Hi Hasbeen,

" .... aboriginals will only really prosper when they forget the words aboriginals & Indigenous exist. They have to join the mainstream to gain the most Australia has to offer."

No, I don't think so: If people take it that they are Aboriginal as a matter of fact, since their earliest years, however defined, and that they aren't, after all, anything else, then why (and how ?) can they let that go ? My wife was Aboriginal, her mother was Aboriginal, HER parents were aboriginal, and so on - how do you forget or deny that ?

As for joining the mainstream, 'southern' Aboriginal people have been in it for 170 years or more. Almost by definition, Aboriginal people on missions were 'in the mainstream': they were bases for the men to go out from, and work all over the surrounding regions, and for the kids get good schooling.

A totally unrelated anecdote about my wife's great-grandfather, John Sumner, perhaps true: He was sitting on the bank of Lake Alexandrina fishing, when a white bloke came up to him and declared, "You, know, you're descended from a monkey. I read it in a book !" Sumner thought for a bit and answered, "Yes, that may be so. But if you get a monkey to sit down here beside me, and talk to both of us in your language, and if I can understand you but the monkey can't, then no, I'm not descended from a monkey. Then if you sit down next to the monkey and I speak to you both in my language, Ngarrindjeri, if you can't understand me any better than the monkey can, then you're descended from a monkey."

As an 'orphan' on the streets of Goolwa (well, the street of Goolwa) in the 1850s, he was working from about eight years old for a local farmer (named Sumner), and later worked as the gofer for the Protector, Dr Walker; he took out the first agricultural lease by an Aboriginal man in SA, got cleaned out by his relatives twice, so gave it away.

Joe

As you know Joe, I live in an area that has a high level of dysfunction, fuelled by drugs, alcohol and welfare. It's not the majority of aboriginal people here, but it's certainly a large enough percentage to cause a lot of social problems.
If I had any power I would focus it all on the first, basic step and that's getting every child to school very day. Not schools that teach dumbed down programs that focus heavily on indigenous language but actual standard literacy and numeracy, history and social studies.
Show aboriginal kids that they are not the first or only culture to experience dispossession and loss of culture. Give them the skills to engage with the wider community, and instead of focusing on past grievances, give them examples of aboriginal people who have succeeded, in situations they can relate to.
When I see newspaper articles praising indigenous achievement, for example indigenous doctors who have graduated, I wonder how community kids can relate to someone who looks like a middle class white person, and truly believe they can achieve the same.
They need exposure to successes from similar backgrounds and the educational skills to follow suit.
One great example is young Vinka Barunga, a girl from a dysfunctional community just outside Derby, in the Kimberley, who has recently graduated from medical school. Her story, and that of others with similar histories, should be told in all schools with indigenous students.

Hi Big Nana,

Yeah, language: my wife's sister, also a brilliant teacher, was a Reading specialist. So her school principal, with one of those really sweet smiles (you know the type), asked her if she wouldn't mind taking all the Aboriginal kids in the school for Aboriginal language, i.e. Pitjantjatjara. None of the kids were Pitjantjatjara, being if anything Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna, Narrangga, Booandik, Nukunu, Adnyamathana or Murning. [But it's all the same, isn't it, Aboriginal language ? Same with Aboriginal culture ? All the same ?]. She declined and the principal asked again. And again. As well as having all the Aboriginal kids dumped on her (i.e. that's multiculturalism: a multicultural class dumped on a multicultural teacher ?), this sort of segregation was tarted up as progressive. She resigned.

Of course, another idiocy with this sort of trick is that Pitjantjatjara kids can already speak Pitjantjatjara, if not all that well (and English usually not at all). They wouldn't have needed it at school. But by Christ they would have needed - do need - English at school, loads of it. But if course, that wasn't the reason for promoting an Aboriginal language, it simply got Aboriginal kids out of teachers' hair. Racism dressed up as 'cultural support'.

One thing that is forgotten and/or ignored and/or denied, is that, in the 'South', the 'settled' areas, basically the urban, agricultural and non-pastoral country, Aboriginal people have been embedded in a Western economy and society, albeit on its edges, since the earliest days. When George Taplin started up his school at Pt McLeay in 1860, he studied the Ngarrindjeri language very hard, since, as a missionary, he believed that one could not save anybody's soul unless one spoke in their language, but he was a bit taken aback to find that some of his kids were from elsewhere on the one hand, but that all could speak English on the other. Eventually he had to drop Ngarrindjeri and teach in English. Kids were familiar with towns, horses, ships, the harvest, money, grog, books, etc. from the 1850s - i.e. bi-cultural.

Love,

Joe

It is not just aboriginal teachers Joe.

My wife is librarian. When she was head librarian for a coastal Queensland city she used to run library courses for most of the schools in the district.

She found it amusing that teachers who reckoned 25 was as many kids as they should have in a class, would dump 80 to 90 kids on her, & shoot through to a staff room for a cup of tea. Interestingly it was the state school teachers who did this, not the other lot.

Hi Hasbeen,

With respect, you're missing my point. I'm suggesting that, for an Aboriginal teacher, Aboriginal kids, 'probes', language classes, whatever, get dumped on them - effectively, segregation in the name of progressiveness. Perhaps it happens in other fields of work as well, for Indigenous graduates: "Well, you're the Blackfella, aren't you ? So you do all the work with Blackfellas. What, don't you want to work with your own people ?'' My sister-in-law wanted to work as a teacher, an ordinary, if highly-qualified than average, teacher of all of the kids in her ordinary class, Aboriginal, Arab, Greek, Vietnamese, Anglo. But no, if you're Aboriginal, you get Aboriginal.

To take up an earlier point that you made, that Aboriginal people have to forget their Aboriginality to join the mainstream. Yes, they may 'forget' their traditional culture, at least down here in the 'South': some Aboriginal people easily became bi-cultural very early on, living and working in towns and on farms and ships. Adopting a package of Western practices, they simply made rational choices about the opportunities available.

Gradually- sometimes rapidly - their living world, revolving around that Western package, pushed the traditional world further onto the back-burner. Nobody stopped people from speaking their language or employing any cultural practices - even now, there are no insurmountable obstacles to any of that. They simply become impractical. I think people down around my wife's community may have forgotten even their clan names and countries by the end of the nineteenth century. So, yes, people have been Aboriginal AND Western for a long time and, in their own inventive ways, still are, certainly genealogically if not in any anthropologically cultural sense. And will continue to be.

Joe

Hi Leoj,

"Unfortunately there is no media or political interest in the good news stories, the strides taken in tertiary education, employment and socially, and in population numbers too."

Yes, this has puzzled me for a long time, the passing over of news about ingenious university graduates. Why the silence ? From both Indigenous elites and most of the media, and from most Australians, Black and White, as well ?

I recall talking to n Aboriginal academic about the rapid growth in graduate numbers; his face fell and he said, "Yeah, but it can't keep going like that. Can it ?" Well, yeah ! But I've rarely come across any hot-shot Indigenous academic or bureaucrat etc. who seemed positive about the notion of tens of thousands of graduates. Clearly power and control is involved there.

But I'm sure many people - and not just Whites either - just don't believe there could possibly be so many Indigenous graduates, or even any Indigenous graduates at all. Won't they lose their culture ? Don't they need their 'own' courses, even their own universities or more likely TAFE colleges (this has been pushed by Indigenous elites for forty years) ? Even if they don't want to enrol in them ? Well no, equal rights means equal rights to enrol [my computer writes "toenail"] in any damn course they like. And the vast, vast majority want to enrol in mainstream courses.

Possibly there is a sort of racism underlying everything in Australia, unconsciously in all of us, that Blacks are (or should be) locked into 'their own culture' to which, of course, something like university study is alien. So it's probably not happening. Well, yes, it is: since 1990, around 130,000 Indigenous people have at some time enrolled at a standard university. Close to twenty thousand are currently enrolled, and more than fifty thousand have graduated.

In fact, on most definitions, Indigenous people have achieved 'Mass University Participation'. In terms of graduate numbers, the Indigenous stock of graduates is roughly equivalent to Australia's in the early nineties.

Le's get used to it.

Cheers,

Joe