Billy Reid, whose photograph appears on the front cover of this issue, is the illustrator for this journal, and its sister journal The Aboriginal Health Worker. Before becoming a professional artist, Billy had a varied experience of Aboriginal life which he can now draw upon in his work as illustrator. He was born in 1948 in the town of Warren in north-west New South Wales, thirteen miles off the Great Western Highway. Dad, known as Bill Reid, was a drover then. Billy remembers, as a child, driving along the outback roads with the horses and the stock. His mother, who died last year, used to drive the wagonette behind Dad, the twenty-odd horses and the cattle or sheep.

Billy spent much of his early life moving between towns in outback Australia. As a child he lived for two years with his aunt at Coonamble while his parents kept working and on the move. Back and forth between Bourke, Coonamble, Brewarrina and Walgett gave him little chance to settle down to schooling. This meant Billy didn’t get going with his education till fairly late. Then, due to constant middle ear infections, which have left him partially deaf, he couldn’t hear his lessons. A good part of Billy’s childhood was spent at the Far West Home in Manly, Sydney. He left school at thirteen.

Billy taught himself to draw whiling away time absent from school, on the Bourke Reserve. His artistic gift clearly runs in the family. Bill Reid Senior, who was later to become Pastor Reid, specialises in intaglio art: he carves emu eggs. As the shell is scraped away different colours are revealed, allowing beautiful pictures and textures to be formed about the shape of the egg.

(Address given to the World Education Fellowship – Queensland Section, 28 July 1983).

The topic chosen for discussion at this gathering is entitled, ‘Towards a Multilingual Australia’. Because of my particular upbringing, experience and knowledge, my presentation will specifically focus on the place of Aborigines within such a society. My fellow speaker will broaden the issue by outlining aspects of the wider Australian society and their relationship to the new ideal. Since we constitute between one and two per cent of the Australian population, perhaps I should limit myself to this proportion of time in presenting my paper. However, I shall adopt an important principle of multilingualism, namely, that of equal recognition, and spend considerably more time in presenting an Aboriginal viewpoint on the contribution my peoples can make to a multilingual Australia. I hope that my fellow speaker does not permit me to ‘hog the microphone’ for too long as I am sure that he will have some important perspectives to add to tonight’s discussion.

To present my people’s place within a multilingual Australia I believe it is necessary to present the current attitudes. The current attitudes can be attributed largely to what has occurred in the past. The settlement of Australia has significance. Therefore I will begin my presentation by outlining the structure of the Australian population and how it came to be. Then to present the Aboriginal view of this and the attitude to the suggested new Australia. To do this I will diverge from the major topic initially to express a view of multiculturalism. Language is an important component of culture and therefore one cannot easily divorce one from the other. A multilingual Australia must also be multicultural, in my opinion. Most Aborigines have a particular attitude to this new Government policy. My people’s attitude will be defined and made explicit through the historical perspective and through a critical analysis of statements made by three groups on multiculturalism. The three groups who have made a statement include, the Working Party on Multiculturalism, established by the Queensland Department of Education, the Commonwealth Education Portfolio, and the Committee on Multicultural Education who reported to the Commonwealth Schools Commission. Having established the current Aboriginal attitude, I will provide some strategic ideas as to how I consider the ideal of multilingual Australia can be achieved. In providing strategies I hope to leave food for thought for later discussion and review.

What does world view mean? What is the Aboriginal world view like and how does it affect people’s behaviour? Is it possible for a white Australian to understand the Aboriginal world view? In this article I hope to present a white person’s point of view on these questions. I have three sources of information: eight years living with Milingimbi Yolngu, ten years learning and working with the Yolngu language, and as many years reading the works of anthropologists, linguists and Aboriginal writers. I feel that I have only the remotest understanding of this question but it is one which needs to be thought about and talked about. Hopefully this article will provoke debate.

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.

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.

In its first report to the Director-General of Education, QATSICC stated that -

It is important the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be encouraged to develop and retain a pride in their own cultural heritage…

There is also a need for the wider Australian society to be encouraged to appreciate and become aware of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage in this state.

Moves by Aborigines to control their own education are receiving support from governments with proposals such as a National Aboriginal Teaching Service. Three Aborigines – a lawyer, a champion rugby player and an educator – told associate editor Tim Isles [of Education News] about their education and successful careers.

Paul Hughes, Mark Ella and Pat 0’Shane came from different backgrounds and have chosen different careers, but each has succeeded outstandingly despite an education system which exposed him or her to racism.

The magnitude of their achievement is reflected in a survey by the Aboriginal Research Centre at Monash University, which found that by 1982 there had been only about 30 Aboriginal graduates from Australian universities.

Significantly, analysis of the survey data showed that three-quarters of those graduates were motivated by the desire to prove themselves and their race. An overwhelming majority had earlier encountered, in the words of the Director of the Centre, Ms Eve Fesl, ’the negative tastes of racism.

There were other important findings too. Most of the respondents had graduated in recent years and had completed their studies at an older age than Australian students generally. The proportion of females was also atypically high, and 88 per cent of the Aboriginal graduates held another university qualification in addition to their basic degree.

But there are important moves under way to improve the Aboriginal education system and free it from often well-meant but damaging white control which has never fully come to terms with the structure of Aboriginal society.

Many teachers involved in school education of Aboriginal children have, for a variety of complex reasons, found it difficult to design programs that begin with the things children know and move to those things that children have to learn. All too frequently school education offered to Aboriginal children has been conceived in Western terms and delivered in our language. Programs designed for children from mainstream Australia have simply been transposed with minimal adaptation into Aboriginal schools. In many curriculum areas the results have not been exciting. In the area of mathematics they have been dismal if not disastrous (see Williams, 1979). The introduction of bilingual education into many of the remote traditionally oriented communities of the Northern Territory has made it possible for educators to re-examine the assumptions on which many of our mathematics offerings have been based. This paper outlines some of the initiatives that have been taken in the Northern Territory to enable children to formally organise and classify local Aboriginal mathematical knowledge as well as begin to acquire some ideas related to the Western view of the world and so provide more meaningful introductory mathematics programs for Aboriginal children.

In considering the role of tutors of Aboriginal and Islander students at secondary school, the fundamental question is, “What can tutors do to help students that isn’t being done by teachers in schools?” Of course, working with students on a one-to-one basis or in small groups will be seen as an obvious advantage of the tutoring system. However, it alone is not enough, and tutors need to develop specific skills and expertise if they are to help Aboriginal and Islander students to negotiate, and achieve in, an imperfect system that is, I believe, inappropriate and even alien to many Aborigines and Islanders.

Films are a significant social event in many isolated Aboriginal communities. It has been argued, however, that they are a disruptive influence on the transmission of traditional culture (Shimpo, 1978) and provide inappropriate models for behaviour (Thompson, 1983).

This paper examines a small group of Aboriginal children’s perception and understanding of films in an isolated, traditionally oriented Aboriginal community. It focuses on the way in which a small group of Aboriginal informants classify films and attempts to examine the basis for some of the classifications. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the extent to which the use of particular types of film classification can give an insight into the isolated community audiences’ knowledge and understanding of the social realities in the wider world outside the isolated community.

This article is the second of a two-part series on Torres Strait Islander children whose families have settled on the Queensland mainland. Here I discuss some of the language difficulties of these children. The first part, dealing with their language backgrounds, appeared in Vol.12 No.3, June/July 1984.

There are at least three competing interpretations of Aboriginal classroom behaviour in tradition-oriented communities. These interpretations and the theories they support may well be familiar to experienced teachers. However, the aim here is not to expound theory but to draw out implications for classroom practice.

The first interpretation is that much of the behaviour of Aboriginal children in the classroom is explicable in terms of cultural deficits relative to the demands of school. It is a time-worn but by no means old-fashioned notion that tradition-oriented socialisation renders Aboriginal children ill-fitted to school. Certainly, Aboriginal students are often characterised as passive and given to non-participation, punctuated occasionally by one word responses at best.

My own research into classroom interaction between teachers and Aboriginal students confirms that there is little verbal interaction between them relative to that in white classrooms (Folds, 1984a). However, the ethnocentric assumptions of deficit theory that school is a given and that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children learn in exactly the same way are ill-founded and have alienated Aborigines from school rather than improved educational outcomes.

Many teachers see classroom behaviour in terms of differences rather than deficits. In particular, relative lack of verbal interaction is viewed as a cultural phenomenon modelled on Aboriginal learning style where the student makes little personal input. The Aboriginal teaching and learning style has been thoroughly documented elsewhere (Harris, 1980).

The Western Australian Maths Syllabus with Notes is the recommended Maths curriculum for all Northern Territory schools. However, for teachers in tribal Aboriginal communities it is obvious that the gulf between this syllabus and the education setting is enormous. It is therefore essential that teachers try to bridge this gulf. The answer does not lie in the syllabus itself, but in the insights a teacher has about the culture and systems of knowledge of his/her Aboriginal students. I would like to talk about these insights in the form of a letter to a first-year non-Aboriginal teacher in an Early Childhood class in an Aboriginal bilingual school in the Northern Territory. I hope it makes her/him a little more insightful, because it has made me so.

Dear H.……

By now you will have had time to look at the Western Australian Maths Syllabus with Notes which is the recommended Maths curriculum for N.T. schools. If you are like me, you will initially have been overwhelmed at the thought of having to interpret it for planning a Maths program in your Aboriginal classroom. But take heart, because I would like to try to help you think about how to do this, and I’ll refer you to support materials and readings that have some answers. Then, hopefully, you can feel confident about planning a Maths program to guide your students towards meaningful experiences.

I believe that, as teachers in Aboriginal schools, it is essential that we try to make education (and Maths in particular) meaningful for our students. Without meaning and purpose in education, we are perpetuating the unequal opportunity that has been offered to Aboriginal students in the past.

In the first issue of The Aboriginal Child at School last year, we described the theoretical framework for considering factors contributing to the school success of Aboriginal children as presented in Aboriginal Futures : Review of Research and developments and Related Policies in the Education of Aborigines (Watts, 1981).

The philosophical basis for this consideration is well worth stating again:

Throughout this exploration of the education of Aborigines the view is taken that school success means success in achieving the full range of goals envisaged in the establishment of schools and the determination of their programs: