School at Maningrida and Its Outstations

Extract

Maningrida is in coastal Amhemland, and it is two hundred miles east of Darwin. Maningrida is an Aboriginal settlement. There are two hundred people living at the settlement now, because some Aboriginal people have moved into outstations.

There are one hundred children going to school at the settlement now. In school we have eight classes, and each class has one balanda teacher and one Aboriginal teacher. We have two pre-schools. One is a Kunividji class, the other one is for Aboriginal children who don’t speak Kunividji, and the white children go there too.

Well, we have three Kunividji classes altogether. Pre-school, transition and year one. There are four Aboriginal teachers teaching in Aboriginal languages. One class is where Nancy Gununwanga, an Aboriginal teacher and Brett Westblade, a balanda teacher, both teach in Kunividji. Laurie Magaldagi and Mellanie Mamariyi and myself, we three Aboriginal teachers, teach with little children from preschool and infants. We three Aboriginal girls are working together with Peter Jones. He is a balanda teacher. Nancy Gununwanga takes her own class, 11 or 12 year olds.

We also have two other Aboriginal girls working with the linguist, Kim Djibama and Lena Djabiba. They take a tape and record the children’s stories about what they had been doing during the holidays and weekends. After each class has been recorded, they listen to the tape and then write the story down. Later they print it in a book, and it is used for children to read, or sometimes they go around the camp and sit with old people and get a story from them about olden times of their life.