Language, parliament, hypocrisy: Happy (belated) International Mother Language Day

February 21 was International Mother Language Day,  a day dedicated to celebrating, preserving and protecting languages of all peoples. In the week leading up to the day, media reported that, late last year, NT MLA Bess Price was told off by house speaker Kezia Purick for using Warlpiri, her first language, in Parliament.

Purick told Price “the language of the assembly is English”, although it remains to be seen where, exactly, that rule is written down. Around one third of the Northern Territory population is Aboriginal, and Warlpiri is one of the stronger NT languages, with around 3000 people still speaking it. In the NT, there is a daily ABC Radio news broadcast in Warlpiri (and another one in Yolngu Matha).

The news about Price being denied the right to speak her language came shortly after PM Malcolm Turnbull’s February 10 Closing the Gap report, which once again showed the extent to which Australian governments are failing the first people of this country. Turnbull started his speech in Ngunnawal, the language of Canberra’s Aboriginal people.

Australia: where the leader of a racist government can use a few words of an Aboriginal language while brushing over the ongoing impacts of colonisation and racism, while an Aboriginal MLA gets a dressing down for speaking her language, the language of her constituents.

A tribute to Gurrumul and his uncle, Mr Yunupingu

On June 2, Dr M. Yunupingu, former Yothu Yindi front man and Gumatj clan member, passed away at his home community of Yirrkala, in North-East Arnhem Land.

It’s often the case that we learn more about somebody’s life only after they die. As it happened, the week Yunupingu died, I had bought a copy of a beautiful new biography of his nephew, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, known more commonly just as Gurrumul.

Reading the biography, and seeing the tributes flow for Yunupingu when he died, I became acutely more aware of the role musicians such as these, bands such as Yothu Yindi, have played in the struggle for recognition, appreciation and respect for Aboriginal people, and their languages and cultures.

There is, of course, the obvious. “Treaty”, for example, catapulted the demand for recognition to an international stage. As Robert Hillman writes in the new Gurrumul – his life and music, “All these issues had been spoken of in a politely insistent way for a long time, but the Yothu Yindi people were different – louder, ruder more exuberant than anyone who’d come before them.”

But an Aboriginal musician reaching international fame, singing songs in his own language – like uncle and nephew both – that has had an impact on Aboriginal audiences that is perhaps not obvious to not-Aboriginal, English-speaking fans. Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr, another relative and Yothu Yindi band member, says that Yothu Yindi paved the way for Gurrumul’s acceptance by an international audience as a solo performer.

In Yothu Yindi, he played the drums and then the guitar and keyboards (all of which he taught himself). He was never the front man like his uncle, but widely recognised as the musical strength of the band.

When he went solo, Ganambarr explains the impact his music (performed in a number of his native Yolngu languages, with smatterings of English) had on her, and presumably not just her: “When that first solo album of his came out, I cried. [He sings in a way] that makes them appeal to a white audience. But the expressions he uses in those songs, they’re the expressions we use in traditional songs … People don’t have to know what the words mean. All that they listen to is the voice, and the impression the voice conveys. And when Yolngu listen to it, we understand every word, and the meaning of every word. It’s so powerful.”

Indeed, there is something very powerful and poignant about the international accolades being showered on a Gumatj man, singing in Galpu, Gumatj and Djambarrpuyngu – three languages that, compared to other Australian Aboriginal languages are probably quite healthy, but are still considered critically endangered.

Hillman writes that Gurrumul’s songs don’t touch on politics much – quite unlike his uncle, for example, who when he wasn’t singing “Treaty” was advocating for bilingual education and becoming the Northern Territory’s first Aboriginal principal.

But perhaps there is something inherently political about an Aboriginal musician – from the strong, proud people who famously sent the bark petition to Canberra 50 years ago -- taking his language and culture to Carnegie Hall in Manhattan, to Paris and London. Writing of Gurrumul’s performance with Sting, in France 2010, Hillman writes: “The Gumatj language, the sacred repository of a culture and history older by far than that of France or any country in Europe, older than the entirety of Western civilisation, [was] about to be plaited with the younger, mongrel language of English.”

But mixed up with Hillman’s sublime observations of language and culture are light-hearted sketches of Gurrumul, down-to-earth, irreverent, utterly uninterested in fame.  The song he was meant to perform with Sting was Every Breath you Take, but “Gurrumul, relishing the swanky hotels booked for the tour … is having too much of a good time to commit himself to a whispery song with lyrics that deal ambiguously with love and longing.”

He did, in the end, do the duet, after a few frantic email exchanges between Paris and the far north Australian Elcho Island, where Gurrumul’s relatives translated Sting’s lyrics into first one, then another, of his languages, until they came up with something he was satisfied with.

Gurrumul grew up on Elcho Island, in the community of Galiwin’ku. While in recent years there has been much media focus on the conditions in Aboriginal communities, and particularly the experience of Aboriginal children there, there is something to be said for Aboriginal’s people’s approach to what the rest of us think of as disability. Gurrumul was born blind, but it didn’t hold him back: as a young one, he would ride his bike down Elcho’s famously steep hill, with family members lining the road yelling “go left! Right! Watch the pot holes!”

His family took it as given that his lack of sight would be made up for with other skills, and were not surprised when he taught himself a variety of instruments at a young age. As a left-hander, he famously plays the guitar upside-down, presumably because he had never seen it be played, so just took it as he found it and adapted to suit himself.

 His was a life seeped in an ancient language and tradition – which comes out in his music and continues to move audiences around the world to tears, although they don’t understand a word he is saying. “We come away from listening to Gurrumul with the word ‘beautiful’ on our lips”, Hillman writes, “but where that beauty comes from, its richness and complexity – that’s the wonder…

“The languages of Indigenous Australians, once numbering in the hundred, have roots in even more ancient languages … What listeners to Gurrumul’s voice and music hear is not simply ‘beauty’ but something that is the sound of life itself being honoured.” And surely, that honour is deserved, given the tenacity with which Gurrumul’s languages have survived, against the odds.

Gurrumul – his life and work, takes the reader on a whirlwind rock star tour of hotels and concert halls across Australia, Europe and the United states, as experienced by a blind man from a remote community, from one of the oldest living cultures on Earth. The story is often told from the point of view of his non-Yolngu band members and friends (as Gurrumul does not talk to journalists), who act as his some-time carers, some time cross-cultural guides.

At times verging on hilarity (he may be blind, but he adamantly refuses to wear white socks, leading to some last-minute panics), Hillman’s narrative is broken up with well-researched short essays on aspects of Yolngu language and culture, and stunning photography.

Poignantly, describing a time in 2010 when Gurrumul was dangerously ill, Hillman writes: “Any black Australian who becomes seriously ill in his late thirties has a very remote chance of reaching his late forties. A frightening number of black Australians – both men and women – lose their lives to renal failure, heart disease and liver disorders at about the age Gurrumul is now – almost thirty-nine – and many who are spared succumb ten or twenty years later.”

And so it was for Gurrumul’s uncle, fellow Gumatj, fellow trailblazer.  Mr Yunupingu was 56 years old, and he died of kidney failure.

In her June 5 obituary on The Drum, Tracy Hutchinson wrote: “I doubt there has been a more profoundly moving induction into the ARIA Hall of Fame than Yothu Yindi's last year.

And I doubt there is a more shameful indictment on us all that Mr Yunupingu died from a treatable illness in Australia in 2013. There are no cheap words to describe the magnitude of that.”

There are no words to describe it, and of course, Aboriginal people don't need words - they are living it. 

And the grieving for this particular man will last a long time. But thanks to his work, and also to technology, Aboriginal people from Arnhem Land and across the country can still watch him, painted up in ways that only they fully understand , singing "Treaty" to the world. Yunupingu's legacy is the voice and pride he gave to his people, and that legacy lives on in Gurrumul and others.

On the perils of writing a glossary

So this year I have landed a contract doing a technical writing job, about which I was rather excited.

We are in the home stretch now, as we get ready to print, and I spent three days this week writing the glossary.

I've never really thought about glossary writers before, although I was involved in writing a dictionary once and found it definitely appealed to my OCD tendencies.

But now, after my experience this week, I would like to talk to someone who writes glossaries for a living. I want to ask: how do you stay sane? What OHS policies do you have in place? Can you still spell?

Here's how my three days went.

I was initially pretty excited about the glossary, being quite a lover of lexicography. "An excuse to read dictionary definitions", I thought happily to myself. "And get paid for it!"

I decided I needed a system. I already had the words that needed to be in the glossary. I read a few "how to write a glossary" articles. My sense of excitement increased. It dawned on me that I would need to read numerous definitions of the same word in multiple dictionaries, to make comparisons and then craft my own Plain English summary. "Wacko", I thought. "I usually do that for fun, and people think I'm crazy. Now it's my job!"

I selected the different dictionaries I would use, a variety of online  free dictionaries, dictionaries I subscribe to and the good hardcopy book variety.

And I began. And I loved it!

For the first afternoon.

By the second day, I was having trouble differentiating between nouns and adjectives.

Oh, and you know that thing you get when you've been looking at a word for so long it starts to appear kind of weird, like it must be spelt wrong?

At the end of the second day of glossary writing, Pete seemed to sense it would be good for me to get out of the house. I went to aqua aerobics. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever done. There was  the horizon! Movement! People! Wet water splashing around in a wet fashion! I laughed a lot in that aqua class, much to the concern of my fellow splashers.

Day three. I was beginning to waver. Each time I made a glossary entry, I'd first been checking to see the context in which  it was used in the document - verb or noun, for example. By day three I was getting a lot better at re-writing sections of the book using plainer English, to avoid having to make a new entry in the glossary.

I started to be  personally offended when one of the dictionaries -- the one I'd decided was my favourite -- let me down. (Yes, that's right, it was letting me down. After we'd been through so much together.)

I took a break at noon to go to a refugee rights  rally. Someone handed me a letter from a detained Tamil man, asking me if I would read it to the gathered crowd.

I looked down at the bit of paper. It had words on it. So many words. They didn't, it didn't .... I couldn't... "No", I said. "I'm sorry. I feel a bit sick. Can someone else do it? It's not even alphabetical order."

After the rally I came home to crank through another letter.  I was up to "m" when I'd gone to the rally. By "p", this is how it looked:

rebate

a discount or amount of money that is returned or given back after something has been paid for. For example, if you have to buy a uniform for work, you might get some of the money you spent back as a tax rebate

recognition

this word must die

redundancy

this word can go to hell

redundant

yeah right

referee

soccer? ole ole ole?

I remembered a book I read a while back called Reading the OED, about a man who - yes, that's right. The whole thing. How did you guess? I remembered finding it entertaining reading  about what it did to his health and sanity.

When Pete got home at six, something happened. I guess I had a slightly wild glint in my eye. Or maybe he'd been there longer than I realised and overheard my end of  the heated conversation with the Merriam-Webster. Whatever. He was clearly concerned. And that was before I looked up at him and started to giggle hysterically, while also sobbing, and gesticulating towards the dictionaries.

I decided it was knock off time.

It only took me a few hours to recover, which bodes well for next week when I crank through s-z. Or so I thought. Tonight I'm wondering if perhaps the whole experience has enhanced my OCD tendencies somewhat...

We recently moved house, and today I bought one of those things you hang in the shower to keep soap, shampoo etc in.

When I was having a shower tonight, I realised that- unless you are very careful about how you arrange said soap, shampoo etc - it hangs at an ugly angle. I spent a fair bit of time working out the best way  to make it all hang nicely (don't worry- when I realised this was going to take some time, I turned off the water so as not to waste).

When I realised what I was doing, I laughed at myself. Well, giggled, actually. Rather hysterically, crouched in the shower stall. And thought about looking up the word "balance" in the Macquarie and Collins...

Language, society, disability: thought-provoking article

Today is International Day of People with Disability, and to mark it I wanted to share this article I read a while back which I think might just have swayed my opinion on the issue of "disabled people" vs "people with disability".

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-15/young-reporting-it-right/4371912

Well, no, actually, I just cringed when I wrote "disabled people", so possibly I am still equivocating, but Stella young makes a compelling case for the social model of disability - society disables us, we are disabled by a society so focused on physical perfection.

"To say that a person "has a disability" is to say that these barriers are our responsibility. My disability exists not because I use a wheelchair, but because the broader environment isn't accessible.

In my own home, where I've been able to create an environment that works for me, I'm hardly disabled at all. I still have an impairment, and there are obviously some very restrictive things about that, but the impact of disability is less."

I must give it more thought...

Happy reading!

Bipartisan support for bilingual ed?

"Our language is like a pearl inside a shell. The shell is like the people that carry the language. If the language is taken away, then that would be like a pearl is gone. We would be like an empty oyster shell."

-Yurranydjil Dhurrkay, Galiwin'ku, Elcho Island, North-East Arnhem Land

Emma Murphy, Darwin

On September 17, the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs tabled its much-anticipated inquiry into language learning on Aboriginal communities: Our Land Our Language.

The report unashamedly puts language front and centre not just to Aboriginal identity but also health and wellbeing. It says, for example, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who speak an Indigenous language enjoy “markedly” better health and are more likely to: be employed, attend school and receive a post-school qualification than those who don’t. They are also less like to abuse alcohol, be charged by police or to have been a victim of violence.

Aboriginal languages are dying at a horrifying rate: of the around 250 languages spoken at the time of invasion, around half have disappeared. The report found that only about 18 are spoken today – many others are being painstakingly revived, recovered and recorded. Greg Dickson, writing on Crikey.com on September 17, said that National Geographic has identified northern Australia as a “global hotspot”, where endangered languages face a “severe threat” of extinction.

It is with this sense of urgency that Aboriginal communities and bilingual education advocates have long rallied for more support and funding for the urgent work of teaching children to speak, read and write their own language.

The recommendations in Our Land Our Language have been welcomed by bilingual education advocates, and are implicitly highly critical of current approaches – especially in the Northern Territory, where bilingual education was dramatically shut down four years ago by the then Labor government.

For example, it recommends “resourcing bilingual school education programs for Indigenous communities where the child’s first language is and Indigenous language” – in the NT, about 40% of children speak a language other than English at home. It also recommends compulsory cultural awareness training, and training in “English as an additional language” teaching for all teachers working in Aboriginal communities.

Beyond the classroom, the report recommends establish a national interpreting service for Indigenous languages, expanding the Indigenous Languages Support Program and establish improving community access to language archive at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

It also recommends constitutional recognition of Indigenous languages.

While it is unclear how many of the recommendations will be implemented, both Labor and the Coalition were quick to welcome the report.  The September 18 Australian said School Education Minister Peter Garrett had promised to “talk to state governments about adopting bilingual education for Indigenous children”. He acknowledged attendance would improve if children were taught in their own languages for the early years.

Opposition Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion said education was a matter for state and territory governments, but conceded “I generally support bilingual education as a transitional program from preschool to Year 5”, the Australian said.

However in the recent past, both Labor and Coalition governments have stressed the importance of English as the predominant language in education.

Labor MP Shayne Neumann, who chairs the standing committee, told media on September 17 that the result of NT Labor’s English-only policy, introduced in 2008, was “a decline in school attendance and educational outcomes”. He said Territory Labor defended the policy at the committee hearing in Darwin early this year, only to quietly drop it soon after.

This report was released less than a month after the NT elections, which saw a CLP government swept to power on a strong bush vote. On the campaign trail, and during community visits since, the CLP has talked up the importance of first-language learning – without committing to any detailed policy or funding commitments.

The task now for Aboriginal communities and defenders of bilingual education will be to make sure governments start putting funding and resource commitments on the table. It will be a large task to rebuild abandoned bilingual programs in the NT, for example. We must ensure governments don’t adopt the easier, more symbolic recommendations and let the actual hard work fall by the wayside.

[Our Land Our Language can be accessed here.]

The joy of Yolngu Matha pronouns

English personal pronouns
1st person singular                   I
2nd person singular                  you
3rd person singular                  s/he/it
1st person plural                      we
2nd person plural                     you all (y'all)
3rd person plural                     they

Yolngu  Matha personal pronouns
1st person singular                ngarra
2nd person singular               nhe
3rd person singular               ngayi
1st person dual inclusive       ngali
1st person dual exclusive      linyu
1st person plural inclusive     limurr
1st person plural exclusive    napurr
2nd person plural                nhuma
3rd person dual                  manda
3rd person plural                nhuma

Confused? Basically this means you can talk about someone in a gender-neutral way.

Also, here's a conversation I had with a colleague today that made me realise how awesome the inclusive/exclusive concept is.

English:
We (James and I) worked on it today and if you're free tomorrow we (you and I) could go over it and then on Friday we (colleagues other than you plus I) have a meeting until ten, but  after that we (you, James and I) could finish it off.

Yolngu Matha (or at least, YM pronouns- keeping the rest in English out of respect for the English-only readers):
Linyu worked on it today, and if nhe are free tomorrow ngali could go over it and then on Friday napurr have a meeting until 10, but after that limurr could finish it off.

Am I the only one who finds that exciting? Still confused? Study another language, it changes your world.... :)

Digital TV and Aboriginal Languages and Culture

Language and education specialists are concerned the federal government's national roll-out of digital television will have a detrimental effect on the preservation and transmission of Aboriginal languages and cultures.

In 1987, the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS) was  established, to balance the introduction of mainstream TV channels (via satellite) into remote communites with some local control and  ability to broadcast local content. Typically  this saw communities having free-to-air access to between two and four mainstream channels, plus Aboriginal-content channels such as National Indigenous Television (NITV) and Indigenous Community Television (ICTV). A lot of ICTV's content is in Aboriginal languages, and is produced by Aboriginal people in their own communities.

Apart from NITV and ICTV, BRACS also  allowed individual communities to broadcast local content.

In her joint submission to the inquiry with Dr William Fogarty, Dr Inge Kral, a research fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic  Policy Research, emphasised the central role multidmedia technologies,  specifically video production, play in contemporary remote Aboriginal life. "Where young people have access to resources they are engaging in digital cultural heritage projects and creative cultural multimedia and music production for broadcasting, festivals and enterprise. Importantly, such activities commonly incorporate Indigenous languages", she said. "Here young adults are exhibiting pride in Indigenous language and culture and modelling of purpose for mother tongue and English language literacy for the next generation."

With almost total unemployment on communities, and limited formal education opportunites beyond school, boredom is a huge factor, particularly for young people. Increasingly, community media and resource centres are becoming places of informal learning, cultural expression and language maintenance. Kral pointed to the popularity of music recording software, which will often also inspire young musicians to film music clips, design CD covers and upload resources to the web.

The ability for such youth-initiated, local content to be broadcast to the community in turn fosters cultural pride and encourages further engagement and activity.

But the digital TV roll-out threatens this flowering informal Aboriginal media industry. The roll-out, according to Kral, will undermine communities' broadcasting ability, as direct satellite-to-home technology replaces the current communtiy-based transmitters. She  told the inquiry: "Remote communities will have 16 channels of mainstream, monolingual, monocultural English language TV and no Indigenous services. This will lead to an onslaught of Western English language images and cultural content.

"It will see an undermining of the motivation for Indigenous youth to participate in activities and training leading to a potential area of employment in the enterprise generation. It will also impact on Indigenous language and culture maintenance and it will hinder one important means by which community pride in Indigenous languages is generated."

The Indigenous Remote Communcations Association (IRCA), in an October submission to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, noted: "For many remote Indigenous people, convergence spells an increasing threat to their fragile linguistic and cultural world, with western media and values distracting young people from gaining cultural knowledge. They feel like a tsunami of mainstream media and communications is bearing down upon them via the internet, 16 channels of digital TV and new media platforms."


In September, communications minister Stephen Conroy announced SBS and NITV would enter discussions about a possible merger. If successful, this could ensure the continuation of NITV, and mean it was accessed by more people, as it is currently not a free-to-air service. But some argue NITV, while valuable,  cannot replace local community-produced content. According to IRCA, "NITV tends not be popular in most remote communities with the programming, typically in English with urban presenters, not regarded by remote viewers as reflective of their experience, views and cultural identity".


IRCA has also pointed out, in Joining the Dots: Dreaming a Digital Future for Remote Indigenous Media, that the benefits of direct-to-home TV technology assume a particular way of accessing media - a particular way of life - that doesn't necessarily apply to remote Aboriginal communities: typically, people move from house to house, watch television outside in large groups, use exention leads to take TVs to sorry camps away from the house.


Remote Aboriginal people  - particularly young people - are embracing new technologies at an impressive rate. Far from this signalling a threat to their language and culture, research is proving that new technologies are  being adapted and used to maintain, share, and develop cultural and linguistic heritage. For this to continue, it is vital that any technological upgrades do not come at the expense of local control of content, linguistic diversity and equal access to content production. Young Aboriginal people are showing that embracing the digital age is not at all at odds with celebrating and expressing one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. Can the digital TV roll-out improve their access to technology without sacrificing their control over it?

New NT education policy still sidelines Indigenous language

[Reprinted from www.greenleft.org.au]

Saturday, November 5, 2011

By Emma Murphy, Darwin

The Northern Territory government’s latest proposed approach to teaching Aboriginal students, like its previous policy, places a primacy on reading and writing in English. It allows for students’ first language to be used to help teachers explain new concepts, but critics fear it falls short of valuing Aboriginal languages.

The draft Literacy Framework for Students with English as an Additional Language was released on August 31. It slightly amends the controversial “First Four Hours” policy, introduced in January 2009, which expired earlier this year.

Many criticised the First Four Hours policy, saying it ended the NT’s “Two-Way Learning” policy, which used bilingual education approaches and recognised the central role of Aboriginal teachers and teacher assistants. Under the First Four Hours policy, the first four hours of the school day — the most productive learning time — were taught in English only.

The government came under much pressure over the policy. At a time when it claimed to be focused on improving school attendance in Aboriginal communities, critics said ending bilingual education discouraged students from taking part in the mainstream schooling system.

Case studies of four Warlpiri schools showed no improvement — and sometimes a drop in attendance rates — since the policy was introduced.

When the policy was announced in 2008, Yolngu educator Yalmay Yunupingu said: “The decision to make English the only important language in our schools will only make the situation worse for our young people as they struggle to be proud Yolngu in a world that is making them feel that their culture is bad, unimportant and irrelevant in the contemporary world.”

Article 14.1 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, to which Australia is a signatory,says: “Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.”

The new draft policy was released in August. Many who saw the First Four Hours policy as an attack on Aboriginal identity and self-determination, and thought it contravened the UN declaration, eagerly awaited it.

The draft is based on a government-commissioned report by the Menzies School of Health Research, which reviewed the literature on “Early years English language acquisition and instructional approaches for Aboriginal students with home languages other than English”.

The draft acknowledges the linguistic diversity of Aboriginal students in the Northern Territoty. It says: “More than 100 Aboriginal languages and dialects are spoken in the Territory. About 30% of NT school students are English as Additional Language (EAL) learners with one or more Indigenous home languages.”

Yet the policy does not recognise that teaching and nurturing literacy in these languages is of inherent worth.

Australia is home to some of the world’s oldest living languages. But UNESCO says it also has the world’s highest rate of language extinction. Yet the draft policy says teaching in the first four hours should remain “predominantly in English”, with home language used to explain new concepts.



Meredith Davies from the Darwin Aboriginal Rights Coalition told said: “Through supporting bilingual education, government respects Aboriginal culture, signalling that it has an equally valid place within the education system. This new policy does not recognise the inherent value of Indigenous languages but rather sees that they may be a useful tool through which to achieve better English literacy outcomes.”

The Menzies review covered several approaches to teaching EAL students. These included “Bilingual 50:50 instruction”, which aims to have students read and speak in both languages, through to “Culturally responsive instruction with strong [EAL] support”, which teaches students to speak and read in English only, but leaves space for “cultural maintenance”.

The Menzies report said effective bilingual approaches require support from the community, leadership from the school and Indigenous teachers, competent staff (including first-language speakers) and appropriate resources.

Failing these conditions, the report said EAL strategies were “the best approach to achieve improvement in student educational and language outcomes”.

The government’s draft policy most closely resembles such EAL strategies. This is despite evidence that bilingual education has strong support in communities, that there are many qualified and skilled Indigenous teachers working in the NT, and that some schools have teacher-linguists and language resource production centres.

The draft policy acknowledges “some communities will identify a desire to have their children learn to read and write in their home language as well as … English”. The education department will support communities by allowing them to use school facilities after hours “for cultural and language activities”.

The draft policy does not address how this option will work in practice. It is not clear whether teachers will have to work overtime or if extra funds will be allocated.

The draft proposes a further option for schools that want to teach Indigenous children’s first language in school hours. Directors of School Performance will consider “arrangements in schools where communities want their children … to read and write in their home language”.

The draft policy says such arrangements may be approved if the school can prove it has community support, competent staff and suitable curriculum resources.

There is no requirement that the government help communities meet these criteria.

Yingiya Guyula is a Liya-dhalinymirr man from north-east Arnhem land who was taught in the bilingual system. He is now a senior Yolngu Studies lecturer at Charles Darwin University. He said learning to read and write in one’s own language — not just maintaining the ability to speak it — was vital for his people to keep their strength and identity, while they negotiate their way through the non-Aboriginal world at the same time.

“Bilingual education did work. It did work,” he said. “I am one of the students who learned Yolngu Matha and Balanda Matha [English] in school. And now, I am here, working in the university, teaching language and culture. I sometimes help [my non-Yolngu colleagues] with grammar.

“Bilingual education never got in the way of a mainstream education. It fitted very, very well. It fitted perfectly. A lot of us are now teaching, and I am able to write, and I do lots of transcriptions, translations, for the stories that our old people have recorded.

“If I had never learnt Yolngu Matha, through bilingual education, back in the late ’60s and ’70s, I would have never got this far.”

[A version of this article first appeared in Tracker magazine.]

Postcard from Galiwin'ku

I have come back to stunning Galiwin’ku, Elcho Island, a tiny island in the Arafura Sea, almost swimming distance from the mainland.

I was here only a month ago, and it’s great to return so soon, to continue getting to know my adopted family.

The build-up to the wet season has definitely intensified since last time I was here, and I am appreciating the hire car (which we didn’t have last time), despite the tiny size of the community. The humidity makes us sluggish – adding to the exhaustion we feel at the end of each day spent speaking in/listening to a foreign language and finding the proper ways to behave in this vastly different culture, interpreting new signs and body language, respecting new boundaries, adjusting to the new concept of time.

This time we are here for an ear health project. It is my first time as a health educator, and talking about anatomy and physiology are proving to be refreshingly concrete after the abstract economic/social/political issues I’ve been focusing on this year. Australian Aboriginal languages don’t tend to use abstractions very often, making discussion of, say, “economic participation” incredibly challenging.

Aboriginal people, on the other hand, are more au fait with anatomy than we tend to be, being hunters etc. So it is no great leap from discussion anatomy to move onto discussing physiological function, if you find the right story line. So somehow over the course of this week I have found myself almost able to describe the entire anatomy and function of the ear in Yolŋu Matha. When I see a diagram of different parts of the ear I find myself knowing the Yolŋu Matha word before the English word, as that is the language I’ve acquired this new knowledge in.

But it is very exhausting, being immersed in the other language all day! It makes me remember being an exchange student in Chile, how I initially needed about 14 hours sleep to rest my brain, before I started thinking in Spanish.

So, the ear health field trip has come to an end for the time being, my colleagues are leaving tomorrow, and I am staying on for another five days. Maybe more language immersion (after a big sleep on the weekend!). I was hoping to do some education with Yolŋu women about the recently released federal government’s Indigenous Economic Development Strategy (http://www.indigenous.gov.au/ieds/) to follow on from some employment research I did last time.

But I’ve started reading the strategy, and it is rather depressing. Spin spin spin. When I have my community educator hat on, I read things differently to if I’m reading for political research, an article for Green Left Weekly, say. Each sentence I read, I wonder what it would mean to Yolŋu, how I would explain it to Yolŋu. And reading this new policy fills me with despair. How’s this for some incredibly abstract generative terms: “economic participation”, “social engagement”, “closing the gap”.

And that is before we start to look at the content, to discover the underlying meaning behind all the spin.

The more I read about the “closing the gap” initiative, the more I think when the government uses those words, it means “turning Aboriginal Australians into whitefellas”. I think it is more assimilationist bullshit. That doesn’t mean the goal of closing the life expectancy gap etc isn’t one worth fighting for.

But for the government, the way to do that seems to be to focus blindly on a few key benchmarks: Aboriginal people owning their own home, Aboriginal people working, Aboriginal people starting their own business.

What about the things we know really contribute to positive health outcomes? Aboriginal people being valued – as Aboriginal people, different to whitefellas, with different values; Aboriginal people having control and power over their lives and affairs; Aboriginal people not being an oppressed minority in a racist system Aboriginal culture being seen as inherently worthy; Aboriginal ownership and structures being recognised... Reckon that might help the health situation any?

Anyway I thought an interesting way to spend my days out here might be to find out what Yolŋu think about “closing the gap”. Have they heard about it? Do they know what it means? Do they agree with it? What would Yolŋu strategies for closing the gap look like? I wonder what the responses will be to the fact that the federal government used almost $100,000 of taxpayers’ money to design the “closing the gap” logo, on top on $1 million over 2 years to promote the initiative? (see http://tracker.org.au/2011/09/great-logo-but-program-a-no-go/)

In an interview with Yingiya Guyula published earlier on this blog, this is what he had to say about closing the gap:

"Let’s build a bridge to close that gap. That’s what I believe. Let’s build a bridge together. You don’t build it for me, we’ll build it together. "