The Brisbane Urban Aboriginal Materials were developed in response to a need - that is the scarcity of teaching materials related to urban Aboriginal lifestyles. They provide classroom materials for teachers which give insights into the lifestyles of Aboriginal people in Brisbane at this time.

The materials provide both teachers and students with an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the culture of urban Aborigines in Brisbane. In doing so, it is hoped the materials will enable teachers to present an accurate and positive view of urban Aboriginal lifestyles.

Over the years comparisons have been drawn between the impoverished people of Asia, Africa and South America, the socalled Third World, and Aboriginal communities, and it has been claimed by some that Aboriginies live in Third World conditions and share Third World health problems. Those claims have been strongly rebutted by others, who point out that Aborigines are not nearly so badly off - they get welfare and various benefits unheard of in the Third World. These people usually add that some Aborigines even have land rights.

I would like to focus on the history and culture of the Aboriginal people in the Manning Valley of New South Wales to show how material that is localised in nature can be used in a school program of studies. Such material helps to reveal the local or regional nature of Aboriginal culture, as well as aspects that are related to the whole of Australia. The common factors of Aboriginal culture have tended to have been over emphasised in the past and little mention has been made of the local or regional scene.

This article is essentially a review of an article by J.P. Fanshawe which appeared some 12 years ago in The Aboriginal Child at School [Vol.4 No.3, 1976]. The comments are still valid today and will probably be valid ten years hence.

In the article Fanshawe puts forward a particularly sound argument on what personal and professional characteristics are necessary for a teacher to become effective in teaching nontraditionally oriented adolescent Aborigines. I believe that many of the attributes Fanshawe advocates are equally applicable to teachers involved in teaching Aborigines in the Primary school and indeed, to teachers in general.

Kunwinjku is the main Aboriginal language spoken in Oenpelli, Northern Territory. It is estimated that Kunwinjku is spoken by over 1,000 people; it is the lingua franca of Western Arnhem Land.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the linguistic difficulties that Kunwinkju speakers face in learning English as a second language, and to suggest some teaching strategies that a teacher can adopt to help children overcome these.

In some people’s minds, the Aboriginalisation of education means placing Aboriginal teachers in community schools and training these Aboriginal teachers to teach and to conduct the school in the ways Westeners once did. That objective is as wrong-headed as it is racist.

The Aboriginalisation of education in each community can only mean the development of an Aboriginal pedagogy if it is to address the perennially documented failings (for example, McConnochie and Harker, 1985; Folds, 1987; Lanhupuy, 1987) of Western schools in the education of Aboriginal people. In this view, Aboriginal people will determine appropriate subject matters for curriculum, ways of teaching, ways of organising the social context of learning, and ways of structuring the relationship between school, community, and the State. That is, the institutionalisation of education will be contested primarily among Aboriginal views of the ways in which education can be coopted for Aboriginal purposes. Anything short of Aboriginalisation of pedagogy in this manifold sense runs the risk of enshrining forever the roles Western education has consistently and persistently used for the practices of cultural imperialism, political domination, and territorial colonisation.

Racism certainly exists amongst primary school children in Australia. Through both experience in school and teaching, the authors have noted marked prejudice amongst students. This prejudice takes the forms of slurs, name calling, recitation of myths and stereotypes, and occasionally violence, and is directed at all minority groups, but notably Aborigines and Asians.

Students in minority groups have most likely been on the receiving end of this prejudice during their school lives and, because of this, may have felt alienated and humiliated. In this paper it is proposed that the teaching of race relations and cultural understanding is one method teachers may use to decrease the racial attitudes of the white non-minority students.