Australia. Drawing from interviews with educators and parents, school-based observations and community fieldwork conducted over the course of two years in two different towns, we found that educators are very concerned that schools, as western institutions, present cultural and physical barriers to effective engagement; but that this view is not shared by Indigenous parents. Rather than seeing this as a simple issue of cultural difference, our analysis seeks to unravel the curious way in which the otherness of school space is acknowledged in educator discourse. Only some place features of school are suggested as a barrier by educators while other aspects – such as the clear identification of insiders and outsiders through school routines and locales – remain unremarked. We conclude by suggesting that schools are inherently exclusionary, a foundational fact which both parents and educators accept and respond to, in ways which both explain the push for engagement within education policy and its irrelevance as a concern for parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The subject of mental health has been discussed for some time in the literature on Australian Aboriginal peoples, although the volume of this work has been relatively small. This literature can be separated into two main approaches. The first has been concerned with documenting and analyzing disorders that are culturally specific to a particular group. The second, more recent body of literature understands mental health issues as resulting from a combination of factors related to the effects of colonization, such as loss of land, poverty, and the destruction of families. This literature is often aimed at diagnosis and the provision of appropriate services for Indigenous people without a comprehensive ethnographic understanding of the cultural specificities of certain mental health disorders. Although mental health problems are discussed, such as suicide, depression, and anxiety, little analysis is undertaken of how such states are locally experienced and understood. This paper reports the complexities involved in understanding mental health from the perspective of youth in a remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia. We argue that it is necessary to understand mental health within the broader context of the lives of Indigenous youth and, in particular, the interaction between their marginalization from participating in the opportunities that globalization offers with issues related to poverty, substance misuse, and specific cultural beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]