It is time, Ms Brown insists, that Australian universities recognised this fact and began harnessing that vast store of knowledge as they sought to dramatically increase Indigenous student enrolments.

Ms Brown knows something about universities and about the sophisticated knowledge systems that enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to survive and flourish for tens of thousands of years.

Currently studying for her PhD in indigenous education and youth studies at the University of Melbourne, and with degrees already attained from the Universities of Western Australia and Melbourne and a Masters at Cambridge while studying as a Charlie Perkins Scholar, her family belongs to the Gumbaynggirr people of the NSW mid-north coast.

She will be among distinguished speakers addressing a dinner in Parliament House, Canberra, on Wednesday to launch Universities Australia's new Indigenous Strategy.

While the number of indigenous students enrolled in Australian universities is at record level - 15,585 in 2015, with 22,300 indigenous graduates since 2001 - the figures also show Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still seriously under-represented at tertiary institutions.

The Universities Australia Indigenous Strategy says that universities have historically underperformed against their obligations to Indigenous people - enrolments had been low, attrition rates high and Indigenous staff remained few.

The new strategy aims to bind all universities together with a series of common goals to increase Indigenous student numbers.

The most forthright of those was to "maintain institututional growth rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' enrolments that are at least 50 per cent above the growth-rate of non-Indigenous student enrolment, and ideally 100 per cent above".

The strategy also aimed to achieve retention and success rates for Indigenous students equal to those of domestic, non-Indigenous students by 2025, and to achieve equal completion rates by field of study by 2028.

Ms Brown will be surrounded by Indigenous scholarship and knowledge at the dinner to launch the strategy.

The MC will be Rachel Perkins, whose father, Charlie Perkins, was one of Australia's first Indigenous graduates and whose name was given to the scholarship that took Ms Brown to Cambridge. Guest of honour will be Melissa Williams, the niece of the late Dr Margaret Williams-Weir, who was the first recorded Aboriginal student enrolled at an Australian university, in 1957.

Dr Williams-Weir was Lilly Brown's inspiration as she undertook her academic career, and they met in 2015.