Eight years ago the Commonwealth Government appointed the first Aboriginal teachers’ aides to schools in New South Wales. Their primary task was to bridge the gap between the Aboriginal community and the school. The aides also had the responsibility of encouraging Aboriginal children to gain further education.

Mrs Betty Wright of Kempsey was one of the first Aboriginal women to train as a teachers’ aide. In 1975 she was appointed to West Kempsey Primary School as its first A.T.A. While working there Betty attended the first Basic Training Program in Aboriginal Adult Education at Sydney University.

People attending this course faced many problems. Most had left families behind, financial support was inadequate and, for some, it was their first visit to Sydney. Of the original twenty-eight students enrolled, only sixteen stayed until the end.

Betty found the most valuable aspect of the course was the chance to learn to develop communication skills. “Talking to white people can be difficult if you are black and have a deep, inbred inferiority complex,” she says. She remembers the anxiety she felt during her first months in schools, wondering how the white staff would accept her. She also felt fear at being the only Aboriginal among so many whites.

In considering the role of tutors of Aboriginal and Islander students at secondary school, the fundamental question is, “What can tutors do to help students that isn’t being done by teachers in schools?” Of course, working with students on a one-to-one basis or in small groups will be seen as an obvious advantage of the tutoring system. However, it alone is not enough, and tutors need to develop specific skills and expertise if they are to help Aboriginal and Islander students to negotiate, and achieve in, an imperfect system that is, I believe, inappropriate and even alien to many Aborigines and Islanders.

This article is the second of a two-part series on Torres Strait Islander children whose families have settled on the Queensland mainland. Here I discuss some of the language difficulties of these children. The first part, dealing with their language backgrounds, appeared in Vol.12 No.3, June/July 1984.

A common misapprehension still prevalent in Australia is that traditional Aboriginal society had no organized educational system. This misapprehension seems based on the ethnocentric concept of British nationalism reinforced by the belief that Christianity was sacrosanct and provided an unassailable moral code. When coupled with the profit motive of capitalism, this belief justified the wholesale destruction of Aboriginal society (Rowley 1970, Reynolds 1981). Prior to European contact most of the instruction of children was carried out by women, and both sexes gained a detailed knowledge of their physical environment. Women were also responsible for the complete spiritual instruction of girls and of boys up to the age of puberty. A boy’s uncle assumed a mentor role during his adolescence (Cowlishaw, 1981). These educational methods were successful in that children were prepared for the particular way of life of their tribe, and there were very few ‘drop outs’, or failures in this system (Hart, 1969).

The tragic deaths of the British explorers, Burke and Wills, demonstrated the worthlessness which the Europeans attached to Aboriginal knowledge. Burke habitually chased Aboriginal people away from his camp with his revolver (Woolf, 1974). The earlier explorer, Charles Sturt had been saved from death by scurvy because the surgeon, John Browne, fed him salt bush berries after observing the Yandruwandra people collecting and eating this source of Vitamin C.

The British believed English to be the language of enlightenment and viewed the 633, (Reed 1969) different Aboriginal languages and dialects as immoral and primitive. The British made little attempt to learn any Aboriginal languages and the fact that the languages did not exist in a written form further enforced the view of their worthlessness. Contemporary linguistic studies show Aboriginal languages are grammatically complex and that most species of plants and animals to be found in a tribe’s country were represented in their language’s detailed vocabulary (Robertson, 1983). Obviously, if Burke and Wills had been less impatient and arrogant they would not have perished even in the arid lands of Central Australia. They could have survived by developing a rapport with local Aborigines. However, if one’s object is to take possession of a people’s land by exterminating them, it is better to view them psychologically as sub-human or a relic from a different evolutionary era, as many social Darwinists did, than to develop an empathy with them (Fromm, 1942).

To get an adult to learn one of the One-Two Hundred Most Commonly Written Words lists is like shovelling coal into a smouldering fire. You know it’s going in, but not when it will ignite.

Yet is a necessary segment of their learning, and approaching it in a Ouija Board fashion to make sentences out of the words after a first, few introductory steps helps.

First, adults appreciate an explanation of the list’s origin and worth. It takes only a moment to explain the words were compiled by sampling several thousand articles and books to see which words occurred most frequently. Taking five minutes and having the learner circle some words from the list in any newspaper article proves this to the reader.

Also, give the learner a copy of the list to keep. The learner can track how many have been learned and also have the option to proceed on his or her own.

At this initial stage, some people benefit from having each word from the list on flash cards in order to learn the words. They can also form the cards into simple sentences. When comfortable for the learner and using only the list itself, point to the words on a small portion of the list for the learner to recognise. Try as much as possible to make a coherent thought from the words: was he for it (?) can spark for what (?) for example.

It is a western New South Wales High School with strong winter sunshine filling the classroom. The teacher moves nervously in from the brick corridor with its interchangeable Education Department prints, and stands just inside the door.

“Right, pay attention please,” the Social Sciences and History teacher says. The group gives the teacher their concentration because they have come to expect interesting and controversial work in these sessions. Even though a few of them are tired and full of canteen lunch, they turn in their seats and begin to chew on the ends of biros.

“This afternoon we have a visitor to the school who I am sure most of you know. She is here to help you…understand and come to grips with the Aboriginal Studies segment of your work…and she’ll probably straighten me out on a few points where I might have gone wrong, too, so I’ll ask you to pay attention to Mrs Copago and save your questions up for a minute or two.”

Mrs Copago is a little bit nervous, too, being in the formal atmosphere of the brick blocks, but she has known most of the students since they were drooling, so she quickly relaxes and settles into the task of talking about her culture and her people.

There is no shortage of questions from the students, and from the teacher, and they are all anxious to learn. Mrs Copago does not mind the questions that the students have heard at home, and she explains about unemployment and drinking in the light of the area’s history and racism in Australia. She talks about the skills and values Aborigines have that most Australians do not have and she ends on a positive note with hope for the Aboriginal community of the area and for Australia generally. The students and the teacher are well pleased by the session and Mrs Copago challenges them to change their own values and their family’s by thinking about different, equal cultures, land rights and the history of Australia.

This article seeks to formalise and link my perception of the Yalata Aboriginal community’s expressed values and objectives with their relationship to practice at Yalata Aboriginal School.

The values expressed here are those outlined by the Aboriginal community; they reflect the community’s felt needs. The process of establishing such needs is open-ended and dynamic, not static. Those needs are expressed through opinions based on experience and resulting legitimate emotion. The community consciousness is now grounded in an emotional strength of purpose that demands the skill to survive well, built on years of frustration and degradation.

The stipulated values can be translated into realisable objectives achievable through appropriate teaching/learning practices.

This article seeks to identify those expressed community values (principles of worth), as related to the Yalata Community School, develop them as a series of attainable objectives, and discuss ways those objectives may be met. Further, it asks the questions, “What are the values/felt needs of the community” and “How does the school try to reflect these values?”