Professional Learning in Arnhem Land

Some professional learning experiences add new strategies or resources to your repertoire. Others do something more profound: they reshape how you see, and remind you how much there still is to learn. 

My recent cultural immersion trip in Arnhem Land was the latter. I travelled with a desire to deepen my understanding. I returned with a confronting, clarifying realisation: I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. 

That realisation wasn’t uncomfortable because it was negative. It was uncomfortable because it was true—and because it asked me to rethink the confidence that can come from surface familiarity. In schools, we may feel we 'know' key concepts: Country, kinship, story, respect. We may have encountered artworks, symbols and narratives in professional learning or curriculum materials. Arnhem Land showed me the limits of that knowing. 

I thought I understood Aboriginal art. I didn’t. What I witnessed was not pattern for pattern’s sake, but purposeful complexity: Layered knowledge held with discipline and care. The relationships embedded in the art were not merely aesthetic; they were cultural, historical and ongoing. The art of the past is not simply 'past'. It is present. It is future. These times coexist—the same lines, the same stories, the same concepts, carried forward. 

One of the most powerful moments was watching a child sit at the feet of his grandfather as he painted. The story being painted was not abstract. In that moment, art was witness. It was memory held against forgetting. It carried responsibility—to ensure the story endures, and that the artwork is protected and cared for with the respect it demands. 

Arnhem Land also challenged my understanding of connection to place. I have a strong commitment to my own land and community, but I realised I knew little about Country as the essence of existence—a complex web of kinship relationships between people, plants, animals, rocks, water and sky. I saw knowledge of managing and tending land over millennia, including practices such as cool burning (fire used carefully and intentionally, bringing new life through regrowth). It reframed fire not only as risk, but also as stewardship and, in some contexts, as a pathway to cleansing and new beginnings of mind, heart and spirit. 

Perhaps most unexpectedly, the immersion asked me to learn through stillness. To listen longer than I am used to. To resist the urge to fill silence. To accept that not everything is mine to know, and that deep learning begins with humility. 

I was struck, too, by the generosity involved in cultural sharing: a willingness to teach, and a desire to walk together with openness. That generosity sits alongside the reality of ongoing grief and injustice, and the pressures on young people to carry culture into the future. It is a strength that should be recognised honestly—as well as a reminder of our responsibility to keep learning and to act with integrity. 

At Walford, our motto Virtute et Veritate—with moral courage and truth—calls us to learning that is honest, not performative. This experience has sharpened my commitment to approach First Nations' perspectives with greater care and accuracy, to value listening as a serious capability, and to contribute to reconciliation through everyday decisions in teaching, relationships and culture. 

These reflections only scratch the surface. But they have made a mark—and they have reminded me that one of the most important sentences an educator can say is: “I don’t know yet.” 

Kerri Proctor
Director of Professional Growth and Operations