Swinburne brickie Matt O’Brien shares skills with Arnhem Land communities

As a part of their Community Development Program, Swinburne has a long-standing partnership with Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA) to provide meaningful introductory skills and training to Indigenous people living in remote communities across digital literacy, allied health and trades.  

Manager of the Northern Australia programs area in Trades and Engineering Technologies at Swinburne, Rachael Woods says what began as a small pilot program with two communities has grown to a significant program working with eight.  

“We started working with Milingimbi and Ramingining about eight years in 2016. In a training capacity, we’ve had 12 staff members deliver courses, including two of our long-standing trades trainers Jon Wallace and Rod Thorne,” Rachael said.

Joining the team

Swinburne’s Head of Croydon Bricklaying Department Matt O’Brien is the latest Swinburne staff to join ALPA’s initiative and has recently completed two trips, teaching in the communities of Gunbalanya and Milingimbi.

“I was asked two to three years ago, but over Covid it got cancelled. I finally got the opportunity and have been up there twice now. I love it,” Matt said.

“In Gunbalanya, we made a grave top for one of the men’s daughters, we did a slab for extra storage space at the Community Development Program office and the Women’s Centre also required two jobs to complete. One was a footpath for safer access to the clothesline and the other was a slab to hold pottery machines for the women to learn new skills.” 

Progress shots of students using their new skills to build a footpath. 

Skills for life

Rachael and Matt say the goal of the program is for students to gain meaningful employment. The accredited units in the Concreting short course covers the key skills and safety knowledge to apply for any future concreting projects that happen in the community.

“We want to provide education in these very remote locations that they may not have had the opportunity to experience otherwise. Our participants of the ALPA program have a good range of skills, with the reinforcement of those skills to be job ready,” Rachael said.

“We give them an introduction to the kind of work. They do work health and safety, we teach them about levelling, using a laser level, optical level and an introduction to concreting,” Matt said. 

Matt says he hopes this introduction will encourage participants to pursue further training or a career that continues to develop and utilise these skills. 

“At the moment, there are six houses getting built up there and concrete time is coming up soon, so I’m hoping some of them have gotten their confidence up enough to apply for a job,” he said. 

A before and after shot of the footpath.

A lasting Impact

While numbers can be low for the first few sessions, Matt says it’s exciting to see more people coming along and learning new skills later in the week. 

“I love being a part of it. In Milingimbi the first day I was there I had five to six people come, then the second day I had nine and by the third day I had 13, because they were telling other people and bringing them along,” he said.  

Rachael says trainers like Matt are what holds up the program. Being there on the ground and connecting with the students is integral to success and attracting strong numbers.

“Our teachers are so flexible and so embedded in the communities and they just live and breathe it. It's really exciting to see and hear about the various successes and feel like there's a greater purpose to what we're organizing. Seeing the buzz that the trainers get out of it too, is such a great thing to be a part of.

“It's not that easy to find someone who’s the right fit for community life. It's really a commitment and to find people that genuinely love it is worth its weight in gold. Matt was one of those people,” she said.

Matt currently has another trip planned with ALPA in April, travelling to Minjilang, also known as Croker Island, to continue sharing his talents with remote communities.