Brian -

Thanks for an easy to read article but you have let yourself be carried away. The aboriginies deal with officialdom - Medicare, Centrelink, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Health etc. in English. They watch TV delivered in English. Everthing written on packaged goods they buy is in English. Why in this country do we have aboriginal adults not having a clue what is being spoken to them in English?

in response to healthwatcher comments posted. why is that Aboriginal people not having a clue about what is being spoken to them is English? For many traditional Aboriginal people just like migrants English is a second language,they too have problems when they come into contact with mainstream society say for reasons where they might have to travel such as health. there remoteness isolates them from the rest of the mainstream community. There are many urban and rural Aboriginal people too how are unable to read and write and they are the product of an governmental system that has failed them. one might think well why dont they just go to school and learn, but in order to understand the problems Aboriginal people face today we must look into the past, where these problems were created.

There is no excuse for aborigines not being able to speak English.

As for teaching aboriginal languages - how ridiculous to force stone- age communications onto students trying to come to grips with an increasingly competitive and complex, global society.

Yeah, I've got to agree with Mr Right on this one. Which is going to be more valuable to an Australian kid in the future: something which is spoken by tens (or more) of millions of people (e.g. Japanese, French, Cantonese etc) in multiple countries, or something spoken by a couple of hundred people in mostly outback Australia?

And that's putting aside the normal liberal notion of being against "forcing" people to do things like this.

Like it or not, the world is shrinking and while we cannot be expected to learn all languages, learning ones which are more useful in the world that we live in surely makes more sense. As a suggestion this article makes absolutely no sense at all.

Brian - as a former language teacher (French) I like the sentiment of your article. I believe the learning of any language other than one's maternal language has benefits for the learner, particularly empathy with others.

My difficulty is that here "in the South" (I am in Noongar country in the SW of Western Australia), there are no regular speakers of Noongar. For many Noongar kids, their first language is not Noongar nor English. It is Kriol: there would be practical benefit in social workers, police, court-workers etc learning to speak the local Kriol.

Brian raises many complex issues: for one, even though general communication in Australia, the media, education above Grade III, the economy, society generally, is in English, will Aboriginal kids continue to be denied the right to learn and speak it, to learn in it through upper primary, secondary and tertiary levels ? And thereby, be able to find work and socialise in it on an equal footing with other Australians ?

And as anybody who has tried to learn an Aboriginal language will tell you, it has a vast range of terms relating to a hunting and gathering economy, and to a particular ritualised ceremonial life. I tried a few times to learn my wife's language, Ngarrindjeri, and found that on the one hand, there were many, many terms for trapping, and making spears, etc., but on the other hand, of course, no terms for most of the facets of modern life, including money, clothes, farm and urban production, grog, tobacco, etc. etc. The overlap of common words has of course been very useful, but it makes up only a few hundred words, and nowadays even the grammar is actually English (adding as 's' for plurals, for example, or 'ed' for past tense).

Most importantly, however, children must be taught in English throughout their schooling from pre-school onwards, and cultural and language work must be funded for after-school and Saturday mornings, taught perhaps by concerned parents. Indigenous children should no longer be denied access to a good education, and without textbooks in a hundred Aboriginal languages, the children are otherwise condemned to no useful education at all.

Joe