Lester-Irabinna Rigney recognised nationally and internationally for work in Aboriginal education in Adelaide

Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney in 2009 received an honorary United Nations award for his work on Indigenous education.

Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney’s decades devoted to Aboriginal education in South Australia have been recognised internationally, with visiting scholar invitations including Cambridge University, Fort Hare University in South Africa and and University of British Columbia, Canada.

In Adelaide, Rigney had been director of Wirltu Yarlu Aboriginal education and dean of Indigenous education at Adelaide University; a visiting scholar at the University of South Australia; and director of the Yunggorendi first nations centre at Flinders University.

Rigney, who grew up in Point Pearce Mission on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, was inspired by his mother Alice, a Narungga woman, the first female Aboriginal school principal in Australia who started the first urban Aboriginal school – Kaurna Plains Primary – later a model for the rest of the nation.

Dr Lester-Irabinna Rigney, a national and international authority on indigenist research methodologies, was inducted into the Australian College of Educators in 1998. In 2009, he received an honorary United Nations award for his work on Indigenous education. He was on high-profile expert committees including the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare COAG Closing the Gap scientific reference group, the national Aboriginal reference group 25-year Indigenous education plan and Australian curriculum and assessment reporting authority’s national languages curriculum reference group.

Rigney was an inaugural chair of the ethics council for the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples. In 2009, he was an author of the review of national indigenous education, Australian Directions, for the federal government. Having worked across the Pacific on Indigenous education in New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, Rigney was a member on the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies research advisory committee as an education and cultural transmission expert.

Rigney was named NAIDOC national Aboriginal scholar in 2011 when he was appointed by the Australian school education, early childhood and youth minister Peter Garrett to the first peoples education advisory group on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early childhood and school education. He also became Australian ambassador for Aboriginal education.

He received the Menzies Australia Institute and University of South Australia joint distinguished fellowship for 2018 and was named a distinguished professor at Kings College in London. He was made a member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2021 for service to Indigenous education and to social inclusion research.