Despite growing initiatives in Aboriginal-designed educational facilities, most Aboriginal children still undertake their schooling in mainstream classrooms where methodology and organisation have evolved according to a white Australian tradition.

The school system is an institution relentlessly perpetuating the stereotypes and social order that have been Australia’s since the British occupation. Aboriginal children are seen to ‘underachieve’ in terms of a system designed to meet the needs of the dominant society. While ‘underachievement’ may be slightly diminished by adjustments in teaching styles, these changes should be part of an overall classroom strategy that is based on an understanding of Aboriginal characteristics and cultural traditions, and a realisation that Aboriginal children’s behaviour reflects their experience of a largely racist society.

Back in early 1982, a mate in New Zealand wrote to me describing, in a very excited manner, his research into cultural aspects of Maori people, especially with respect to the poetry relating to funeral rites. Concurrently, I was completing the Multicultural Education Diploma, and fostering an infant interest in aspects of Australian literature dealing with the immigrant experience and cultural difference (viz. Judah Waten’s Alien Son, and Nancy Keesing’s Shalom). Whilst I had not at that stage successfully made the link between such literature and its effective use in the educational process of students of non-English speaking background, I remember thinking that perhaps I should soon pursue a course which would lead me to an understanding of Aboriginal Australians, in some way similar to Terry’s pursuit in New Zealand.

Lake Mungo, in New South Wales, is the home of the first known people in this country. Here, the oldest known evidence of Aboriginal people in Australia has been found. Because of its importance, it is a site which everyone should know about. To give us a feeling for Lake Mungo, Billy Reid, the illustrator of The Aboriginal Health Worker and The Aboriginal Child at School, came with me on a trip. We travelled west to the Darling River (whose Aboriginal name is Calewatta), and then south-east to Lake Mungo itself. Billy made wonderful drawings to represent the deeds and everyday life of those people. This can be reconstructed from the fossil evidence found at Lake Mungo. He has also drawn some scenes of life along the banks of the Calewatta - the river which is Billy’s own home. He hails from Bourke.

This paper describes the way in which a program in Adult Literacy has been successful in developing individualized educational programs. The fundamental criterion for this is the identification of the individual needs for each learner, and the development of a teaching-learning program that enables the learner to become self-directing and active in the attainment of literacy skills.

The Aboriginal learning system is not a functional learning system for everything that needs to be learned in school. Whether a formal or informal style fits the task best is dependent on the nature of what has to be learned, more than on the student’s cultural affiliations. Today Aboriginal children not only need to acquire age-old knowledge in traditional ways but they have to acquire new knowledge...and they need to develop new ways of learning.

This paper includes a short history of Aboriginal women in Australia from about the turn of the century. This has been made possible by the writings of such women. Most non-Aboriginal women have been and are ignorant of this history. They need to understand this past in order to come to terms with it. Aboriginal women are also not aware of how misinformed non-Aboriginal women are of the role of Aboriginal women in their own society. An extensive dialogue is needed to develop the mutual understanding necessary for the construction of a peaceful and just post-colonial Australia.

Success in teaching reading does not depend simply on materials and schemes. Locked into our own cultural norms as we are, we may overlook other fundamental influences.

Language death can occur naturally, and in different ways, or it can be caused by deliberate policy. This is how deliberate practices and policies brought it about in Australia.

• • Diverse linguistic groups of Aborigines were forced into small missions or reserves to live together; consequently languages that were numerically stronger squeezed the others out of use.

• • Anxious to ‘Christianise’ the Aborigines, missionaries enforced harsh penalties on users of Aboriginal languages, even to the point of snatching babies from their mothers and institutionalising them, so they would not hear their parental languages.

• • Aboriginal religious ceremonies were banned; initiations did not take place, and so liturgical, ceremonial and secret languages were unable to be passed on. As old people died, their languages died with them.

• • Assimilationist/integrationist policies were enforced which required Aborigines to attend schools where English-only was the medium of instruction.

• • Finally, denigration of the Aboriginal languages set the seal on their fate in Victoria (within forty years of white settlement, all Gippsland languages had become extinct), most of New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland. Labelling the languages “rubbish”, “heathen jargon”, “primitive jibberish”, and so on, made Aboriginal people reluctant to use their normal means of communication.

To go into an isolated Aboriginal community as the only teacher requires very careful preparation and demands a unique type of individual. However, out of the challenge of the situation can develop warm and lasting friendships and the arrival at the position where the school is a key point in the community, playing a vital role in the growth of the locality and the individuals in it. The teacher must initiate the effort to develop sound relations and the best place to start is in the classroom.

Queensland has isolated Aboriginal communities whose contact with the dominant society is restricted by the tyranny of distance, if nothing else. Several additional communities experience greater contact because of proximity.

In 1972, a majority of these schools were still mission controlled. Transition to State responsibility has occurred at various negotiated rates, but by 1978 all were the responsibility of the Queensland Education Department except for Islander schools in the Torres Straits. These remained the concern of the Department of Aboriginal and Islanders Advancement until 1985.

Language is an important part of a child’s total development as a person. Through language the child learns the behaviour patterns that are expected within his society, the society’s religious beliefs, and how the society sees the organisation of the world around it.

“Language is a powerful force of socialisation or the preparation of a young person for later life in a social group.” It has a vital function in “accumulating and transmitting culture” (Bostock, 1977, p.6).