Despite the introductory ‘rider’ being provided so that readers be ‘advised to remain aware of the possible cultural bias resulting’ from the fact that ‘those interviewed, although possessing vast experience of Aboriginal education are non-aboriginal people’ (p. 26), Buckley's article is a confused and poorly articulated comment on the views of a small number of non-Aboriginal educators relating to attendant issues to implementation of the Batchelor College Teacher Education program. Buckley gets off to a poor start by not getting the name of the program correct. His Remote Access Teacher Education program is in fact known as the Remote Area Teacher Education (RATE) program and has been referred to as this for most of the last fifteen years.

This paper reviews the research work of Dr Stephen Harris in his 1990 book entitled Two-Way Schooling: Education and Cultural Survival. It is not possible to review the book in its entirety in great detail, so an overall view will be taken and the following key questions will be answered:

• who is doing the talking?

• what kind of Indigenous subjects are being constructed?

• how is the construction ofworld view achieved?

• are there any alternatives?

Between 1978 and 1979 I taught in a number of small newly established schools in some of the communities of what was then referred to as the Central Reserve (now called the Ngaanyatjarra Lands) in Western Australia. I had recently graduated from college and was very uncertain about the content and methodology required to be an effective teacher of Aboriginal students. This general lack of confidence was compounded by my lack of experience in interacting with Aboriginal people, especially those who spoke little English. Moreover, there was no support service from the regional education office in Kalgoorlie (about 1000 kms to the south) and I generally taught in one-teacher situations with little opportunity to share with other colleagues. In general, I found my professional life in the Central Reserve to be quite dissatisfying and disillusioning.

In the past ten years there has been an increasing interest in early childhood education in Aboriginal communities, particularly for 4-year-olds and under. The reasons for this are varied. One of the main reasons is the existence of the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP) where Aboriginal people in remote communities receive the equivalent of the unemployment benefit in exchange for work and training, usually four hours per day for five days. Other larger communities, for example Yuendemu or Maningrida in the Northern Territory, have considerable numbers of people studying, often at Batchelor College, and therefore some type of support is needed to take care of their young children. Increasingly Aboriginal people are taking on professional jobs in communities — teachers, health care workers and office administrators. All these factors are leading to a need to re-evaluate traditional forms of child care, which in these changing times is putting an unacceptable burden on older women and the extended family generally. Other pertinent reasons are the need for a more cohesive strategy to pass on cultural knowledge, to support language maintenance and language revival and support very young mothers who need the support of older women with more experience.

My topic today is Aboriginal education – a reality in the 1990s. To be more specific, I should say Tiwi education is a reality in the 1990s. For it is in the Tiwi context that education has taken a giant step forward. This is because firstly we are working together to Aboriginalise the school – or rather to localise the school. Secondly, I have been challenged to ‘let go’, to move away from the dominant role as Principal (i.e. non-Aboriginal, non-Tiwi Principal). This challenge came as late as May 31 1995 from our present Assistant Director of Catholic Education.

Milimika commenced at Murrupurtiyanuwu when we realised that for a Tiwi person it is too difficult to stand alone in leadership. Thus as Principal-in-Training I came up with the idea of a Milimika group.

The data reported in this article were collected in 1990 and 1991. To determine if verbal reasoning abilities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary applicants have changed over the years, data for a more recent group of applicants were examined. Data from a sample of 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary applicants for 1994, 1995 and 1996 were subjected to analysis.

In northern Australia Aboriginal ‘settlements’ or communities are, in the main, the product of a variety of west-centric priorities, the needs, for example of missionaries to keep prospective converts conveniently at hand to maintain the pressure of the Christian conversion process or for government agencies to distribute welfare from single accessible locations. The establishment of fixed communities usually brought considerable advantage and power to those mainstream organisations which established them. However, along with some obvious physical benefits for the local people, such as improved access to some of the accruals of west-centric technology and welfare, came a variety of hazards and obstacles to the maintenance of a lifestyle with which local people felt secure and confident.

Last year I was approached by the Thursday Island High School in Torres Strait to analyse the major linguistic differences between Standard English and Torres Strait Creole – the language of the majority of the students – insofar as these affect the students' comprehension and production of written English texts. In this, the High School was responding to a request by its Management Committee and general concern about the students' acquisition of English literacy.

In 1994 I was employed as a consultant in the Office of HRM working on a DEET (Department of Employment Education and Training) funded project in the compilation of an Indigenous employment strategy which resulted in the development of the university ‘Recruitment and Career Development Strategy for Indigenous Australians’.

Poems, songs and chants are excellent resources for developing competence in English for Aboriginal children who speak other languages at home. Children find rhythmic and repetitive language attractive and accessible. It is not unusual to hear children using the language over and over again in their play and, incidentally, teaching it to younger children in the community. As chunks of language are memorised, new language structures and vocabulary are also internalised. While there is very little commercial material available which is relevant to the interests and needs of remote Aboriginal children, it is a powerful learning activity for children to work with the teacher to create texts which reflect shared experiences.