Indigenous Pupils Relish Lessons in Heritage

MATTHEW Bowen is a rugby league legend. He played his earliest football on Dhurrbil, the hard red dirt of Hope Vale’s football field, where the only relief for skinned knees and elbows is the lush carpet of prickles. He is our home town’s most famous export, known for his virtuoso feats in the NRL. What is little known is Bowen is a native speaker of one of Australia’s 250 or so original languages, first recorded by Captain James Cook in 1770.

Guugu Yimidhirr is his mother’s tongue. Lillian Bowen is a teacher at the local school and is a virtuoso linguist. On Thursday, she accepted the Queensland government’s Reconciliation Award on behalf of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy’s culture program.

It was a moment of great significance. The conservative Newman government recognised an effort, within the public school system, to ensure that Aboriginal language and culture is transmitted to Aboriginal children.

The award recognised that reconciliation is not just about closing the gap on socioeconomic measures. Aboriginal peoples want to retain a connection with their ancestral language and culture, and with their ancestral lands.

Federal Arts Minister Tony Burke spoke for all Australians when he said that “language is central to the practice and continuation of culture in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Preserving indigenous languages … ensures that culture, concepts and values remain part of Australia forever.”

The notion that indigenous Australians should give up their identity and their languages is now history. We also need to rid ourselves of the misconception that there is a contradiction between indigenous culture and modernity, and that there is a trade-off: if you are more steeped in Aboriginal tradition and language, it will be more difficult to integrate into the globalised world; or vice versa, that you lose authenticity if you integrate in the mainstream.

Maintenance of heritage is not a matter of freezing our culture in time or defining what is authentic Aboriginality. The indigenous languages and cultures need to live, grow and change just like wangarr – whitefella – culture.

Lillian Bowen and her famous son are Aboriginal citizens who combine modern life with maintenance of ancestral culture. Recently I sat at the back of her classroom and watched her teach Guugu Yimidhirr. Ngadhu galgan yanday – the hairs stood up on the back of my head as she delivered a powerful and engaging lesson.

Lillian Bowen is pleased a larger than expected number of students have some knowledge of their ancestral language. They have learned from extended family speaking it. But we can’t deny that the number of fluent Guugu Yimidhirr speakers has dwindled in the past 40 years.

I hope mainstream Australians, who have a whole sovereign state working for their interests and supporting their culture, understand that survival of Aboriginal language and culture is core to Aboriginal people. This desire requires goodwill and some support from mainstream society.

Consider the experience of the Guugu Yimidhirr people: first decimated by the invasion during the gold rush, then concentrated in a mission station on land that no settlers wanted. Kept as inmates under Queensland’s infamous protection laws. Decimated again by disease when the Australian government deported them from their land during World War II, then thrown into welfare dependency and decades of neglect.

Oppression and lack of recognition deprived Aboriginal people of the capabilities and confidence to integrate into the modern economy and to maintain their culture.

A new policy was needed to help people build capabilities in both these areas. During our reform work in Cape York Peninsula we have become increasingly aware that the education of our children is the most important key to the future. To this end the Cape York Australian Aboriginal Academy now runs three primary schools in partnership with the Queensland government. No excuses are accepted for why Aboriginal students should not learn the skills needed to continue into secondary and tertiary education and employment.

There has been much focus on the mainstream learning method, called Direct Instruction, that we are using in the academy. I have also written about our club and instrumental music programs.

There is a third learning domain – culture – where we focus on traditional languages and cultural knowledge. So as not to compromise mainstream learning, we have extended the school day to make time for our ambitious programs. We believe the separation between an uncompromised, English-language mainstream learning domain and an Aboriginal cultural domain is necessary. The mainstream class domain prepares students for the global economy. In the culture domain, people such as Bowen teach them about their identity and history.

If there is a measure of support, we will untie the historical and psychological knots that ensnare large parts of our indigenous heritage. On Thursday night, Bowen said: “Many adults don’t know much language but now our grandchildren are learning it and teaching their parents. The older students can now come up with their own sentences in language. The youngest children in prep now know all their doing words in language. When they did that for the first time, I had tears in my eyes. They are now learning the words for all their family connections. It’s my passion to make sure every child in Hope Vale knows their mother tongue.”

With proper teaching materials, with recognition and the emergence of a cultural infrastructure in digital and traditional media, people such Bowen are helping their culture and language flourish. It is a national oversight that we do not have a comprehensive policy for the indigenous heritage of all regions.

A large part of Australia’s heritage has been lost. But the irretrievable losses continue in our time. There is still much to learn and record about our heritage. “Kangaroo” was one of the words Cook learned from Bowen’s ancestors, when he wrote the first short word list of Guugu Yimidhirr, the first record of any Australian language, in 1770; 243 years later, the work Cook started – a simple wordlist of the Guugu Yimidhirr vocabulary – has not been completed.

This week’s political brouhaha between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott about their respective commitment to constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians was ironic. There have never been two leaders more credentialled and committed to constitutional recognition. The Prime Minister’s apology to the Stolen Generations was historic and the Opposition Leader’s commitment to indigenous people and their culture is well known.

One of the proposals for constitutional reform is the formal recognition of indigenous languages. The recognition of Guugu Yimidhirr as a heritage language, along with our country’s many other native tongues, is what is meant by constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians.

Noel Pearson chairs the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.