Billy Reid, whose photograph appears on the front cover of this issue, is the illustrator for this journal, and its sister journal The Aboriginal Health Worker. Before becoming a professional artist, Billy had a varied experience of Aboriginal life which he can now draw upon in his work as illustrator. He was born in 1948 in the town of Warren in north-west New South Wales, thirteen miles off the Great Western Highway. Dad, known as Bill Reid, was a drover then. Billy remembers, as a child, driving along the outback roads with the horses and the stock. His mother, who died last year, used to drive the wagonette behind Dad, the twenty-odd horses and the cattle or sheep.

Billy spent much of his early life moving between towns in outback Australia. As a child he lived for two years with his aunt at Coonamble while his parents kept working and on the move. Back and forth between Bourke, Coonamble, Brewarrina and Walgett gave him little chance to settle down to schooling. This meant Billy didn’t get going with his education till fairly late. Then, due to constant middle ear infections, which have left him partially deaf, he couldn’t hear his lessons. A good part of Billy’s childhood was spent at the Far West Home in Manly, Sydney. He left school at thirteen.

Billy taught himself to draw whiling away time absent from school, on the Bourke Reserve. His artistic gift clearly runs in the family. Bill Reid Senior, who was later to become Pastor Reid, specialises in intaglio art: he carves emu eggs. As the shell is scraped away different colours are revealed, allowing beautiful pictures and textures to be formed about the shape of the egg.

Moves by Aborigines to control their own education are receiving support from governments with proposals such as a National Aboriginal Teaching Service. Three Aborigines – a lawyer, a champion rugby player and an educator – told associate editor Tim Isles [of Education News] about their education and successful careers.

Paul Hughes, Mark Ella and Pat 0’Shane came from different backgrounds and have chosen different careers, but each has succeeded outstandingly despite an education system which exposed him or her to racism.

The magnitude of their achievement is reflected in a survey by the Aboriginal Research Centre at Monash University, which found that by 1982 there had been only about 30 Aboriginal graduates from Australian universities.

Significantly, analysis of the survey data showed that three-quarters of those graduates were motivated by the desire to prove themselves and their race. An overwhelming majority had earlier encountered, in the words of the Director of the Centre, Ms Eve Fesl, ’the negative tastes of racism.

There were other important findings too. Most of the respondents had graduated in recent years and had completed their studies at an older age than Australian students generally. The proportion of females was also atypically high, and 88 per cent of the Aboriginal graduates held another university qualification in addition to their basic degree.

But there are important moves under way to improve the Aboriginal education system and free it from often well-meant but damaging white control which has never fully come to terms with the structure of Aboriginal society.

Films are a significant social event in many isolated Aboriginal communities. It has been argued, however, that they are a disruptive influence on the transmission of traditional culture (Shimpo, 1978) and provide inappropriate models for behaviour (Thompson, 1983).

This paper examines a small group of Aboriginal children’s perception and understanding of films in an isolated, traditionally oriented Aboriginal community. It focuses on the way in which a small group of Aboriginal informants classify films and attempts to examine the basis for some of the classifications. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the extent to which the use of particular types of film classification can give an insight into the isolated community audiences’ knowledge and understanding of the social realities in the wider world outside the isolated community.

One of the most distressing intoxicants for Aboriginal people is methanol. This occurs in the spirit provided for duplicators used in schools. The spirit duplicators are cheap, versatile, and can print on different colours, so they are deservedly popular. But from time to time the local people sample the duplicating fluid, which is widely known to produce a big high, and to intoxicate like alcohol (ethanol). Many of these people have been lucky enough to wake up with a bad hangover. Others have become blind, or even died.

Questions of language policy in Australia have rarely been addressed in a comprehensive manner. Migrant communities have long been concerned with an array of issues covering maintenance of their own languages, and access to suitable English teaching and to services through translating and interpreting, but policy in these areas has developed in a haphazard manner, with often little sustained interest shown by Australian institutions.

A good deal of interest therefore has been created by the deliberations of the Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts, which has since May 1982 been considering the “development and implementation of a co-ordinated language policy for Australia”. The establishment of such an inquiry was pressed both by ethnic representative bodies (migrant and Aboriginal) and by organizations of language professionals – linguists, applied linguists, language teachers and academics. Indeed the language issues that have often troubled migrant communities have also in various ways animated language professionals, who have had to cope for example with a decline in foreign language studies in schools, difficulties in establishing and maintaining community language programs, disorganization of translator/interpreter services, serious underresourcing of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses, and above all a severe lack of data and information which could be used as a basis for planning.

The Commonwealth Department of Education has been a prime mover for such an inquiry since the mid-1970s, and through its contacts, especially with language professionals, has had a chance to develop a coherent outlook on language – at least those aspects related to education. Also, the Department has assisted or itself conducted most of the important investigations into language teaching in Australia over the last decade: no fewer than 22 reports or submissions are documented by the Department since 1975, attesting to the quiet but persistent growth of interest in this area. The work of a small group within the Department resulted in an important document that appeared just after the announcement of the Senate inquiry – Towards a National Language Policy. Written to encourage interest in language policy and to test community reactions, it set out an extensive agenda of issues that are closely reflected in the actual terms of reference of the Senate inquiry [see pp. 45-46 Terms of Reference].