(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.

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.

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).

(This is the first of two articles, based on a paper delivered at the 1982 conference of the Applied Linguistic Association of Australia, entitled: “Language maintenance among Torres Strait Islanders living on the Australian mainland.” It deals with the language backgrounds of most Torres Strait Islander children attending mainstream Queensland schools. The second part, which will appear in the next issue, discusses some of the language difficulties experienced in the classroom by many of these children).

Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, one could detect an inexorable logic in the development of Aboriginal affairs from the time of the initial conquest of the country until at least the Second World War. The assumption of what Mr Justice Blackburn termed the “legal fiction” of peaceful settlement of terra nullius (an empty land) nothwithstanding, the entire country was, in the view of its long-term inhabitants, definitely not empty, nor without law and government. (Even the South Australian Colonisation Committee seems to have concurred in this view by assuring intending settlers that they would be protected from hostile savages, in 1834, two years before formal settlement.

The non-fictional fact of conquest, however, placed at the doors of colonial administrations the responsibility for those conquered remnants who survived the process of settlement. But since the raison d’être of settlement required the fiction of empty and available land, the proprietary rights of its owners had to be denied from the first. To this was rapidly added the impropriety of heathen representing themselves or giving evidence in court, since they could not take the oath. Thus, although Walmadjeri and Tanganekald alike were henceforth British subjects and liable in British law, certain of their legal rights had to be postponed until they could understand their full importance – which could take an indefinably long time during which they might die out anyway. Understandably, with British civilisation at the pinnacle of human evolution, ahead of even the French, the German and of course the Hindu civilisations, and Aboriginal barbarism at or even below its base – George Grey surmised that Aboriginal life must represent some animal regression from that of the Garden of Eden – this period of apprenticeship for civilisation was a necessary burden for those with Christian charity to bear (Rowley, 1972:126)

A recent educational report acknowledged that in Australia, or at least, Western Australia, Aboriginal people were the most single disadvantaged group in Australia at both an educational and socioeconomic level.

The group this article concerns itself with is the children of the Central Desert area of Western Australia and in particular those children who are eligible to attend high school. Because few facilities exist for high school children in the Central Desert, the children are relocated away from their homelands in order to attend high school. Norseman supplies the facilities to cater for the needs of some of these children and for the purpose of this article, enrolment figures of the Norseman Project Centre will be used to exemplify the issue of the Aboriginal child not at school.

The Commonwealth Schools Commission published, in April this year, Commonwealth Standards for Australian Schools, in which the Commission establishes a range of recurrent resource standards which it judges to be desirable for Australian schools.

In the first part of the report the Commission addressed the principles by which such standards were established as well as the educational context and objectives of Australian schooling, and considered the factors affecting the development of these objectives, the changes in society and education.

In the second part of the report, Basic Recurrent Resource Standards for Australian Schools, recommendations are made for school organisation, school size, class size and student groupings, staffing and other resources.