G'day Susan,
After WWII the remnants of the various colonial era empires (mostly British but also the newly independent Indonesia) collaborated on a development scheme whereby the more affluent entities provided assistance to the less affluent ones. In the same way that international agreements take their name from where they were formally signed by Heads of Govt (HoGs, for short), this one, signed off in Colombo, became known as the Colombo Plan. The component that most in Oz would remember or have heard of involved the Oz govt providing scholarships to students from India, Ceylon (as it was at the time), Malaya (ditto), SIngapore, Indonesia and Fiji; there may have been others but these are the ones I remember. The scholarships supported students' attendance at high school (from what Americans would call "Middle School", to Year 12), places like RMIT (now a uni and not unlike MIT or CalTech) and university. They were expected to return to their home country and spread their skills to accelarate their homeland's development.

Northcote High, where I was a student, was one of (what was then called) the Central Zone high schools in Melbourne, where the quality of education was regarded as exemplary and so had quite a few Colombo Plan students. In that era and that locality, Colombo Plan students were the only non-angloceltic people we "saw"*. One of them, a Fijian Indian, was a particular mate of mine.

* I write "saw" advisedly, as Aboriginal people were not noticed by those of us from what anthropologists might call "the dominant community". My Religious Instruction teacher was a man who we all took pride in knowing, as he was "famous"; he was a star in the Fitzroy Football Team (Premier League, Australian Rules) and he taught us RI!!!. Many years later, Pastor Doug Nicholls became Governor of South Australia, the first Aboriginal person to reach such heights, and it was somewhere in between that I realised the extent of my (and my community's) blindness; Northcote and Fitzroy had always been centres for the Aboriginal community in Melbourne and still are. I have been lucky enough to have been given the opportunity to learn to see.

Cheers, Rowan