Ashah Tanoa

University Indigenous Education Units (IEU) support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ success, via providing academic, social, and cultural support and a sense of community on campus. As a result of the social distancing guidelines imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Australian universities have transitioned to online learning and campuses have closed. These rapid changes pose challenges for IEUs who have had to quickly innovate to ensure they can continue supporting their student cohorts. This paper provides a qualitative case study to describe how one IEU, located in Perth Western Australia, employed a ‘relationships-first’ strategy to maintain contact with and deliver support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. We outline the Centre’s activities during the transition to online support, including adaptation of the Transition Academic Pastoral and Support (TAPS) model, hosting weekly virtual ‘cup of tea’ sessions, and providing students with laptops to complete online learning– these moves are contextualised within a discussion of the Eurocentric foundations of Australian higher education, which has been exacerbated in recent years by neoliberalism and its Western capitalist bias. Against this backdrop, high-frequency contact provided students with an ongoing sense of a community of practice which is a necessary pre-cursor for their success.