{"id":3463,"date":"2006-09-28T23:32:37","date_gmt":"2006-09-28T23:32:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/09\/bush-school-the-warlmanpa-and-the-bakers\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:47:06","slug":"bush-school-the-warlmanpa-and-the-bakers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2006\/09\/bush-school-the-warlmanpa-and-the-bakers\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush School: The Warlmanpa and the Bakers"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was an engaging documentary Bush School<\/a> on SBS tonight, about Warrego School in a ghost mining town out of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It started a few years ago with eleven Warlmanpa<\/a> children from the Mangarlawurru [Mungalawurru] Aboriginal community travelling 80 km each day to get to there. They’re still going, singing their lessons in the bus. They attend 100% of the time, achieve national benchmarks in English literacy and numeracy, focus on horse-riding and swimming. The school is working hard to combat the hearing loss that most of the kids suffer from (ear infections have meant that several of the children have hearing aids). And they’ve sent one of their brightest students to study at a private girls school in New South Wales.<\/p>\n


\nIt’s required amazing energy, determination and interesting ideas from the non-Indigenous teachers, Sandra and Colin Baker, who are the centre of the doco. But it has also taken phenomenal dedication on the part of the small and determined Warlmanpa community at Mangarlawurru, who look after the kids and support this school – the grandparents and great grand parents, Eva Napanangka Kelly, Marie Napanangka Rennie and Colin Japaljarri Freddie. They are determined to raise their families away from the alcohol and despair of the local town. And undoubtedly the presence of the Bakers, even 40 km away, and the schooling, transport and opportunities they provide, have made it easier for Mangarlawurru community to keep going.
\nBUT – the downside – there are no natural successors to the Bakers at the school. There don’t seem to be any Indigenous teacher trainees in the school, even though the Northern Territory has a tertiary college which trains Indigenous teachers<\/a>. The kids deserve a decent education when the Bakers retire, and teaching Indigenous kids shouldn’t require the 24\/7 that the Bakers put into it. Nor should secondary education for Indigenous kids require them to get scholarships to private schools thousands of kilometres away.
\nAnd as for language – well, a handful of Warlmanpa families (including those at Mangarlawurru) have been tenaciously hanging onto their language against all the odds. But language doesn’t get much of a look in, in the doco – in fact I didn’t hear the word ‘Warlmanpa’. Just once in the program Marie got in a couple of sentences about how she and Eva were teaching the children ‘language’, the names of bush foods. One Warlmanpa word was nganjawarli<\/em> ‘bush tomato’.
\nSo, watch ‘Bush School’; it’s an endearing picture. But don’t take it as THE model for Indigenous education, because Bakers and Evas and Maries and Colins are rare, and the combination is even rarer.
\nNgulayi!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was an engaging documentary Bush School on SBS tonight, about Warrego School in a ghost mining town out of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It started a few years ago with eleven Warlmanpa children from the Mangarlawurru [Mungalawurru] Aboriginal community travelling 80 km each day to get to there. They’re still going, singing … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indigenous-australia-news","category-indigenous-language-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4417,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3463\/revisions\/4417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}