Indigenous Australia News

In the chaos of starting first semester, three excellent events have passed unnoticed in this blog (but not in my thoughts): Tony Woodbury’s Master class and workshop on speech play and verbal art T (February 13 2009) at ANU, National symposium on assessing English as a second/other language in the Australian context (20-21 February 2009) at UNSW, and the State Round of OzCLO, the High School Computational and Linguistic Olympiads at the University of Sydney (starring Wemba-Wemba, Pitjantjatjara and a brilliant problem on Japanese braille).
What must be passed on, however, is this message from the Reverend Dr Djiniyini Gondarra. Longterm readers of the blog will remember his appalled and very moving reaction to the heavyhandedness of the Intervention in the Northern Territory in 2007. Things have not improved.

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Today’s Honours list [.pdf] gives Indigenous Australians something to celebrate – Mick Dodson as Australian of the Year and the award of a Companion of the Order of Australia to Faith Bandler.
And for Indigenous languages, there are two awards of Members in the General Division of the Order of Australia to celebrate:
1. the late Dr R. Marika, “For service to Indigenous communities in rural and remote areas as an educator, linguist and scholar, through the preservation of Indigenous languages and the promotion of reconciliation and cross-cultural understanding”
2. the Reverend Dr Bill Edwards, who has worked for over 50 years with Pitjantjatjara people, learning the language, helping with documentation, with schooling, who pioneered the teaching of Indigenous languages at university, and who still helps out as an interpreter in hospitals and gaols.
Both awards come in the shadow of a government decision which goes against what both Bill and Dr Marika have fought for. Bill has protested about the NT Government’s decision to close bilingual education in a letter to the Australian.
Dr Marika died before the decision was made. But in her 1998 Wentworth Lecture [.rtf], we can see what she would have said about the destruction of her hopes for two-way education.

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Re-awakening languages: Theory & practice in the revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous languages
Proposals are invited for an edited volume that will include contributions from a broad range of authors involved in the revitalisation of Australian languages. If you, your colleagues or your students are participants in Indigenous languages revitalisation anywhere in Australia you are strongly encouraged to contribute.
The book will be independently edited by a panel consisting of John Hobson (University of Sydney), Kevin Lowe (NSW Board of Studies), Susan Poetsch (NSW Board of Studies) and Michael Walsh (University of Sydney) and be published by Sydney University Press (SUP). It is intended that the final product will be a significant Australian resource comparable to Hinton & Hale (eds.) (2001) The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice.

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Richard Trudgen of the Aboriginal Resource Development Service Inc (ARDS, working with Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land) has an interesting discussion paper on the Federal Intervention in the Northern Territory.
It’s called ‘Are We Heading in the Right Direction? “Closing the Gap” or “Making it Bigger”?[.pdf] [Thanks Greg for pointing it out!] He gave the paper [1] just before the NT Minister for Education, Marion Scrymgour, announced the plan to make all schools teach in English for the first four hours every day (see posts by Inge Kral and Felicity Meakins), but much of what he says is directly relevant to that policy.
One of his basic arguments is that in places like Arnhem Land much of the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in areas such as education, health, etc stems from a failure of communication. Yolngu often don’t understand what non-Indigenous people are telling them, and vice versa. But the consequences are much worse for the Yolngu who, so Trudgen says, are living in nightmarish confusion. Bureaucrats/teachers/police etc. are irritated by communication breakdown, but it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives so much.
The Minister’s response to this breakdown is to tell Indigenous people “Learn English”. That’s what Governor George Gawler told the Indigenous inhabitants of Adelaide in 1840. Trudgen’s response is to tell the non-Indigenous people who go to work in Arnhem Land “Learn Yolngu Matha” [or the relevant local language].

“All teachers, police officers, health personnel, administrators, miners, and contractors entering Aboriginal lands, should attempt to learn the language of the people, as does the Australian Army before sending soldiers into East Timor, Afghanistan and other non-English speaking places”. [2]

Learning a language is difficult, hard work and takes time, so that it is unlikely that many non-Indigenous people will adopt Trudgen’s approach. The Minister’s approach,has behind it a kind of realism (for access to information the Yolngu must learn English), and above all the weight of the mass media (predominantly English-speaking) and the concerned but ill-informed opinionati (such as Helen Hughes). Unfortunately they mostly fail to recognise that the same reasons why the average Darwin journalist/NT teacher/bureaucrat doesn’t bother learning Indigenous languages (difficult, hard work and takes time) apply to Indigenous people.

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This arrived in the e-mail – and would be a great opportunity for an Indigenous researcher interested in languages to work with the fabulous audio-visual collection at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra, or to engage with the Government on language policy.

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The inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Non-Fiction) has been won by Philip Jones for his book Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and encounters on Australian frontiers (Wakefield Press, 2007).
[ Update 6/10/08 And the book has now also won the Chief Minister’s NT History Book award against some fine competitors, including the author and Anna Kenny (Muslim cameleers), Darrell Lewis (Murranji track), Alec Kruger’s autobiography, and Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster on murderous Constable Wilshire].
The book is a pleasurable mingling of history and reconstructed ethnographic fragments, presented as a series of stories about encounters between Aborigines and non-Aborigines from 1788 to the early twentieth century. Each chapter is a reflection on an artefact in the collection of the South Australian Museum. These are the stories that are shrunk into a single line caption in a museum display. The stories are about the people involved – the maker, the collector, their friends, associates and relations – bringing in the history of the artefact and the wider context in which it was collected, and what this may say about the relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines.

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