It has become fashionable in educational circles to pay homage to what is described as ‘cultural activities’ in schools, particularly those schools in which the clientele is drawn from a culturally different community. Such an addition to the curriculum content of schools is a response to the concern that schools are somehow irrelevant to the needs of the client group. While the latter point may indeed be true, this paper argues that curriculum decisions in the area of ‘culture’ are deceptively simple.

In June this year a Central Australian excursion was organized by the Department of Labor and Ceduna Area School for seven of the school’s secondary Aboriginal students. With the exception of Keith Peters, a first year student who had recently come to Ceduna from Yalata, the students had had very little contact with the tribal way of life. They were ignorant of Aboriginal customs and laws, and in some respects this ignorance had led to contempt or fear. Some of the boys were, for example, terrified that they could be taken and forcibly initiated, so that, when on the first evening of the trip we were stopped by some Yalata people on the road south of Coober Pedy, they begged us to drive on, and hid their faces under blankets in the back seat. The second night (Saturday June 21st) we camped out for the first time just north of the turn-off to Indulkana. Keith, a great comedian, but at this stage not well-known to, or accepted by, the others in the group, decided to stir them up by mentioning that there were “wild nungas” in the area. This raised considerable alarm and for the rest of the night few of the boys dared to leave the campfire without a strong stick and a friend as a bodyguard.

The aim of the program is to integrate school life and community life as much as possible.

On June 5th, Infant B, consisting of sixteen children, went on an excursion to Rocky Point.

Prior to departure we prepared a picnic lunch which involved counting how many sandwiches we would need, how many cups we had to take if each child was to have his/her own cup, and how much cordial we would have to prepare. We also counted out enough biscuits to give each child two and enough apples to give each child one.

This is a book of twenty-four stories by Raymond Bandeedye and Charlie Djordila of the Burarra language group in Arnhem Land. The stories are presented in Burarra, with a brief English translation (provided by K. Glasgow of the Summer Institute of Linguistics) following each story. The stories are illustrated. The book has been produced by the Department of Education, Darwin.

I feel that there is an immediate need for teachers coming into contact with a new Aboriginal community to evaluate themselves not only professionally, but also socio-culturally.

The hazards and pitfalls of acculturation interchanges are too numerous and complicated to enumerate, and it is incumbent upon the new teacher to ‘establish’ himself (or herself) initially in the new environment. The community is only too cognizant of the behaviour and actions of a new member in its midst, and once the Aboriginals establish ‘you’ in their mental structure, then acceptance gradually comes. The reasons for culture conflict are manifold, and we, as teachers, must be careful not to use these as an excuse for indifference and neglect of our ‘client’ community.

Jane enters the classroom amid cries of subversive laughter and cruel comments. She seats herself and proceeds quietly and methodically to do her school work. The other children keep on teasing, pounding at that little girl’s emotions, until she finally sobs and sinks below her desk. She doesn’t hear everything they say - she doesn’t have to - she knows what they are saying and why.

At the Jervis Bay Primary School there is in progress a project which is designed to involve the Aboriginal children at the school (about 25 per cent of the total enrolment) in some educational decision-making. The program is being funded by the Australian Government’s Schools Commission Innovations Program.

It was judged that in the total school environment the Aboriginal children were followers and not initiators and that this was in part attributable to the skills-oriented competitive structure of the classroom system that exists at the school, and in which leadership and success fall largely to the non-Aboriginal pupils.

The bringing of Aboriginal culture to European children as well as urbanised Aborigines has long been a fundamental concern. I guess that my four years in a tribal situation (Indulkana, S.A.) brought the situation even more realistically to me. I often wondered what the reaction of teachers was when it came to the time to “do Aborigines” in the Social Studies curriculum, or on National Aborigines’ Day. Even for the most sympathetic teacher, the lack of materials, books and references etc. must have made the task daunting. All too often, I suspect that the subject was mentioned, glossed over and forgotten as quickly as possible, and for that, from a resource point of view, one cannot blame the teacher.

After reading Mr. C.F. Mounsey’s article in The Aboriginal Child at School, Volume 2, No.5, December 1974, we were struck by the similarities of the problems of the school he mentioned with those of the Katherine Area School, except that our pupils were, shall we say, less ‘resourceful’, but the absenteeism and resulting fall off in performance followed the same lines.

Teachers often become very despondent about their job. One reason for this is because all too often they are made aware of their failures rather than their successes. In this article I am very pleased to be able to report on the success of Cherbourg State School. Although Queensland reserves are not noticeable for creating hope, one of the bright lights at Cherbourg is education.

We decided to institute our Project Program because:

1. 1. a considerable number of our pupils both in the upper Primary and lower Secondary schools have had a record of failure for most of their school career, and

2. 2. the results of both aptitude and attainment tests indicated that the existing school programs were unsuccessful in alleviating this pattern of failure.

Australia is a member nation of the International Labour Organisation. Article 23 of the I.L.O. Convention concerning the Protection Integration of Indigenous and Other Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in Independent Countries reads: