Educator and advocate Aunty Roslyn Sackley – better known as Aunty Ros – is a proud Ngiyampaa and Wiradjuri woman from the central west of New South Wales. Throughout her life, she has made profound contributions to community and Country, providing invaluable leadership and guidance to research teams.
Her significant human rights advocacy and service to the community has been celebrated and recognised with admission to the degree of Doctor of Letters at the University of Sydney.
“We’re very grateful for the enduring collaboration with Aunty Ros,” said Presiding Pro Chancellor and Emeritus Professor Alan Pettigrew.
"She’s had a profound impact on our students, teaching staff and researchers. Her advocacy has been instrumental in informing approaches to intersecting challenges of disability and health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
“Aunty Ros strengthens our teaching – providing ongoing mentorship and guidance to PhD students in Disability Studies. Her efforts help improve how students learn and gain a comprehensive understanding of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content.”
As an infant, Aunty Ros lost her vision due to meningitis.
She was forcibly removed from her family before the age of two and grew up at schools for vision impaired children in Sydney.
Aunty Ros is thought to be the first Aboriginal woman with a disability to complete a university degree in Australia. She achieved this with total vision loss, and without family or community support. She completed her degree in an era requiring her to wait for academic materials to be converted into braille before reading them. She graduated from Charles Sturt University with a Diploma of Teaching and went on to become an educator for most of her working life, teaching in schools, at TAFE and in the university sector.
In later decades she completed a Bachelor of Arts, Education and a Graduate Diploma of Sociology, which she used to help thousands of students graduate from school, overcoming barriers of societal racism and disablism.
Aunty Ros has had a profound impact on our students, teaching staff and researchers ... informing approaches to intersecting challenges of disability and health in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Emeritus Professor Alan Pettigrew
Aunty Ros went on to co-found the first advocacy network for carers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability, established in Redfern in the mid-1990s.
In the 2000s, Aunty Ros was appointed as Australia’s representative to the committee informing development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In this capacity, she advocated for and represented Aboriginal people with disability and the broader community of blind and vision impaired Australians.
Aunty Ros was also a key to creating the first online accessible university course for Aboriginal people with disability living in rural and remote regions of Australia in 2011. The program developed developed e-books tailored to the learning needs of students studying via the Australian Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Education (ACIKE).
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