Aboriginal children attending school have special needs that should be recognised and catered for by the school system. This paper will deal with the practical aspects of Aboriginal education. In particular the focus will be on Aboriginal Primary education within Western Australia. The paper also limits itself by addressing issues related to more traditionally oriented Aboriginal groups living in remote communities. However, while the main emphasis is given to more traditionally oriented Aboriginal groups, many aspects can be usefully employed and extended to Aboriginal education in general. Therefore the aim of this paper is to give teachers and educators basic information about Aboriginal education so that they can develop appropriate education programs to meet the needs of the Aboriginal children within their schools.

Katherine High School is the only school offering secondary education in the region and thus is catering to the educational demands of a culturally diverse community. In seeking to meet these requirements the school has endorsed the Participation and Equity Program (PEP) of the Federal Department of Education and one highly successful and continuingly popular experimental component of this program has been the TESL (Aboriginal) unit.

This unit represents the attempts of educators and community members to construct an educational environment in which the aspirations of the Aboriginal people can be ameliorated without compromising their Aboriginality.

Kava has been introduced into Aboriginal communities in Northern Australia. Persons from Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land visiting the South Pacific region on study tours have been impressed by their welcome in Kava bowl ceremonies, and some of them hoped that the Aborigines might use Kava instead of alcohol.

In 1983 many Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land used Kava, and much more was used in 1984. By 1985 it became a social epidemic or ‘craze’ in many communities. Rings of people of both sexes and of all ages often sit together under trees around Kava bowls for many hours. They may drink up to a hundred times the amount normally drunk in the Pacific Islands by the same number of people in the same time.