Traeger Park Primary School is situated in a community composed of white and Aboriginal cultures and sub-cultures. The enrolment is approximately three hundred and eighty and of this more than half the children are of Aboriginal descent. Approximately sixty of these Aboriginal children live in cottage homes because they come from cattle stations or they are state wards. The various sub-cultures would include –

1. Stable middle-class part-Aboriginal group.

2. Lower socio-economic group of part-Aboriginal people living in town.

3. Full blood Aboriginal people in fringe-dwelling situations

4. A transient white group who live at caravan parks.

5. People employed by railways.

6. A small group of middle-class whites.

Within the white cultures, there are many disadvantaged children from broken or disturbed homes. All these sub-cultures within the school have tended to make the middle-class white group disadvantaged. We are faced with the problem of keeping these children up to the academic standard expected by parents. In the fringe-dwelling group there are twenty-five children from one particular camp and thirty-five from other camp situations all around the town. Many of these people see this school as theirs even though they live much closer to other primary schools. The principal aim of the school is to develop in the children an awareness of themselves and their place in the community, and a self-concept that enables them to live a full and satisfying existence in the environment of their own choice.

During the past 18 months, one of the most obvious differences recognized between two groups of students of the same age – those I have taught in Victorian secondary schools and those I now teach at the Yirrkala Post Primary School in the Northern Territory – is a huge difference in the degree of commitment to the function of the school.

This does not express itself in an obvious antagonism of the students for the school or its teachers. Rather, while the European students would attempt to force the school to meet their needs, as they recognized them, our students place few demands. If, in the past, I adopted inappropriate methods or irrelevant subject matter, the students would quickly and obviously let me know and in a constructive way, if I cared to listen. If the school was promoting values which clashed with the family or particular social group values of a student, then often the student and the family would engage in conflict with the school.

My present students apply themselves with almost equally stolid rigourousness, seemingly irrespective of the task. Can you imagine a class which is so docile that it will sometimes allow a new teacher to teach exactly the same subject matter as that already taught by a previous teacher? On appearances, is this a model class? Are the students and the parents so satisfied with the efforts of the school that they need never express antagonism or attempt to change what it is doing? I do not believe that this is so.

As a beginning teacher completing my first term in an Aboriginal school, I would like to reflect upon my experiences of the last three months.

I was trained in a three year Primary course at Salisbury C.A.E. and accepted a position at Fregon Special Aboriginal School, 900 miles north-west of Adelaide. Fregon is an Aboriginal community which recently transferred from control by the Presbyterian Ecumenical Board of Missions to control by an Aboriginal Council. The community consists of approximately one hundred and fifty tribally-oriented Pitjantjatjara people and ten Europeans.

I will deal with the following points which cover my experience – personal situation, cultural factors, teaching.

Teachers of Aboriginal children have been concerned with the eventual end results of their teaching efforts for some time. We have probably all asked ourselves the impossible question, “Where are we going in Aboriginal education?” I remember attending a conference at which we were to discuss the topic, “Where are we going and why aren’t we getting there?” Needless to say, the discussions were as vague and undirected as the topic. Surely this will always be so whenever we attempt projecting our thoughts into the future of another culture. We simply cannot predict what the future holds for the children we teach.

I would suggest it would be more valid and beneficial to our students if we carried on more discussion about Aboriginal children’s needs and abilities as individuals, then design our programs to suit the child and his environment. I believe generalizations have helped in creating the situation of deprivation we see on any reserve or mission, town or city. Generalizations have probably helped in making the school day utterly irrelevant for many Aboriginal children. Specifically, this is more likely to be so wherever Aboriginal schools have either adopted in toto programs designed for other schools or have been instructed to follow a program written by educationists who have perhaps only a shallow appreciation of a particular area. It is probably true to say that in most areas people who don’t live on the reserves and missions simply do not know what is happening on these places. They cannot know of the personalities involved in the programs they write. One wonders if the Watergate scandal would be with us if Richard Nixon had spent more time than the reported three days a month in the White House. He simply didn’t know what was happening either. So then, we cannot afford to generalize in Aboriginal Education and we need the autonomy necessary to enable the staff on the particular mission or reserve to create what they consider to be a relevant program. And within that program, the optimum development of the individual student must be catered for.