In the International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples, it is appropriate to celebrate the successes of Anangu empowerment in the Anangu schools.

This report was originally delivered to the State English as a Second Language Conference held in Brisbane in December 2001. It was part of a team presentation made to a plenary session by representatives from Torres Strait (Terry McCarthy, Mette Morrison David, Judy Christian Ketchell, Raba Jobi, Keith Fisher, Kay Ahmat and Susan Shepherd). Its aim was to inform Queensland English as a Second Language teachers about the language situation at Thursday Island State High School shortly after the appointment of an Education Advisor English Language Acquisition. The report deals with the linguistic background of the students, the teaching of languages other than English and the urgent need for appropriate professional development in English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language insights and methodologies.

Education in Torres Strait is at a crossroad. On the one hand changes are about to occur to its organisation. On the other hand crucial inroads are being made into community life by that process of education.

I have lived in Torres Strait. I know some of the fears, hopes and disillusionment of many Torres Strait Islanders. I want to share some of my insights into your situation. When I left Thursday Island in 1972, it was with sadness and with a determination to find out how to better teach the young people of the Torres Strait. I would like to share one set of my findings with you. In particular, I would like to share the experiences of a small American Indian community with you. In many ways their story is like yours. Some of their lessons may help you in these days of rapid changes.

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.

The Aboriginal consultative group to the Schools Commission in their report. Education for Aborigines, made the following statement about the involvement of parents in the education of their children.

Ear disease and hearing problems are alarmingly widespread in Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory. School hearing screening results indicate that between 25% and 50% of Aboriginal children may suffer from middle ear disease and associated hearing loss. This means that up to half the children in any classroom cannot hear their teacher properly.

The English-based creoles, which are spoken by a very large number of Aboriginal Australians, are so named because it is obvious that a large proportion of their lexicon is derived from English. This fact alone, however, does not indicate that they are merely regional varieties of English. They are distinct languages. Together with other world creoles, they are at the frontier of linguistic research and the subject of considerable controversy. One critical forum of debate centres on the validity of creoles as languages of education. It is the intention of the authors that this paper should achieve two things. Firstly, it is intended to contribute constructively to that debate. Secondly, it is intended to provide an overview of the present use of some creole languages in Australian schools.

This paper addresses the potential importance of assistant teachers in confronting the challenges of Indigenous literacy education. A discussion is raised with reference to a range of relevant literature, while reflections drawn from the author's involvement in evaluating the National Accelerated Literacy Program (NALP) in the Northern Territory are used to highlight an urgent need and vital opportunity to support assistant teachers – as mainstay figures in Indigenous education – in becoming “wellsprings” of literate practice and principled pedagogy. An overview of Accelerated Literacy methodology and the NALP is provided as a framework for considering how to embed strong literate practices and principled pedagogy in remote Indigenous communities through the provision of empowering professional development to Indigenous assistant teachers: facilitating for them a genuine and qualified status as literacy educators. The prospects and challenges of pursuing such an opportunity, in the context of NALP, are likewise considered.

This paper provides a description of a postgraduate clinical psychology training programme's journey towards becoming more biculturally responsive and how the learnings from this have been applied to the wider Department of Psychology at the University of Canterbury (UC), Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). The paper includes a discussion of cultural competency, and frameworks which have been proposed as a way to blend Western and Māori knowledge and clinical and cultural practices. The reasons for introducing the changes, the process of change and the actual changes are described, together with a discussion of the outcomes of the changes. Key principles in undertaking the changes were that it was considered important that the process that was seen as an ongoing journey. Further guiding principles were that a graded, integrated approach was required, undertaken in partnership with Māori, and with a commitment to biculturalism before multiculturalism.

Eight years ago the Commonwealth Government appointed the first Aboriginal teachers’ aides to schools in New South Wales. Their primary task was to bridge the gap between the Aboriginal community and the school. The aides also had the responsibility of encouraging Aboriginal children to gain further education.

Mrs Betty Wright of Kempsey was one of the first Aboriginal women to train as a teachers’ aide. In 1975 she was appointed to West Kempsey Primary School as its first A.T.A. While working there Betty attended the first Basic Training Program in Aboriginal Adult Education at Sydney University.

People attending this course faced many problems. Most had left families behind, financial support was inadequate and, for some, it was their first visit to Sydney. Of the original twenty-eight students enrolled, only sixteen stayed until the end.

Betty found the most valuable aspect of the course was the chance to learn to develop communication skills. “Talking to white people can be difficult if you are black and have a deep, inbred inferiority complex,” she says. She remembers the anxiety she felt during her first months in schools, wondering how the white staff would accept her. She also felt fear at being the only Aboriginal among so many whites.

Over the last two years Australians have become more aware through the bitter comments of Aborigines in the media that a new government cannot overnight solve problems which have been festering for more than a century. It is still possible for the National Population Inquiry Report to note in 1975 that ‘in every conceivable comparison, the Aborigines and Islanders … stand in stark contrast to the general Australian society, and also to other “ethnic” groups, whether defined on the basis of race, nationality, birthplace, language or religion. They probably have the highest growth rate, the highest death rate, the worst health and housing, and legal status of any identifiable section of the Australian population’. They also have the least schooling.

This non-selective bibliography is limited to published material and is part of the Bibliography of Torres Strait to be found on the Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander Studies Unit’s website at . Torres Strait Islander authors are marked with an asterisk.

The following article is based on a “paper given in 1976 in Alice Springs at an induction course for teachers newly appointed to work in Aboriginal Schools in the Northern Territory. Mr Brennan is Principal Education Adviser to the Northern Territory Division of Education. In his talk he was concerned to give practical advice to this group of teachers and we believe that his comments will be helpful to teachers who work with Aboriginal children in a variety of settings around Australia.

Much has been said and written by the reading specialists about the way children learn to read and how teachers should be facilitators in this natural process. Frank Smith says that phonics need not be taught in the classroom; in fact he says it makes the learning to read process more difficult for children (Smith 1973, p.185).

Phonics or grapho-phonics tells a reader and writer how spelling patterns relate to sound sequences (Reed 1977, p.393). Whether phonics is taught incidentally on a one-to-one basis or whether it is taught more formally, I believe phonics does have a place in the classroom today, particularly in the bilingual Aboriginal classroom. Teachers of Aboriginal children should feel free to teach phonics, despite what the specialists say.

Much that has been written relates to native English-speaking children, brought up in a literate society where newspapers and bedtime stories are the norm. In this paper I am concerned with non-English speaking tribal Aboriginal children, in a pre-literate society. They attend bilingual schools where they learn to read and write first in the vernacular and then in English. I will point out that what the reading specialists advocate in learning to read naturally, is not always sound advice for tribal Aboriginal children learning to read and write in the vernacular.

This article is based on an interview conducted with four of the central figures in the development and operation of the Arrernte Early Childhood Project. The project works with Aboriginal families in the centre of Australia and is developing culturally appropriate curricula for children aged from three to six years, in the Arrernte language.

The project stresses the need to involve grandparents, aunts, uncles and elders in the development of curricula so that the Arrernte culture can stay alive alongside other Australian cultures.

The preparation of this paper has been stimulated by the table appended to the article “Parental involvement: endeavours to improve communications between Meningie Area school and the Pt. McLeay community in the period 1973–4” (A.M. Nankivell, The Aboriginal Child at School, Vol. 3 No. 1, 1975 pp. 48–55). The table, headed “Summary of Main Points Arising from Group Discussion of the Eight Major Problems at Meningie”, is a report of some conclusions derived from a seminar conducted with “Aboriginal and white parents and representatives of the various administrative and ancillary bodies concerned to discuss mutual problems”.

The article and table describe a number of ‘facts’ and make deductions, based on the unchallenged wisdom of psychologists, which purport to ‘explain’ problems in Aboriginal education. Indeed, the table is a succinct statement of the kind of explanatory system which has been used in Aboriginal education; an explanatory system which deserves close examination in the light of the failure of Aboriginal education over the last 130 years. The comments which follow, then, are not directed exclusively at the paper under discussion; they refer to general problems of explanation in Aboriginal education.