Most Australian states have expressed concern about effective ways in which they can meet the educational needs of Aboriginal adolescents who are not oriented to a formal academic high school program. Western Austtalia has for some years experimented with one particular approach and I am sure that teachers in other states will find much of interest in the following report.

In October 1973, a small group of about 30 Aboriginal people moved from Wyndham, Western Australia, forty miles across the Cambridge Gulf, to establish the community of Oombulgurri on the site of the now closed Forrest River Mission.

The move was from the ‘futurelessness’ of existence on the Wyndham Reserve to a chance to build their own future as an autonomous community living on tribal land. A Mawaba (Executive) was elected. The Oombulgurri Association employs an auxiliary staff whose role is to advise the community. The Auxiliary has no decision-making power.

Just twelve months later, Oombulgurri has grown to 200 people, of whom 60 are school-age children, with an additional 30 below school age. From the outset those moving back to Oombulgurri – most of whom made little real attempt to ensure their children attended school regularly in Wyndham – insisted that a school must be included in the community plan. The school functions as a community school. Two qualified teachers are employed by the Oombulgurri Association. They work in the school with four Aboriginal teaching assistants selected from the community. Each of these assistants is involved fully in planning and decision making, and is totally responsible for the day to day teaching and disciplining of various groups within the school. It has become yery clear that the students gain a great deal by having some of their own people involved in actual teaching and curriculum building. The school has become much more than an institution imposed on the community. Women from the community are also involved in the pre-school and child care centre. Working with a member of the Auxiliary, the women plan the curriculum and carry out the daily program.

In the following article, Miss Simpson outlines an inquiry study about Aboriginal Australians that she developed and followed with her sixth grade pupils.

Readers of the Journal who teach classes composed of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children may well decide to try out Miss Simpson’s approach.

Those readers who teach in schools with a predominantly Aboriginal enrolment might like to reverse the emphasis and mount an inquiry study about non-Aboriginal Australians.

Increasing numbers of schools arrange excursions for their Aboriginal pupils. Excursions such as the one described by Mr. Scheiwe can be a delight to both pupils and teachers. The gains are varied.

Perhaps teachers who have tried other approaches would like to share their experiences with readers of the Journal.

“How do you use them?” is a question I have heard often. It is asked by teachers with reference to their classroom assistants in schools on Aboriginal communities. A seemingly simple question yet it points to a whole complex of issues, all relatively minor in themselves but which in sum are apparently a cause for concern for many in these schools.

In this brief article I intend to look only at those issues which directly affect the place of the indigenous classroom assistants in education. I am concerned that although the potential value of such resource personnel in our schools could be limitless, we appear not, in fact, to be scratching even the surface of such potential in many of these schools. Ultimate opportunity and responsibility to ensure that the role of these auxiliaries is a viable and effective one is ours as teachers.

Mr. Farnham describes the setting of one of Queensland’s schools for Aboriginal pupils. Would other teachers like to write in descriptions of their settings? As well as being of interest to teachers, such descriptions would, I am sure, stimulate Aboriginal pupils.

Traeger Park Primary School is situated in a community composed of white and Aboriginal cultures and sub-cultures. The enrolment is approximately three hundred and eighty and of this more than half the children are of Aboriginal descent. Approximately sixty of these Aboriginal children live in cottage homes because they come from cattle stations or they are state wards. The various sub-cultures would include –

1. Stable middle-class part-Aboriginal group.

2. Lower socio-economic group of part-Aboriginal people living in town.

3. Full blood Aboriginal people in fringe-dwelling situations

4. A transient white group who live at caravan parks.

5. People employed by railways.

6. A small group of middle-class whites.

Within the white cultures, there are many disadvantaged children from broken or disturbed homes. All these sub-cultures within the school have tended to make the middle-class white group disadvantaged. We are faced with the problem of keeping these children up to the academic standard expected by parents. In the fringe-dwelling group there are twenty-five children from one particular camp and thirty-five from other camp situations all around the town. Many of these people see this school as theirs even though they live much closer to other primary schools. The principal aim of the school is to develop in the children an awareness of themselves and their place in the community, and a self-concept that enables them to live a full and satisfying existence in the environment of their own choice.

Mr. Fleming reports on two approaches – one with a group of young children and one with a group of older non-readers.

I visited Papunya School in March and found the staff enthusiastic and excited. They are working out a school program so that they can utilize fully, for the children’s benefit, the diverse skill and talents of the teachers.

Mr. Widders was born and raised in a total Aboriginal family-society. Leaving Armidale High School at 15, he spent several years in various jobs before becoming a student at Armidale Teachers College. This paper was presented to the Fourteenth Annual Conference of The Australian College of Education, at the University of Sydney in May, 1973 and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author and The Australian College of Education.

Mrs. Cusack writes about the activities and results of a club for young Aboriginal girls and comments in her covering letter that the teachers felt that “we had to train ourselves to look for progress, to have confidence in the girls’ potential and always to be optimistic in our own outlook”.

Not surprisingly, teachers and students have found the experience very worthwhile.

During the past 18 months, one of the most obvious differences recognized between two groups of students of the same age – those I have taught in Victorian secondary schools and those I now teach at the Yirrkala Post Primary School in the Northern Territory – is a huge difference in the degree of commitment to the function of the school.

This does not express itself in an obvious antagonism of the students for the school or its teachers. Rather, while the European students would attempt to force the school to meet their needs, as they recognized them, our students place few demands. If, in the past, I adopted inappropriate methods or irrelevant subject matter, the students would quickly and obviously let me know and in a constructive way, if I cared to listen. If the school was promoting values which clashed with the family or particular social group values of a student, then often the student and the family would engage in conflict with the school.

My present students apply themselves with almost equally stolid rigourousness, seemingly irrespective of the task. Can you imagine a class which is so docile that it will sometimes allow a new teacher to teach exactly the same subject matter as that already taught by a previous teacher? On appearances, is this a model class? Are the students and the parents so satisfied with the efforts of the school that they need never express antagonism or attempt to change what it is doing? I do not believe that this is so.

Mr. Mounsey was formerly the Headmaster of the South Hedland Primary School at Port Hedland in Western Australia.

Mr. Lui is a school teacher at Coconut Island, and has been teaching in the Torres Strait Islands for ten years. Mr. Lui thinks it is important for the parents and the other people in the community to be interested in the school, and in this interview he talks about ways in which he works at Coconut Island to get the school and the community together.

Readers will be interested in the approach being taken by the West Australian Department of Public Health in offering health services to Aboriginal people.

As a beginning teacher completing my first term in an Aboriginal school, I would like to reflect upon my experiences of the last three months.

I was trained in a three year Primary course at Salisbury C.A.E. and accepted a position at Fregon Special Aboriginal School, 900 miles north-west of Adelaide. Fregon is an Aboriginal community which recently transferred from control by the Presbyterian Ecumenical Board of Missions to control by an Aboriginal Council. The community consists of approximately one hundred and fifty tribally-oriented Pitjantjatjara people and ten Europeans.

I will deal with the following points which cover my experience – personal situation, cultural factors, teaching.