From the centre to the city: Aboriginal education, culture and power

KEVIN KEEFFE

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY ABORIGINAL EDUCATION, CULTURE AND POWER

ABORIGINAL

Canberra 1992

FIRST PUBUSHED IN 1992 BY

Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. @ KEVIN KEEFFE 1992.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA CATALOGUINGIN-PUBLICATIONDATA:

Keeffe, Kevin. From the centre to the city: Aboriginal education, culture and power. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 85575 235 1. [l].Aborigines, Australian - Education. 121. Aborigines, Australian - Social conditions. 131. Aborigines, Australian - Study and

teaching

- Australia. I. Title.

COVER PAINTING Nganampa manta l h g k i t u ngaluntjaku (To hold o u r land /language, culture]firmly), 1989, by Sarah Napangati Bruno, Paul 'QampitJinpaBruno, Monica Nangala Robinson and Victor Tjungarrayi Robinson, acrylic on canvas, 93 X 123 cm, purchased by the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET) 1989, reproduction courtesy of DEET.

-

TYPESET in 9/14 Compugraphic Century Schoolbook by Jackie Covington, Aboriginal Studies Press. DESIGNED by Denis French, Aboriginal Studies Press. PRINTED on 115gsm matt art by Pirie Printers Pty Ltd, Fyshwick ACT.

CONTENTS

Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction The issues Defining terms: a personal view The issues in the centre The issues in the city An ethnographic approach

Part 1:

The painting: a description and commentary The critique in the painting A y a ~ n g ucurriculum for Walungurru school Central Australian art and schooling Central Australian art, cultural politics and the nation-state Which way for the Australian curriculum? ABORIGINALITY IN ACTION: THE CULTURAL AWARENESS CAMP

Aboriginality and the Cultural Awareness Camps 'Bilking and learning about Aboriginality-as-persistence Talking and learning about Aboriginality-as-resistance Defining Aboriginality in use Aboriginal culture in action

Part 2:

1 1 4 10 12 13

Aboriginal Culture in Action

CHAPTER 1 PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

CHAPTER 2

viii ix xiii

Aboriginality and Education

CHAPTER S THE PUBLIC VIEW OF ABORIGINALITY

Aboriginal educational needs in the city Aboriginality and curriculum change CHAPTER 4 ABORIGINALITY AND ETHNICITY

Negotiating identity What is ethnicity? The components of Aboriginality and ethnicity

19 21 29 31 34 37 41

Aboriginality and descent Aboriginality and history Aboriginality and the Dreaming Aboriginality and land The limits of Aboriginality-as-ethnicity CHAPTER 5 ABORIGINALlTY AND IDEOLOGY

Ethnicity as ideology Aboriginality-as-persistenceas an ideology Aboriginality-as-persistenceand multiculturalism Aboriginality-as-resistance and ideology Resistance and persistence in political practice CHAPTER 6 ABORIGINAUTY IN EDUCATION

Dominant themes in Aboriginal education

Part 3:

Yanangu Culture and the Curriculum

CHAPTER 7 PINTUPI CULTURAL VALUES AND EDUCATION

Public versus private in Pintupi culture Cultural values and assimilation Assimilation and education Culture and the bilingual curriculum CHAPTER 8 TOWARDS A BICULTURAL CURRICULUM

Defining the yawngu domain Defining the walwala domain Items of significance for the curriculum Implications for the local curriculum Broader curriculum implications

F%+ 4:

Cultural Autonomy and Social Justice

CHAPTER 9 AUTONOMY AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY

A twenty-first birthday Personal autonomy in traditional society Autonomy through land rights Recognising autonomy in history Autonomy, land rights and education

Autonomy and Aboriginal education Changing the curriculum map CHAPTER 10 GUILT AND THE AUSTRALIAN HISTORY CURRICULUM

The 'guilt industry' Through some classroom windows CHAPTER 11 BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

The bridging course The institution Efficiency and Aboriginal education Aborigines, structural pluralism and the state References Index

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1 2

Regional map of Central Australia showing places and language groups mentioned in text Representation and key to painting

2 23

PLATES The painting in preparation, from left Sarah Napangati Bruno, Paul Tjampitjinpa Bruno, Victor Tjungarrayi Robinson, Monica Nangala Robinson (Canberra Times) Monica Nangala Robinson and Victor Tjungurrayi Robinson explaining the painting to conference delegates The painting after completion Schoolboys in front of the doors at Yuendumu School (Jon Rhodes) Michael Tjakamarra Nelson explaining his mosaic to the Queen and the Prime Minister, RJL Hawke, a t the opening of the new Parliament House, 1988 (Canberra Times) Esther Bruno, from Walungurru, in Canberra (Alana Harris, AIATSIS) Students a t an ACT primary school with a rainbow serpent built during NAIDOC Week, 1988 (Canberra Times) Students at Spence Primary School, ACT, painting cardboard didjeridus, NAIDOC Week, 1990 (Alana Harris, AIATSIS) Papunya School during the Assimilation era (W Hilliard) Pintupi children at Kungkayunti outstation 'school', 1979 Presentation of curriculum to Charles Perkins at Wajungurru School, 1987 Monica Nangala Robinson (left) and Sarah Napangati Bruno discussing the planning of lesson activities in a bicultural curriculum, Walungurru, 1987 The Yirrkala Bark Petition The author at a curriculum planning workshop, Walungurru, 1987, with Sarah Napangaii Bruno Tertiary success for Queensland University's first Aboriginal medical graduates Christine Woolgar and Noel Hayman, 1990 (Courier Mail)

TABLES 1 2 3 viii

General cultural comparisons Items of significance in the y a w n g u domain Items of significance in the walypala domain

20 20 22 36

39 52 87 91 123 124 124

130 141 161 171

PREFACE

The collection of essays that make up this book were completed in March 1990. Towards the end of 1991,I was re-reading them and remarked to an Aboriginal friend that a lot had happened in the last year. 'A lot has happened', he agreed, 'but nothing much has changed'. He is right. Real change in Aboriginal education, culture and power has remained elusive, despite many changes on the surface. There is still uncertainty about the place that Aboriginal culture should hold in schools and the nation. Teachers are trying to find the right approach to Aboriginal studies, the best way to teach their Aboriginal students, the most appropriate curriculum. Aboriginal parents and community members are still arguing for a greater say in the decisions that affect the education of their students, searching for the right blend of strategies for a successful and culturally balanced education. Aboriginal students are leaving school too soon, while non-Aboriginal students are completing school with little knowledge or understanding of Aboriginal culture and history. Policy-makers, politicians and the public would like to see the 'Aboriginal education problem' solved, and Aboriginal poverty, alienation and injustice eliminated. The issues that generated these essays have been on the agenda of Aboriginal education and cultural politics for some time. The challenge for change still remains. In 1991 the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported at great length on their perception of the underlying issues of the deaths in custody and the best way of addressing those issues. The Commission's report peels away at the issues to reveal common factors in the lives that ended so abruptly and so tragically. One common feature is low educational achievement. The Commissioners felt that part of the answer, at least, could be found in making schools and educational institutions more responsive and respectful to Aboriginal culture, especially through the increased involvement of Aboriginal people in decision-making. Such calls have been made before. They will continue until change occurs in the way such issues are approached in daily practice, at all levels, across the nation. Also in 1991, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was fully established after a bitter and lengthy passage of legislation. The Commission aims, through regional councils and a national board, to give elected Aboriginal people a direct say in the processes of policy formulation and planning. Its strengths and limitationscannot be discussed here, except to say that the domain of education is yet to experience such a major development.

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Despite the first year of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (AEP), the structures and processes for involving Aboriginal people in educational decision-making are not well established. The weaknesses at the State, Territory and regional level are to a certain extent offset by a growth in strength at the local level. There are now over 2,000 Aboriginal parent and school communities established through the Aboriginal Student Support and Parental Awareness Program (ASSPA). These committees have power over a limited but real budget. Through this means, they have gained a foot in a door that has been closed in the past. Such committees could be said to be at the forefront of a positive transformation in the relationship between schools and communities across Australia. The year 1991also saw Commonwealth legislation that was not bitterly fought but unanimously passed through both Houses of Parliament. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation has been established to lead the way in a decadelong process of reconciliation. The Council, with twenty-five members, the majority of whom are Aboriginal, is charged with the development of strategies for increasing awareness amongst the general population about Aboriginal history, culture and language, and raising to the public agenda Aboriginal concerns over dispossession, impoverishment and discrimination of all forms. The Council has other functions. Through the ATSIC structure, there will be a process of consultation and negotiation over a possible instrument of reconciliation (such as a treaty). The Council will also oversee efforts by Commonwealth, StatelTerritory and local governments to address Aboriginal disadvantage in the decade leading up to the centenary of federation in the year 2001. A fundamental element of the process of reconciliation is education, as without major changes in this area, all other change seems to be impossible. In order for review and renewal to take place in the overall relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia, a major re-think about the place of Aboriginal culture in the lives of schools and the life of the nation is necessary. Already, a national agreement to increase the attention given to Aboriginal studies in the curriculum has been reached by ministers of Commonwealth and State/Territorygovernments. These recent initiatives are part of a national attempt to construct a framework for change. However, real processes of change occur at the local level, when people start to question what has been taken for granted and begin to change their ways of doing things. Such change is much harder to realise. Education for Aboriginal students, and education about Aboriginal Australia, are areas where change is difficult. The unknown outweighs the known, and certainty is rare. In this book I do not pretend to have any magical solutions

PREFACE

xi

that will lead to instant change. I have simply tried to outline some thoughts about Aboriginal education, culture and power, in order to contribute to improving the chances of a positive relationship between Aboriginal and non-AboriginalAustralia. The book is dedicated to Daphne Nash in appreciation of her support, encouragement and forbearance. Thanks. Kevin Keeffe Canberra, October 1991

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In my three years of work in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Curriculum Development Research Fellowship I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to establish links with a wide network of people working actively in Aboriginal education or Aboriginal studies. They have all contributed in some way to the contents of this book. As it is not possible to name and thank everyone individually, I can only list some of the organisations where they have worked. The organisations that readily provided assistance are numerous. First the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies provided an excellent base for the research, and I thank the Council, Principal, Research Director and other staff for their support and cooperation. Also in Canberra, people from the Central Office of the Department of Employment, Education and Training were very helpful, as was the ACT Department of Education (formerly the ACT Schools Authority) and the Australian National University, especially the Prehistory and Anthropology Department. In Central Australia I received much assistance from the Central Land Council, CAAMALmparja, the Northern Territory Department of Education and Batchelor College. I was particularly grateful for the welcome provided by the councils of Wajungurru and Papunya communities and the staff of schools in those communities. I am very grateful to Ken and Leslie Hansen for allowing the use of a pre-publication version of their excellent dictionary. Some of the chapters of this book have appeared elsewhere, in earlier or differently directed forms, and I thank the editors and publishers of the journals, Australian Aboriginal Studies (for Part 2) and Discourse (for part of Chapter 11) for their cooperation in this regard. On a more personal note, I wish to thank my friends and colleagues at the Institute (and elsewhere) for the congenial atmosphere they provided. In particular, I would like to thank those who read and critically commented on drafts of papers in the preparation of this book, including Alex Barlow, Maggie Brady, Joan Corbett, Mary Edmunds, Daphne Nash, Kingsley Palmer, F^,zalRizvi, Deborah Rose, Jane Simpson, Luke Taylor and Ian Watson. Donna Hume assisted greatly with the final stages of text formatting. As well, I thank other friends such as Bruce Chapman, Pat Fowell, Romina Fujii, Jeff Hulcombe, David Nash, Shirley Purchase, Joann Schmider and Robert Tickner and troops for all the help they have given. Of vital importance was the cooperation and friendship of the yagzngu teachers at Wajungurru and Papunya and I thank them and their families

xiv

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

warmly for looking after me and my family during our visits. Although all the individuals and organisations that I have named are owed much, they are not, of course, in any way responsible for any mistakes or misunderstandings in the text. These remain my own responsibility.

INTRODUCTION

From the centre of Australia to the cities, from places such as Waungurru (Kintore)l on the edge of the Gibson Desert to places such as Canberra, the national capital, Aboriginal Australians and non-Aboriginal Australians are negotiating. They are locked into a difficult and continuing process of cultural, political and economic negotiation with each other as well as within their own ranks. The Australian school is one place in which this process is being carried on. In the school, the curriculum is a central and contested site for negotiating the meaning and place of Aboriginal culture in contemporary Australia.

THE ISSUES The essays in this book, written at different times for different purposes, are grouped into four parts. Part 1describes Aboriginal culture in action, introducing the reader to the issues as they are lived out in social action. The first chapter is set in the centre and in the city, revealing the connections between cultural issues in 'the bush', 'the town' and the nation. It uses a particular Pintupi painting as a focus. The second chapter describes events that took place in the city, exploring the issue of Aboriginality in an urban educational context not at a school but at an Aboriginal-controlled Cultural Awareness Camp. While Part 1sets up the contrasts and suggests the connectionsbetween the Centre and the city, Part 2, Aboriginality and Education, is set in the city but takes a broader view of these issues. It introduces the reader to some ways of looking at Aboriginal education, culture and power as important issues that challenge taken-for-granted explanations. Chapter 3 discusses the public view of Aboriginality and the way this emerges in the curriculum. This is discussed through the theoretical lens of ethnicity in Chapter 4 and as ideology in Chapter 5. The last chapter in Part 2 explores the two themes of Aboriginality - as resistance and as persistence - in Aboriginal education theory and practice. Part 3 is set in the Centre. It focuses on Pintupi educational experience. The first chapter in this part discusses the cultural gaps between Pintupi cultural values and the curriculum. Chapter 8 describes a series of workshops in which Pintupi people worked to narrow these gaps and develop their own vision of an appropriate curriculum. Part 4 looks at the issues of Aboriginal education, culture and power from a more national perspective. In Chapter 9, Aboriginal autonomy is the central concern and the reader is asked to consider the Australian history curriculum as a case-study of the way in which a central and significant Aboriginal value is

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

2.

treated in the curriculum. Chapter 10 explores the notion of guilt in the Australian history curriculum while the final chapter looks at the issues of autonomy and social justice as they make their impact on one higher education institution. The essays in this volume have one common thread. They all seek to describe, analyse and criticise the meaning and place of Aboriginal culture in the Australian school curriculum. There is, of course, not just one Australian curriculum. There are many different types of school in different places with different purposes and ideals and different sorts of students. Whatever form the curriculum takes, wherever the school happens to be and whatever the nature of the student group, the issue of cultural identity is a major concern. In these essays, the curriculum for Aboriginal students, in both remote and urban Australia, is set beside the curriculum for non-Aboriginal students to show the ways in which arguments about the place of Aboriginal culture in Aboriginal education are reflected in arguments about Aboriginal studies and Australian studies. All of these curriculum arguments are just as much about cultural politics as they are about educational politics. For Aboriginal parents, students and community members, the 'culture in the curriculum' issue can raise passions and fuel frustration. For teachers, NORTHERN TERRITORY

LUBITJA

Figure 1: Regional map of Central Australia showing places and language groups mentioned in text

INTRODUCTION

3

curriculum developers, policy-makers and the general non-Aboriginal population the issue can cause confusion, uncertainty and antagonism. Schools in the cities, towns and settlements of Australia are all grappling with related questions and there are no certain, unarguable answers, which is not surprising when it is recognised that under the surface of the curriculum question lies a much more difficult one, yet to be resolved adequately in the history of this nation. When we explore the meaning and place of Aboriginal culture in the curriculum, we are talking about the meaning and place of Aboriginal culture in contemporary Australia. This volume is one of the results of a research fellowship initiated in 1987 by the Council of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies to investigate strategies for curriculum development in Aboriginal studies and Aboriginal educationS2The Aboriginal people with whom I worked during this research project know that they and their children have had limited access to education. They also know that they have limited access to the culture of power that makes and re-makes the curriculum in its own image. Efforts in Aboriginal education during the 1980s attempted to change this on two fronts. First, attempts were made to give Aboriginal students greater access to the dominant curriculum, through wider access to and longer participation in mainstream education. Getting more of the same has been the aim of battles on this front. Second, there has been an attempt to reduce the alienation and cultural exclusion that destroys the effectiveness of the mainstream curriculum by arguing for the development of a culturally appropriate Aboriginal curriculum, as a central and essential component of the total curriculum: not more of the same, but more of something else - a different sort of education. A growing number of Aboriginal people are beginning to confront the painful possibility that this dual approach may be fundamentally contradictory. They are worried that their efforts to have both an 'appropriate' and a 'successful' education might be pulling in opposite directions. They rightly expect that Aboriginal children should no longer have to discard their cultural identity to gain an education. However, they also expect schools to teach beyond (and for their children to reach beyond) that cultural heritage in order to secure a recognised social and economic identity within contemporary Australian society. As such, they want education because they want the skills and the jobs that add up to economic equality. They want to learn the secrets, the hidden knowledge, the rituals of the culture of power in Australian society. What some Aboriginal people are beginning to question is whether putting human energy and institutional resources into separate cultural maintenance, at the expense of access to the dominant culture, involves making a negative choice for the future of Aboriginal

4

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Australia. Aborigines are concerned about being caught between what seems to be a 'culture trap' and an 'assimilation trap'. The role of education in this choice is central, leading to a conflict of purpose that creates an enormousstrain on theory, policy and resources. This dilemma is mirrored on the other side of the imaginary curriculum frontier that separates Aborigines from white Australians. In the Australian bicentennial year, an argument about the correct version of the Australian past to be taught in schools erupted in the media and journals, with both left and right attacking the school version of the past as inaccurate or undesirable. Australian schools are actively engaged in the process of building a collective cultural identity. The nature of this Australian identity has inbuilt contradictions and there is an easy slide from a curriculum that develops and informs a growing national identity, to one that trumpets an empty, unquestioning nationalism. The place given to Aboriginal culture (and history) within this broader, emergent curriculum will in some ways be a measure of the viability, appropriateness and legitimacy of the Australian cultural identity of the future. These difficult questions about the meaning and place of different cultures in the curriculum are not capable of being resolved easily. The sometimes painful but necessary process of negotiation about, and struggle over, the meaning of cultural identity is a struggle for power over culture and power over education. This is part of a broader struggle taking place as much within Aboriginal Australia and within non-Aboriginal Australia as between the two groups.

DEFINING TERMS: A PERSONAL VIEW Although this volume is the product of a research fellowship at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, it has its origin in my personal experience. Since the early 1970s I have been working with Aboriginal people, mainly in the field of education, but also in other areas, such as the protection of sacred sites. Throughout this time I have been struggling to understand the often depressing but sometimes exciting world of Aboriginal education. This volume continues some of my own search for understanding in this world in which I have been a cultural outsider and a professional insider. There seems to be a set of terms that, if only they could be given a clear and fixed meaning, could explain the world in which I work. The terms education, culture and power - are used with seem& confidence by those around me, and even by myself, as part of daily language, yet their meanings seem always to be out of reach.

INTRODUCTION

F

However, the more I think about these words, the more confused they become, and the more meaning they seem to carry. I have become less confident in their use and more preoccupied by their ambiguities and contradictions. The essays in this volume are attempts to clarify their meaning, not for final resolution, but in order to give their use the 'extra edge of consciousness' that Raymond Williams (1983,21) suggests we strive for. As such, the essays centre on issues that arise from practical experience, but are explicitly theoretical, inescapably political and ultimately personal. Writing about Williams' discussion of the word 'education', Ivan Illich says that his use of the term reveals the surprise and passion of a writer telling us about the 'inconstancy of a word on which his integrity depended' (Illich 1983, 5). This common but complicated word started to shift meaning for me as a student teacher in Brisbane in the early 1970s - a time of enormous social and cultural upheaval. The word 'education' seemed to be used with confidence by the lecturers at the teachers' college. They were mentally unruffled by the winds of change brought by writers such as Neill, Illich, Freire and Holt. Their works made me, and other teachers of my generation, aware of a contradiction not mentioned in classes. There seemed to be a clash in meanings between the common understanding of education as socially beneficial, offering equality of opportunity, and education as socially harmful, reproducing and even creating inequality. It was outside the college, in the narrow streets of West End and South Brisbane, that the double meaning of 'power' began to niggle at my awareness and shock my naive preconceptions. It was here that Aboriginal people of my age were talking with excitement about 'Black Power', and reading borrowed copies of the works of Carmichael, Malcolm X, Davis and Cleaver. This power was expressed in daily life with a tenacious survival and occasional triumph over state power, most potently signified in the uniforms of the Queensland police of the time. These were the difficult days of the Pig Patrol', before such institutions as Legal Aid were established. Aboriginal people, with white sympathisers in a support role, organised the 'tailing' of Queensland police cars. The patrols monitored and interfered in the reckless and often brutal runs made by the police through the city streets and into the pubs, where they collected Aboriginal arrests like trophies, with special prizes for young and beautiful women (see McNally 1973; Watson 1973). The 'Pig Patrols' were illegal. They were in direct and subversive opposition to the power of the police, the courts, the welfare agencies, and the legislation which impacted with often brutal force on the daily lives of Brisbane's Aboriginal people. I began to see the same force and the same word operating

6

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

in the schools. In my mind, these two puzzling words - education and power become inextricably linked. Three years of teaching in Kowanyama, a western Cape York Aboriginal reserve, did not diminish the preoccupation nor lessen the unease. The school in this 'community' was undoubtedly part of the Queensland State Government's power over the Aboriginal population. The school gained its purpose, its rationale, from its essential role as an agency of forced social change in a place that Goffman (1961) would call a 'total institution'. The teachers, as members of the all-white staff, possessed power, by controlling and determining the nature and outcomes of education. Here, too, contradictions emerged, with the Aboriginal 'inmates' perceiving this connection between education and power. They saw education as 'the key', as one man put it, and were anxious to grasp it. In many cases they succeeded in gaining the key, only to find that behind the door was only more of the same powerlessness, poverty and unemployment. It was in Kowanyama that another word began to emerge as needing definition and analysis, forming part of and extending the semantic cluster of education and power. 'Culture' was often talked about in ways that intrigued me. It was as if it had life: the culture was 'dying' or 'still alive'. The term was used as a possession, a thing, that could be 'kept' or 'lost' or 'left behind'. It could also be 'passed on' as part of education - at the weekly 'culture lessons', where women made baskets and men made boomerangs. There was also an apparent uncertainty about the value of Aboriginal culture. Knowledge of 'culture' gave pride and power to 'the old people', but it was 'cultural difference', the more progressive teachers said sympathetically,that limited access to the power of education for the young. The institution was built around the idea of assimilation, of cultural absorption into mainstream Australia, but inconsistently ensured that people were kept apart from that mainstream. 'Education', 'culture' and 'power' were also important words in Central Australia, and were equally as elusive when I worked in the outstations and bilingual schools of the area. Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara and Alyawarre people were as engaged as I was in fathoming their meanings. For them, the words were of even greater and essentially personal and political concern. Aboriginal power was evident there in such forms as a vigorous ritual and ceremonial life, a 'healthy' language, and an ongoing formal and informal education process in the Aboriginal culture and power that derived from the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976. This power was often under attack, however, from a strong white presence, also expressed in terms of power, culture and education. The political power of the Aboriginal councils, for example, seemed to be thwarted by a lack of political literacy, and by the heavy hand of white

INTRODUCTION

advisers working without the constraints of regulation or supervision (see Tonkinson 1982; Myers 1986). Aboriginal culture, in all its forms, seemed to be faced by competition from and contradiction with the huge material resources of the dominant and wealthy white culture. Education was part of this presence, always transmitting the dominant culture, despite the determined attempts to provide bilingual education and the occasional feeble step towards bicultural education. The schools seemed to erode Aboriginal culture and power, without ever really succeeding in offering access to the non-Aboriginal sources of social power and the tools of the dominant culture. In my daily work I was caught between white education, power and culture, and their Aboriginal equivalents and oppositions. This position raised more concerns about the meanings of these words and the vital significance to be found in their semantic and political interaction. In the contexts of urban Brisbane, Cape York and Central Australia, I can remember little mention being made of the word 'Aboriginality'. It is working with Aboriginal people in Canberra that has brought the use of this word into my daily language and central concern. The preoccupation with education, power and culture became condensed into a determination to understand Aboriginality, as the term as it is used by Aboriginal people contained so much of the other three words. It spoke to the same concerns and evoked the same intense emotional response. An understanding of Aboriginality may provide access to an understanding of the significance of education, power and culture in the lives of Aborigines in places such as Canberra. It is certainly as difficult to understand as the other three terms because it comes from the same linguistic powerhouse of social action and creativity. Nevertheless, some tentative, preliminary working definitions are necessary here, if only to emphasise the fact that I am not using the commonplace, narrow and simple meanings of these words in the essays that follow. THE MEANING OF 'CURRICULUM' In order to define and describe Aboriginal education, culture and power there must be a focus on curriculum. A curriculum, in these essays, is thought of as being much more than a set course of study or the texts that students use. It is also a site of social action. As Schwab (1971, 5) describes it, 'Curriculum in action treats real things: real acts, real teachers, real children, things richer and different from their theoretical representation'. During my research for this volume, I became increasingly aware of the elusive nature of the way that the concepts of education, power and culture interact with each other and are condensed in the curriculum. The curriculum

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

we have in Australian schools today is a product of the way in which people working in and around education have interpreted the meanings of these concepts in different historical periods and places, particularly overseas. This received social and cultural tradition is always changing in response to newly emergent ideas and is adjusted according to shifts in the balance of economic, historical and political forces. The contemporary curriculum is a contradictory cluster of valued knowledge, concepts and skills, determined mainly, but not only, by groups possessing more power in society. It is also shaped by students themselves in their interaction with this cluster of meaning. What students learn about being Australian, or about what it means to be Aboriginal, or both of these identity concepts, is one part of the curriculum. This learning happens in corridors and playgrounds and sportsfields as much as in the classroom. Some of this curriculum is implicit and hidden. Powerful learning also sometimes happens in the gaps and silences of the school curriculum. A broad, inclusive notion of curriculum allows for a generalised, or regional, study of the political, economic, historical and cultural factors that shape the learning experience. THE MRANING O F 'POWER' Much of the critical curriculum theory that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s was built on a one-sided notion of power, analysing the negative force of education in securing the domination of ruling classes and social groups. However, such an approach ignores the contradictory role of the school in producing new forms of oppositional knowledge as much as the positive school role of giving students the sort of options that might enable them to take control over their lives and the futures of the communities in which they are situated. Aronowitz and Giroux (1985, 216) build their study of curriculum change around a flexible and adaptable definition in which power is viewed as 'both a negative and positive force, as something which both works on and through people. Its character [is] viewed as dialectical, its mode of operation as both enabling and constraining.' Such a sense of power is necessary to develop a curriculum analysis that can be both critical of the relations of force in society and hopeful of change; capable of showing both the possibilities and limitations of social action centred on the curriculum. Only such a sense of power is capable of viewing cultural change from two perspectives, those of the relatively powerful and the relatively powerless. THE MEANING O F 'CULTURE' Despite its central nature in discourse on education, the meaning and use of 'culture' remains contested. Raymond Williarns (1983,87) regards this word as 'one

INTRODUCTION

9

of the two or three most complicated words of the English language'. It is possible to identify a range or continuum of meaning assigned to the term that allows users to slide between thinking about culture as an active process to seeing it as a total way of life; from a personal orientation, in the head, to something collective and jointly held; from a sense of self that is absorbed in the lap of the family to those social things that form the high points of expressiveness for a group (art, literature, and so on). Both senses are significant in the curriculum as this is one place in which formal cultural transmission and informal cultural production occur. This sliding continuum of meaning from culture as a thing to culture as a process is very important for an understanding of Aboriginal education. In the disciplines of Aboriginal education and Aboriginal studies, two separate notions of culture constantly recur and are sometimes in tension with each other. The first sense is based on the 'total way of life' notion. It sees 'Aboriginal culture' as the unified sum of those elements of knowledge, skills and understandings that are (or were) essential and distinctive aspects of a 'traditional' or 'authentic' Aboriginal way of life. Knowing how to find and prepare foods from the bush ('bush tucker') is an element of Aboriginal culture. A land rights song, played on an electric guitar, is not. The second sense of culture that is presented (if rarely theorised or described in Aboriginal education) is more active. In this understanding, culture is not so much the total way of life of a people as an always changing bundle of ideas, perspectives and mental frameworks. The bundle contains elements and practices which people individually and collectively build and tear down, imagine and share, borrow and reject, select and adopt during the processes of social life. Getting bush tucker is still a cultural activity in this sense; so is the land rights song. Different historical and economic conditions have a significant effect on the nature of this sense of culture. My preference in these essays is for this latter broad and more flexible notion of culture, despite the dominance of the former definition in Aboriginal education. This is the sense that will be emphasised and argued for, sometimes in contrast to the totalising sense, throughout essays in the volume. My bias is based on the belief that an understanding of culture restricted to the former, totalising sense of Aboriginal culture excludes dynamic development to focus on pristine preservation. It ignores the uneven distribution of cultural knowledge across a society. It slides past the facts of historical change so as to ignore the force of economic and political relations in contemporary society. It is a passive, objectified, static version of human culture generally excluding more than it includes, especially in contemporary Aboriginal Australia.

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

10

THE MEANING OF 'EDUCATION, THINGS AND IDEAS' Michael Howard (1982, l),writing about Aboriginal power, claims that, 'Aborigines lack both the ideological and economic bases of power in contemporary Australian society; for the most part they control neither things nor ideas'. The essays are all based on the conviction that efforts to include Aboriginal culture in the curriculum are part of a specific attempt by Aborigines to regain control over both things and ideas. Aborigines have identified education as one area in which they can recover some of the control and autonomy they have historically lost. They are seeking access to the things that education can provide. In the first instance, these are things such as the economic and technological resources of schools and education departments. In the future they hope that this resource control will provide access for their people to the things that shape their position in Australian society - things such as qualifications, jobs, security and access to capital. To gain some control over these things, it is necessary for them to regain control over ideas, particularly over those ideas about the distinctive nature of Aboriginal culture and its special place in Australian culture. In this regard, Aborigines are talking to and arguing with all Australians. Their arguments are resisted. The realm of culture is a contested terrain and the curriculum is a significant site on this terrain. Aborigines are lockedin a dynamic struggle with groups in the dominant society and with themselves over the right to claim its ground. They are seeking a restructuring of power relations through a restructuring of this particular field of knowledge and control. The Aboriginal education and Aboriginal studies curriculum is part of a wider and more difficult tussle for power that can be seen in the centre of Australia and in the city.

THE ISSUES IN THE CENTRE Remember this, Aboriginal people have been cut back all the time, but, like a grapevine, this makes us grow back richer and stronger.

Â

When Victor Tjungurrayi Robinson said this to me in 1987,I was a guest researcher visiting the school where he worked at Walungurru, on the Northern TerritoryWestern Australian border. This was a community, or mini-township, of some 400 predominantly Pintupi people that had grown around the foothills of Mt Leisler since 1981. The new store and school, the huge powerhouse, the yellow streetlights, the houses and occasional garden, were the culmination of a steady, if irregular, movement over two decades by the Pintupi people back to their homelands. I had first worked with Pintupi people in 1979 at staging posts in this westward movement, when they had outstation schools outside Papunya at Yinyilingi and

INTRODUCTION

Kungkayunti. Now they had a 'proper school' in a 'proper town' in 'Pintupi country'. The corrugated iron windbreak school in the shade of a desert oak had been superseded by a three-classroom, air-conditioned 'pre-fab', completely wrapped in security mesh and securely padlocked at the weekend. At the time of this visit, I had come from the city to collect material for an Aboriginal studies school text on Aboriginal culture and land. While this was preying on my mind, some people had other ideas of more practical, immediate and local benefit. In the minds of Tjungurrayi and his colleagues, I was seen as a resource person who might be useful in assisting them to develop their own bilingual, bicultural curriculum strategies. At their direction and in the face of their own energetic commitment to change, the textbook idea was hijacked and disappeared. In its place we began a collaborative research project aimed at producing a case-study of curriculum change in remote Aboriginal community schools. My version of the results are presented in Chapter 1which, along with the extended curriculum case study in Part 3, is my own limited analysis of a continuing research project. As a researcher working in collaboration with the yapangu (the Pintupi term for an Aboriginal person), I have talked issues through with them formally in workshops and informally over cups of tea. They have acted, spoken, written and painted about their ideas themselves, at conferences, in meetings and on paper. While I report some of their views as accurately and objectively as I can, what I say about their work is certainly different in form and content to what they say. Unlike my involvement, they are engaged in a research project on which they continue to work during every day in their school. As such, it is necessary to emphasise that this writing cannot pretend to be speaking for the Pintupi, but is interpreting, extending and discussing the implications of what they say about the place of their culture in the curriculum. They have spoken and are speaking for themselves, about their own work and ideas at their school. My reciprocal responsibility, defined explicitly by them in the early stages of our work, has been to express what I see as the implications of their words and actions for schools in other parts of Australia, especially those 'in the city'. Remote Aboriginal schools such as the one at Walungurru, where Tjungurrayi works, are usually not happy schools. Historically they have had the lowest rates of success in Australian education, suffering the highest rates of absenteeism, school leaving and individual failure. Many of the children who do come to school sit there for some seven years and come out at the end with minimal literacy skills, a smattering of simple spoken English and some limited numeracy abilities. Their skill levels are not enough to begin a secondary school course of study (if they had that option at Walungurru or nearby) or to gain access to

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

mainstream employment training programs (a limited option at Walungurru, also). Teacher and Aboriginal staff turnover is high, program development is patchy and discontinuous and any positive results are achieved against the grain of negative expectation. These schools seem locked into reproducing inequality. One of the reasons often given for this poor school report card is community and student alienation. That is, schools in such situations have been seen by Aboriginal people as places where they, their culture and society, have been 'cut back'. Tbday, a t Walungurru, the school is starting to be seen as a place in which Aboriginal people are growing back, 'richer and stronger', culturally, ' I see why this transition has taken place, whether politically and educationally. R it can be sustained and developed and whether it is possible for other schools to learn from the experience, became central issues for the overall research project. The yamngu have acted to hold the place and meaning of their culture as a central element of the daily lives of their small community. Tjungurrayi and his fellow yarwngu teachers3 have seen their major role as ensuring that the curriculum of the school is in step with general Pintupi opinion on this issue of cultural maintenance and development. As a group in their school and community, they are in the process of developing their own cultural, historical and political critique of the sort of walwpala (non-Aboriginal,from whitefella) education they have known. They are expressing their criticisms through curriculum experimentation, meetings and writing in their school, all of which are processes of cultural production. They are working through the issues of education, culture and power that are central to this text. In 1989 one of the public expressions of their work was at a national curriculum conference in Canberra. The painting they produced in the national capital (see Chapter 1)provides a starting point from which to show how one group of Aboriginal people from the Centre are defining the meaning and place of Aboriginal culture in their local curriculum and the link between their precise cultural concerns and the walypala culture around them. There is a mesh between their local concerns and the cultural concerns of the Australian nation at this time. The issues they discuss through their art have broader implications that draw out the cultural, economic and political lines that link people like the Pintupi with other Aborigines and other Australians. The imagined barrier that separates 'remote' from 'urban' and ya¥no,ngfrom w a l e dissolves when we engage as contemporary Australians, sharing this moment in time, place and purpose.

THE ISSUES IN THE CITY Chapter 2 also examines Aboriginal culture in action. It is also set in the city of Canberra, but at a Cultural Awareness Camp, rather than an Australian curriculum

INTRODUCTION

13

conference. The camp is a specific instance of a general process through which urban Aboriginal students are engaged in learning about their culture, becoming aware of their heritage and developing their Aboriginality. This particular camp was an officially sanctioned extracurricular program, funded by the Commonwealth Government and organised by the ACT Schools Authority and the ACT Aboriginal Education Consultative Group. While I was an observer at the camp in that I did not address the students as a group, I was also a participant in my temporary capacity as Aboriginal education consultant for the Schools Authority. My role was to provide administrative and practical support: dealing with the cheques, running people and things around (the appropriate gubba [non-Aboriginal] role in such events). Writing about it came a year later, when I was trying to sort out an understanding in theory for what I observed in action. Just as I wrote about the curriculum a t Walungurru, the way I write about this camp in the city is the action of a cultural outsider. The way I understand both sets of events is necessarily different from the understanding of an insider. Although I have known some of the tutors at the camp since I was a Brisbane teenager, learning about the 'wrong' side of town, and have known the yanangu teachers for a decade since I was a young school teacher, I remain a cultural outsider. This position gives me the necessary critical distance to write about the events, but denies me the specific insights that may be available to the insider. In stepping between the Centre and the city, from working with yanangu to working with kooris, from working with government to working with Aboriginal organisations, I remain located in my own cultural world, assisting in, observing and writing about the worlds of others. These worlds, although different, do overlap and are able to push and pull on each other. The world of the yanangu may be geographically remote but it is actively integrated with the world of the kooris and with the processes of national educational and cultural politics. Having worked on the fringes of some of the worlds in which such processes are occurring, I can comment on what I see as common forces and describe the links that are affecting the development of both Aboriginal and Australian cultural identity.

AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH To vyrite about the reasons for, directions of, and contradictions of curriculum and cultural change in Aboriginal education and Aboriginal studies, an ethnographic approach is necessary, especially for an outsider. Only such an approach can hope to describe and interpret the specific actions of small groups of Aboriginal people in widely varying types of places, and then step back from this to attempt to describe and interpret the broader historical, political and economic context in which such actions are taking place. Only an ethnographic approach that recognises

14

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

the links and fractures between the local, particular and specific on one hand and the national, state and regional on the other can accurately and sensitively portray contemporary events and analyse the sources and directions of changes as they occur. As an ethnographer,I can write about the way the outside (the state, the education system, the national curriculum) seems to affect what I see happening on the inside (in camps, meetings, presentations and social actions). In the ethnography of education, Willis' (1977) evocation of English working-class cultural perspectives indicates the potential of ethnographic writing to show what would otherwise be unseen (the cultural and political perspectives of the relatively powerless) and to challenge what would otherwise be taken for granted (the expectation of school failure for particular social groups). In particular, Willis ethnographically analyses the ways in which the cultural perspectives of powerless groups towards education serve to reproduce their lack of power in society, and to reproduce inequality. As such, it remains a classic ethnographic text for anthropologists and educators. Since the publication of this text more than a decade ago, however, the genre of ethnographic writing has expanded to encompass new areas of concern and ways of writing about these concerns as Marcus and Fischer (1986) point out. They suggest that the 'present experimental moment' in ethnographic writing can be characterised by the search for a dual vision. With one eye on the representation of other dimensions of cultural experience and the other eye on an informed critique of our own Western society, ethnographic texts have the potential to reveal difference, to challenge sameness and to grasp the interaction between whole systems and small groups. A dual vision allows an ethnographic text to show the perspectives of subjects at the same moment as showing the social realities that shape those perspectives. One experimental ideal for ethnographic theory and writing is to find ways to 'present rich views of the meaning systems of a delimited set of subjects and also to represent the broader system of political economy that links them to other subjects' (Marcus and Fischer 1986, 91). It is the aim of the essays in this volume to provide a specific local ethnographicaccount of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal actions and concerns in the construction of the curriculum, while placing this account within a broader perspective and deeper analysis of educational and cultural change. Part of the new ethnographic wave includes works that probe the distinctive meaning systems of cultures through analysis of the ways in which cultures most radically differ from one another, a key area of difference being their conceptions of personal identity (Marcus and Fischer 1986, 45). Personal identity, cultural identity, traditional identity, contemporary identity, yanangu identity, koori identity and Australian identity are all being actively negotiated

INTRODUCTION

15

through social actions and events around and in schools. To describe and analyse these abstractions, and to explore abstractions such as culture itself, it is first necessary to describe Aboriginal culture in action, especially to describe moments when the forces of culture are engaged and activated for educational and political purposes. The two chapters that follow explore Aboriginal culture in action, firstly through a Pintupi painting prepared at a national curriculum conference and secondly through an Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Camp. They show Aboriginal people mobilising their culture and constructing a viable and forceful identity in both the curriculum and the nation.

NOTES

1. The township of Walungurru is known as Kintore. Both names are used in popular speech, but the Pintupi name, from the site nearby, is the preferred formal name for the school and will be used in this book. 2. For reports on the specific nature of the fellowship's research process, see my initial report in the Institute journal, Australian Aboriginal Studies (Keeffe 1987). Readers with a particular interest in the Aboriginal studies dimension of the research may wish to read Keeffe and Schmider (1988), which is a guide to curriculum review and renewal in AboriginalIAustralian studies. 3. Including Sarah Napangati Bruno, Monica Nangala Robinson, Irene Puntytjina Nangala, Tilau Nangala Parker, Paul Tjampitjinpa Bruno, Douglas Tjupurrula Multa.

PART 1

ABORIGINAL CULTURE IN ACTION

CHAPTER

m

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

The conference delegates sit in a large university hall, listening to a panel put forward their views on directions for the Australian curriculum/ By this time on a Canberra winter afternoon, some of the delegates are beginning to feel uncomfortable on their cold plastic chairs. The question under discussion, 'Which way for the Australian curriculum?' seems a long way from being given a confident answer, At the very back of the hall, behind a display screen featuring parliamentary education materials, one response to that question is in the final stages of preparation, after four days of intensive effort, The last of the carefully placed dots are being applied to the canvas with a paintbrush dipped in glowing red acrylic paint. The four artists are anxious to complete the painting in time for a conference presentationthat had been squeezed onto the agenda at the last moment. A portable electric blow heater is brought into action to dry the final dots. At last, the painting is finished and the sense of urgency is lessened. The artists, Sarah Napangaii Bruno, Paul Tjampitjinpa Bruno, Monica Nangala Robinson and Victor Tjungurrayi Robinson from Walungurru, a predominantly Pintupi community on the Northern Territory-Western Australian border, have travelled over 2,000 kilometres to attend the conference, and are ready to present their work. As the artists walk up the aisle to the platform, the delegates catch a rushed glimpse of the large canvas which they carry between them, The glimpse is enough to leave a vivid impression of the shimmering power of the painting, its still wet colours glistening in the overhead lights.Tired minds becomefocused and alert, ready to see and hear the views of people from a remote Aboriginal community on directions for the Australian curriculum.On the stage, it takes time to get things right. A lectern is used to prop up the painting and the artists move around until they find a position in which they can talk freely about their painting despite the unsettling stares of 500 curriculum experts; more people are listening than the population of Walungurru, their home town. Eventually, they are ready to tell the story of their painting, in both Pintupi and English.

20

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Plate 1: The painting in preparation, from left Sarah Napangati Bruno, Paul 'Qampitjinpa Bruno, Victor 'QungarrayiRobinson, Monica Nangala Robinson (Canberra Times)

-.h 2: Monica Nangala Robinson and Victor Tjungurrayi Robinson explaining the painting to conference delegates

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

21

THE PAIN77NG: A DESCRIPTION AND COMMENTARY The Pintupi title of their painting (see plate and key) is Nganampa manta lingkitu ngaluntjaku, which can be literally translated as 'to hold our earth firmly'. Pintupi, like other Australian languages, is characteristically polysemous: any term is likely to have many meanings, determined by context and levels of knowledge. As a result, the title of the painting can also be interpreted as 'to hold (grasp) our earth (dirt, ground, land) firmly (strongly, powerfully)'. Further, the image of holding earth forcefully in the hands is intended to convey a larger message about holding on, especially through education, to that which comes from the land. In an Aboriginal view, this includes law, language and culture. The title provides a material image for an abstract process, as the panels of the painting and the commentary indicate. Most Pintupi acrylic paintings are designed to represent graphically the creativejourneys of Dreaming ancestors through the country (see Sutton 1988; Myers 1989). The paintings codify necessary knowledge about the connections between the events of the Dreaming, significant places in the land and Pintupi people today. In this painting, the artists extend the usual uses of the artistic form to develop a commentary on their own experience of education, and a statement addressed to all Australian education providers about Aboriginal education and the place of Aboriginal concerns within the total Australian curriculum. The symbols or icons used in the painting are common elements in the Central Australian artistic system, adapted here to express multiple contemporary meanings, while maintaining the link with core Pintupi concepts and values (Munn 1973; Peterson 1981). The specific, grounded, totemic geography of most paintings is here abstracted to speak to general abstract themes and issues, in that while most paintings are about particular places, this painting says more about relationships with place in general. Thus, the concentric circles refer, as in other acrylic paintings, to sites of ancestral action and to places in the landscape. In this painting, the concentric circles also refer to institutions such as schools and councils and to bodies of knowledge. In most paintings the occasional use of footprints indicates the motion across the earth of a Dreaming ancestor from one site of action to another. Here it indicates the movement through time (and space) of the Rntupi people, before and after the coming of non-Aboriginal people into their social world. The U-shapes are people, with the size of the U an indication of size, age and status. White dotted U-shapes are walypala, or non-Aboriginal people. This symbol refers to the impression that a person sitting cross-legged on the ground leaves in the sand behind them. The bars and ovals in the southwest section represent the spears and coolamons of traditional male and female use,

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Plate 3: The painting after completion

and suggest the knowledge and skills of the grandparental generation. The colours also carry meaning - the red of the sand, the green of the food from the bush, the white of the salt lakes and the sometimes yellow of the spinifex. The use of the colours is bold and innovative, helping to convey the importance and optimism of the artists' story. The painting is in five panels, representing different periods of time, starting from the centre, and following the footsteps from the northwest (top left), to the northeast (top right), southeast (bottom right), and southwest (bottom left). It is intended to be read as a chronicle of a Pintupijourney from the past, through the present and into the future; from their land to the settlements, followed by a return to their own land. The painting has a special emphasis on their experience of schooling, and the values that they believe should be at the centre of an appropriate education. As such, it is both a historical and philosophical narrative. The journey is represented through the tracks of feet moving from one panel of the painting to another. Each panel refers to a different period of time, as explained briefly in the Pintupi text and translation accompanying the painting. From the top left, or northwest corner, and looking clockwise, the four corner sections of

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

@

c

Place, camp, institution, knowledge source footprints (through time, place) Aboriginal adult

C Aboriginal child

(2

non-Aboriginal adult

-

non-Aboriginal Australia, government spear

23

0 coolaman

Figure 2: Representation and key to painting

the painting refer (roughly)to the 1960%1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. During these periods different government policies of assimilation, integration, selfmanagement and self-determination have been applied, shaping the nature of Pintupi educational experience. The painting speaks of their reactions to these changing general and educational policies and the directions for change as they see them. The particular focus of their concerns is the place of Aboriginal cultural knowledge and values in the schools of the time and for the schools of tomorrow.

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

24

While each symbol can be 'read' at a number of different levels, each panel can also be interpreted from a number of different perspectives. Sarah Bruno has described each panel of the painting in Pintupi. This text was written after the painting was finished and translated by the author (with the assistance of Ian Green). The Piitupi notations are the starting point for a parallel contextual discussion that interprets the historical and cultural dimensions of the artwork. The parallel discussion is based on conversations with the artists during the planning and production of the painting.

THE CENTRE: IN OUR ORIGINAL COUNTRY The yagangu (Aboriginal) of long ago, before the walvpala (whitefella) came, are living in their land. The children learn about their dreamings, their language, their ceremonies, and their country, all this is passed onto them from their grandmothers and grandfathers.

NGURRA WALYTJANGKA Yirritilingku yanangu tjuta nyinanyi ngurrangka, walypala wiyangka. Pipirri wiima tjuta nintirringanyi tiukurrpa, wangka, tulku, ngurraku, k a p w u g u kamu tjamukunu. From a historical perspective, the central panel refers to the period known as yiriti, the time before the Pintupi world was transformed through contact and involvement with non-Aboriginal society. As the panel shows, this was a time in which all of Pintupi life was close to the earth, to rnanta. The large roundel at the very centre of this panel symbolises the essence of the land, as the source of the Dreaming (tjufcurrpa),of all knowledge, understanding and resources. Its centrality and size indicate the power of place in the Pintupi view. To the north, south, east and west, extended family groups (walytja) live off the land, moving around sites of particular significance to their families. Their children have always been with them. From an educational perspective, the pre-contact period, which ended for most Pintupi in the 1960s, but for some as late as 1985, was the only period in which education was correctly assumed to be based on principles of universal access, equal opportunities and ensured successful outcomes through an appropriate curriculum. However, the central panel has a contemporary dimension as well as a historical one, hence the use of present tense in the text. The panel refers to both the time before walypala presence, and contemporary knowledge and understanding about land, language and culture. The knowledge is then and now, there and here, traditional and contemporary, historical and current. This knowledge is at the centre of the contemporary Pintupi world, and is accessible

PINTUPI AST, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

25

through bicultural education,just as the Dreaming is both a distant historical period and an accessible domain of the Pintupi world, able to be activated through religious ritual. TO THE NORTHWEST

In the 'ration times' (up to and including the 1960s),the yanangu are sitting, not knowing. The walypala are teaching the ( y a ~ n g uchildren ) about their (non-Aboriginal)language and (non-Aboriginal) culture. The other yanangu people are sitting 'behind', at the back (and not involved). YALINYZJAREA WILURARRALKU

Ratjintayimi yanangu tjuta ngurrpa nyinanyi. Walypala tjutangku nintini pipirri wiima tjuta tjanampa wangkaku kaltjaku. Yanangu kutjupa tjuta nganti nyinanyi. The top left of the painting, or the northwest panel, shows a historical period of enormous change for the Pintupi, when an ongoing but uneven process of relocation from the bush into settlements (government reserves) at Haast Bluff and Papunya occurred. For most Pintupi, this was during the 1950s and 1960s, a time when government policy was unambiguously one of assimilation, and the settlements (and schools) were clearly institutions of forced social change. During that time, people volunteered, or were persuaded and cajoled, to leave their own lands and come into the settlements (see Chapter 7). The Pintupi made difficult choices either to come in, stay behind, or to become intermittently involved in settlement life. Such decisions were often fraught with anguish, involving the separation of families, the risks of infectious diseases, fighting and a considerable loss of personal and social autonomy. The role and motivation of authorities and the degree of coercion involved in persuading the Pintupi to leave their lands is subject to intense, and often acrimonious debate, as discussed in Long (1989), Myers (1986, 34-40), Rowse (1986) and Nathan and Japanangka (1983). This panel is a conceptual model of settlement politics of the time, with a special focus on education, although the model holds true for other areas of cultural interaction. The smaller U-shapes are the children, shown to be surrounded and enclosed by walypala teachers, with whom they have no connections of kin, country or culture. The artists were once children in these schools, learning a foreign culture and a foreign language. Their parents, grandparents and related community members are shown to be behind, at the back and not involved. They are without power, influence or significance in the schooling process or in the selection of knowledge for the curriculum. The transmission and elaboration of

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

26

Pintupi knowledge across the generations are blocked, along with access to country. The language and culture of the school has no formal or informal connection with the language and culture of the community, nor with the concepts of ngum (land), walytja and tjukurrpa that underpin Pintupi values. TO THE NORTHEAST

(In the 1970s), although the others continue in ignorance of walypala ways, a few yanangu eventually learn about walypala language and culture and (start to work in) schools. At the same time some of the children and the adults together learn about grog and petrol-sniffing.

YAUNYTJASBA KAKARRALKU Y&-~angumaekurrpalpi nintirringanyi walypalakunu wangkaku kaltjaku, kuulaku, kanya yagangu kutjupa tjutaya ngurrpa nyinanyi. Pipirri kamu yanangu tiga kutjupa tjuta nintirringanyi tjurratjaku pitulaku. In the top right or northeast panel, time changes as the feet move into a period in which government policies moved into attempted integration, rather than assimilation. It is the 1970s, in places such as Papunya. The white U-shapes are now joined by a few black ones, representing the fact that some yamrigu (such as the artists themselves) are gaining access to walypala knowledge and skills, and are working in the schools as assistant teachers. They do not have the authority to determine the nature of the curriculum, nor do they, or the general community, have any involvement in educational decision-making. They are 'working as they are told'. At that time, petrol-sniffing and alcohol came to Haast Bluff and Papunya from other communities. In the painting, the cans and bottles are shown as white dots in front of some of the ~ h i l d r e nOf . ~ course adults drink, if not sniff, but there are no dots in front of the larger U-shapes, indicating that the focus of the panel is on the introduction of new knowledge to the young from the walypala domain, including knowledge with a negative social effect.

TO THE SOUTHEAST Tbday, yan0,ngu and walypala have joined, living and working together. YULPARIRRA KAKAKRALKU

Kuwarri, yawngu kamu walypala tju¥ngulpnyinum warrkarrinyi. In the bottom right or southeast panel, the school of the present era (ie the 1980s) is shown a t the level of working adult relationships. While there is an inner circle

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

27

of responsibility, surrounding the central resources and knowledge of education, the majority members are non-Aboriginal. Other yanangu and walypcila staff are outside this group. The expressed ideal is one of cooperative, shared decisionmaking and teaching responsibilities, inside the school. It is outside the school that the ideals seem to evaporate, with no community involvementbeing shown. This panel says, in effect, that this 'model' is where the Pintupi teachers have come to by the end of the 1980s. Changes have occurred in yawngu roles, especially through on-site teacher education programs, and the artists are keenly aware of the significance and responsibility of this role. They have, in this panel, painted a critique that depicts the fundamental flaw of this model. Where is the grandparental authority, the community knowledge, the access to yagangu understanding? In a sense, the panel points out that despite rapid change in individual yawmgu and walypala relationships in the school, changing the broader social and cultural relationship between the school and the community in which it is located is still on the agenda. Irene Puntyjina Nangala (1988) has written a Pintupi history of Waungurru school. She describes how their school was established in 1982 as an outstation school, following the return of Pintupi people to their own country after two decades of institutionalised settlement at Haast Bluff and Papunya. With the return to their own country, the yan0,ngu teachers have been able gradually to move to a position from which they can comment with authority on the need of the school to reflect and support the cultural concerns of their community. The general Pintupi community position on this issue has evolved in the context of the continuing bilingual outstation program, begun in 1972 at Yayayi outstation (Coutts 1982; Heffernan 1977). In the relatively few years that the school has been established at Waungurru, the artists and their yanangu teacher colleagues have maintained the educational program at the school for long periods during staffing shortages and the illnesses and delays in town that lessen walypala teacher effectiveness. They are aware of, and confident in, their role in providing educational continuity to the community. They are also aware of the need for a process of negotiation about the cultural content of the curriculum.

TO THE SOUTHWEST (In the future) our grandmothers and grandfathers are holding onto (and not forgetting) the land. They are telling us how to teach in school. They are saying that yan0,ngu schoolteachers should instruct the children. The yanangu and walypala teachers are together working out (how to operate the school). The boss (or the government) is sending other walypala teachers to work in the school with yagmgu people.

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Tjamu kapap tjutangku manta witini. Tjana watjani yaaltjiyaaltji kuulangka nintintjaku. Tjana w a t j a yanangu kuultitji tju-gku nintintjaku pipirri tjuta. Yeangu karnu walypala kuultitji tjuta tjungurringkula wangkanyi. Walypala mayutju tma paluru yiya@ walypala kutjupa tjuta warrkarrinytjaku yananguwana. As depicted in the bottom left, or southwest panel of the painting, the artists see their ideal future school as one that is an integral part of the community in a balance determined by the older men and women: those who 'hold the earth firmly'. The generation of grandparents (tjamu, kami)3 is shown with their spears and coolamons. These are the signs of the gender divisions of traditional labour and knowledge, and the complementary tools of authority. The grandparents, as an autonomous decision-makingbody, have the authority to direct the younger (artists') generation about the organisation of knowledge in the school. They are the ultimate determiners of the balance between local and external knowledge, because they are in control of the local, Pintupi domain of knowledge. The artists, presently student teachers, will then be the managers of the school, meeting the professional and kinship responsibilities of holding and looking after the students in the school.4 They plan to work in collaboration and cooperation with wulypala teachers, meeting them on their own, firmly held ground. They aim to ensure that the curriculum will reflect the needs and concerns of the community, providing access to external skills and knowledge in ways that support access to the Pintupi skills and knowledge represented in the centre of the painting.

In the bottom right section of this particular panel is a large U-shape, facing upwards. This is the non-Aboriginal Australia that is being addressed throughout the painting. This is the distant public whose understanding is being sought; the government that would provide the resources necessary to develop their school and community plans; the education system that will send teachers to their communities; the body of skills and knowledge that is promised through education, and the 'bosses' who will decide on their educational futures. In the Pintupi world, being a mayatja,5 a 'boss', is an authority bestowed by virtue of age, knowledge and responsibility. Such authority carries with it a reciprocal obligation to 'hold' and look after the land and the people (Myers 1986,212-14). The artists seek recognition of their own and their older generation's authority and responsibilities in the negotiation of knowledge and the collaborative development of a successful educational service for their own children and community. At the same time, they are challenging external authorities to live up to the responsibilities that flow from their power.

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29

THE CRITIQUE IN THE PAINTING In summary, the painting explicitly raises a number of concerns that need to be sensitively addressed in future educational developments, particularly in the area of curriculum development for the Pintupi and their 'countrymen' in other Aboriginal communities, especially those in remote communities. The painting is a substantial critique of the institution of schooling. The critique has historical, cultural and political dimensions, but also offers possibilities for positive change. Historically, the artists are critical of the social forces that have led to them growing up into adulthood without the access to country upon which a full, complete, successful education in Pintupi terms is based. They criticise the sort of walypalu schooling they received while being estranged from their parents' and grandparents' country. They visually describe the school of the times as a place of failure, alienation and exclusion. The artists are conscious of the fact that they are living through a period of great historical significance in which their political and educational ground has shifted from relative powerlessness to strength. They are now speaking from a strong position from which to begin developing a new education service for their children. They believe they are able to use the school to retrieve essential elements of their own education and to restore to the younger generation their right to grow up yagangu. It is important to note the limits of their claim. They do not say that they know how the balance of knowledge should be framed, or what the curriculum would look like. Essentially, they are now in the middle, seeking access to y a ~ n g uknowledge from their parents and grandparents, and walypala knowledge from the outside, all for transmission to the children. In the painting they are seeking recognition from two sources for their right to negotiate about the correct balance of yagarqu and waZypala knowledge and power. They see their way, from the perspective of their history, to a point in the future where they will be able to balance the processes of cultural retrieval and restoration on one hand, with the many demands (especially economic and employment demands) of their current location within a modem and developed nation-state on the other hand. Getting to that point is a difficult and conceptually tangled task that will take more time, commitment and resource support. Culturally, the critique in the painting questions the role of schooling in separating the child from the extended multi-generational family and the culture of the Pintupi community. It suggests that a number of urgent social problems in their community can be traced back to this artificially created cultural gulf. Throughout their schooling experience, however, the centrality and force of the implicit social knowledge that underpins their own way of life has resisted

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challenges by the complex cultural force of the walypala way. The artists believe that they (on behalf of their grandparents)still hold the land strongly, and therefore still hold the language, the culture, the knowledge and values of yan0,ngu life. The belief of these Aboriginal teachers in the need for schooling to grow from and be a part of the social and cultural reality of the community, is clear. Walungurru school is part of Walungurru community; the community exists as a statement of Pintupi cultural strength, so the school must be strengthened by and help to strengthen Pintupi culture. The painting is an aesthetic declaration of their ongoing cultural self-determination. As such the painting is a cultural construction made in explicit interaction with two different cultural worlds. Politically, developing the ideas for the painting, creating it and presenting it to the conference can be seen as the production of a Pintupi cultural and educational manifesto. They have painted what they believe about what should be. In the painting, the artists are taking political action back in their own community, and are addressing the national political agenda at the same moment. The painting calls for a local restructuring of the relations of power in the school, and by extension the community, towards structures that are built upon distinctively Aboriginal social relations and decision-making processes. Their production of the painting is a claim for recognition and legitimate authority for themselves as central mediators in the negotiation of power between the inside authorities and the outside world. The thinking behind the painting calls into question and poses alternatives for the usual forms of authority in an Aboriginal school. This work and their work in the school is questioning the nature of the curriculum, the overwhelming value placed on knowledge that is external to the community in which schooling is situated, and the lack of structural formal power for their people in the schooling process. Such probings at the source, allocation and distribution of power and knowledge raise difficult issues for teachers, community members and education authorities. The painting is also political on a national dimension. It paints Australia as much as it paints Wal-ungurru. All of Aboriginal Australia shares a past that was like the central panel of the painting. AU of contemporary Australia shares a present that is alienated and removed from that past. There are reasons, the artists claim, for Australia as a whole to reconsider its relationship with Aboriginal Australia along cultural and educational, as much as political and economic lines. The local, cultural implications of their painting will be described in the next section, before considering the connections between this local view and the politics of cultural identity at the level of the nation-state.

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A YANANGU CURRICULUM FOR WALUNGURRU SCHOOL Most days, these artists are not artists. Certainly, the established artists at Walungurru- would not count them in their number, and would be critical of the quality of some of the details of their 'dot-work'. They usually work in their small primary school as assistant teachers, and engage in a Remote Area Teacher Education P r o g r p to gain formal teaching qualifications. They do not (perhaps legally cannot) control their government school. In recent years, however, they have been able to make some inroads into adapting the core curriculum for their own purposes and are now being given authority to take some major educational and administrative decisions. While these are important steps, they do not go as far as is either possible, or from their perspective, desirable. Despite the evident sophistication of their views on the political, cultural and historical dimensions of education and their understanding of the uses of art as a forum to discuss appropriate values and knowledge for the curriculum, the full extent of their educational vision remains unfulfilled and may be ultimately idealistic. Despite their actions, their school structurally remains fairly much 'a walypala school' located in a yawngu community. However, their relative lack of structural power in the educational system does not mean that they cannot and do not take bold, decisive and powerful actions. It is the curriculum that has been the focus of their actions. At the local level, the curriculum of their school, like the painting, aims to be centred on yawngu values although expressed in an introduced medium. The yawngu teachers have begun to formulate the major content and processes of a curriculum centred on a Pintupi sense of self, and core Pintupi values such as connection to land, relatedness with other yanangu in the extended family and the community, and the complex of religious knowledge that comes from the Dreaming. These are expressed in the recurring phrases of Sarah's text (and have been selected as being key elements of the yanangu domain in a model for bicultural c~rriculum).~ According to the artists-as-teachers, access to valued yanangu knowledge is fundamental to the educational growth of the Pintupi person. Myers (1986) provides a detailed ethnographic interpretation of the Pintupi concept of the person who shapes social behaviour. He stresses the significance of ngurra (land), walytja (family) and tjukurrpa (Dreaming) as organising concepts for pre-contact Pintupi social life, and their relevance for an understanding of contemporary social life. He describes them as acting as a code

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32

for each other, under the rubric of 'part for whole', and as such they provide a code for Pintupi action, shaping the Pintupi view of reality and their concepts of the individual. These three concepts and their interaction in the yawngu domain are a t the thematic centre of the painting, Pintupi ideas on the person and on organising school knowledge.

EDUCATION FOR THE PERSON, YAIjANGU WAY We are talking about the word y a g ~ n g u From . that we are thinking which way to teach our children in school. We wish to teach our children about their country, family, ceremonies, to learn and understand these things. If they don't learn these things they will be ignorant. We wish to teach our children yam¥ngand wcdwala ways. If they do only walypala ways they will lose their understanding and will do things like petrol-sniffing and fighting. They will not listen to old people talking to them. To avoid this we have to do yapungu and waZypala work.7 N g a n ~ wangkanyi a yini yanangutjarra. Palunyatjanu nganaga kuligi yaaltji yaaltji nintintjaku pipirri tjutanya kuulangka. Nganea yunytjurringanyi pipirri tjutanya nintintjaku (ngurra, walytja, tulku, kuliptjaku, nintirrintjaku) wiyapaka tjana nintirringanyi ngaa tjutaku tjana tjinguru ngurrpa kutu nyinaku. Nganaca yunytjurringanyi pipirri tjuta nintintjaku yananguku munu walypalaku warrka palyantjaku. Pipirri tjuwupaka warrka walypalaku palyagi tjana pina patarringku munuya kutjapa kutjapa palyanmalpa panya yiwarrtjunkuya pitula munuya tjurratja tjikira pikarringku. Wiya tjana kulilku yagangu tina wanglcanyingka yalatjingkamarra kuulangka pipirri tjuta nintintjaku panya yaganguku munu walypalaku warrka. In talking about their school, their community and themselves, the Aboriginal teachers always use the word yamngu. For outsiders, developing an understanding of this word is a major step towards understanding the Pintupi world in particular, and perhaps the Aboriginal world beyond it. This is so because around the word there is a cluster of meaning about identity, the self and others. Some indication of its complexity and significance for education can be gained from the definition provided in the PintupilLuritja Dictionary (Hansen and Hansen in press).

yanangu n. people; animals; objects; used to contrast reality with unreal objects; a real body, not a spirit; a real animal not just a stump that looks like an animal; v. yagangurringu, became a person, to be born;

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This word was the starting point for a curriculum development workshop and ongoing curriculum activities in the school (see Keeffe 1988). For three months in 1987 a great deal of attention was given by the teachers to formal and informal discussions about the curriculum implications of this key term for identification. In discussing the dictionary set of meanings, the Aboriginal teachers added an essential other meaning not made explicit by Hansen, namely, the use of yawngu to refer to 'Aboriginal' in contrast to walypala. Although the term's primary referent is to 'person', this has been conflated with 'Aboriginal person' for so long, and the need for a contrasting term for 'non-Aboriginal person' is so recent that it is generally understood to refer to Aboriginal person in ordinary usage. As it is usually impolite and sometimes offensive to discuss the physical processes of birth and conception, the 'being born' sense of the verb yawnguwingu (to become yamngu) was not discussed in the workshops. However, the teachers pointed out that the verb can be used to describe becoming initiated as an adult member of the society. In this sense, the significance of the term yanangu for social maturity is central, giving another indication of the importance of the word in Pintupi concepts of the person. The word is used throughout the so-called 'Western Desert' region, including languages such as Luritja, Pitjantjatjara, Ngaatjatjarra, Yankunyjatjara, Wangkatja and Kukatja. Some of these languages use a slightly different pronunciation in keeping with local phonological rules (such as dropping the initial 'y' in Pitjantjatjara). The complex of meanings associated with the word, however, seems to be consistent across the region. In relation to the use of the cognate term anangu by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara speakers, the dictionary for these languages (Goddard 1987) includes the transitive verb, amngununyi, which is defined as 'to make a person of someone for example, raise, help recover from debilitating alchoholism', as well as referring to bringing someone into the world through procreation. Any term that refers, even indirectly, to areas of social and cultural significance such as social maturity, identity, physical reality, personhood, must be of interest to educators searching for the means to make the curriculum more relevant, appropriate and meaningful. The Pintupi regard the yawngu domain as the essence of any education process. According to the yawngu teachers, the experience of attending schools where their own domain of the person is neglected or ignored is a difficult and traumatic experience, usually not worth persevering with. They say that the students who try to be educated in a context that does not support yanangu ideas, usually fail. As their own ideas about themselves do not correlate with those of the school, the students become overpowered by an emotion referred to as kucta, a term which is usually glossed as 'shame' or

34

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'embarrassment', but which in this context (as well as some others), suggests a sense of alienation (cf Myers 1986, 120-25). The y a w n g u teachers felt that those of their countrymen who try to downplay, or ignore their own yanangu aspects, have great difficulty in replacing it with a vialypala persona. One of the y a w n g u teachers declared that petrol-sniffing and drunkenness were results of failed attempts to shift personal and social identity. It would seem essential, especially for curriculum development in schools in the Western Desert region, to pay close attention to those elements that belong in the y a w n g u domain if schools are to come close to achieving the commonly stated goal of educating the person as a whole. It is impossible for a foreign institution such as a school, with its dual and often contradictory tradition of cultural transmission and social control, to achieve this educational goal without a massive reorientation of the curriculum towards recognising the significance of learning in the yanangu domain. One step towards doing so is for Aboriginal teachers to be given the responsibility to elaborate and define their own cultural domain, and for them to select aspects of it that they view as essential to school experience. This is discussed in detail in the case study essay in Chapter 8. What is important to recognise here is that the artists, in the painting under discussion, are carrying on with the work that they have been doing in their school and in their community. They have found the means, in a modem adaptation of a traditional form, to express their political stance on the nature of an appropriate curriculum. This stance is informed and underpinned by core Pintupi concepts that include the idea of personal identity - an identity that is expressed in relationships with their land, with their family and with the Dreaming.

CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN ART AND SCHOOLING Aboriginal art and schooling have a linked history, in which numerous influential Aboriginal artists have found their vocation in the crayons and coloured pencils of the classroom. What has since become known as the Central Australian acrylic art movement started in 1971 when a Papunya schoolteacher,Geoff Bardon, began a project for students to paint the walls of the school (see Anderson and Dussart 1988; Bardon 1989). The art project was 'taken over' by a group of men from the older generation in the Papunya community led by Kaapa TQampitjinpa. These men recognised the potential for their art to be displayed on permanent surfaces, rather than only on natural ones. According to Forge (1989; 151), the teachers in the settlement recognised that transferring the art to a permanent vertical surface gave it the status of 'art' in European cultural terms. The permanence was illusory

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

for, as Forge comments, 'nothing can withstand a Department of Education [which] had the original work painted over'. In the murals, the men of Papunya found a way to erode the strident assimilationist nature of the school; to provide an alternative educational voice. The mural was intended to educate the children about the stories of the place in which the school was located. Putting some of their 'culture' on the walls of the school therefore became simultaneously an act of cultural resistance and a demonstration of cultural persistence (see Chapter 2). The initial rationale for the project, from the teachers' viewpoint, was that it was one way of curbing student graffiti, the younger generation's medium of cultural resistance. In both dimensions the art defies the expectation of cultural homogenisation inherent in assimilation policies. The department regarded it as such at the time, and it is probably why they had the walls painted over. A decade later, and in the nearby community of Yuendumu, problems with graffiti led to another moment in which the school encouraged local artists to 'make their mark' on the school. In 1987 the Warlukurlangu artists of Yuendumu painted all the doors of the school with acrylic paintings based on Dreaming stories.8 The doors are beautiful, in a way that not many things in remote government schools have much chance to be. The artists' rationale for the doors project is explained by Paddy Japaljarri Stewart: 'We want our children to learn about and know our Law, our Drearnings. This is why we painted these Dreamtime stories' (Warlukurlangu Artists 1987, 3). The project shows the possibilities available to a school when Aboriginal ideas and values are not marginalised but centralised. The doors, like the Papunya walls, are visual metaphors for what could happen, and sometimes does happen, in the curriculum, pedagogy, and administration of the school. The crossed purposes of such cultural actions and responses at the schooling site are significant.Schools need not be seen as places where Aboriginal people inevitably become assimilated into the dominant society, where their distinctive personal and social identity is stamped out in the individual and eliminated from the group. This denies the possibilities that are always present when human action is involved and human imagination is active. One narrow, bleak and negative view of education and power sees all schools as simple machines of the state and the dominant groups in society, designed perpetually to manufacture sameness and to stamp out difference. In this view schools with Aboriginal students, through the formal and informal curriculum, stifle Aboriginality, suffocate cultural opposition and produce a student population assimilated to the norms and values of the dominant society.

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It is narrow, negative and incorrect to view the culture of the school as Western to the total exclusion of Aboriginal cultural concerns. It is based on a functionalist idea and a static notion of culture. Schools are sites in which people take political actions and negotiate about values and meanings; they are sites for human agency, for cultural production, innovation and reformulation. The contemporary curriculum has numerous gaps and spaces into which local political action moves in order to create widespread change and eventual reformation of the total curriculum. In Central Australia, the 'cultural' is the main arena in which politics in general and educational politics in particular, is played, and Aboriginal people are critical, active and creative players. The acrylic art movement provides a model of possibilities for the curriculum. Central Australian acrylic art is an emergent art movement that is both retrospective and futuristic. It looks back and draws from the values and concerns of yapzngu life before the coming of the walypato, as well as looking towards a future where these values and concerns are recognised and respected by non-Aboriginal Australian society and the nation-state. The art movement also looks inward and outward at the same moment: looking into yanangu knowledge and showing this out to the wider world. It is not simply a depiction of a traditionally located mythical Dreaming world. The art is bicultural - centred on

Plate 4: Schoolboys in front of the doors of Yuendumu School (Jon Rhodes)

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULXURAL POLITICS

Aboriginal ideas but using Western materials. This is a model for the curriculum. It is possible to observe another dimension of this process at work through an analysis of the contradictory position of Aboriginal art a t the level of the state, and the ways in which Aboriginal people are using these contradictions for their own political and cultural purposes.

CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN ART, CULTURAL POLITICS AND T H E NATION-STATE The claim that the painting prepared in the conference addresses the national political agenda is not reading meaning into the painting after the event. Neither is the national reference simply an extension or application of the painting's primary local reference. Rather, the production of the painting itself was due to the interaction of national political forces on the contested terrain of 'culture', in which education is a key area. The message of the painting is explicitly addressed to the Australian curriculum movement and to the predominantly non-Aboriginal nation of Australia. At one level the painting is an authentic product of a specific local cultural tradition, realised in a contemporary medium, addressing contemporary cultural concerns of the Pintupi. At another level the painting is a product of the present moment in the cultural politics of the Australian nationstate. The artists came from Wajungurru to Canberra as result of a conjunction of political forces operating at the national level. The scarce economic resources needed for the venture were obtained, in the first place, from the Australian Teachers' Union, whose activity and commitment in the area of Aboriginal education has been a continuing force for change. These resources were supplemented by bodies that included the ACT Schools Authority, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and the Department of Employment, Education and Training. All of these bodies, and the individuals who represented them, as well as the three television networks and two capital city newspapers that covered the story, had cultural and political agendas that differed from those of the artists. The coincidence of their interests culminated in the construction of the painting. The involvement of the state in the painting was most apparent during the conference when the Governor-Generalwas shown the work in progress and discussed it with the artists. Eventually, after the conference presentation, the artists negotiated the sale of the painting to the Department of Employment, Education and Training for use in a public relations campaign for the National Aboriginal and Ibrres Strait Islander Education Policy, which was in the budget

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preparation stage at the time. The department bought the sole rights of reproduction and have produced posters for schools based on the painting and text. They have used a copy of the painting for the cover of the policy document and it served as a backdrop to the launching of the policy at Parliament House by the Prime Minister, the Minister for Employment, Education and Training and the Minister for Aboriginal Affaim9The painting itself now hangs in a conference room outside the office of the Departmental Secretary on the top floor of a Canberra office block. Government bodies were a significant force in the production of the painting and are a significant force in its reproduction. As the consumer of the artwork, the department claimed the right to use the painting to testify to the legitimacy of the government role in education for Aboriginal people. The painting was seen as an Aboriginal expression of the need to address the first goal of the policy, aiming at Aboriginal involvement in educational decision-making. Thus, the painting was produced within the complex and contradictory networks of Australian education politics. Art and education are both cultural domains, in which the state invests heavily with little return. Education politics can be viewed as a subset of general Australian cultural politics, a field in which Central Australian acrylic art has earned a significant place. The incorporation of this art demonstrates the contradictory and uneven nature of relations between the state and minority groups, on the terrain of culture. The Central Australian acrylic art movement has captivated the Australian and international art worlds in an unprecedented fashion in the last two to three years. Since its beginnings at the Papunya school as recently as 1971 (see Bardon 1989; Crocker 1983; Forge 1989; Sutton 1988),the movement has come through stages of exclusion and ethnographic interest to eventual recognition and widespread acclaim. It is now vaunted as a movement that could not only challenge, but defeat modern art on its own terms, and could be said by many to be the most evocative marker of Australian cultural identity. This is so especially from the transient perspective of the urban glitterati who delight in gazing at the art through their cocktail glasses and seeing reflections of international art movements such as Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism at the same time as they see 'Australianism'. The art is seen as having a sense of place and purpose that is absent in other modern Australian art. From humble, remote and recent beginnings on the most distant periphery of Australian art, Central Australian acrylic art has gained a place at its very core. Such a leap in cultural significance has undoubtedly been partially due to the presence of Aboriginal culture in the massive national identity formulation process that took place in Australia during the bicentennial 'celebrations' of 1988.

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Plate 5: Michael Tjakarnarra Nelson explaining his mosaic to the Queen and the Prime Minister, RJL Hawke, at the opening of the new Parliament House, 1988 (Canberra Times)

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This process was something of an identity crisis, bearing symptoms similar to culture shock, most evident in the ambiguous attempts by the state to incorporate Aboriginal art into major political statements about the identity and legitimacy of the nation-state. The Barunga bark painting1Âwas one element of this strategy, while Michael Tjakamarra Nelson's mosaic in the forecourt of the new Parliament House site was another. In the latter case, Nelson's acrylic painting has been translated into another medium, and incorporated into the major architectural symbol of the power of the state. Despite the translation and re-contextualisation, the message of the mosaic and of all Central Australian acrylic art is clear, as Michael Nelson (quoted in Nairne 1987, 217-18) has expressed it: You must appreciate that we, my generation, were brought up in the bush, in our own country in the desert. We were instructed by the old people. We did go to school and learned something of the European way, but only to a limited extent. We were primarily brought up within our own Law. We became well versed in our own culture.. . Well, it is good that you people can get the chance to see our painting...Maybe you'll even understand and learn from these designs; learn from these Dreaming tracks that are so much a part of us.. .White people don't really fully appreciate these Drearnings that we paint. These Dreamings are part of this country we all live in.. .We've been trying to explain it to them, to explain what it means to us, for the sake of all Australians. We try to show them that this is our land. Given the interests (backed by massive economic resources) of the state and the international art market which have both become involved in Aboriginal art, can the Pintupi education painting be regarded as an 'authentic' expression of Aboriginal beliefs? Has the painting been devalued and its political purposes derailed by this broader national engagement? To answer these questions it is necessary to ask to what extent the intentions of the artists were realised in the painting, or the extent to which their work has been appropriated, incorporated and consumed in the national arena of cultural politics, as Fry and Willis (1989) would argue. The cheque has been signed, sealed and delivered, but who now owns the ideas? Obviously, the artists. They agreed to come to Canberra, decided that they would create a painting, planned its content, painted it, presented it and sold it for their own reasons. Some of these reasons are biographical and personal, some are historical, some reasons relate to political demands in their home community. A great deal of their reasoning was based on the fact that they were in the national capital, at a national curriculum conference, and were engaging in a national political debate. They had something to say and ideas to share with

PINTUPI ART, THE CURRICULUM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

the nation about education, about the place of Aboriginal culture in education, and about land rights. In using their own art forms to express such a message to the nationstate, the Pintupi artists are following an emergent tradition in the Aboriginal element of Australian cultural politics, a classic example of which is the Yirrkala bark petition produced in 1963(see Chapter 9). According to Morphy (1983,115), the bark petition's genius 'was that it introduced an Aboriginal symbol into Parliamentary discourse, making it harder for Europeans to respond in terms of their own cultural precedents.' A painting, unlike a submission, cannot be answered with a vague and polite ministerial letter, filed and archived. It demands a response and sets terms based on Aboriginal values for any subsequent negotiations. Like the bark petition, the painting also displays and makes explicit those values that are central to Aboriginal thinking, but are usually remote from non-Aboriginal thinking. Like Michael Nelson's work, the art has a teaching function directed to effective non-Aboriginal learning. The ongoing significance of 'land', the retention of religion, culture and language, the expressed right to remain yagangu, the significance of generational authority, are values that are generally outside the thinking of non-Aboriginal teachers and educational decisionmakers, but are central to the painting and accompanying text. They are values that are central to the work of the artists, as teachers in their school, as values that should permeate the curriculum. In the painting, they have a vehicle to drive the double message home that they want education, but on their own terms, and they want non-Aboriginal Australians to learn from their experience.

WHICH WAY FOR THE AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM? The focus question asked at the conference at which the painting was developed was, 'Which way for the Australian curriculum?' A number of directions are suggested in this painting and in the related work of Aboriginal educationists across Australia. The Australian curriculum movement can draw strength from the example of the acrylic art movement that began at Papunya school two decades ago. The school curriculum and art in any society share cultural, pedagogical and political aspects and functions. Just as the national (and international) art world has been open to an indigenous movement founded on yan0,ngu values, the world of education, especially the Australian curriculum, may be also open to an indigenous education movement founded on the same set of values. Opening lines of communication in such directions requires a number of major shifts in the thinking of Australian educators and some important curriculum policy reforms.

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For example, Aboriginal experiments in reworking and reshaping a curriculum based on historically and geographically distant post-colonial forms of knowledge have much to offer us as we try to decolonise and Australianise the curriculum we have now. For groups such as the Pintupi, their challenge lies in finding curriculum directions that are founded in their own local, specific cultural traditions while still providing access to the skills necessary to participate in and contribute to a reworked, inclusive Australian culture (a challenge for all of us). Such efforts require a more generous and purposeful level of resource support, at local, state and national levels than has been received to the present. The Aboriginal commitment to self-awareness, self-management and the education of the whole person within the social and cultural context of their own community is worthy of widespread attention and, perhaps, imitation. A national curriculum based on these ideas recognises that an alienating curriculum is one of failure and exclusion and searches for ways of recognising and respecting the culture of students and supporting their hopes for the future. The Aboriginal emphasis on land as the source and focus of social action, identity and creative energy is a timely curriculum inspiration in a period of increased environmental awareness. Especially significant is the powerful example of a small group of people who have been dispossessed, impoverished and denied their fundamental rights to an education. Despite this history, they have retained a sense of their own educational destiny, are recovering their own cultural, social and political futures and seek to assist others to do likewise. They are people who have been cut back, but who are growing back even stronger. All of these are directions to address significant mainstream education issues and to inspire cultural and political action inside and outside schools. The title of their painting Nganampa mar& Zingkitu ngaluntjaku, or 'to hold our earth firmly', contains a message for all Australian educators, all Australians and ultimately perhaps, all humans.

NOTES 1. The Australian Curriculum Studies Association Conference was held in Canberra in July 1989. 2. A symbol developed by Andrew Spencer Tjapaltjarri and the Healthy Aboriginal Life Ramin order to communicate with Aboriginal communities about substance abuse and health issues (see National Aids Bulletin, 1989 (3)3).

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3. Hansen and Hansen (in press) define the terms as: tjamu n. relationship term; grandfather; grandson; male ego's wife's mother's father; one's father's father's son's son; may generally refer to all male ancestors who have died; generally to all one's male offspring; syn. tatata kami n. relationship term; granddaughter; grandmother; wife's mother's father's sister; daughter's daughter; all departed female ancestors; female offspring below the daughter generation; syn. kapali. 4. Hulcombe (1988) describes the community and school meetings that led to the formulation of this 'model', as shown in this panel of the painting. See also Chapter 8. 5. According to Hansen and Hansen in press: mayatja n. boss; one who has some authority over you i.e. father, uncle, father-in-law etc; syn. mayutju mayatja pulka idm. important boss; big boss; government official; lit. 'big boss'; one who is superior to other authorities; used of most European authorities regardless of their position; syn. mayutju pulka. 6. See Chapter 8 for a more detailed discussion. 7. Monica Nangala Robinson, 1987.

8. Warlukurlangu Artists (1987) is a book of photographs of the painted doors, accompanied by Warlpiri and English texts.

9. The poster of the painting includes the text by Sarah Bruno under discussion here. 10. See the comments on the Barunga bark painting in Land Rights News, vol. 2, no. 7, 1988. The painting has now been hung at Parliament House.

CHAPTER

2

ABORIGINALITY IN ACTION: THE CULTURAL AWARENESS CAMP

The music from the cassette player echoed in the valley, bouncing off the jumbled rocks and down to the river. By the water's edge, a cluster of Aboriginal teenagers on the first day of their Cultural Awareness Camp were watching Mark as he played the didgeridu. The instrument had been hollowed out to play at middle-C so that the drone merged with the electric guitar, backing the singer on the cassette. Some of the students joined in the chorus: 'Cause we have survived the white man's world, and the horror and the torment of it all. We have survived the white man's world, and you know you can't change that,' Others laughed at their attempts to draw out the notes at the end of the chorus. The song came to an end, but the didgeridu player continued until, breathless, he placed the instrument beside him and looked around at his circle of young admirers.

Geertz (1973, 11) describes practising ethnography as being similar to reading a manuscript that is foreign, faded, full of things that do not quite make sense or fit together very well, or that have strange echoes with other worlds. In this metaphor the manuscript is not written conventionally, in graphs of sounds, but in fleeting and fast-flowing moments of social action. When we 'read' another culture different from our own, we construct a reading of these actions. We try to interpret their meaning so that it somehow fits a known pattern. The construction of a reading of Aboriginality has to begin with a description of such fleeting examples of social action. The concept of Aboriginality is used in social life, especially, but not only, by Aborigines. In active use, like other concepts such as nationalism or democracy, it is constructed, contested, and sometimes contradicted or confused. That they are constructed and contested is not to say that such concepts are 'made up' or are somehow not authentic, but rather that they are products of social action and human imagination, operating in particular political and economic circumstances (see Beckett 1988, 2). It is these circumstances that give concepts such as Aboriginality or nationalism their twosided and ambiguous nature as well as their appeal to those who may believe in, or live for, these concepts. There are many aspects of social life that could be used to describe and analyse Aboriginality in action, including the arts, politics, or the 45

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

writing of history. In all these areas in recent times, especially since the advent of policies of self-determination,Aboriginality has become a key concept. In urban Aboriginal education the uses of Aboriginality are clearly visible and profoundly significant. The active use of Aboriginality is clearly revealed in the Cultural Awareness Camps that have taken place across Australia as part of externally funded, but internally supported, cultural education programs. It is in such a situation that the adult members of the society decide upon the contents of Aboriginality which they feel their children should master. The camp is a conscious construction of culture and identity, concentrated in a burst of formal instruction. It is curriculum in action. The emphases given to different elements of Aboriginality indicate the priorities they hold for Aboriginal adults. Conversely, the response of children to these priorities indicates their own concerns. Students are never the passive recipients of cultural transmission, but actively engage and rework the messages they receive. Aboriginality can be said to be composed of two key themes. I call these Aboriginality-as-persistence and Aboriginality-as-resistance, in order to provide a pattern for explanation. Aboriginality-as-persistenceis one of the essential and always present themes of Aboriginality. This theme is made up of a set of elements that are bundled together as a significant part of what Aboriginal people mean when they refer to and use the word Aboriginality. When this theme is dominant in a particular situation, the elements that are stressed are such things as: a belief in the persistence of an inherently unique identity; the continuity of cultural practices that originate in traditional Aboriginal culture; the common sharing of these by all Aboriginal people in Australia. Aboriginality-as-persistenceis seen to be the dominant theme of the Aboriginal studies curriculum. The emphasis on persistence and continuity that characterises this aspect of Aboriginality (and in some contexts delimits it) is founded on a particular notion of culture as a fixed and static body of material, knowledge and concepts. Sometimes, such culture is described as being genetically transmitted, inherited and reproduced. In contrast, Aboriginality-as-resistance is a more active theme in its usage by Aboriginal people, especially the young. It is not only a specific set of shared elements, but also a living set of cultural practices. These practices are in dynamic interaction with the dominant non-Aboriginal society, and the cultural practices that are an essential part of this society's way of life. Aboriginality-asresistance is particularly evident in the practices of students in schools. The elements that are stressed when this aspect is dominant are such things as resistance to non-Aboriginal authority, oppositional stances in key areas, political

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struggle and collective solidarity. The means to express these elements are often drawn from the resources of the dominant society, demonstrating a different notion of culture as a dynamic, creative, political process rather than the one celebrated in Aboriginality-as-persistence. The two coexisting themes underlie all Aboriginal discourse on Aboriginality. In any particular context one theme may seem submerged or muted by the other. They are not at all total opposites, but are variations on the same subject. Their interaction is shown by the fact that the persistence of Aboriginal people, as an identifiable social and cultural group, is in large part due to their successful and continuing resistance. The two themes are in tension, and a t times compete for attention or contradict each other. The contrasts between the two themes and their occasional unity can best be understood by listening to Aboriginal people talk about them and observing their active construction and transmission.

ABORIGINALITY AND THE CULTURAL AWARENESS CAMPS Cultural Awareness Camps across Australia were funded from 1984 to 1987 through the Commonwealth Government Participation and Equity Program (PEP). The program as a whole was designed to improve the educational opportunities of young students from 'disadvantaged' groups, those with low educational rates when compared to the norm of the white middle class. It was an ambitious program, costingjust over $146 million in total (McRae 1988, ix). As Susan Ryan, the minister responsible for education at the time, evidenced particular concern about Aboriginal education needs, 2 per cent of these total funds were dedicated to programs identified as Aboriginal. Thus, the Aboriginal component of PEP amounted to just under $3 million, an unknown amount of which was spent on ventures such as Cultural Awareness Camps? Aboriginal groups in cities and rural centres in New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory elected to spend their funds on similar projects as well as many other projects. Each of these Cultural Awareness Camps stressed the need to educate students in their Aboriginality. Such an emphasis was a direct result of the priorities of those Aboriginal groups who, under self-management policies, were given the responsibility for determining the allocation of their funds under the program. At the national level the National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC) These determined funding allocation and set priorities for project implementati~n,~

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48

were discussed by State and Territory Aboriginal Education Consultative Groups (AECGs) which made local decisions based on their perception of local and state needs. These bodies have consistently endorsed the concept of Aboriginality as the key to policy and practice in Aboriginal education. The major statement of the NAEC on a national philosophy of Aboriginal education begins with the declaration that: The National Aboriginal Education Committee recognises that there is a common feeling of 'Aboriginality' among all the descendants of the indigenous people of Australia, both traditional and non-traditional. We believe that education for our people must be a process which builds on what we are by recognising our natural potential and cultural heritage (NAEC 1985, l). Thus, Aboriginality was, throughout the 1 9 8 0 ~at~ the head of the agenda in Aboriginal education. It was stressed as both the target of specific Aboriginal education programs and as the means by which Aboriginal students could achieve success in schools. In curriculum terms, it was both content and process, aim and means, objective and strategy.

TAMING AND LEARNING ABOUT ABOMGINAUTKAS-PEWISTENCE Mark, a tutor at the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Camp, was listening to the complaint of a young boy, who said, 'You know what gets me? What gets me is when kids in the playground reckon I'm not Aboriginal because I've got blonde hair and blue eyes.' Mark looked at the boy and replied, 'You know what you should tell them? You tell them that you're Aboriginal because you've got Aboriginality in your blood. You know, white people have got a mixture of blood genes from all the different people in Europe. Asians have got about three blood genes, and negroes have got four. Aborigines have only got one blood gene, because we were always here by ourselves. So even if you've only got one drop of Aboriginal blood, you're Aboriginal all the way through, You just tell them that-' In analysing Aboriginality-as-persistence,one of the key elements is the belief in an ongoing, distinctive racial identity. It is a socially elaborated genetic fact. Aboriginality is claimed to be inherent: a permanent and inseparable attribute

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of social identity. It shows a belief in the continuity of a distinct racial identity that has persisted and persevered despite enormous change in the face of colonisation, domination and extensive intermarriage, as well as efforts by government to minimise, downplay and reduce the significance of racial identity through the assimilation policy. Mark's advice to the boy can be seen to be derived from and compatible with commonly held ideas of the dominant s6ciety on race, transformed by popular belief and shaped by a determination to stress biological distinctiveness. An example from a 'Wmanian Aboriginal education journal illustrates a similar belief: Aboriginal people, unlike Melanesians, Polynesians, and Africans, rapidly lose their blackness as they mix with other races, which makes it hard for most Tasmanians to feel that those whose skin is almost as pale as their own can really be 'fair dinkum' about their difference. But why should a few generations, a hundred years and a skin change alter fundamentally the deeply inherited culture of any human being? After all, the Aboriginal culture has grown for at least 40,000 years, and the European culture, as we know it, for only about 5,000 years (Mallett 1986, 18). This statement indicates that there is a perception of a biological source for culture; it is 'deeply inherited'. In popular terms for Aboriginal people (and for others in our society, also), the culture of a group is 'in the blood'. Because of the length of time that Aboriginal people lived in Australia this inheritance is regarded as more powerful, more enduring and of greater influence than the relative contribution of any European genes. As it is older, it is deeper and impossible to lose. An emphasis on the age and supposed unbroken continuity of Aboriginal culture is frequently expressed through the use of archaeological evidence of human occupation in Australia, interpreted to imply a single cultural tradition, as in the constitution of the ACT Aboriginal Education Consultative Group: Aboriginal people lived in what is now known as the Australian Capital Territory for possibly 100,000 years before the arrival of Europeans (Lake George core samples). During this time they established a unique culture through their mastery of the land and its resources (ACT AECG 1984, l). The age, spiritual nature and Australian origin of Aboriginal culture is emphasised throughout the..curriculum materials used in schools to discuss Aboriginality. An explicit example is the teaching kit, produced by the Curriculum Development Centre, called Aboriginalitg and I h n t i t y . In this kit, Aboriginality is defined by Nelson (1984, 2) as:

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FROM THE C E W B R 3 THE CITY

Unity through a deep-seated belonging to the earth, embodied in the original clan lands throughout Australia, as bequeathed by the Ancestral beings. Further, Aboriginality is a sense of belonging to a geographically broad group of people with related unique cultures, and a recent heritage of oppression and degradation. Some of the elements that make up this inherited and deep-seated culture can be listed and briefly described. They include a belief in an unsevered spiritual connection with land, as shown in this statement and the claim by Truscott (1979, 384) that, 'Culturally and spiritually we totally identify with the land.' Another common element of Aboriginality-as-persistenceis the belief in the value of 'caring and sharing'. This is a phrase that has been centralised in the Aboriginal discourse on Aboriginality, as for example in Perkins (1974, 191), Gilbert (1977, 300) and is particularly evident in a story told by an Aboriginal woman who tutored at a number of the Cultural Awareness Camps across Australia, and whose taped stories are used in many schools. In one story, she tells of a group of children who are fighting over who should ride a new bike. The story has an exchange between the characters: 'Listen, we're Murris aren't we? We're Kooris. We're Aborigines aren't we?' And they stopped and looked at him and said, 'Yes, of course we are.' 'And Aborigines share and care don't they?' And they looked at him for a moment and said, 'Yes, of course we do.' And he said, 'Aborigines don't fight and argue. They decide things so everyone agrees to it. Don't they?' And all the kids were quiet for a while and hung their heads (Watson 1984). 'Caring and sharing', the belief in the persistence of kin-oriented networks that underpin social behaviour in all parts of Australia (see the account in %ad 1984, 141 and Langton 1981, 18) and a certain essential quality identified with Aboriginal blood, as well as a distinctive 'style' of social interaction (Schwab 1988, 77) and language use (Eades 1988, 97) are all elements that axe said to be combined as vital interactive aspects of Aboriginal identity. These elements are used to define the commonality of Aboriginal culture, as it has been inherited by every person of Aboriginal descent.8 Despite this common inheritance, there is still a perceived need to realise these elements in practice. In other words, racial origin gives a right of access, a permit, to a culture that still must be learned in order to make it a reality for an individual. The contradiction between the notion of an inherited culture and the need to master its contents was in evidence at the Cultural Awareness Camp, and is one of the essential dilemmas of the construction of Aboriginality.

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The dance instructor at the camp marshalled the students for rehearsal, calling out to them: Alright, you kids, get into four lines, boys at the front and girls at the back. Now this afternoon, we're going to learn how to do the brolga dance from Cape York, Everyone watch me.' One of the parents watching turned and commented, 'You know, it does you good to see these kids here dancing. l wonder how long it's been since black kids did this dance here? Oh, did they have that dance down this way?' The Aboriginal organisers of the camp based their rationale for the camp on the fact that students would be expected to engage in activities regarded, by them, as being of a traditional kind. These included learning dances that were taught by tutors from the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Company, based in Sydney. The dances were interpretations of those used in more remote parts of the continent, such as Mornington Island and Cape York. Other activities were also drawn from the domain of the arts and included the construction of a large sculpture of a rainbow serpentl hand stencils and playing a didgeridu. Aboriginality-as-persistenceis clearly evident in the connection that Aboriginal people in urban areas feel can be maintained through the medium of the arts.4 It is part of the beliefs of the dominant society that there is an artistic tradition of Aboriginal culture that can and should be maintained. It was recognised by the former Minister for Aboriginal Affain as 'animportant part of our national identity proudly reflected in our music, design and the performing arts' (Hand nd, 2). It is a safe tradition in the sense of being non-threatening and is used by non-Aboriginal Australians to evidence their interest in the aesthetic aspects of Aboriginal culture (see ANOP 1985). Art is also an exxernal manifestation of culture that can be taken out of the context of society and treated as a commodity for consumption, resale or investmentl by Aborigines or whites. In this case, instruction in Aboriginal arts provides an investment in cultural capital. In this controlled and formalised training in Aboriginality much of the learning takes place in a style that is, of necessity, somewhat artificial and contrived. It is simulated cultural education, causing a narrowing of content in the curriculum. At the camp, no mention was made of the religious context, or ceremonial significance of the dance for the cultures from whom it was borrowed. No explanation was offered of the different cultural traditions of Cape York and Mornington Island. The mode of transmission was shaped by the pedagogical methods of the dominant society, so that teaching was organised along school-

FROM THE CEMRE lU THE CITY

like lines. The significant point for the students was, however, that the dance was Aboriginal, they were Aboriginal and learning the dance would enable them to prove it to their friends and, perhaps, to themselves.

TAMING A h D LEARNING ABOUT DORIGINALflKAS-RESISTANCE >

The teenage girl adjusted her red, black and yellow head-band, and spoke to her young cousin about the things she had learned in her Aboriginal Studies course. 'l never knew before about Pemulwy. We only got told about Bennelong and all that, But Pemulwy was a real freedom fighter, and gave the English soldiers a really hard time, They ended up cutting his head off and sending it to England to study. l reckon he started land rights, because he was only fighting for his land.' The choice between Bennelong and Pemulwy as markers of identity for young Aboriginal people exemplifies the range of choice between resistance and persistence as components of meaning for Aboriginality. The study of Aboriginal

Pla* 6: Esther Bruno, from W@ungum, in Canberra (Alana Harris. AIAWIS)

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history in schools, and subsequent popular understanding, has been restricted, until very recently, to general knowledge about events on the frontier in which Aboriginal people, as individuals, as named figures, were absent. The exceptions were the characters of Bennelong and Jacky-Jacky (Fesl1984; West 1985;Wilmott 1987). In fact, the New South Wales curriculum for Aboriginal schools for many years recommended the study of their characters as moral lessons for students.5 Both characters represent the antithesis of resistance, being cooperative with explorers and settlers and generally accommodating to invaders. The growth of Aboriginality has seen an intervention and revision of this officially endorsed history, so that the 'culture heroes' of accommodation and assimilation are being replaced by the 'culture heroes' of resistance. In New South Wales during the 1980s, the figure of Pemulwy was promoted as the new culture hero, representing resistance to white incorporation and a rejection of acc~mmodation.~ For example, the newsletter of the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group is named after him. As the editor comments: The newsletter has been called Pemulwy in honour of one of the first Aboriginal people known to have resisted the invasion of Australia. Pemulwy and his son, Tedbury were both outlawed while leading resistance [to] the invasion for 20 years after 1788. They led a form of guerilla warfare right around the area of modern Sydney and were perhaps the first Aboriginal people to resist attacks on their culture and identity (Anon. 1986, 1). In a foreword to Miller (1985), the President of the NSW AECG continues this theme, saying that: 'Their style of resistance was enormously successful and laid the foundations for a movement that has been carried on right up until contemporary days' (Morgan 1985, xiii). Such continuity of resistance serves to demonstrate an important overlap in the categorisation of Aboriginality as persistence and resistance. Both are part of a sometimes complementary and at other times contradictory unity. Aboriginality is a complex social reality, only artificially explained by the abstract divisions of resistance and persistence. Aboriginality-as-resistance was consciously taught to the students at the camp through activities and in the context of discussion. For example, the afternoons at the camp were devoted to question and answer sessions where the adults would advise the students on issues chosen by the students. On one of these afternoons, the question of Aboriginal languages came up for discussion and one of the tutors explained her views: Now some white people will try to tell you that you haven't got language - that you've lost your language. Well, we didn't lose our

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languages; they got taken off us. Hundreds of them - stolen. But we've still got some words they haven't managed to take off us and we're going to hang on to them. They're important words and they mean a lot to us because they're ours - and we understand them. This example of the selection of a particular cultural characteristic, language, as a charter of group identity, is on one level an example of persistence. But it is not simply that, as the 'bite' of this statement demonstrates. Aboriginality, even when using a symbol of persistence, often has an element of resistance that is integral and essential. Lexical items have survived from the many original languages of Aboriginal Australia. These words are now being used as symbols of the survival of Aboriginal culture, and a t this level they are used to express the determination of Aboriginal people to resist cultural homogenisation into the European-dominated mainstream. Words like 'koori' are words of collective identification and words of power. They are also significant for the promotion of pan-Aboriginality as a common set of beliefs and practices that stresses the unity of Aboriginal identity. This is in tension with the fact that there are language variations in these terms of Aboriginal identity across Australia. J Miller (1985) has argued for the use of 'koori' as a term for all Aboriginal Australians because of the specific history of the Eora people of Sydney. His book is built on a local historical study, and is subtitled, 'The heroic resistance, survival and triumph of Black Australia'. Throughout the text, Miller chooses to use the term 'Koori' to describe his people. This choice is made because the term Aboriginal 'did not give my people a separate identity': It is out of respect for the memories of the Eora, my ancestors and other surrounding tribes that I will use the word Koori and to identify fully as a Koori. I would also like to see this word become a term of national identification for all Kooris living in Australia today (J Miller 1985, vii). The sentiments of Miller show that Aboriginality is a conscious construction of both persistence and resistance, aimed at unifying Aboriginal people across Australia. The central importance of resistance was also evident in activities that occurred as part of the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Camp. As with Aboriginal children in many areas of urban Australia, a great deal of time was spent by the children in painting, silk-screening, and colouring in the Aboriginal flag. This powerful symbol of resistance was designed as recently as 1972, and has rapidly become a significant marker of common identity for Aboriginal Australians. Its symbolism was explained to the students at the camp through a poem:

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Black is for the people, The people of my race, Yellow for the sun the life giving force, as ageless as time and space. And for our land, the red, Like the blood that's been shed, Since our whole world changed pace. (Watson 1986, 12) The colours of the flag have become symbolic of Aboriginal resistance in a sense of being more than an abstract and remote item of micro-patriotism. That the association with the flag is of a different order than, for example, most Australians feel towards the national flag, is evident from the fact that young Aboriginal students talk of 'wearing their colours'. This is the same phrase that 'bikies' use about their emblems, and indicates that the colours are used as a marker of personal commitment to cultural opposition. Wearing the colours of resistance is in itself an act of resistance. With a flag goes an anthem: the two are needed to formalise the statement of sovereignty that underpins resistance. One of the tutors at the camp suggested the song which opened this chapter as 'our national anthem'. The lyrics illustrate the notions of survival through unyielding opposition: You can't change the rhythm of my soul You can't tell me what to do You can't break my bone by putting me down or by taking the things that belong to me 'cause we have survived the white man's world and the horror and the torment of it all We have survived the white man's world and you know you can't change that. All the years has just passed me by I've been hassled by the cops nearly all my life People trying to keep me so blind But I can see what's going on in my mind. (Willoughby 1981) Just as traditional Aboriginal arts have been appropriated by Aboriginal educators to demonstrate persistence, modern non-Aboriginal arts have been appropriated and converted to demonstrate resistance. The record album produced by the bands Us Mob and No Fixed Address (from which this anthem is taken) is a product of Aboriginality-as-resistance.The title and cover illustrations as well as the lyrics speak of opposition and confrontation. These songs, and others like them, were played continually at the camp, becoming a distraction from the more formally organised curriculum of dance rehearsal, indicating some of the students' priorities, interests and concerns.

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The flag, anthem and the Canberra Tent Embassy (see Chapter 9) are all symbols of pan-Aboriginality and make the statement of independent sovereignty that is the ultimate claim of Aboriginality-as-resistance.That they are all borrowed from the symbols of power of the dominant society indicate the active potential of Aboriginality-as-resistance (as compared to Aboriginality-aspersistence) to construct meaning in relation to the dominant society. The borrowing also points to the possible location and source of the power of idea^.^ The official motto of this resistance is that of 'Land Rights'. The phrase itself, in the urban genre of demonstrations and strident political activism, has become a symbol around which a vast array of meanings crystallise. It is generally capitalised in text, said as one word in speech, and connotes much that cannot be adequately discussed in this context. In the active social context of the Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Camp, the meaning of the phrase is based on resistance, rather than on the mystical connection with land that is characteristic of persistence. Land Rights, the students were told, began 200 years ago, when Aborigines first started throwing spears at Captain Cook. Aboriginality-asresistance not only recognises the impact of white colonisation, but actively and continually interacts with it. The active construction of Aboriginality-as-resistance in the context of schools is particularly important for an understanding of the continual failure of schools to fulfil1 the promise of education to provide equality. The students at the camp (many of whom had not previously met) used the gathering as a chance to exchange experiences about schools. Part of their schooling, in the sense of the informal curriculum, has been learning how to resist the racism of their fellow students. Their experiences echoed those of Keith Smith talking to Kevin Gilbert about the experience of being black in a European school: We all went to Bankstown High and that's where the problem really started because we used to get all sorts of shit thrown at us, black bastards, niggers, you name it. We were always brought up to be strong willed, brought up to respect the fact that we were Aboriginal people. When you've got 13 or 14 White kids all around you and calling you a black nigger you learn to fight and if you can't fight you soon learn because you get sick and tired of getting black eyes and a busted nose. Nobody likes a black. This has been proven to us for decades, for 200 years. It gets proven to us everyday, in one way or another that we're not wanted (Gilbert 1977, 187-88).

A few of the students also spoke to each other, and to sympathetic adults, about the attitudes of teachers towards them, and about what they regarded as the humiliating content of school lessons, particularly in Australian history. Their

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stories, many of them poignant, made some of the adults remark that little had changed since their own school days. In some ways this may be so, despite the very real changes that have occurred. Jimmie Barker's description of his experiences at school at Brewarrina Aboriginal Station in 1913 is an example from the past: During my first lessons from these men, I learned that as I was black or partly coloured, there was no place in Australia for me. It gave me the firm idea that an Aboriginal, even if he was only slightly coloured, was mentally and physically inferior to all others. He was the lowest class known in the world, he was little better than an animal; in fact, dogs were sometimes to be preferred. As I was less than twelve years old, it was impossible to disbelieve men of authority who were much older (Mathews 1977, 64). To the students at the camp, disbelieving such lessons of the 'hidden curriculum' is now possible. Modern teachers in large schools in the cities have less power over students, in a very real sense, than would the teacher at an Aboriginal station of former times. Blatant and angry racism is now less immediately visible, replaced by what the Australian National Opinion Poll called a 'soft racism that permeates middle Australia' (ANOP 1985). Most importantly, the Aboriginal students now have the language of response in the form of They Aboriginality and the means of opposition through Aboriginality-as-resistance. can invert the negative message of teachers and the curriculum and turn it into a positive message about their own collective identity. Aboriginality-as-resistance takes specific oppositional form in the school lives of students. White authority, personified in teachers, is actively resisted with a range of responses that include 'cheeky behaviour', sullen withdrawal, inattention and absenteeism. For many students, absenteeism (or 'jigging') is a legitimate and effective oppositional behaviour. It is one strategy in which Aboriginality-asresistance is evident. This can be gauged from the students' descriptions of the deliberate selection they make of classes not to attend. They claim to avoid classes of teachers who are insensitive, paternalistic or racist. While many of the teachers may in reality be simply fairly boring teachers, the language of explanation the students use is based on a grammar of Aboriginality. A teacher who fails to recognise their Aboriginality is resisted through avoidance. The explanation of this behaviour from the perspective of teachers is also based on Aboriginality, but of a different order. Truancy as resistance is not recognised. The continued absence from school of one of the students who was at the camp was explained to me by the teacher as being due to 'walkabout

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

mentality', which he claimed was 'scientifically proven'. An Aboriginal educationist preferred to explain it by saying that the boy would have been going through initiation at his age in traditional society. Both explanations are mystifications dominated by a belief in what I call Aboriginality-as-persistence, with no recognition of Aboriginality-as-resistance.

DEFINING ABORIGINAUTY IN USE The two themes of Aboriginality can be seen to be parts of a sometimes contradictory unity, with the significance of either persistence or resistance being stressed depending on context and social purpose. Their common ground is in their appeal to a unification and self-definition of Aboriginal identity. This is clearly an active response to generations of administrative, scientific and social definitions of Aboriginal identity in terms that deny and divide. As Marcia Langton describes it: Many Aboriginal people living in the urban centres have refuted the logic of the terminology that has been foisted upon us by successive pieces of legislation and now by the social scientists; half-caste, coloured, part-Aboriginal, detribalized, remnant and so on. We have rejected the notion that we are assimilating into the European population and adopting white life styles. We are exploring our own Aboriginality and are finding that the white social scientists cannot accept our own view of ourselves (Langton 1981, 16). The language she uses ('refuted', 'foisted', 'rejected', 'our own') indicates that Aboriginality is developed in direct response to the ideas and themes used by the dominant society. The themes of Aboriginality as both persistence and resistance are present in her explanation, as is an indication that the locus of concern for Aboriginality is with those many Aboriginal people living in the urban centres, despite its intention to be a theme of common identification for all Aboriginal people (as for example in the definition by the NAEC, referred to earlier). The elements of Aboriginality-as-persistence are drawn from a notion of an essential, enduring and unilinear Aboriginal culture, transmitted through the blood, and constantly reproduced despite white intervention. That this construction is problematic is indicated in the need to learn the culture through formal and artificial means. The sort of awareness generally emphasised in the lessons of the Cultural Awareness Camp was a passive one, in which Aboriginal students were given access to a body of cultural practices that were externalised, objectified and then reified. They were not expected to become actively engaged in the production of meaning but were to passively receive a static and fixed body

ABORIGINALITY IN ACTION

of knowledge especially dependent on the interpretations of archaeology and anthropology. However, this process was not total or automatic. Students were able actively to select, reject, qualify or resist the elements of persistence that were presented to them. Many students, born and raised in suburban blocks, openly questioned the spiritual basis of land rights, wondering a t its mystical application to their own lives. A few students decided to listen to modern bands rather than attend dance rehearsals. Some of the tutors also qualified the theme of persistence, choosing to emphasise in their lessons the contemporary nature of Aboriginal society. These actions resist persistence as a total and restricted set of ideas. There is a sense, too, in which the construction of Aboriginality-aspersistence includes processes of selection, elaboration and qualification. It seems that the specific set of elements that compose the theme are determined, in part, as oppositional to what are perceived as the essential and enduring elements of white culture. 'Sharing and caring' is emphasised in contrast to the stereotype of white possessiveness: spiritual relationships with land are contrasted with perceived white rapaciousness. The elements of Aboriginal society that are most readily incorporated are the ones that are most different, and these are consistently given most emphasis. These processes of selection are not made consciously, and, hence, the representation is one of pure cultural continuity. By contrast, Aboriginality-as-resistanceis not only a specific set of elements, drawn from a revision of the past rewritten to create victory out of defeat, but is also a living set of oppositional cultural practices which is explicitly interactive with contemporary and historical white society. It is created in this interaction and actively uses the forms of the dominant society to convey a series of oppositional statements. Compared to the elements of persistence, Aboriginalityas-resistance is more active, conscious, dynamic, modem and political. The opposites of resistance/persistence, race/culture, inheritedAearned, active/passive show the elements of Aboriginality to be inherently contradictory. The elements do form a unity at the moment that the individual child identifies and is identified by others as Aboriginal. The education of Aboriginal students in their Aboriginality is a process of intertwining oppositions into a contradictory unity. The relative correspondence or contradiction of these elements shapes what it is that Aboriginality means for each individual.

ABORIGINAL CULTURE IN ACTION The work of the artist-teachers in their painting discussed in Chapter 1 and the actions of Aboriginal people in forums such as the Cultural Awareness Camps have

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a number of common elements. Recognising the commonalities weakens the imaginary barriers that artificially separate 'traditional' from 'modem' and 'remote' from 'urban'. Similarly, a brief analysis of their common features may help to cross the lines that separate black from white Australians. In the Centre and in the city, an overwhelming and common concern is with cultural action in education. In both contexts, Aboriginal people are negotiating meaning and bartering cultural values. In a local, specific sense, they are claiming ownership over the cultural education of their young, basing the reason for their actions in this regard on their rights to an education that supports their own sense of themselves and their collective sense of self-awareness. In doing so, they explicitly reject cultural assimilation or forced social change. They seek to choose their own directions. At the same time, however, they are surrounded and dominated by a society that has historically marginalised and excluded them, denying them their right to shape their own identity and imposing another upon them. The dominant society in contemporary Australia, and the economic and political forces within it, still contribute to the shaping of Aboriginality. Domination and encapsulation are a social reality which can be occasionally forgotten in the privacy of family, but it cannot be ignored for longer than a moment. It shapes and defines the reality of their daily lives, and limits the possibilities for autonomy and self-management. Educationally, it is this reality that creates the difficult challenge of developing a curriculum which allows access to and participation in the dominant society without forsaking a primary identity in Aboriginality. Expressed in another way, it is the challenge of maintaining cultural autonomy while trying to gain some measure of economic and social equality. This challenge will never be met or the dilemmas resolved by artificially imagining cultural separateness and isolation or denying the interaction between Aboriginal education, culture and power and its non-Aboriginal equivalents. Nor will a balance be achieved by seeing Aboriginal culture, either in the Centre or the city, a s a residual but pure extract from a traditional essence. Culture is active. In the city, Aboriginality in action often appears in contradictory forms, because it is constructed. However, the concept of Aboriginality should not be dismissed as being just a confused version of traditional Aboriginal culture because of its actively constructed nature. Nationalism is similarly constructed, but it has the power to summon the fiercest emotions and grip the imagination of young and old alike. In the Centre, contemporary yanangu identity is also constructed in explicit interaction with walypala reality, as in the use of canvas and acrylic paints for asserting 'authentic' Aboriginal identity.

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Neither should Aboriginality in the city be written off as simply a twisting of old themes into new forms to suit changing political and economic circumstances. All socially constructed concepts of importance draw selectively from the past and reform this past to address the needs and concerns of the present. Instead, Aboriginality can be viewed as the key concept of Aboriginal culture in the city, just as the y a p n g u concept is the key concept of Aboriginal education in Walungurru.

NOTES

1. Despite the large amounts distributed, I know of no published national account of the way in which the Aboriginal funds were used, or how the results have been evaluated. I did attend a 1985 conference in South Australia that discussed PEP projects on a State basis as part of an informal national evaluation. 2. The National Aboriginal Education Committee was disbanded in 1989, eventually to be replaced by the National Aboriginal Employment Education and Training Committee, itself disbanded in 1991.

3. There are many other elements used by kooris that could be included in this discussion, ranging from the use of concepts such as 'walkabout', or 'koori time' to not using your name in a telephone call. This discussion concentrates on the educationally significant elements. 4. See discussion in the programs for artistic exhibitions such as A Changing Relationship (1988); Art and Aboriginality (1987); Aboriginal Art in Transition (nd) to determine the connection between Aboriginality and the arts. 5. The NSW Department of Education syllabus for Aboriginal schools (1940, 16)provides a telling example, stipulating lessons about: 'Stories of Wylie, Jacky Jacky, the Trackers and of other aborigines who have helped the whites. Stories of the early explorers; Blaxland, Hume, Sturt. Stories of primitive man after the style of Catherine Dopp',

6 . The Aboriginal independent school established in Sydney in 1991 was called Pemulwy School. Windradyne is another figure of resistance - a guerilla fighter for justice (Coe 1986, 30). 7. Blainey uses this borrowing of symbols of power to deny Aboriginality, saying, 'Even the Aboriginal flag is really a sign of their assimilation though proclaiming otherwise: after all, a flag is essentially European' (in Hasluck 1988, vi). I view it not as a sign of assimilation, but of Aboriginal cultural and political activity; a cheeky act of defiance.

PART 2

ABOKIGINALITY AND EDUCATION

CHAPTER

3

THE PUBLIC VIEW OF ABORIGINALITY

In the school staffroom there was the usual buzz of activity. Teachers were coming and going, organising rosters and duties. One small group was talking about an article from the daily newspaper on remote Aboriginal education, focusing on bilingual programs, community-based schooling and self-determination. A teacher remarked: 'It's a tricky business isn't it?Thank God we don't have to worry about it here, where there aren't any real Aborigines. One boy in my class is supposed to be Aboriginal, but he doesn't look it to me. Maybe he's one-sixteenth Aboriginal, but his father is a well-off public servant so I don't know what sort of difference his Aboriginality is supposed to make.' Similar words to those used by this teacher can be heard in staffroom conversations in every town and city across Australia. Teachers hold such attitudes not because they are teachers, but because they are Australian. In 1985the Australian National Opinion Polls (ANOP) surveyed the attitudes towards Aborigines of 2,000 adults across Australia, interviewed twenty-eight 'opinion leaders' and conducted seventeen group discussions around particular themes. Despite the poll being commissioned by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the results were so negative that the report was suppressed, until a newspaper 'leaked' the results? According to the ANOP findings, 'middle Australia' is permeated with what they labelled as 'soft racism' towards Aboriginal people. While one-quarter of their sample was supportive on issues such as land rights, one-quarter was implacably opposed. Meanwhile, the other half of the population, 'middle Australia*itself, leaned towards 'opposition and prejudice through fear, ignorance, misinformation, and soft racism.. .[a] prejudice which has a greater propensity to harden than to turn to sympathy' (ANOP 1985, 5). Typical of this attitude set, according to the ANOP, is the use of criteria such as 'blood content' (darkness) to define and judge levels of Aboriginal culture, or degrees of Aboriginality. The commonly held belief in the public mind is that 'real' Aborigines are considered to be those 'full-bloods' living a 'tribal' lifestyle in the 'outback' (ANOP 1985,46).These people are different in kind to, and more deserving of special assistance than, the so-called 'half-caste educated radicals' who are the 'stirrers who cause all the trouble'. Only 3 per cent of all respondents believed that Aborigines were the socially disadvantaged group most deserving of government assistance, while 42 per cent believed Aborigines were receiving 66

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too much assistance, especially in the form of what they called 'handouts' in the areas of education, land, housing and welfare. The denial of Aboriginality and the denial of legitimacy in relation to socialjustice programs go hand in hand (ANOP 1985, 17).2 Teachers can be thought of as lifelong members of 'middle Australia'. The majority of them, in my own informal 'polls', would tend to share many of the views described by the ANOP. In 1985a group of twenty curriculum consultants in the Australian Capital Territory discussed the poll results in a formal seminar. Every participant agreed with my impression of the widespread nature of such attitudes amongst teachers they work with and the general public, giving subjective confirmation of the accuracy of the poll results. They based this observation on the prevalence of the attitudes in general discussions, as well as beliefs held by people in other domains that they are involved with, such as sporting groups and social gatherings. In the same year, thirty-eight teachers from three primary schools, two high schools and one college in the Australian Capital Territory were surveyed about the curriculum location and content of Australian studies in their schools.3 Every response indicated that learning about Australia generally included learning about Aboriginal Australia, but that this learning was narrowly defined to learning about pre-contact, 'traditional' society and culture. Only one teacher included anything in the curriculum that could be regarded as contemporary content, or taught anything about Aboriginal urban culture. In the same survey, 135 students from the same schools identified 'Aborigines' as one of the major areas of current learning about Australia, and traditional Aboriginal culture as the main form of this content. Each of these students engaged in follow-up informal interviews. At this time a disturbing number of students, when asked what they knew about urban Aboriginal Australia, volunteered remarks that were similar to the ANOP's findings. Some common (although not quantified) responses were that Aborigines in the city received handouts in the form of free houses and free cars, were paid to go to school and that most were simply pretending to be Aboriginal in order to get these benefits. There are direct connections between public attitudes, teacher attitudes, curriculum content, the restricted form of learning about Aboriginal Australia and student perceptions of Aboriginality. The commonalities are too striking to be coincidental. This chapter, and the two chapters that follow, look behind these connections in order to develop a critical and theoretical understanding of the construction of Aboriginality in different contexts.

THE PUBLIC VIEW OF ABORIGINALLY

ABORIGINAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS IN T H E CITY One of the common consequences of the attitude set discussed is the denial of any social or economic disadvantage in urban Aboriginal Australia. Attitudes denying social need for urban Aboriginal Australians may be founded on ignorance in the general population about, for example, Aboriginal educational and employment opportunities in Australian cities. As depicted by the 1986 census, the Aboriginal population of all states and territories except the Northern Territory is predominantly urbanised. At the time of the census, 66.5 per cent of the Aboriginal population was to be found in urban areas. Canberra, where the conversation reported at the start of this chapter took place, provides an ideal example of urban education and employment needs, It is a city in which the Aboriginal population is more embedded into the mainstream of surburban Australian reality than in any other area of Australia. In such a situation, 'middle Australia', according to the ANOP, believes that Aborigines should aim for 'integration and acceptance in white society as wageearners and home-makers' (ANOP 1985, 46). They should not be eligible for any special remedial or compensatory provision of group or individual assistance. What though, is the relative educational situation of Aborigines in Canberra? For all Australian students, retention rates have increased significantly in recent years (35 per cent in 1983 to 58 per cent in 1988). In the Australian Capital Territory the retention rate in 1986 for Aboriginal students was a mere 17 per cent, compared to 48 per cent for all Australian students at the time and 30 per cent for Aboriginal students in Queensland. In the same year, the Australian Capital Territory Aboriginal youth unemployment rate was 21.8 per cent, compared with the non-Aboriginal rate of 9.5 per cent. Aboriginal teenagers in Canberra in 1986 were three times more likely to leave school early than their non-Aboriginal peers and were twice as likely to be out of work and looking for a job when they did so. Even in Canberra, with Australia's most affluent Aboriginal population, there is a case for intervention to ensure a more equitable spread of participation rates and educational outcomes. Denial of the case, through restricting assistance programs to those who are in the outback, or who have the blackest skin, is based on both ignorance and romance. There is widespread ignorance about the contemporary social reality of Aboriginal Australia. The ignorance seems confirmed by the fact that over 30 per cent of the ANOP respondents could not name one Aboriginal achievement of any sort, or name an Aboriginal individual who had

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

'impressed' them. There is also an enduring set of romantic myths about the existence 'out there' of genuinely deserving traditional Aborigines (see Bowse 1988, 174). The ANOP poll suggests that teachers, as an influential segment of middle Australia, do not understand Aboriginality, do not accept the validity of urban Aboriginal culture and do not support programs of government intervention in relation to Aboriginal education for the majority of the student group. Ignorance, soft racism and a denial of the legitimacy of urban Aboriginal Australia are attitudinal obstacles to ambitious programs of educational change. Given this, how can programs in schools for Aboriginal students and Aboriginal studies curriculum development be made to work?

ABORIGINALITY AND CURRICULUM CHANGE It is necessary, as a starting point for teacher change and curriculum change, to explore and reveal as much as is possible about the meaning and use of Aboriginality in urban education. Only with some access to an understanding of Aboriginality can the curriculum of the school be transformed along the lines suggested by Aboriginal people - that is, to a form that is more 'appropriate' for the culture of its students, and more encouraging of the development of a future Australia attuned to the interests and concerns of Aboriginal Australia. Aboriginality, as a concept, was put forward in the 1980s as the central issue of curriculum change in both Aboriginal studies and Aboriginal education programs. Because teachers cannot fathom what it means, or comprehend the way it is used, they avoid the implementation of central policies, they resist the demands on their time and their students' needs. They retreat from the uncertain and unknown into the lessons of the past. Even with positive attitudes to Aboriginal claims for curriculum recognition, teachers are nervously afraid of doing the 'wrong thing'. They are painfully aware of the shortcomings of their pre-service training, have recognised the shortcomings of the texts they use, but are simply unsure. In such a climate, educational change becomes stranded. Teachers, as cultural outsiders, need to have some point of access, through which they might gain some understanding - a window into a cultural world different from their own. This is especially important when the external, material trappings show more similarity than difference. For schools to succeed al or Aboriginal in developing an appropriate, contemporary ~ b o r i ~ i n studies education curriculum, or a positive relationship with members of the Aboriginal parent group, teachers do need to have access to more information focused on urban Aboriginal culture. To understand trends in curriculum development in

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Aboriginal studies, it is necessary to understand what is meant by the elusive concept of Aboriginality. There are important repercussions for educational practice in an understanding of Aboriginality, especially when the attitudes expressed in the curriculum are recognised as being based on stereotypes about it. Teachers know that students resort to the use of stereotypes when they fail to understand a concept (defining a stereotype as an indicator of a misunderstood concept). Such concerns lead to a scrutiny of teaching practice and curriculum design directed towards avoiding the perpetuation of stereotypes and confronting the results in the form of negative beliefs, attitudes and practices. At an in-service training session in Canberra, a primary school teacher remarked that she had been 'doing' Aboriginal studies for twelve years. When she examined the attitudes revealed by the ANOP survey, she suggested to a group of teachers: I don't know about the rest of you but I suddenly feel a little queasy. What else have I been teaching in my course but how to think about Aborigines in a negative, stereotyped, really a bit racist way? What's that old line about that to educate others we must first educate ourselves? I just never realised what I'd been doing. In order to realise what we have been doing, it is necessary to look at the way the framework of ethnicity shapes our ideas of Aboriginality and Aboriginal culture.

NOTES

1. See Rowse (1988, 161-77) for a detailed critical analysis of the poll, its procedures, interpretations and consequences.

2. This was apparently confirmed by the agreement of 47 per cent of voters to the Coalition Economic Action Plan intent on shaving $100 million off the Aboriginal Affairs budget (Sunday Herald, 15 Oct. 1989). 3. I was a member of the review team. The results of the survey were reported at the National Review Conference of the Bicentennial Australian Studies Schools Project, La Trobe University, November 1985.

CHAPTER

ABORIGINALITY ETHNICITY The young and nervous principal was coming to the end of the meeting that had been arranged to introduce him, as a new arrival, to representatives of the town's Aboriginal community, He looked up from his notes and addressed the group around the table, saying: 'If there's one thing you can be sure of it's that I'll treat all ethnic groups in the school fairly, and Aborigines are no exception.' The chairperson of the local Aboriginal education consultative group smiled and said, 'Well, there's one thing you should be sure of, mister. We just aren't any ethnic group, you know, I like pizza, but ' m Aboriginal, not ethnic.' The meeting burst into laughter and applause. The principal blushed and tried to grin, but looked somewhat strained. On his notepad, he scrawled a reminder for the next meeting: 'Aborigines - not ethnics'.

NEGOTIATING IDENTITY In the process of cultural and political negotiation between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal Australia, the relative correspondence between Aboriginality and ethnicity is a central bargaining point. The nature and form of Aboriginal cultural identity, and its place within Australian cultural identity, changes considerably if Aboriginality is regarded as another form of ethnicity and Aboriginal Australia is regarded as just another ethnic group in multicultural Australia. Aborigines deny this position. They consistently choose to emphasise a separate cultural and political identity from those of other groups in Australian society who emphasise their non-English-speakingor ethnic background. They deny ethnic status on the basis of a claim for a separate, original, indigenous identity. Their claims are contested but forceful. Despite this, both popular opinion and government policy reflect a more ambiguous understanding, in which Aboriginality is considered to be a specific, if special, type of ethnicity. Educationally, defining Aboriginality as a particular ethnicity leads educational programs, research and curriculum strategies down the same multicultural path. This path may not be the right one. 'hjudge this, it is necessary to cover some important, but tricky, theoretical ground relating to the concept of ethnicity and its strengths and weaknesses as a description of Aboriginality. The theoretical ground is important, because a critical understanding of the way that ethnicity theory shapes our educational practice is necessary for informed

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practice. It is tricky because the concepts dealt with are rarely the subject of agreement in social science and different theoretical interpretations have different political and practical consequences. On the surface there are close parallels between the components of Aboriginality, as described in Chapter 2, and the components of ethnicity, as it has been described and criticised in sociological and anthropological literature. This chapter critically examines and compares these apparently common components.

WHAT IS ETHNICITY? What has been called 'ethnicity theory' has been invoked to explain many sorts of social actions and political events in a wide variety of different contexts across the world. In all of these situations, the concept of ethnicity is used to relate a vast set of observable features of social life to each other. According to ethnicity theory, much of the strife and disunity in international politics can be traced to the recent emergence of ethnicity as a salient force in countries across the globe. Glick (1985, 150)and Said and Simmons (1976, 21) claim that ethnicity has arisen because of the failure of nation-statesto provide the sense of cultural and personal identity which is needed in the modern era. As a construct of social science and an object of theoretical analysis, the term itself is relatively recent in the literature, first being used by Reisman in 1953(Glazer and Moynihan 1975, 1). The British social anthropologist, Raymond Barth, defined the nature of an ethnic group as one based on categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves. In his analysis, ethnicity has an overwhelming and superordinate status that 'cannot be disregarded and temporarily set aside by other definitions of the situation'. Ethnic identity 'constrains the incumbent in all his activities' (Barth 1969, 17). It is a dominant concept in social life. The American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in some influential early writing, agrees with these priorities. He sees the 'congruities of blood, speech and custom' as having, in and of themselves, an indescribable and at times overpowering force over social behaviour. One is bound to one's kinsmen, one's neighbour, one's fellow believer.. .by the virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself. The general strength of such primordial bonds, and the types of them that are important differ from person to person, from society to society, or from time to time. But for virtually every person in every society, at almost all times such attachments

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seem to flow more from a sense of natural - some would say spiritual - affinity than from social interaction (Geertz 1963, 109-10). Geertz, and other ethnicity theorists who have followed him, emphasises the subjective, emotive emphasis on ethnic identification. Ethnicity is commonly described as being a 'feeling', but a very powerful one. Geertz describes what he sees as the master status of ethnicity, with a power to shape and determine social action, overriding any other forms of identification (see Salamone and Swanson 1979, 172). What Geertz describes as the 'congruities of blood, speech and custom' are the essential and spiritual, original and enduring 'primordial ties' that are said to be the subjective key to a group identification based on ethnicity. A theoretical emphasis on such ties is the central assumption or 'hard core' of the ethnicity school,1 as described by Woon (1985, 535): Social scientists taking this approach believe that primordial ties such as kinship, descent, place of birth, ancestral origin, race, religion, and language call forth a certain emotional attachment from the members.

This is obviously a long list of very different things, all bundled together to make up something labelled 'ethnicity'. The attempted conflation of the diverse factors listed has to be questioned, especially if the concept is to be given theoretical primacy, so that any social or cultural activity can be analysed simply as one aspect of ethnicity. This makes social analysis and educational planning simpler, but may tend to make it dangerously simplistic, as did the concept of race in the social sciences and schools of earlier generations.

THE COMPONENTS OF ABORIGINALITY AND ETHNICITY Some authors writing about Aboriginality have uncritically equated it with ethnicity. Amongst these authors are Pierson (1972), Bostock (1977), Tatz (1979), Jupp (1984), and Carter (1988). In their use of the terms Aboriginality and ethnicity, these authors do not question whether the two concepts can be validly used to stand for each other, but assume their semiautomatic equivalence. As well, they do not analyse in detail their understanding of the components of Aboriginality.2 As a result, it is necessary to work the other way to untangle the theoretical confusion and conflation: first finding the components of ethnicity, then seeing how they are matched with descriptions of Aboriginality, before theoretically criticising the equation of the two concepts. To do this, the indicators of ethnicity that Keyes (1981) describes can be compared to the features of Aboriginality as described by Coombs, Brand1 and

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Snowdon (1983). Both works list the components of the concepts they are dealing with and these are directly parallel. 'faken together, the texts demonstrate the ways in which social analysis based on ethnicity theory has recently become significant, especially in the influence of 'liberal' social science on government policy. Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983) attempted to develop a descriptive analysis of Aboriginality for use in the government context, aimed at influencing official policy and educational practice. The book was sponsored by and intended for government agencies. It was dedicated to those 'public servants who recognise and accommodate Aboriginality' (1983, iii). 'Nugget' Coombs himself can be seen as responsible more than any other individual for the design of public service structures in Aboriginal affairs. With the other authors, a teacher (now a Federal politician)a and an anthropologist, Coombs represents a significant non-Aboriginal view on the contents of Aboriginality as interpreted and constructed by powerful, albeit left-oriented, groups in society. While their emphasis on education policy and practice as a field in which Aboriginality must be understood is welcome, I believe that their description of Aboriginality is misguided and has negative consequences for educational policy, practice and theory. In order to develop a more humane and effective delivery of essential services, such as education, Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon attempt to rework the usual historical process of division, separation and segregation caused by government policies. They do so through the description of what they perceive to be Aboriginal unity and commonality. The authors are explicitly engaged in the construction and elaboration of a framework for Aboriginality, for use by the state. I would argue that, because the authors have been implicitly operating within the conceptual framework of ethnicity, they have failed to account for major elements of Aboriginality. Particularly, in basing their components of Aboriginality on the 'primordial ties' of ethnicity, and a reified notion of traditional Aboriginal culture, Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon have given a description of Aboriginalityas-persistencethat neglects or suppresses any notion of resistance, human agency or regional diversity. For them, Aboriginality is composed of a set of features that are regarded as universal, essential and enduring. These features are said to be shared by all Aboriginal people. Providing a written checklist of ethnic identity, the authors state that, 'Wherever in Australia people identify as Aborigines they share certain enduring characteristics' (1983,20). These are listed in a table in the following form: 1. Being and identifying as a descendant of the original inhabitants of Australia.

ABORIGINALJTY AND ETHNICITY

2. Sharing historical as well as cultural experience, particularly that arising from relations with non-Aborigines. 3. Adhering to, or sharing, the Dreaming, or Aboriginal worldview. 4. Having an intimate familial relationship with the land and with the natural world; and knowing the pervading moulding character of these in all matters Aboriginal. 5. Basing social interaction on the mutual obligations of kinship. 6. Giving importance to mortuary rituals and attendance at them. 7. Speaking and understanding more than one language. (Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon, 1983, 21)

This list closely parallels the components listed by Keyes (1981), who maintains that ethnicity derives from a cultural interpretation of descent, language, religion, ancestors' experiences (historical and mythical), and personal identity. Aboriginality, as understood by Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon, is a special form of ethnicity. By taking the statements of Aborigines and anthropologists, as well as data from their own research in Arnhem Land and Central Australia, Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon have selected key elements of Aboriginal society and culture, and built from these a description of what they believe Aboriginality to be. These elements are represented as being common to all Aborigines. Unfortunately, considering the deliberate educational policy changes they are seeking, the elements they select are not common, not universal, not essential and not enduring. Detailed analysis of each of the listed components, and comparision with contemporary urban Aboriginal social reality, reveal that each one is only loosely applicable and, if present, is only mildly forceful in the specific located world of Aboriginal city dwellers. Furthermore, and significantly for the theoretical untangling that is attempted here, the 'enduring' characteristics they list equate with both the components of Aboriginality-as-persistence,observed in the previous chapter, and the 'primordial ties' that are at the heart of ethnicity theory. This assertion can be demonstrated through looking closely at the descent component which they identify as a starting point for the content of Aboriginality.

ABORIGINALITY AND DESCENT In their elaboration of the descent component of Aboriginality, Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983,30) describe it as being 'more than descent'. They argue that Aboriginality is more than simply a common identification in physical terms,

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although descent from the original inhabitants is part of Aboriginality. This is in accord with the statements on descent that were discussed in the context of Aboriginality-as-persistencein Chapter 2. The authors claim that government policy has shifted from an identification of Aboriginal people in biological terms to one based on cultural terms. An emphasis on cultural identification in government policies is called for, given the official disinheritance and social violence that have been an integral aspect of official policies based on race. However, the notion of race is still embedded implicitly in the use of descent by these authors and is fixed through government legislation that determines Aboriginal identity (eg DAA, 1988).4 Aboriginality emphasises common cultural identity in order to unite Aboriginal people where race subdivided them. The component of descent still divides Aborigines, as a group, from the rest of Australian society. The use of descent as an element of Aboriginality relates to the first of the primordial ties of ethnicity listed by Keyes (1981, 5). He maintains that ethnicity derives from a cultural interpretation of descent, based on a socially validated parent-child connection. This direct conceptual parallel opens this particular theoretical construction of Aboriginality to some of the critiques of ethnicity, especially in contrast to theories based on race.

ABORIGINAUTY AND RXSTORY In the analysis of the history component of Aboriginality Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon (1983, 32) claim that a commonality of experience is a key ingredient: Although incidents vary in the two hundred years of what could be called the colonization of Aborigines, the overriding character and quality of the encounters are the same for Aboriginal people wherever they live and have lived on this continent. Again, this indicates that the authors are engaged in the construction of a framework for common identification. A shared history, as the tutors at the Cultural Awareness Camp indicated, can be used to encourage resistance and to demonstrate persistence. In this context, what sort of common history is being promulgated? Here, the common Aboriginal history is one of being acted upon, rather than acting. It tends to be based on a view of Aborigines as an amorphous mass of victims. As such, there is little room for stories about individuals acting to engage, resist or even defeat the forces of colonisation. As Barwick, one of the authors they refer to, has pointed out elsewhere, 'The treatment of Aborigines as an amorphous mass is still a noticeable feature. The problem of anonymous,

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group or community achievements is one which bedevils any historian working outside the hegemonic mainstream' (Parkes and Barwick 1982, 138). By denying the heterogeneity of Aboriginal history, the authors paper over significant differences and contribute to the relegation of Aboriginal people to an anonymous block, unable as individuals to challenge the tide of historical events. One consequence of the emphasis on a general account of common Aboriginal experience as victims is that there is a loss to analysis of the varied Aboriginal responses to invasion, oppression and domination. In this case, their intervention into history denies active human agency, as well as local actions that have an impact on national trends. Keyes (1981, 8) points out that intense suffering experienced by ancestors has been subject to symbolic interpretations and made the foundation of ethnic identities. He uses as examples the (very different) experiences of American blacks, Indians, and Jewish peoples to show that the historical experience of forebears can be selected and marked as emblematic of ethnic identity. It is another feature of Aboriginality that is regarded as being a distinctive component of ethnicity. Ethnicity, as a social theory, has an ambiguous relationship with history. In one sense, it emphasises the use of historical experience as a group marker, but in so doing ignores the historical aspects of the 'emergence' of ethnicity itself. In this sense it is fundamentally ahistorical. We are left with an abstracted notion of ethnicity which mistakes surface appearances of similarity for a deep essential identity. At the same time this notion of ethnicity glosses over basic divisions in order to preserve artificial boundaries between groups (see Muga 1984, 11).

ABORIGINALITY AND THE DREAMING Another essential and universal component of Aboriginality according to Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon (1983, 35) is that of 'adhering to, or sharing, the Dreaming, or Aboriginal world-view'. Keyes (1981, 7) identifies religion as another cultural feature that is often taken as being an essential element of the cultural heritage of an ethnic group. There are therefore common elements of both ethnicity and Aboriginality to be found in the significance of religious criteria. The applicability of this criterion of Aboriginality to all Aboriginal people in Australia raises some profound and far-reaching questions. Not all of them can be adequately discussed here, given the constraints imposed by the complexity of the Dreaming, the variation in social and economic situations across Australia and the difficulty of probing the depths of knowledge and understanding

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about the concept that are shared across Aboriginal societies. Some general points of concern can be raised about the implication in the work of Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983), that the Dreaming is universal and persistent. The term 'Dreaming' itself is not the translation of an Aboriginal concept even though it has now been appropriated by Aborigines themselves. The term, while a powerful one, is anthropological in origin and has been generally adopted as part of the cultural exchange that has occurred since colonisation. Similarly, explanations of the Dreaming, even by Aboriginal writers, are heavily dependent on anthropological texts. For example, Langton (1981, 21-22) draws explicitly from Stanner (1966). She uses the notion of the Dreaming as defined by Stanner to describe the persistence of values into urban Aboriginal life. It is interesting that a concept directly derived from European social science and expressed in invented terminology should summarise a key component of Aboriginality-as-persistence. In their discussion of the Dreaming, the authors have once more buried actual cultural difference in their creation of ethnic commonality. That these differences should be condensed into a single term to explain a complex reality is symptomatic of writers on the general phenomenon of ethnicity. Such is the consequence of creating a catch-all concept which is, 'diffuse, generalised [and] over-arching' (Muga 1984, 5).

ABORIGINALITY AND LAND Another essential criterion of Aboriginality discussed by Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983,40)is 'having an intimate familial relationship with the land and with the natural world; and knowing the pervading moulding character of these in all matters Aboriginal'. This equates with the discussion by Keyes (1981, 8) in his characterisation of one of the distinctive features of ethnicity as the significance of an ethnic homeland. Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983,37)compare the use of terms such as 'England the Motherland' with the Aboriginal use of 'The Land, my Mother', arguing that the relationship is of a different essence. In their analysis the Aboriginal words are 'assertions of perceived sacramental fact of a relationship as living and as emotionally binding as the biological relationship with which it is identified'. They argue that 'for each Aboriginal individual his or her relationships with land are crucial elements of personal identity' (1983, 40). It is idealistic to believe that Aboriginal people in Canberra, for example, share as intimate and familial a relationship with land and with the natural world as do Aboriginal people leading a hunting-gathering lifestyle. To make

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such a claim is to refuse to acknowledge the influence of history, and the reality of dispossession. The importance of land to most urban Aborigines is surely in this fact of illegal and brutal historical dispossession, rather than in the supposed continuity of religious attachment to tracts of land. Furthermore, by collapsing the categories of land relationships and relationships with the natural world, the ideology of the Aboriginal primitive with mystical connection to land is perpetuated, reproduced and applied to all Aboriginal people (see Bowse 1988, 174). As Charlesworth (1983, 3) argues: For other Aborigines who no longer have any close connections with their traditional territories, the claim is for a general tract of land (not necessarily traditional or ancestral Aboriginal land) on which they can live and by means of which their economic or social needs may be met, or for land by way of compensation for being dispossessed of their ancestral lands, or as a symbolic gesture of restitution of the part of the white Australian majority. A supposedly essential component of Aboriginality has been shown to conceal real differences, allowing them to remain covered by a veil of mysticism, irrelevant to many Aborigines. Land rights, as an element of Aboriginality-asresistance for many Aborigines in the cities, is a symbol of their striving to attain justice and equality. This is ignored in the description of Aboriginality suggested by Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon, as it is ignored in the Australian ethnicity literature, which translates and diverts demands for social justice into demands for cultural freedom. The right deriving from precepts of social justice for compensation for dispossession may very well be a common Aboriginal right. Rights deriving solely from 'intimate familial relationship with the land and the natural world' will accrue to few Aborigines in the 1990s. Similar theoretical difficulties are raised by the other three components of Aboriginality suggested by Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983). Generalisations about kinship, mortuary rituals and multilingualism gloss over the complexities of geographical and historical difference, and express the ideal of behaviour as the essence of group identity, held in common by all members of the group. These features are crystallisations of what is regarded as 'real' Aboriginal culture, and deny the Aboriginality of those Aboriginal cultures that have developed in the cities of Australia. Each of these three features is also regarded as a key component of ethnicity, and the same criticisms can be raised in regard to them.

THE LIMITS OF ABORIGINALITY-AS-ETHMCITY As with the ideology of Aboriginality-as-persistence, the concept of ethnicity reduces the many components of social relations into a single pattern based on

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primary and primordial attachments. It also operates in a historical and political vacuum which ignores the reality of divisions in ethnic groups that are the result of external, economic and historical forces. The general concept of ethnicity, according to Muga (1984, 5),. necessarily minimises the obvious cleavages within minority groups, between the rural and urban contexts of ethnicity, between those ethnic groups in the underdeveloped sectors of the production process and those in the advanced sectors, and between those minorities in the privileged situation of technical and intellectual workers and those in manual labour. At the level of political rhetoric, such tendencies are obviously useful, but in the extension of the theory to government policy and practice, the result is one where the power of the government to enforce consent and contain resistance is enhanced. Similarly, as a means of explanation for a complex social phenomenon such as Aboriginality, ethnicity theory is inadequate in its partiality. It can be seen that the forms of identification included under the rubric of ethnicity are exactly parallel to the features of Aboriginality-as-persistence.The suggested enduring, essential and universal features of Aboriginality are equivalent to the 'primordial', essential and universal features of ethnicity. What is excluded is any notion of resistance or diversity. These notions are submerged and lost through an overwhelming concentration on the themes of persistence, continuity and commonality. The facts of empirical difference, political dynamics and government intervention are swept away through the creation of a theoretical concept with assumed master status. This is an example of what Eipper (1983, 427) calls the use of 'sleight-of-hand' in argument: employing a concept as a top hat out of which they pull all kinds of groups and conflicts, labelling them ethnic. By this I do not mean to suggest that they are dishonest, only that, whether they know it or not, they are illusionist. The question of whether government policy actually works to pacify and contain ethnic minorities, or contributes to the development of new forms of ethnic organisation and agitation is ignored in ethnicity theory, which partially explains its popularity in government circles. As Muga (1984, 17) writes, 'the whole problematic of ethnic resistance is flipped over and transformed into the question of ethnic persistence.' Thinking about Aboriginality in a mental framework derived from ethnicity fails to account for the ways in which Aboriginality, especially in the produces cultural forms in interaction with form of ~boriginalit~-as-resistance, the dominant society. Just as with Aboriginality-as-persistence,ethnicity ignores

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the vexed questions of the powerlessnessand inequality of social groups in favour of explorations into the sources of their identity. These sources are limited to a retrospective, passive, personal and particular version of culture, that refuses to acknowledge the processes involved in the actual construction of culture in daily life. The limitations of this view of Aboriginality are seen in the curriculum, in the attitudes of 'middle Australia', and in the attitudes of teachers and students. It is particularly evident in the failure of the state, or Aboriginal people, to achieve equality and justice in Australian society today.

NOTES 1. It must be noted that there are profound theoretical divisions in the literature on ethnicity, in the areas outside the 'hard core'. Blu (1980) comments that British writers on ethnicity have tended to emphasise the behavioural aspects of the phenomenon, while American authors tend to concentrate on the cultural or cognitive aspects of ethnicity. This division reflects that of the social and cultural paradigms of anthropology.

2. Pierson, for example, defines Aboriginality as self-identification as an Aborigine, differentiation by others on biological andlor cultural criteria, and acceptance or rejection by whites or Aborigines for 'being Aboriginal'. He refers to Aboriginality as a specific form of ethnicity and sees the policy of assimilation as an official denial of the cultural bases of ethnicity. Pierson (1972, 231) states that the term ethnicity can imply factors that are not present in the Australian situation, but does not mention what these might be. Carter (1988, 73-74) explores the use of idiom to ritualise stigma in order to affirm ethnicity but does not define or compare this to the Aboriginality that is being constructed. 3. Warren Snowdon moved from the Central Land Council to become the member for the Northern Territory in 1987. 4. The working definition used by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs has been, 'An Aboriginal or l'brres Strait Islander is a person of Aboriginal and l'brres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or l'brres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives' (DAA, 1988, 3). The new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission definition eliminates the last clause, leaving a racial tautology: 'An Aboriginal person is a person of Aboriginal descent' (ATSIC bill, clause 4).

CHAPTER

ABORIGINALITY IDEOLOGY ETHNICITY AS IDEOLOGY In recent years, some of the work of ethnicity theory has been criticised for being blind in its partial discussion of ethnicity as 'primordial', ignoring the questions of power, ideology and the constructed nature of the ties that are represented as natural. To evaluate these claims, it is necessary to provide some background to the much debated notion of ideology. Although a difficult and problematic concept, it is an essential item in a toolkit for understanding Aboriginality in education, for as Skilbeck has noted, 'the concept is very important for educationists because they inevitably operate within a given ideology and will be under pressure to transmit to their pupils the values inherent in that ideology' (Skilbeck and Harris 1976, 9). If ideology (following the definition made by Stuart Hall 1983) is understood as 'the mental frameworks - the languages, the concepts, ~at~egories, imagery of thought and systems of representations - which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense or define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works' (1983, 59), then ethnicity is an ideology. It is a mental framework deployed differently by particular groups, in order to make their own sense of the social world. It is certain that groups with more power over things and ideas in society show an active interest in trying to make 'their' sense of the world the authoritative, moral, legitimate and natural one for the society as a whole. On the other side of the fence, groups seeking power also have an interest in contesting and qualifying this process, claiming their own appositional mental frameworks as valid and true, leading to a contest for common sense - a battle for ideas and power. The school is one such battleground for this. Dominant groups usually succeed, however, in 'framing all competing definitions of reality within their range' (Hall 1977, 333). These groups, especially through control of institutions such as schools and the media, have the material resources necessary for limiting opposing or alternative frameworks, making their own view seem to be the only authoritative or commonsense view. This process is known as 'hegemony' (Gramsci 1971). It is a strongly contested and uneven process. Ethnicity can be critically examined as a hegemonic ideology; it is one ideology which is used by groups to define reality in a way that tends to keep the patterns of domination in place. Of particular interest here is the work of de Lepervanche (1980), Eipper (1983), Muga (1984) and Keesing (1986). These authors claim that the theory of

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ethnicity, and government practice modelled on it, submerges and disguises the issue of race, slipping it out of view. Marie de Lepervanche (1980,25) argues that 'in social scientifictheory and research, and in government policy, the trend from race to ethnicity (via assimilation) can be examined as a series of ideological transformations in the recreation of hegemony'. Her criticism documents the parallels between the use of racist ideologies by dominant groups in the last century, and the use of ethnicity today. Despite their different emphases, the effect of both these ideologies has been to entrench dominant interests. The commonalities and differences between ethnicity and race are important for any understanding of the ways in which ethnicity and Aboriginality are used in education theory and practice. The essential differencesbetween race and ethnicity are the same as those between nature and culture or between the body and the imagination. A sociologist working in multicultural education offers the following distinction: 'At a simplistic level, a racial group can be differentiated because of a physically identifiable characteristic whereas an ethnic group is differentiated on culturally identifiable criteria' (Foster 1988, 84). The reason that this definition is rightly admitted to be simplistic is that whatever the criteria are focused on, both groups still undergo differentiation, on terms that are set, in the main, by dominant groups in the society. These processes of differentiation can be described as part of the construction of an ideology of difference. Disguising the question of race in a general discussion on the social construction of difference does ignore, but does not eliminate, the questions of power and control. Critics of ethnicity theory look at the concept from a cooler and more cynical theoretical perspective and see not 'primordial ties', but 'powerful ideologies'.

ABORIGINALITY-AS-PERSISTENCEAS AN IDEOLOGY Looking at Aboriginality-as-persistenceand ethnicity as two complementary and parallel ideologies (suppressing resistance temporarily for the sake of argument) suggests that hegemonic processes are in operation, despite the intentions of exponents of the ideology, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Aboriginality-aspersistence mystifies the concept of 'culture' in the same way as ethnicity does. It represents it in the form of a unique inheritance, or 'primordial tie', through which every Aboriginal person is assumed to carry an equivalent amount of what is perceived as the same body of knowledge, values and concepts that make up Aboriginal culture. This is the private and personal dimension of culture, different to, but not autonomous from, the public dimension (see Beckett 1988, 4). Every Aboriginal person, in this ethnicity-driven view, has something that could be called

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a 'culture gene', or a 'sociological number-plate' (see Keesing 1986). This evenly distributed cultural uniformity enables the easy incorporation of individuals into government cultural agencies, for if all Aboriginal people have the same 'culturecontent', for the purposes of the state in consultation and representation: 'any Aborigine will do!' As a political consequence, most Aboriginal leaders now channel their energies into structures established by the government. Instead of being in an autonomous position from which they can criticise, they now form a relatively socially conservative group, embedded in the hierarchy, and dependent on the favours of government for social services. Jakubowicz explains that for other 'ethnic groups' this results in the formation and incorporation of a new ethnic broker belt, which would be discomfited by having to criticise government action (Jakubowicz 1981,8; 1984,21).They are the politically literate, employed to manage the welfare dependent, aligning themselves with the state more than with the communities of which they were once an organic part. In the Aboriginal situation, this group of people (disrespectfully called 'Koori-crats' by some Aborigines), are given the responsibility of representing community opinion, acting as patrons for those outside the circles of influence, and frequently acting as a scapegoat for failed government policy (see Rowse 1985; Howard 1982). The American cultural anthropologists Delmos Jones and Jacqueline Hill-Burnett have focused attention on the role of ethnic elites in promulgating ethnic ideology both for their own benefit and for the benefit of the state. It is this elite who are most concerned with the promulgation and reproduction of ethnic ideologies as they represent group identity to the state. In considering the Australian case, they point out that after the advent of massive government funding for Aboriginal affairs, the diversity of employment for educated Aborigines was replaced with a locking of this elite group into institutions funded or sponsored by the state. By 1976 'not a single visible national level Aboriginal leader was discovered who did not occupy a position in, or connected with, government' (Jones and Hill-Burnett 1982, 224). Such a strategy is one means by which the power of the ideology of Aboriginality-as-resistance is contained and quelled. Opposition becomes institutionalisedand contained, given a job, a seat on the board or a grant. An 'official' version of Aboriginality, modelled closely on ethnicity, allows this process to take place. The implicit notion of public ethnic culture that underpins ethnicity theory parallels Aboriginality-as-persistencein other ways, with subtle but far-reachingconsequences. By representing Aboriginal culture as an inert and static, even if inherited, body of knowledge and skills it is not seen

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as the continuing product of human agency. The culture is objectified and reified, thought of as a 'thing' (Berger and Luckmann 1966, 106; Keesing 1981,72). This leads to the channelling of political activity into attempts to gain or regain power over this body of knowledge, and to control the institutions which are regarded as holding this knowledge (especially schools and research institutions). A diversion of energy into the realms of 'culture' and away from any campaign for social, economic or political equality, becomes a way of muffling resistance. While acknowledging the limited demands of racial and cultural heritage, powerful groups shift the focus of demands away from more material, substantial gains (cf. Cowlishaw 1986, 10; Jones and Hill-Burnett 1982, 235). The state, as Miles and Eipper (1985) have pointed out, deals with minorities by imposing upon them essentialism, that is, the assumption that all members of a group share equally in a common essence that defines them as different. This essentialism, I would argue, has its origins in the ideology of ethnicity, in which group identity is reduced to particular primordial ties. These ties have minimal active cultural or political significance, but are constructed from the residue of other social formations, located elsewhere in time or place. By limiting the minorities such as Aborigines and migrants to demands for this form of cultural freedom, real demands for social and economic justice are ignored and quelled. In the case of Aborigines any claims for sovereignty and autonomy are neutralised, individuals are incorporated, an Aboriginal middle class is created, political activity is diverted and culture itself is bureaucratically reified. By recognising Aboriginality only in its persistent forms, the government is actively contributing to the construction and incorporation of Aborigines as simply another ethnic group. Ethnicity provides the new theoretical template for this process. By simplifying culture, and ignoring conflict and ambiguity, ethnicity theory diverts attention from the questions of contradiction, replacing them with an illusory and idealist construction of persistence and continuity. By viewing Aboriginality as a specific, complex and contradictory ideology, it is possible to have a different understanding of the way Aboriginal people use Aboriginality. An understanding of the role that ideology plays in the processes of the construction, reproduction and, occasionally, the rejection of dominance can be gained through an examination of the way that Aboriginality modelled on ethnicity is used as an ideology of dominance in the context of policies on multiculturalism in general and multicultural education in particular.

ABORIGINAUTY--AS-PERSISTENCE AND MULTICULTURALISM It took the children five or six weeks to make their rainbow serpent. One serpent-maker,nine year old Steven said, 'I liked getting my hands

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all gluey from the papier-mache'. Just before lunch the serpent was hung in the library, where it could be seen from all the classrooms in this open-planned school. After that, the children settled down for a rainbow feast: a nutritionally sound miniature Rainbow Serpent made from cherry tomatoes, carrots, cheese, capsicums, olives and grapes, and some technicolour junk food including fairybread and paddle pops. (Jeannie Zakharov, Education Reporter, Canberra Times, 11/3/88) In multicultural Australia, Aboriginality has a special place. It has been regarded by those in the 'multicultural industry' as the original and indigenous Australian culture, to be celebrated by all Australians (ACPEA 1982, 17; Galbally 1979, v; Commonwealth Schools Commission 1987a, 9). The Hawke Government's keynote document National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia includes 'acknowledgement and recognition of the special status and place of Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander people in Australian life' (OMA 1989,48). The particular version of Aboriginality that is celebrated in multiculturalism can be seen by examining the usual school activities included under the multiculturalism label. At the school multicultural day, a 'family of nations' is simulated through a stereotypical display of ethnic food and folk dancing: spaghetti and polka in room one, bogong moths and corroborees in room two. Err01 West, the Chairman of the National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC) describes these types of 'damper day' programs and seriously questions their value in an Aboriginal studies curriculum: Most of us know the type of program: the fondling of a few artefacts of unknown origin, obscure use and unthought of value; the class

Plate 7: Students at an ACT primary school with a rainbow serpent built during NAIDOC Week, 1988 (Canberra Times)

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reading of fictionalised Aboriginal dreaming such as, 'The Rainbow Serpent' or 'Tiddalik the Frog'; the quick flick through some Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander art books followed by a simple question and answer sheet or a 'join the dots' activity (West 1985, 29). Aboriginal students in the city do not qualify as Aboriginal in the particular construction of Aboriginality that the dominant society endorses, reproduces and makes them subjects of in school multicultural activities. The problems with this limited view are evident in an anecdote from Colin Tatz (1972, 258): For years in Melbourne, I gave on request, extra lessons to Aboriginal teenagers, lessons in Aboriginality. It was both ironic and pathetic. These young people wanted to identify as Aborigines but felt that they had no cultural, religious, historical or ritualistic bases for a satisfying or genuine identification. The irony and pathos were misplaced. Tatz was subjecting them to an ideology of Aboriginality for which they could not qualify. The cultural bases he cites in a checklist of identification are constructed through the dominant ideology of ethnicity, modelled precisely on an interpretation of the essential, enduring elements that supposedly constituted traditional, or 'real', Aboriginal culture. These elements are those of Aboriginality-as-persistence,frozen in the past. The lessons that Tatz gave on Aboriginahty were qualifying the students to be excluded, marginalised and divided. In such ways, the ideology of ethnicity matches the ideology of race in its reproduction of Aboriginal disunity and disinheritance. The implicit understanding of 'culture' in this context is that the cultures to be celebrated in multiculturalism should be different, that is not of the dominant culture. They should be retrospective, being located in the residual or country of origin culture and they should be dominated, to be incorporated into a reworked but unchallenged dominant tradition (Williams 1981, 28; 1973, 205). It is through such a definition of culture1 that the category of 'ethnic' is created. In this context, the representation of Aboriginality is based on the residual and persistent, to the frightened exclusion of the emergent and resistant; it is a specifically narrow, misunderstood and essentialist interpretation of Aboriginality.

ABORIGINALITY-AS-RESISTANCE AND IDEOLOGY At the Cultural Awareness Camp discussed in Chapter 2, many students failed to recognise the calls made to them on the basis of Aboriginality-as-persistence, preferring to listen to the call of Aboriginality-as-resistance in the songs and electric guitars of rock bands.2As Therborn explains, people become 'qualified' to take

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up the repertoire of roles given in the society in which they are born, through particular ideological processes, in which the significance and force of hegemony are evident. However, people can 'qualify' these dominant ideologies in return, in the sense of modifying their range of application to themselves (Therborn 1980, 17). One is addressed by dominant ideologies but one can decide to ignore, or even deny the message. One can say, 'No, that's not me you're talking about.' Students qualified their response to the persistence aspects of Aboriginality at the camp. Instead they actively participated in the production of cultural forms that were, in part, opposed and resistant to the hegemony of the dominant culture. Through such activities, an emergent cultural tradition was being produced, in competition for the attention of subjects with both the residual and the dominant cultural traditions (Williams 1981, 28; 1973, 205). This emergent cultural tradition is stimulated by the ideology of Aboriginality-as-resistance.This ideology is both a major reference point and a point of origin for cultural production, in the sense that Johnson (1979,234)means when he describes cultures as the ground on which ideologies work. The culture experienced by Aboriginal people in the cities of Australia is a complex, located whole, the outcome of the interactions between different ideologies, an important one of which is that of Aboriginality-as-resistance. Patrick Dodson, acting as a leader of the Aboriginal Land Rights movement, called on this ideology in 1985, in a newspaper article aimed at trying to unify Aboriginal opposition to changes in land rights legislation that related to Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory: There are difficulties in areas of Australia where Aboriginal people are absolutely surrounded in a sea of white people and do not have the opportunity to move or relate to the country that is theirs, but by the same token there is a fierce sense of identity and a fierce sense of Aboriginality that comes from knowing that across this country no one Aboriginal person stands in isolation (Dodson 1985). There is nothing pathetic or ironic (cf Tatz 1972,258)about this 'fierce sense' of Aboriginality. In this account, it represents a significant critique of the dominant society and points to social activities and practices whose meanings are both cultural and political, and which present distinct emancipatory possibilities. Aboriginality-as-resistance is an ideology that stresses collective solidarity and opposition. Of course, such opposition can have negative personal and material consequences. Aboriginality-as-resistance as an ideology is also ambiguous and paradoxical; built around an uneasy although sometimes exciting combination of rejection of the surrounding white society and creative borrowing from and

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interaction with it. The school, as the place of initial socialisation into the dominant society, offers resources for creative mergers between white and black culture (art, rock music and writing, for example). Sometimesthese mergers occur neatly and productive active learning takes place. At other moments, perhaps more frequently, the school becomes the first point of rejection of the dominant society. School resistance then becomes the beginning of a track leading almost inevitably to social and economic marginalisation and alienation. Like the counter-school culture of working-class 'lads' that Willis (1977) describes, resistance can lead to entrapment and a lack of personal options for social or employment mobility. For Aboriginal students, the rejection of school, articulated as the rejection of white society, leads to a rejection of the possibilities for personal autonomy that are theoretically available through education and employment. A life on the dole is then rationalised as being simply Aboriginal life i t ~ e l f . ~

RESISTANCE AND PERSISTENCE IN POLITICAL PRACTICE It must be remembered, however, that the ideologies of resistance and persistence only exist as separate entities in the abstractions of analysis. They are inseparable in practice, especially in Aboriginal politics. Resistance and persistence, culture and ideology, hegemony and opposition, all exist simultaneously, interacting and competing for the subjectivity of the individual. In the complex and continuous social processes of ideological formation, ideologies 'overlap, compete and clash, drown or reinforce each other' (Therborn 1980, vii). An overlap, or merger, in the use of the ideologies of resistance and persistence, can be seen by an examination of the political rhetoric that emerged in response to the officially sanctioned 'celebration of a nation' in 1988. The bicentennial activities tried to include the usually soft construction of Aboriginality-as-persistencein these celebrations. The 'natural heritage' became the 'national heritage'. In response, Aboriginality-as-resistance hardened and became less tractable to official cooption and persuasion. Nevertheless, Aboriginal resistance to celebration through protest made full use of elements of persistence as a way of constructing a unified political stance across the diverse elements of the Australian Aboriginal population. An example was the call for support by urban Aborigines made by the Chairman of the Central Land Council before the Australia Day protest meetings in Sydney in 1988: And for Aboriginal people living along the coast where the white people took over first, they will be able to see that they are still part of the Aboriginal family. People down there might not know their language anymore, but the emu story and the snake story goes all over

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Plate 8: Students at Spence Primary School, ACT, painting cardboard didjeridus, NAIDOC Week, 1990 (Alana Harris, AIATSIS)

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Australia. When they see us dance we can celebrate that we all belong to the songs that go across the whole of this country (Rubuntja 1988). Williams (1983,206; 1981,204)identifies a process he calls the selective tradition by which the dominant culture selects particular elements of meaning from the past, and redefines them in terms that are compatible with other elements from the culture. The ideological processes of Aboriginality demonstrate that an emergent cultural tradition also selectively draws from the past (or residual) cultural forms and redefines or reinterprets these elements into new meanings and values, practices and experiences. The ideological elements of resistance and persistence are intertwined in the processes of cultural production. Similarly, an emergent tradition has the capacity to select elements of meaning from the dominant cultural tradition, invert them, and transform their use. Signs of power are used in this way, as in the use of flags, embassies and anthems in the land rights movement. More abstractly, the very ideologies of oppression may be used in the construction of a challenge to this oppre~sion.~ Hall (1985, 112)describes the ideological struggle involved in attempting to win a new set of meanings for the term 'black' by disarticulating it from its place in a signifying structure, and investing it with a positive ideological value. The construction of Aboriginality may be construed as a similar strategic appropriation of the ideology of ethnicity, and the notion of culture on which it is based. To separate the moment of appropriation from the moment of adoption is, however, a difficult analytical exercise (cf Williams 1981, 205). In other words, how can we tell whether people are thinking for themselves, or thinking in line with the mental frameworks reproduced by the state? The school, as a centre of ideological reproduction, has a significant role in this ambiguous process. Schools are part of the organisation of power in the society; they are state agencies. The social relations of power are condensed and crystallised within the state (Therborn 1980, 85; Hall 1985, 93). It is in the school that the ideology of ethnicity is dominant, and it is through the school that Aboriginal students (and teachers) are constituted as its subjects. As a result, some individual Aborigines are beginning to adopt (rather than appropriate) the concept of culture that is implicit in the ideology of ethnicity. Ventures such as the Cultural Awareness Camp, and other 'multicultural' activities, reproduce the notion of Aboriginal culture as something that can be formally and artificially transmitted, and restrict the possibility of education system resources being used for cultural production that might challenge the cultural and political status quo. The state, through the use of incorporated Aboriginal organisations such as the NAEC and the Aboriginal Education

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Consultative Groups is able to contain any formal resistance to its dominance, and still appear to be encouraging the elusive rhetoric of 'self-determination'. Through the school, and the state resources channelled through it, Aboriginality is being condensed into a form that can be incorporated into the dominant cultural t r a d i t i ~ nThe . ~ elements of Aboriginality that are resistant or oppositional are limited and constrained, edited from the formal curriculum and denied the support of state resources. The elements that are persistent or residual are affirmed and approved, incorporated into the formal curriculum, and provided with state funding. Through such processes, Aboriginality is transformed and remoulded into a soft and pliable form that does not challenge hegemony. The state in this case actively and selectively incorporates the residual, simultaneously denying the emergent, so that cultural reproduction ultimately overwhelms cultural production. This chain of reasoning has an economic end that cannot be ignored. Therborn (1980, 33) has argued that, 'all ideologies operate in a material matrix of affirmations and sanctions, and this matrix determines their interrelationships'. A practical illustration of the truth of this proposition can be observed in the funding practices of the state. It is an accidental, but ironic, twist of language that Aboriginal organisations, particularly in the educational system, must be 'incorporated bodies' and provide 'submissions' to 'qualify' for state funding. Incorporation and submission are processes of domination that demonstrate the power of the state, through its gigantic material advantage, to qualify the power of competing ideologies. The dimensions of Aboriginality that hold a promise of a challenge to dominance through resistance, independence and sovereignty are marginalised and muted; they are not, however, extinguished. They cannot be extinguished because domination is a process that is never static or complete. Aboriginality, in the fullest and dialectical sense of the word, has emerged from the active response of Aborigines to their unequal status in Australian society. While inequality and injustice remain as characteristic features of Australian society, perpetuated through institutions such as schools, Aboriginality will continue to be an ideology that unites Aboriginal Australians in a challenge to society through a call for socialjustice. Their resistance will surely be persistent, or, as a banner at the 1988 Australia Day rally proclaimed, "h survive is to resist, and to resist is to survive.' NOTES 1. As Kalantzis and Cope (1984, 85) point out, 'Culture is no more and no less than we can be happily "multi" about. Italian peasant

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village life and Polish communism are not "culture" because we could not really have either in Australia - no-one could suggest we be this multicultural - but spaghetti and polka are culture, without a doubt. At this point multiculturalism becomes neither a serious means of reform policy nor an intellectually worthwhile curriculum activity.' 2. It seems, from the evience of the camp, that students who are summoned by an ideology of dominance do not simply respond automatically. Students do resist, avoid and challenge. The lack of a dialectical element in the Althusserian model of ideology leads to a theoretical weakness, rendering it incapable of explaining the reaction of the students at the Cultural Awareness Camp, or the complex contradictions inherent in Aboriginality (see Hall 1985,99;Giroux 1983, 264). 3. See Chapter 6 for further discussion. 4. This has been evident in challenges to white racism, as exemplified by the 'negritude' or 'anti-racism racism' of Fanon (1963) for which McGuiness (1972, 150) provides an Australian Aboriginal example. 5. This condensation is an active example of the way that the state brings together a range of ideologies into a system of regulation and normalisation, transforming them in the reproduction of hegemony (Hall 1985, 93).

CHAPTER

ABORIGINALITY EDUCATION

You bastards'll only be be able to put in tall demands when you learn to stand tall. You'll only be given dignity when you have dignity. You'll only get justice when you get unity and act with pride in a just cause. Aboriginality, eh? You say you want your Aboriginality back? That means having some rules don't it? And the first two orders of those rules is share and care...I don't care how hard it is. You build Aboriginality, boy, or you got nothing. There's no other choice to it. (Grandfather Koori, in Gilbert 1977, 300-4). In the anthropological literature up until very recently, Aboriginality has been variously described as: 'an accident of Aboriginal descent' (Berndt and Berndt 1964,37), 'a fiction which takes on meaning only in terms of white ethnocentrism' (von Stunner 1973, 116), an 'attempt to fill a cultural hiatus' (Elkin 1974, 381), a 'mirage' (Berndt 1977, ll), and a 'defeated ethnogenesis' (Sansom 1982, 137). These labels imply a sense of measurement and evaluation, a process by which Aboriginality is declared as somehow false or not real. In these cases, Aboriginality is being measured against a particular interpretation of Aboriginal culture, and has been found wanting. I would argue that it is the act of measurement and the interpretation of culture that are flawed. Aboriginality is compared to a body of reconstructed facts, concepts and traditions, objectified by the label of 'traditional', and 'supposed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of western percipients' (Said 1985, 4). This is the notion of culture against which Aboriginality can be seen to differ and against which Aboriginality and urban Aboriginal culture are found to be lacking. It is this inadequate, fossilised, functionalist notion of culture that underpins ethnicity theory and much educational policy. It cannot adequately explain, or be employed to improve, the lived reality of Aboriginal people today. Aboriginality, as a word of significance for Aboriginal people, belongs in a semantic complex with the three words at the centre of this book: education, culture and power. As Williams has said, the words are all 'strong, difficult and persuasive' (1983, 12). They refer to the same area of human thought and experience, share the same sense of potent significance, and together form a structure of related meaning. Through a study of the social processes of the Cultural Awareness Camp described in Chapter 2 certain features of Aboriginality, education, power and

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culture are evident as operating concepts. Foremost amongst these shared features is their particular contradictory, ambiguous character. 'Education' is the purpose of such camps. They are intended to educate the students in their Aboriginality, in order to provide them with a substantive content to what is their essential birthright. This process is contradictory in and of itself. 'Culture' is something to become 'aware' of through the camps by bringing the past into the present, and bringing the present into consciousness. In this sense, culture is both lived in and learned about, constructed and consumed, internalised and externalised. 'Power' is part of thisprocess but it is also contradictory and ambiguous. The camps seek to empower Aboriginal students, by giving them access to knowledge about their people and themselves - knowledge that could be the source of pride and self-esteem - and educating them in cultural power. The camps are de-powering, in that they demonstrate dependency on the state as a mediator for this cultural power. Every tutor's cheque is drawn from the state, in which social power is centralised and condensed (includingthe power to define, allocate and restrict cultural education). Every student also receives an allowance from the state for their attendance, setting a pattern for future dependence on a benevolent state: a state that shares and cares, whose authority is legitimated because of its nurturant nature. Aboriginality is the essential and central concern of the camp, for parents, teachers and students. In active social use, the concept is in and of itself ambiguous and paradoxical: built around an uneasy combination of resistance and persistence, drawing strength and weakness from both. It is an inherently contradictory ideology, constantly in danger of being turned inside out and upside down, into the very opposite of what it first appears to be. This is not because it is Aboriginal. but because it is an ideology. Australian nationalism, for example, operates in a similarly strange, double-sided way.

DOMINANT THEMES IN ABORIGINAL EDUCATION

ABORIGINALITY-AS-PERSISTENCE Social scientists,trying to soften government policy, are reluctant to recognise these contradictions and see only Aboriginality-as-persistence. They draw a picture of Aboriginality according to a template provided by ethnicity theory. Aboriginalityas-persistence becomes equated with 'primordial ties' (see Chapter 5), held by all Aborigines in common. As a result, the relationship between Aborigines and the larger social system within which they are encapsulated and by which they

ABORIGINAUTY IN EDUCATION

are dominated is eliminated from analysis. This illusion of purity in isolation ignores the active role that the state, through agencies such as the school, plays in the construction of the categories 'ethnic group' and 'Aboriginal'. The elements of this notion of Aboriginality are represented as being part of a 'natural heritage', rather than as an active construction, limiting the possibilities of human agency, and reinforcing the hegemonic status of those bodies, such as schools, that offer substance to this heritage. In this view, such features of Aboriginality as sharing and caring appear to be inherent cultural traits, rather than a constructed and imagined product of social life. Grandfather Koori said, 'you build Aboriginality or you got nothing'. Ethnicity theory forgets about the building of cultural elements in order to present a uniform and even facade. Aboriginality is more complicated than liberal social scientists working within the soft versions of ethnicity theory are capable of representing it. Despite the double-sidedness, the twists and turns, Aboriginality is a fiercely held ideology through which a distinctive Aboriginal culture is being generated in the suburbs and schools of our Australian cities. From this urban base, it has grown out to rural and remote areas, especially across these divisions by young people and in national political efforts around land rights, and the contact that has been evolved in further education across Australia. Although it is in ongoing interaction with other ideologies, it cannot be swept aside as either 'false consciousness' or as not 'really' Aboriginal; for, as Stanner has reminded us, 'It is the essence of their struggle to go their own way' (1979, 60). Aboriginality-as-persistence has been defined here as an ideology that emphasises the inherent, commonly held maintenance of a distinctive and particular Aboriginal cultural identity that has persisted through time, despite the ravages of history and geographical dispersal. Recognition and accommodation of this ideology has led to changes in Aboriginal education that have made the nature of the school experience for many Aboriginal students a qualitatively different one, especially in the last decade. Improvements and innovations have included: the proliferation of Aboriginal studies courses; the employment of Aboriginal people in key positions; the development of teacher education programs; the scattered but significant development of bilingual education programs; the occasional outstation school or bicultural program; curriculum theory and practice based on cultural difference rather than deficit; and community consultation as a normative practice. Cultural differences between the home and the school are now widely recognised as schools focus attention on what the school can do to minimise alienation. An emphasis on institutional change rather than forced student change has clearly improved practice in schools. The notion of culture used and the nature

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of the difference identified should, however, be open to question, in order that their use may be as clear and accurate as possible. According to Paul Hughes, writing as Chairman of the National Aboriginal Education Committee, there will only be positive educational outcomes 'when educators are able to provide an education system in tune with our culture', one that 'assumes indigenous people's differences and strengths (not lacks).' As a response, the NAEC 'urges manifestations of Aboriginality in all Australian schools' (Hughes 1984, 20-22). A close examination of the general cultural comparisons provided by Hughes (see "fable 1)indicates the dimensions of difference. This list, like that of Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon discussed in Chapter 4, is the assemblage of the indicators of ethnicity and Aboriginality-as-persistence.It is an example of what I call 'cultural dualism'.l Much of the explanation and description of Aboriginal contemporary culture and its place inthe school curriculum has come from research carried out in remote communities by anthropologists and linguists, such as Stephen Harris (1980) and Michael Christie (1986). Their research has been based on the education experiences of remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, but has been borrowed and inserted into the urban and rural contexts, particularly by Aboriginal reference groups such as the NAEC and the AECGs. In this context the local cultural inventory is used to define a 'national culture'. In other words, the local particular meaning and place of culture as recorded in ethnography is extended and spread out to apply to all Aborigines, for contrast with all non-Aborigines. One stage of this is the production, by ethnographic researchers, of explicit lists of 'us-them differences, in which the "us" is monolithically referred to as the West, Euro-American culture, or modern industrial society and is contrasted to the "them" which is the specific village, group or culture as subject of the ethnography' (Marcus and Cushman 1982,49). Cultural dualism goes beyond this to compare both cultures as coherent, monolithic structures. The argument goes that there is 'something' called Aboriginal culture. It has different models for socialisation and education from non-Aboriginal (European) culture. These models emerge from different cultural strategies for relating to the land and other people and have survived two centuries of colonisation. All Aboriginal people share these cultural dispositions, as they share a different world view, regardless of urbanisation or language loss. Aboriginality persists despite massive social change. This argument has been used to explain students' alienation, absenteeism, low retention and underachievement in a single, condensed and

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Tbble 1 GENERAL CULTURAL COMPARISONS ABORIGINAL SOCIETY History is timeless Engage in holistic thinking Time is circular, without boundaries - is past continuous Spiritual views are not questioned Being rather than doing is important - fit into circumstances that are there Immediate gratification important Aboriginal society is acceptable as it is Group oriented - everything is for all group members Kinship is important in a family unit - a person can go from home to home Aborigines expect children to be like them Spontaneous lifestyle - do what you want, when you want to Uncritical of children or society because of respect Personal lifestyle - hard to understand an 'impersonal' person Basically listeners - do not speak unless it is important Illiterate - use symbolic language Little eye contact - is impolite to do so Indirect in questioning - talk around the point Non-legislative - laws are morals and to support the group, not to isolate anyone Accepting of others following separation for wrong doing or work A non-market economy - money not important Age is respected Giving is important (Source: Hughes and Andrews 1988)

NON-ABORIGINAL SOCIETY * History is quantified and specified * Engage in empirical thinking * Time is linear and quantified with reference points - is future oriented * Spiritual views are debated and questioned * Try to change circumstances that are there

* Deferred gratification important * Society needs to change

* Individual oriented - acquisitions are for you * Kinship of far less importance

* Non-Aboriginal children not expected to be like parents * Structured lifestyle must plan and be stable if want to succeed * Critical - everyone is judged

-

" Impersonal lifestyle - people would rather be alone

* Basically verbalisers - think out loud, must speak

* Literate - use books, and very verbal * Lots of eye contact - is impolite not to do so

* Direct questions - very much to the point * Legislative - laws are written and offenders are isolated

* Not accepting of others following separation for wrong doing - money important and complex * Youth is respected * Saving is important

* Market oriented

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universal reason. Schools (and institutions) fail Aboriginal students because they fail to recognise and accommodate their cultural differences. At every level of practice including timetable, curriculum, pedagogy, classroom organisation, languages credentialling process, staffing, discipline policy, the textbooks, assessment and evaluation processes, school-community interaction, schools are criticised by Aboriginal people and researchers for failing to respond to cultural difference. Schools, it is argued, are ethnocentric, monocultural, assimilationist institutions that deny the validity of the culture of their students, and thereby deny their students their right to an appropriate, culturally sensitive education. Cultural difference is certainly a major factor in student alienation and underachievement (and logically without Aboriginal-controlled schooling it will continue to be a major factor). That is not open to debate. What is necessary to find, however, are ways for policies and programs to work towards the recognition and support of Aboriginal culture, while also providing access to the dominant culture. Debate over cultural definitionsmust be part of the search for these ways. For effective curriculum and political practice, we do need to look beyond the 'culture-list'; we need to go behind the totalising form of the cultural difference explanation in order to examine whether other factors may also be significant but ignored; to critically analyse the notion of culture that is used; to examine some of the unintended consequences of an emphasis on overwhelming cultural difference. To put it another way, I am concerned to examine cultural difference as an aspect of the ideology of Aboriginality-as-persistencein order perhaps to reveal another face hidden from the casual glance.

NOTIONS OF CULTURE The 'cultural difference' model is often expressed in terms of 'cultural dualism', in which there are two monolithic and fundamentally different bodies of attitudes, knowledge and values that are labelled 'Aboriginal' and 'non-Aboriginal', or 'Western'. The differences and incompatibilities between these two cultures are the cause of student alienation and consequent failure. This leads to dual lists of cultural traits expressed in oppositional terms, in which difference overwhelms and excludes common humanity in every dimension of cultural significance. The notion of culture on which such lists of difference are drawn up is similar to the notion of culture that underpins both Aboriginality-as-persistence and ethnicity. It is the labelling of a dynamic, interactive process as a singular, set and fixed body of commonly shared knowledge, attitudes, values and behaviours. This approach treats cultures as reified totalities in which there are

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no differences in distribution across ages, regions, classes or gender groups. The definition used by Stephen Harris (1980, 19), for example, describes a 'particular culture' as 'the total shared way of a life of a given people'. He later talks about 'two fundamentally different world views' (1988,76),as do Hughes (1984,20-22), Christie (1985, 8-14) and Burney (1988, 10), as well as many others. It is not the facts of difference, but the duality that should be examined carefully before leaping into educational change strategies. Even if, for sake of argument, the existence of a uniform, homogenous, total, undifferentiated, overpowering and intact Aboriginal culture is accepted, the existence of a 'Western culture' or a 'White world view' is impossible to accept. In this view, the cultural world inhabited by John Elliot, millionaire, 55, from a leafy suburb in Adelaide is the same as that inhabited by Jane Souza, butcher, 35, from Collingwood. It is equally materialistic, technological, selfish, individualistic, future oriented, comfortable, rational, manipulative, quantified and destructive. In order to raise appreciation and sensitivity towards Aboriginal culture as a whole, the writers build a false totalising and negative view of non-Aboriginal culture. The overgeneralisation of such an approach becomes evident when Christie (1985, 13; emphasis added) declares that the great disadvantage of the 'White world view is that it affords us much more power than we know how to handle', citing nuclear bombs as an example. In relation to that sort of power, of course, Nelson Tjakamarra, John Elliot and Jane Souza have an equal and common share of nothing at all. Cultural dualism, like Aboriginality-as-persistence,wields a wide brush to paint over the cracks of difference, the gaps between the boards that come from real differences in location, power, age, class and gender. Also like Aboriginality-as-persistence,cultural dualism suggests that cultural commonality is inherent, shared equally by all Aboriginal people because it comes from a unique, ancient inheritance. 'Something has definitely been passed down to all the Aboriginal people', remarks Christie (1985, 12; emphasis added). The two conceptions of culture - a public totality and a personal essence - merge into one in this process. Both conceptions underestimate or ignore the dynamism of culture, the social construction of shared meaning, the political and economic realities of cultural change and the distribution of knowledge within 'communities'. It is interesting that such explanations should be complemented by more 'psychosociological' theories of racial difference in mental process, such as 'dual brain theory' and 'field-dependence'. Such explanations lean towards a biological racial determinism precisely because they downplay social change, human agency, history, the force of politics and economics and variations of power within society.

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ABORIGINALITY-AS-RESISTANCE Mavis went crazy one afternoon in the shed at Kowanyama that we used as an interim post-primaryclassroom. For the life of me 1 can't remember what started it; what particular incident lit the fuse of her quick and explosive temper. I can remember the look in her wide and wild eyes as she rushed into the classroom with a huge lump of concrete over her head, advancing towards me with murder, it seemed, on her mind. I can remember Bernice shouting, 'Quick, sir Keeffe, run, she'll kill you properly one-time.' I didn't run, but stood my professional and authoritarian ground. I had the power of the Queensland State behind me, I was white, I was male. I was sir Keeffe. She was just a young Aboriginal teenage girl who had lost her temper, Mavis swung her arms back and prepared to wipe me out. I had solid, material authority and power, but Mavis had a lump of concrete. Was I standing my ground or was It that I just couldn't move? She didn't wipe me out - but the point is that she could have and very nearly did, despite the obvious differentials of power and authority between us. Most days in most schools, power relationships are being negotiated between students and teachers. Although lumps of concrete are rarely introduced into the negotiations, students do have the power to determine, limit, subvert or resist the authority of teachers. The authority of the teacher and the authority of the curriculum can overrule and attempt to stifle the personal autonomy of the student, but it cannot eliminate it. Ultimately, students learn whatever and however they feel like learning. They have certain ultimate powers over the learning process. In Aboriginal schools the working out of power relationships is real, stressful and complicated. One part of this working out process involves cultural building and production and interaction with the 'other' culture: the cultures of their teachers and their non-Aboriginal classmates, and the culture of the shops down the road from the school. This is the positive interactive assertiveness of Aboriginality-asresistance. In contrast to Aboriginality-as-persistence, Aboriginality-as-resistance is an active and dynamic concept, emphasising the particular place that Aboriginal people hold in Australian society. From this precise location, those inspired by this ideology are engaged in the conscious production of new cultural forms and political organisations, drawing creatively from the resources of the dominant society, and from Aboriginal traditions, but not setting out to discover lost objects or lifestyles from the past. It speaks of resistance to white authority, political

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struggle and collective solidarity, but is constrained by the structures (material, ideological and cultural) of the dominant society. Aboriginal young people often become politicised at the same time as they become socialised. Rebellion against a single teacher becomes rebellion against a whole society and the way of life that the school claims to prepare the student for. There is nothing noble about being poor and jobless without trades or qualification,totally and seemingly permanently locked into welfare dependency. The glorification of resistance that is part of the ideology of Aboriginality,however, presents what often seems to be a validation for such self-produced failure and social dislocation. By constructing Aboriginality in such a way as to socially endorse rejection of the dominant society, poverty and powerlessness become legitimated and entrenched. This is the down-side of the 'koori' way, although the up-side is an important and easily understood emphatic statement of pride. To ignore the negative side is to romanticise failure, to perpetuate exclusion and to frustrate social justice.

NOTE 1. I am aware of the use of 'cultural dualism' to describe a subparadigm of feminist social science in the 1970s. Although there are interesting theoretical parallels, there is no space to discuss them here.

YANANGU CULTURE AND THE CURRICULUM

PINTUPI CULTURAL VALUES AND EDUCATION

The long thin strip of bitumen under the wheels of the Toyota seems to stretch northwards forever. I know that when the road cuts through the low red hills north of Alice Springs it continues past small highway townships through Tennant Creek, Katherine and on to Darwin. A long way behind me is Adelaide. From sea to sea, the road bisects the continent. To venture off this road is, for most Australians, to enter dangerous country, marked on their tourist maps with dire warnings about fuel, water and permits. To leave the safety of the bitumen behind, to drive past the cattle stations that ring Alice Springs and to keep going west on the dirt towards places such as Papunya, Yuendumu and Walungurru is to enter the desert and Aboriginal land.The idea of the desert and the idea of Aboriginal land frightens many urban Australians, 'Better to stick to the bitumen', they tell each other. They stay on the straight, the narrow and the safe roads. They don't risk the unknown. Two vehicles drive past me when I stop for a while at the Papunya turn-off.The first is a shining new Land Cruiser, with a new swag roiled on the back. I don't have to see the Z-plates to know that it is driven by a government official, travelling by himself. The other car is coming from Papunya, on its way into town. It is a heavily laden Kingswood, springs groaning and tail-pipe scraping, A hand casually detaches itself from the mass of people inside and waves. l wave back, wondering who it is. For Aboriginal people coming into town, turning onto the bitumen is also leaving the known and entering the relatively unknown. There is some fear there, as they enter town in a vehicle that is overcrowded and 'unroadworthy' by Alice Springs standards. But the fear is mingled with anticipation, also, for the town holds promise of different forms of sociability - entertainment, shopping, maybe even a drink. Even with family in town, perhaps living in the pockets of land that are Aboriginal-ownedtown camps, there is a sense in which they are entering a different sort of country, a country that is named, subdivided, owned and controlled by walypala.

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The road that the government official, the Aboriginal family and I are driving on links two parts of the same world. The parts are so different, they might be different countries. l b go from Alice Springs to Papunya and Walungurru is to go from white middle Australia to black Central Australia. You can see this road as a drive that leads from suburban security to social security; from bank loan dependency to welfare dependency; from housing loans to homelessness; from material affluence to grinding poverty. One commonly-held view of the purpose of education is to reverse this direction, or at least to shorten the road, so as to decrease the differences and diminish the distance between these two worlds. In this view, schooling is a road out of a poverty trap. I am sure that many Aboriginal people see this road differently from the way I see it. They see the road out of Alice as a road to their own country, to the place where they belong, their own world. Out there, their identity is recognised and confirmed by people who speak their language. The road leads not to homelessness but to home, with all the sense of security of family that the word implies. It leads to a place where they can truly be themselves, detached from walypato business. Another purpose of education is said to be based on an understanding of this view of the road. Schooling aims to support, not undermine, this Aboriginal sense of identity. For Aboriginal people, escaping the poverty trap through an education, job training and employment strategy has risks of walking into an 'assimilation trap', with a high price attached of possible family, language and culture loss. Taking the opposite direction is taking a decision that places a greater weight on cultural maintenance, on commitment to identity, sometimes at the price of accepting poverty and welfare dependency. How can we know whether this is a 'culture trap'? In trying to ease the intensity of this Aboriginal choice, government policies in general and schools in particular are trying to go in two directions at once, shifting between two policy goals. Cultural autonomy (based on special principles of self-determination) and economic equality (based on general citizenship principles of equity of education, training and employment) may be conflicting directions for policies, schools and individual Aboriginal people and communities. Nevertheless, these are the twin goals of government policy and of schools. In the school, the project is to find ways in which the curriculum can be adapted to support Aboriginal cultural concerns, without weakening or denying access to the opportunities and choices of future further education, employment and job training. The Pintupi know this road and the available choices very well. Their history, as told through the painting in Chapter 1for example, shows the effects

PINTUPI CULTURAL VALUES AND EDUCATION

on people of policies and practices that ignored or did not understand Aboriginal cultural concerns. In order to translate a sense of this history and these cultural concerns into appropriate actions, we need a detailed analysis of Pintupi conceptual frameworks. This involves, for teachers, policy-makers and curriculum writers, some suspension of the deeply embedded assumptions and associations of their own cultural views. Concepts such as 'privacyy and 'gender' provide an example of understandings that are implicitly taken for granted in any particular culture. The Pintupi view these concepts differently, in a way that matters for educational policy and practice.

PUBLIC VERSUS PRIKATE IN PINTUPI CULTURE Pintupi society offers one example of a cultural group that interprets privacy differently from the way in which it is understood generally in urban Australian life. Over the last 200 years or so, since the Industrial Revolution, European society has become transformed, and nowhere is the transformation so evident as in Australia. These rapid and continuing changes have been paralleled by transformations in people's ideas about such things as privacy, domesticity, individuality, personhood and, importantly, gender relations. In contrast to urban ideas, traditional Aboriginal life, especially in the desert, was based on a very different structure of the domestic domain. As a consequence there is a difference in the way concepts such as privacy have developed. The nature of privacy in a world without walls must be different? The desert environment is sparse and unpredictable. In such an environment, social relations are spatially dispersed, so that individuals need to maintain relations with scattered groups of people constantly moving over a large known area. Individual movements between social groups were never constant or predictable. Group membership fluctuated over time, as is evident in the recollection of band membership and travel given to the anthropologist Fred Myers, by his main informant, Maantja Tjungurrayi (1986, 93-102). When these bands are compared, it is obvious that the 'domestic' group was never a constant. As an indirect result of this high social and physical mobility, Pintupi values placed an enormous significance on the concept of 'relatedness' to others. People who are far-flung emphasise their relatedness in order to stay in touch over distance and time. This attitude to others is paralleled by a cultural stress on the autonomy of the individual and the freedom of the self.2 The environmental and sociological constraints of Pintupi traditional life resulted in a way of life that featured individual cooperation with a variable and wide-ranging variety of persons through time. This social flux was ordered

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and regulated by a social emphasis on certain values. Daily life was organised, according to Myers, around common values of relatedness, and the recognition of shared identity. Relatedness was the idiom of interpersonal action and the Pintupi used the emotions of grief, compassion, melancholy and shame with others as political strategies in daily life (Myers 1986, 117-19; 121-24). The Pintupi social system is primarily divided into self and others. Others are divided into family (walyfja) and strangers (those who are different, ~ u r n p a i i )One's . ~ family, one's relations are those with whom one shares a camp, a fire. They are the members of your domestic unit and as such have shared identity. As we have seen, this is an ever-changing category. In small-scale, highly mobile band society, the society is primarily the domestic group. Feminist anthropology argues that the domestic unit should be the central departure point of societal analysis, rather than a residual category of sociality (see Yeatman 1984, 33). This is the locus of societal value, the point of contact between self and others, the crucible of socialisation, where personhood is shaped and developed. It is in the camp (ngurra) that the public and the private are coexistent. The assumptions that operate here are those that also operate in any extension into broader domains, for it is here that societal values are created, taught and applied. The Pintupi do have a concept of privacy, which can be observed in the domestic domain, as it is defined here. It can be unpackaged through the phenomenological and sociolinguistic analysis of Pintupi terms. The term matupurra is used to refer to one's own personal property, something which is very necessary to oneself. The term is also used to refer to objects that should not be separated from others which would be considered incomplete without such objects. The wheel of a car is an e ~ a m p l e . ~ The people and objects of one's camp are considered as being matupurra for oneself. Without your family, you are in~omplete.~ They are your sense of privacy, giving you a sense of comfort and shared identity equivalent to, but very different from our own urban sense of privacy. In this close environment, men and women are interacting in a way that is known and familiar. Kin roles are understood and the social environment is dominated by shared values that are reflected in appropriate behaviour. For the Pintupi, privacy is being with their kinsmen in controlled sociality. Solitude is thought of with fear and horror, as is separation from kin or being in a social environment that is crowded with strangers. One of the shared values that permeates the domestic and the public domains of Pintupi life has been closely analysed by Myers (1986,212,221-3; 1982, 83). The Pintupi term kanyininpa is a polysemous one which essentially means 'having', 'holding' but also implies 'looking after1.6It is derived from the expression

PINTUPI CULTURAL VALUES AND EDUCATION

Ill

describing how a small child is held in one's arms against the chest. It is an image of security, protection and nurturance. In its semantic extension it transcends many domains. Elders have and hold juniors; senior women have and hold young girls; parents have and hold children. A sister's husband 'holds' a young initiate in the novices' camp, instructing him and protecting him. In the kinship domain it is the central metaphor used to conceptualise the relationships between generations. In the 'private', 'domestic' domain, it expresses the way that the older generation should nurture the younger. As such it mediates the opposition between older and younger. It also mediates the opposition between men and women who should, through reciprocal food supply, hold and nurture each other. Not to do so is always a source of shame (Myers 1976, 478 ff; 1986, 120-25). The use of the term also transcends this domestic domain, and extends into talking about country, showing that the private extends into the public. The Dreaming (tjukurrpa)will 'have' and 'hold' the individual before birth and after death. The individual must reciprocate and 'look after' the country, through ritual. Male and female ritual serves to nurture the land. This concept of nurturance, like the concept of privacy, is again a very different one from the Australian urban conceptual model. The Pintupi concepts of private and public can be compared to the European concepts but they cannot be subsumed or reduced by them. To attempt to do so is to gloss over a richness of social interpretation available through careful analysis. The notion of privacy is a social and cultural construct that receives different interpretation in different cultural formations and historical periods. The concept of an isolable domain of social existence that is particularistic, private and domestic is an artefact of European urban thought.7 It receives its fullest elaboration in the culture of modem urban life and the consumer society. This framework for conceptualising the domestic domain goes against the notion of a universal dualism in gender relations between male and female domains. Rosaldo (1974) brought to feminist anthropology the assumption that there was a universal dichotomy between female 'private' and male 'public' domains. This viewpoint came to be accepted during the 1970s as one form of feminist orthodoxy, a separate sub-paradigm of feminist t h o ~ g h tThe . ~ separation of these domains emphasised their differential values and suggested the universal social inferiority of women. The assigning of women to the domestic sphere through reproductive and child-care functions was the common basis of all human society, and underpinned the universal oppression of women, despite a great variety of social forms for this oppression. The domains are separate, mutually exclusive and unmediated. Importantly, this separation is regarded as a human universal, when the Pintupi concept of private and domestic would suggest otherwise.

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There are dangers in declaring that a particular concept of social and cultural organisation is a universal. Often, because this concept has its origin in a more powerful culture, it is naturalised and becomes normative regardless of the possibility that the dominated group's values may be more rational or appropriate to their particular environment. There are also dangers in relativism, in which the values of a minority group are regarded as sacrosanct and not open to external evaluation, especially from the dominant society. The exploitation of women, including domestic violence, can be perpetuated through a relativist orientation. There are historical examples of the negative consequences of imposed external values. European values were regarded, in the period of assimilation, as ideal, natural and normative. Aboriginal values were either dismissed and ignored, or were regarded as psychological constraints that blocked the momentum of necessary social change.

CULTURAL VALUES AND ASSIMILATlON The Lake Mackay Reserve was established in 1957 in order to 'control and supervise' contact between the Pintupi and Europeans.0 Although originally established as an inviolate reserve, the era of assimilation changed the protected nature of this area and Pintupi life, as seen in Chapter 1. The emphasis at the time on the universal provision of welfare services (including education) at the periphery of mainstream society, suggested that the Pintupi, instead of being 'left alone', should be 'looked after'. The ways in which this took place demonstrate the cultural gaps that exist, and the ways in which Pintupi understandings of social relations differed from the understandings of their taskmasters on the settlements. When the Pintupi left their desert lands and entered settlements such as Papunya, especially during the 1960s, their needs were determined by the policymakers in Darwin and Canberra in the light of European conceptualisations of cultural value. Government policy dictated that the Piitupi should, for their own good, be assimilated into the mainstream culture. They were placed in institutions with the overt function of achieving forced social change, aimed 'by training and precept, [to] render the native acceptable to everyday social life, and as an individual, attracted to it' (Northern Territory Welfare Branch 1961,29). The results are now agreed to be disastrous. The failure to recognise the different Pintupi concept of privacy resulted in the imposition of a Western notion of privacy in the form of 'transitional housing' designed to teach people our own sense of enclosed and restrictive lifestyle. The need for the domestic group to be both private (composed of close

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kin) and public (able to see and be seen) was not recognised in housing plans designed in the city. Hence the houses were 'vandalised': the internal walls were destroyed and the windows smashed. The fluctuating nature of the domestic group was also disregarded. In the institution, management plans were drawn up on the basis of a European domestic structure, and the daily life of the inmates was organised according to nuclear family groups. A husband was required to leave home at the morning siren for the rollcall, and work for wages to bring home to his wife. She was busily engaged in housework training courses, or preparation for work as 'a trainee seamstress'. They met together for meals in the settlement dining room, unless one of them had contravened settlement regulations and required discipline by having food withheld (Davis, Hunter and Penny 1977, 50; Long 1989, 35). Meanwhile, everybody was 'continually supervised' in relation to their personal hygiene, in order to change their 'extremely primitive personal habits' (Northern Territory Welfare Branch 1961, 24). The failure to comprehend the Pintupi concept of nurturance resulted in physical, social and spiritual ruin.The old were judged to be incapable of holding and caring for the young. The need to hold and care for country was ignored by the policy of controlled settlement. Spiritual disintegration resulted and was accompanied by physical and social decline. In the first decade of institutionalisation (1961-71), 231 people died, at a time when the total population of the settlement was between 600 and 1,000 (Davis, Hunter and Penny 1977, Appendix L)J0 These are some of the unforeseen and unintended results of the imposition of European values which are neither appropriate nor wanted. It is important to realise that the settlement value system was not a 'one-way street', in which the will of the superintendent was imposed uniformly and unevenly on a reluctant but passive population. Many Pintupi people adjusted to the life on the settlement. Some young people, particularly, viewed Papunya as a place of refuge from a harsh, uncertain and rigorous life on the fringes of the desert. They were attracted to the increased opportunities for sociability with age-mates. Other Pintupi, particularly the old, resisted the settlement routine by refusing to eat even if it meant death through malnutrition. Still others found an intermittent connection to be a useful compromise, where life in the settlement was punctuated by life in the bush, particularly collecting dingo scalps for sale. What did not die, or even wither, was the Pintupi value sytem. It was transposed into the new situation, so that concepts such as kanyininpa came to be applied to the new situation of white government officials and black community councillors, for example (see Myers 1982, 88; Rowse 1986, 197). In this situation, the right of authority had to be earned through caring and looking after those

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in their charge. This often resulted in confusion, when the ideology of nurturance came up against either hard-hearted officials or overly demanding Aborigines. The point is that the Pintupi value system, established in the desert, socialised into individuals in the domestic group and reapplied in the changed world of the settlement, maintained its significance and value, in the eyes of the Pintupi if not those of their new bosses.

ASSIMIllATlON AND EDUCATION In order to 'advance from their present unsophisticated ways of living, the greatest hope for children lay at their attendance at school' (Northern Territory Welfare Branch, 1961, 26). During the assimilation era most educational programs were founded on theories and practices of 'cultural deficit', or on the need to overcome 'cultural disadvantage'. This approach identified poor Aboriginal performance with the deficiency of the home environment, citing factors such as poor health, language deficits, an impoverished environment, inadequate motivation and low self-esteem (eg Coombs 1978, 88-89; Seagrim and Lendon 1976, 222). Aboriginal student needs were defined in terms of an assumed 'lack' of certain cultural traits regarded as the essential ingredients of educational and social success. These were all non-Aboriginal ingredients. Intensive remedial efforts were engaged to fill or compensate for these gaps in order to assist a shift to mainstream attitudes and cognitive skills. Harker and McConnochie (1985, 124) have argued that these programs were essentially normative; they defined the natural order of things according to Euro-Australian standards. They were also prescriptive. They placed the focus of explanation on the psychological deficits of children, rather than the program deficits of schools. School and the home were placed in conflict over the mind of the student. Cultural differences and Aboriginal cultural values were ignored and no effort was made to encourage or reinforce students' own cultural identity. The simple fact that Aboriginal (and other nonEnglish speaking background groups) continue to exist as identifiable sections of the Australian population signals the failure of assimilation and the deficit model upon which it was built. A bleak, probably overdetermined, but provocative view of assimilationist education, is given by the linguist, Robert Dixon (1980, 90) who claimed that: Many Aboriginal children regarded school as a white man's game, that had little relevance to the pattern of living and little usefulness; only a minority did learn to read and write. The net effect was that a

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generation of Aborigines were lost to one culture, without having been taken into smother, knowing something of two languages but being master of neither. Rather than producing bilingual and bicultural citizens the Australian system was making Aborigines into demi-lingual, demi-cultural nobodies.

CULTURE AND THE BILINGUAL CURRICULUM Bilingual education has the promise of making schools less of a white man's game by providing a curriculum that is relevant to the 'pattern of living' (the culture), useful to the student in his or her community, and productive. The ideal goal of producing 'bilingual and bicultural citizens' indicates the sense in which it was believed that local and cultural integration of the school, the community and the person, would reduce alienation and cultural fragmentation, and would lead to broader social participation, to true active citizenship. Ensuring that the curriculum supports both senses of citizenship, within the local community and within the broader society, is the productive challenge of bilingual education. The Watts-Gallacher report of 1963 set out a charter for reform in Aboriginal education practice in the assimilation era for schools such as the one at Papunya. This report stated its support for the ideal, if not the reality, of initial education in the vernacular. It argued that: it cannot be doubted that the language which should be used as the medium of instruction in the early years is their own vernacular language. The education of young children in their own tongue will not only help the children to feel secure in the school situation but will also promote their concept development and, importantly, will help them to feel that school life is not divorced from village life (Watts and Gallacher 1963, 57). The idea was rejected as impractical and expensive at that time, mainly because the authors failed to see a major role for Aboriginal teachers and wondered how teachers could be trained to teach adequately in the language. However, the reference to vernacular and bicultural education in this important report indicates the early recognition of cultural alienation as a factor impeding student progress. Importantly, it recognised the potential for a bilingual program as an ideal to minimise the shock caused by unresolved differences in cultural ohentation between the home and the school. When bilingual education funding was announced in 1972 the Prime Minister, E.G. Whitlam, stated that 'tribal cultures should be preserved not crushed'. The government established an education advisory group which declared

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that 'the school should be the agent of cultural continuity rather than of cultural discontinuity' and talked of programs that would 'further bicultuml understanding' (Watts, McGrath and Tandy 1973). Significantly, therefore, bilingual education in the Northern Territory was initially introduced with a specific social and cultural rationale, as well as for language learning and language maintenance. While language and culture are inseparable in social practice, an emphasis on the language domain over the social and cultural domain in school practice leads to a different sort of curriculum. It is in developing the sort of curriculum that flows from a social and cultural rationale that bilingual education in the Northern Territory seems to be failing. Bilingual education, in not translating into bicultural education, is providing an educational service that is considerably less than imagined in the ideals with which it was established. As a consequence, the important initiatives contained in the bilingual program have not been sufficient to eliminate the cultural alienation that students experience in the school. As the bilingual program expanded from five schools at the outset to twenty-one schools in 1989 (reaching nearly half of the remote Aboriginal student population of the Northern Territory, or 3,500 students, and using seventeen Aboriginal languages) a sequence of stages in implementation and development was worked out." There were, initially, five stages from initial request and negotiation to a stage called bilingualhicultural education where a 'relevant dualmedium curriculum is to be built up' (Northern Territory Department of Education 1980). By 1989 the stages had been revised to a six-stage sequence, culminating in an accreditation stage. The stage before this was the bilingual education stage, with a note in the official handbook for programs, to the effect that bilingual education should be taken to mean bilingualhicultural education (Northern Tterritory Department of Education 1989, 23). None of the bilingual programs that I have seen in operation could be said to have yet reached the stage of having an integrated bilingual/bicultural program.12 This impression is supported by reading about the activities reported by specialist staff in bilingual programs across the Northern Territory (eg in Northern Territory Department of Education 1989).While the schools have started to become bilingual and biliterate, the majority and most valued activities of the school are still essentially monocultural. For example, the vernacular literacy program is primarily geared towards transfer to English literacy, rather than to the maintenance and development of vernacular literacy (or oracy). Similarly, the Social and Cultural Education curriculum (part of the centrally defined core and essential learnings) is seemingly also geared to a 'transfer' to non-Aboriginal culture

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and society through an increasingly external focus on non-Aboriginal social and cultural concerns as the student proceeds through the school. This increasing external orientation is partially a consequence of the 'widening horizons' approach to content structures, in which learning proceeds from the known to the unknown. Obviously, the role of the school in providing access to knowledge and understanding about the 'outside world' is a necessary one. However, there is an equally valid potential role for the school in the maintenance, support and development of the cultural orientation of the students. In the present context, this role is closed off and constrained. It is also clear that learning that is only situated in the external and the foreign will always be disengaged and ritualised, rather than integrated within student experience. It is learning at arm's length. Furthermore, the kind of learning activities that are labelled as 'cultural', and included in the officially recognised Aboriginal domain, are generally restricted to the pre-contact version of culture, to activities and knowledge that can be clearly labelled as 'traditional', or whatever the old people come up with. In a review of bilingual programs in 1980, Colin Bourke noted that 'some schools have mounted programs InAboriginal artlcraft, dancing and other material aspects of culture. The Aboriginal teaching assistants and community leaders seemed to feel that such things were acceptable even if unimportant' (Bourke 1980, 66). What is important is generally excluded because value is assigned by non-Aboriginal teachers - outsiders with temporary power over the definition of cultural value. The contemporary dynamic Aboriginal culture that is a primary and inescapable feature of modern life in bush schools and communities, and the deeper Aboriginal culture that carries the meanings behind the material objects, are usually not recognised as part of Aboriginal biculturalism in the school. The situation now, as it has been for decades, can be characterised as one of vernacular speaking students sitting through literacy programs whose relations to community values, ideas and concerns are tenuous. In the school, the recognition of Aboriginal culture is restricted to the olden-time stories of the primer readers, some dance instruction on one afternoon a week and the occasional 'bush tucker' trip. Both curriculum content and organisation demonstrate little connection with local cultural issues, concerns and practices. There is either a minimal and uneasy engagement or, more commonly, an extreme estrangement. The work of the school is regarded as either inconsequential or as intrusive to the life of the community. The interface between the school and the community all too often becomes one with jagged edges in which there is a lack of mutual interest; a divorce from sense of reality or purpose.

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'h view this dilemma only in broad terms as a communication gap

between the community and the school is to slide the student out of the picture. Aboriginal children come to the school with their initial, primary socialisation in place. They are already accepted and recognised as members of their family and their community. They already have a known, if developmental, social persona and identity. They are already located in their own culture even if they have yet to master all its intricacies and nuances. These children bring to schools an overflowing bundle of skills, knowledge and concepts. When they go up the steps of the school for the first Their slowly time, they cross the threshold of another culture, another s0ciety.1~ and informally accumulated bundle of cultural assets is suddenly valueless. Their knowledge is worthless, their skills are useless, their concepts are misplaced. The young child enters a foreign domain where 'he is expected, and his parents as well, to drop his social identity, his way of life and its symbolic representation, a t the school gate' (Bernstein 1971,138).What has become evident over the years in the Northern Territory is that students do not usually choose to go along with this expectation. They continue to view their own identity as being primarily located in the home world, and the secondary socialisation of the school does not really challenge the primary socialisation of the home and the family. Therefore the values internalised in the first phases of social life are generally likely to hold. What does not take hold in this situation is the value system of the school, the necessary skills or the content that should be learned in the school. Therefore, both approaches, an explicit assimilationist one and a half-hearted bilingualhicultural approach, have the same consequence. They provide a weak and partial opportunity to learn only a little from either the Aboriginal or nonAboriginal domains. This is not an adequate educational service. The road to Walungurru that introduced this essay joins two very different parts of the same world. In this world, some cultural values are shared while others are the property of particular groups in the society. Government policies in general and schools in particular are caught between the two often conflicting goals of cultural autonomy and economic equality. The former goal is based on special principles of self-determination while the latter is based on general citizenship principles of equality, especially of education, training and employment. The two dimensions can contradict one another, and pull in opposite directions. While the goals will seemingly always be in tension with each other, Aboriginal people are finding ways in which these tensions can be resolved. Many Aboriginal people have achieved what they personally regard as a successful balance in their own working and personal lives, a sort of operational biculturalism.

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The outstation movement is one example of an originally autonomous Aboriginal strategy that fulfils both a cultural and economic rationale. 'Two way schooling', if it can resolve where it stands on this issue, could become an approach to education that reconciles the apparent conflict between being Aboriginal and being equal.

NOTES 1. The ethnographic description offered here is based on an interpretation of the work of Myers (1986). It is interpretative in the sense that he did not address these issues directly, but his phenomenological approach allows such reinterpretation. His work is also filtered through my own experiences with Pintupi people and their Western Desert neighbours from 1979 to the present. 2. Myers argues that such an emphasis was necessary in order to maintain a polity, a coherent group, in an egalitarian society where dominance needed to appear muted. Such dominance includes the dominance of men over women and elders over juniors. 3. walytja n. relation; same place; personal possessions; family, tamed animals, v. walytjarringu, became a relation, possession etc; see yanyu, malpa, tjantu, wanmi, tjami, yalumunpa; syn. ngulytju wampali n. stranger; recent arrival; one who arrives and is not related to anyone in a community; one who may be related but arrives from another community for the first time; recently initiated man; see maliki (Hansen and Hansen in press).

4. matupurra n. essential; personal property; integral part; something that is very necessary; should not be separated from the main part eg the wheel of a car (Hansen and Hansen in press).

5. Note that the word for family, walytja, is also the word for personal possession. 6. Cf Hansen and Hansen (in press): kanyinu (la) v. kept; had; cared for; copulated with; looked after; to sight a rifle; had as spouse; lit. heldlkept'; used as euphemism for sexual intercourse. 7. Cf Williams (1983, 243): '[The meaning given to] privacy, in its positive senses is a record of the legitimation of a bourgeois view of life; the ultimate generalised privilege of seclusion and protection from others (the public)'. 8. If we view the curriculum through this theoretical lens we see it operating as a celebration and reinforcement of public, male culture. It is a particularly exclusive notion of public culture, built upon patriarchal, male views of the world and of relevant knowledge; it relegates women to the domestic domain and out of public life. Instead

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of being neutral, knowledge is power and men use knowledge to strengthen their power over women. 9. Patrol Officer E.C. Evans, in his Patrol Report of 19 August 1957, wrote that the reserve had been declared so that 'contact between these people and Europeans can be controlled and supervised. An inordinate disturbance of their present way of living and the introduction of diseases presently foreign to them could have disastrous results' (quoted in Nathan and Japanangka 1983, 77). 10. Long (1989,35) records 129 deaths between 1962 and 1966, mainly from malnutrition. 11. In 1989there were twenty-one bilingual programs, including three Catholic and one independent program. Seven Northern Territory schools operate bilingual programs in Western Desert languages, of which there are some 3-4,000 speakers in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. 12. I base this on ten years of irregular observation of five Central Australian communities, as well as extended field visits in two communities. 13. For some students starting school at Docker River, this was the first time they had been up steps, off the ground.

CHAPTER

8i

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The young man at Papunya had just come back from town. Tomorrow, or someday soon after, he would go west to Walungurru for the football and to see his family, Meanwhile, he was 'showing off', walking down the dusty road in his new jeans, running shoes and T-shirt, playing Warumpi band songs at full volume on his cassette player. Everyone sitting outside their houses watched and listened and one child started to dance and sing along as the 'Kintore song' belted out: Ya~angutjuta kakarrara nyinapayi Tjuuratja tjikira nganarna pikarripayi Nganarna kakarrara wiyarrinyi Nganarna watjilarrinyi A lot of people always stay in the east After drinking grog we start fighting In the east we are becoming nothing We are yearning for our own country Arralaka wilurarra Kintorelakutu Tjamuku ngurranka palya nyinantjaku Arralaka wilurarra Kintorelakutu Tjamuku ngurranka palya nyinantjaku We must go west towards Kintore! We'll be better in our grandfather's country We must go west towards Kintore! We'll be better in our grandfather's country Yanangu tjuta! Yanangu tjuta! Irrirtitja nyinapayi ngurra panya Waiungurrunya Kuwarrilatju nyinanyilpi Kuwarrilatju nyinanyilpi Tjamuku ngurranka ngurra panya Kintorela Mobs of people! Mobs of people! The olden time ones always lived at Kintore. Finally now we are sitting! Finally now we are sitting! At our grandfather's camp in the same home at Kintore. Arralaka! Wilurarra Kintorelakutu. We must go! West towards Kintore!

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It has been said that Aboriginal cultures are some of the very few in which popular songs are about places, rather than sweethearts (Myers 1979, 344). Pintupi love songs have always been about a network of places scattered through the Gibson Desert. For this young man's grandfathers' generation such songs formed a corpus of narratives about these places, the mythological events that occurred there and the Dreaming ancestors who caused these events to happen. The songs, like the ancestors, are said to 'travel' from place to place (Moyle 1979, 10). For the young man's generation, the sandhill country of the Gibson Desert has been, until recently, only the stuff of story and song. Since 1982 and the establishment of the township usually known as Kintore at the site known as Walungurru, the songs have become tied to known places. Since that time, too, the songs of place have come to be composed on guitars and sung to a different sort of tune. Although the tune and the instrument change, the ideas remain much the same. An effective bicultural education program strives for this sort of relatively painless adaptation to rapid social change. However, any change, and especially educational change, can cause internal and externaltension in small communities such as Walungurru. The Pitupi no longer live in scattered networks of shifting domestic groups but mainly in larger centralised settlements. The work of maintaining such artificial communities is rarely recognised in policies that treat 'community consultation' as automatic and unproblematic. Instead, these communities regularly explode either inwards or outwards with the pressure that is constantly exerted, either from within or without, as they have no particular reason for being a social entity in their own terms. There are ways in which songs provide illustrations of some of the stresses of these new communities. When Charles Perkins, at that time Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, visited Kintore in September 1987, the Warumpi band played in his honour one evening on the veranda of the school. The electric lights and, of course, the music rapidly drew a large crowd. They played the song above, a crowd favourite for this new town. They also played a song about Papunya (also called Warumpi), written to placate the feelings of members of their hometown crowd who had become jealous of the Kintore song. Away from the school, under a single street light, some women were 'painted-up' as they practised for an inma, a traditional dance, for the guest of honour. They were aware that the rock and roll took precedence over their offering. The move back to Pintupi land has been viewed by the yawngu as a move to reclaim and recover a highly prized possession - their cultural autonomy. It is this cultural autonomy, this separateness from both walgpala society and other yanongu that has motivated the move west. In their own country they are able

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more readily to define their own domain, an element of which is the meaning and place of Pintupi culture in the curriculum. Although there are always the stresses illustrated in the story above about the songs, and although the idea of a community is more of an elusive ideal than an existent reality, the Pintupi are now in Pintupi country. They are searching for ways in which the curriculum of their school can be, like the songs, part of the place where they live.

DEFINING THE YAMANGU DOMAIN The significance of the term yanangu was introduced in Chapter 1, where it was seen to be a central concern for the painting and for the educational ideas that formed the conceptual basis of the curriculum work being carried out in the school. It will be recalled that the Pintupi regard the yawngu domain as the essence of any education process. The term condenses the force of concepts such as social maturity, identity, physical reality, personhood and the power of cultural identification. In 1987 the ya¥no,ngteachers at Waungurru, as part of the curriculum development workshop process, drew up two contrasting lists, showing the major contents of the two domains: yan0,ngu and walywala. These lists were broad and

Plate 9: Papunya School during the Assimilation era (W Hilliard)

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Plate 10: Pintupi children at Kungkayunti outstation 'school', 1979

Plate 11: Presentation of curriculum to Charles Perkins at W4ungun-u School, 1987

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inclusive and not initially focused on the school, at least in an explicit sense. They were designed to demonstrate some of the main things and ideas that were regarded as being important to y a v n g u , on the one hand, and to walypala on the other. Some of the things and ideas that y a w n g u were said to regard as significant and which they 'worry for' included the list in Table 2 (not in a specific order). Tbbk 2 ITEMS OF SIGNIFICANCE IN THE YAWNGU DOMAIN

ngurra waarrkaku nintirrinytjaku mayi mani kulintjaku walytja wijinyi yankupayi ngankari pikarrinyi wankanytjaku tjiptu pira kapi nintintjaku puutjingka tuiku kanyintjaku palypirrpa tjaatji waaja tjurratja mingkulpa mutakayi

place, camp, country, land work to learn, become knowledgeable plant food money to hear, to listen, to think family, relations, one's own to go out bush for food medicine man fighting to talk sun, days of the week moon, month to learn where water can be found in the bush (all Aboriginal business) things from the Dreaming (songs, etc) to have, hold and look after cards church house sweet bush plants, wine bush tobacco cars

Some people may be surprised or even disturbed by some of the items selected as being of importance to y a w n g u . These readers have an overly romantic view of Pintupi culture as pure, unadulterated and strictly 'traditional' and feel that items of significance for the yanangu should be as culturally different from

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mainstream Australian life as is humanly possible. Items on the list such as money, cars, houses, cards, work and church have importance for many Aboriginal people (as they have for most Australians). What is interesting in this case is that they have been absorbed and incorporated into the dynamics of the yanangu cultural domain. The school, it seems, has not. The reasons for this difference reach to the heart of any understanding of culture. Previous chapters have argued against a totalising and static view of culture. If culture is seen as an active process, through which symbols and meanings are constructed, shaped and shared, items such as work, cars and houses can become integrated with Aboriginal culture, as they become integrated with Aboriginal daily life. The set of meanings shared by a group is an important element of the culture of the society, and it is a dynamic set of meanings. Aboriginal societies have successfully absorbed many elements that are recognisably non-Aboriginal in origin. In the process of absorption and incorporation, they have been able to redefine the elements in their own cultural terms. lb rework such elements is to have and hold power over them; to 'reinvent' them (Michaels 1986). A brief look at how some of these items are now included in Pintupi culture indicates the flexibility of cultural tradition when conditions of domination are minimised. Money is now widely used as part of ceremonial gifts, as a way of honouring kinship obligations, as well as a source of life support. Cars are owned and used according to obligations to kin and country, as well as, for example, to drive the children to school. Houses are often spatially redefined according to Aboriginal cultural values to be in keeping with ideas of a public lifestyle. Card games serve to distribute money in an egalitarian society so that no one is rich for very long. The language of work is now used to describe ritual roles (owners, managers, workers, business, etc) as well as being important as a means of escape from welfare dependency. Aboriginal Christianity is continually developing creative innovations into introduced knowledge and practice. Each of these introduced elements was once foreign, but has been naturalised and Aboriginalised. Aboriginal people have gained the power over them necessary to absorb and reform them. This has not been the case with the school, and hence the school is not in the list of items of significance. Until Aboriginal people have enough power in the school, and enough presence in the curriculum, to reform the school as part of their domain, schools may always be foreign, un-Aboriginal and alienating.

DEFINING THE WALYPALA DOMAIN The list in "fable 3 was arrived at through group brainstorming. As can be seen from some of the suggestions, this was a relatively light-hearted exercise, but it

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does serve to indicate some of the yagangu perceptions of what is significant to the members of the dominant culture, while also providing some indication of the non-Aboriginal lifestyle in the centre.

To,â‚ 3 ITEMS

school time money education birthdays cleanliness church telephone family travelling

OF SIGNIFICANCE FOR WAIYPALA meetings houses budgets bank parties washing machines rent alcohol friends travel allowance

holidays shopping clothes insurance mining air conditioners power cigarettes sunburn aeroplanes

A comparison of the nature of the items selected in the two lists indicates that yawingu tend to perceive Western culture to be relatively intellectually and socially impoverished as well as overly materialistic and technologically inclined. While there is an undeniable element of good-natured ethnocentrism in the list, there is little indication that yanangu believe that Western culture and society are unambiguously worthy of imitation. Certainly, the role of the school as Western cultural transmission agent seems to go largely unappreciated. It is important to note that some of the items, such as money, family and church, appear as concerns in both domains. These overlaps, as well as the apparently non-Aboriginal items of significance in the yagangu domain, should caution us against being too narrow in our interpretation of contemporary Aboriginal culture. Groups such as the Pintupi are often labelled as 'opposite to contemporary', when they are obviously engaged and enmeshed in modern Australian society. These groups also indicate an Aboriginal awareness that biculturalism does not mean having two distinct social or cultural domains that do not overlap. 'They are not separate paddocks,' declared Murphy Roberts, an Aboriginal teacher from the nearby Papunya school, and it is the task of the school to ensure they are complementary, rather than competitive or contradictory.

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ITEMS OF SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE CURRICULUM After devising the two lists, the yan0,ngu teachers selected the five most significant items from the yap-~ngudomain considered essential for worthwhile ('proper') education. The aim was to select five yano,ngu things or ideas that were regarded as being particularly significant to the development of the whole yawngu person in the context of the school curriculum. It was decided in discussion that these five key ideas of the yanangu curriculum should be written on a large drawing of a hand that was placed on the wall of the meeting room. This particular visual metaphor was selected for several reasons, mostly to do with the semantic connection between the term yap-~nguand the human body (see Chapter 1).The metaphor turned out to be a rich and productive one, as lengthy talks brought out a number of ways in which a hand symbolised the function and ethos of a school. The hand depicted people's thoughts about the preferred school role in holding, sharing, giving strength, lifting up, looking after, joining together, friendship, communication and cooperation.

If it is possible to choose one Pintupi word that connotes this cluster of meaning, it would be kanyininpa. In the previous chapter we saw this word to be an essential ordering principle that shapes the flow of daily Pintupi life. The concept acts as a mediating force between gender groups and between generations. It justifies dominance and authority by translating it into nurturance and caring. Myers (1986, 212) analyses the word in metaphoric terms: The metaphor of 'holding' (kanyininpa), as the Pintupi invoke it, is rooted in a powerful experience: it derives from a linguistic expression describing how a small child is held in one's arm against the breast (kanyirnuyampungka). The image of security, protection and nourishment is immediate. Extension of this usage characterises a wide range of relationships as variants of this mixture of authority and succor. Most fully the concept designates a central core of senior persons around whom juniors aggregate and by whom they are 'held'.

This sense of the term is, to an outside observer, characteristic of the mode of teaching practice most favoured by yap-Lngu teachers, especially in outstation schools in which the teacher is working with the younger members of her or his close kin (one reason why such schools are often socially delightful if physically dreadful to teach at). The authority yano,Â¥nghave in such schools seems to derive more from kinship, age and the responsibility they have adopted for 'holding looking after and growing up' children, than any authority that might derive from a formal teaching qualification. This is not to argue that the skills and external

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recognition and legitimation to be gained from such qualifications are not significant, desirable or necessary. They plainly are. It is, however, to argue that the internal qualifications of social connection rather than the professional qualifications of academic connections are what counts in the first instance. The core items of significance chosen by yan0,ngu teachers were:

ngurra walytja tdku kuLintjaku nintirrinytjaku

camp, home, place, land, country kin, countrymen, one's own, belonging to songs, ceremonies, objects from the Dreaming to hear, to listen, to think to understand, to become knowledgeable

From the preceding discussion, it should be evident that it would be possible to discuss the meanings of these words at great length on a number of levels. A oneline definition is necessarily inadequate and clumsy, but still indicates the potential richness ofthese concepts for the education of the whole person. They are words that unlock a world of meaning on Pintupi ideas about the person, the culture and the total education process. One of the yanangu teachers used the terms 'identity' and 'recognition' (in English) to define how the concepts fitted together for her. Like the fingers of a hand, the concepts are interrelated and together structure the meaning of the Pintupi world for the individual person. Talking about the meaning of one word flowed into talking about the meaning of another as all the concepts are integrated coherently, in the identity of the person. Each concept acts as a code for learning and understanding the other, and for learning and understanding oneself. Pintupi education, in the lifelong, formal and informal sense, is based on a growing understanding of, and authority in, these concepts. The education of a Pintupi person is invalid (is not an education) if it does not support the development of competence, knowledge and understanding in these five areas. Such an education will be unsuccessful in contemporary social and cultural terms, failing to contribute to the development of a person who can act competently in the complexities of a bicultural lifestyle undergoing rapid social change. Perhaps the school can only support the initial phases of such an education, but it can make sure that it never denies the validity or weakens the foundations of Pintupi education. This responsibility can be met by ensuring that the total curriculum of the school is based on respect for the dignity and growth of the human person, demonstrated by a respect for these five key components of yan0,ngu thought. A school that denies the significance and validity of the yawngu domain denies the individual, for ignoring the personally significant will

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always lead to alienation, as it is described in educational literature, or kupta, shame, in Pintupi thought.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE LOCAL CURRICULUM The significance of the five core words also lies in their potential for providing an organising framework within which to plan curriculum content and learninglteaching processes. Three of the terms (ngurra, walytja, tulw) are obviously rich sources of content, while the other two (ku;intjaku and nintirrinytjaku) indicate appropriate teachingtlearning strategies and orientations towards the sources of knowledge. The first three terms are observable things, the other two are ways of knowing and understanding, reflecting a division into content versus process. In contrast, the five key items from the walypala domain that were regarded as essential for schooling are characterised by their orientation towards process and skills rather than content. These were 'reading, writing, listening,

Plate 12: Monica Nangala Robinson (left) and Sarah Napangati Bruno discussing the planning of lesson activities in a bicultural curriculum, Walungurru, 1987

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speaking, number': terms which are virtually 'culture-neutral'. The significance and position of the walypala domain is still being debated in the school and community. At the time following the curiculum development workshops, the overall strategy for the school curriculum seemed clear and promising. The relationship between the yapxngu and the walypala domains was clearly one based on yanangu values as the central and essential focus of the curriculum. This was the knowledge, the value, the culture that had been denied when the people were estranged from Pintupi country in the east. This was the time when, as the Warumpi band song of 1983 puts it: Nganarna kakarrara wiyarrinyi Nganarna watjilarrinyi (In the east we are becoming nothing We are yearning for our own country) Moving back to Pintupi places was a way of recovering the Pintupi sense of self, both individually and collectively. Bringing Pintupi knowledge into the curriculum as a central element was necessary to support this community project and the individual sense of self. By starting from what the person is in the Pintupi world view, the long process of developing a theoretically grounded curriculum that aims to educate the whole person had begun. The responsibility and authority for this long process is still in the hands of the yan0,ngu teachers. Walungurru is their ngurra; the school is their walytja. It is their story to tell about the development of the yanangu side of the curriculum.

BROADER CURRICULUM IMPLICATIONS The next step in the curriculum development exercise was to translate these ideas into school practice; not detracting from, but supporting, such essential school tasks as developing literacy and numeracy skills and developing them in the context of the Northern Territory core curriculum. As part of the curriculum development workshops a plan for Pintupi Action Research was initiated and developed in cooperation with the yanangu teachers. At the time, they used this plan in the following sequence for both strategy development and curriculum content planning: wangkantjaku palyantjaku nyakantjaku nintintjaku kutjupa wangkantjaku

talking, planning doing looking, observing understanding, deciding more talk, revising the plan

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The most complex task for the yaFngu teachers has been to negotiate with their walgpala colleagues about the content of this side of the curriculum. At times, shared planning sessions that I observed managed to balance the content and process of the curriculum in these two dimensions. However, the always existent priority was to ensure that learning, even in the walypala domain, did not conflict or clash with the yanangu rationale for the total curriculum. At times yawngu teachers considered that the walypala domain should have been more developed than the staff had allowed it to become. At other times, the walgpala staff considered their own role to be superseded by the emphasis on a yanangu curriculum. The balance between external and internal knowledge and skills often slips in the acute tensions that emerge in remote schools. These issues, and the story of detailed curriculum change at Walungurru, are local issues and local stories. We are concerned here with the broader implications of curriculum change. An appropriate education service necessarily includes curriculum designed to decrease the alienating distance between the culture of the community and the school. Marsh (1986) characterises one mode of curriculum development as being based on processes of 'centralised, efficiency-oriented curriculum decisionmaking'. In this curriculum development and delivery approach, the emphasis is on the imposition of selected knowledge, skills and values from outside the cultural framework of the school community. Education is trucked in on a Tbyota or beamed in via satellite. This approach, while relatively administratively simple, fails to recognise the cultural dimensions of any learning process. While the range and quality of learning experience is potentially the same for all humans, socialisation selects, elaborates and emphasises certain key aspects from within this range; ideas about what things should be learned and the best way to learn them are subject to cultural interpretation and political decisions. Particular concepts, particular ways of doing things, become part of a cultural tradition providing models of and for behaviour. The Pintupi cultural tradition is different from the Yolngu one, for example, in the same way that the working-class cultural tradition is different from the middle-class one. Our schools, and our government education agencies, are historically embedded in a Western middle-class cultural tradition, emphasising particular concepts and ways of doing things, resulting in the alienation of students from different cultures or classes. Hence there is a need for local curriculum decision-making, enabling the selection, elaboration and interpretation of valued knowledge from the range provided by the local cultural tradition as well as from the external cultural

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tradition. The yanangu teachers argue that they can 'hold and look after' their family and their students in keeping with the reclamation of Pintupi values so ignored in the settlement era. In 1988 they argued further that, having taken hold of the curriculum, they should continue to look after it (witira kanyintjaku). This led to the change of the two-handed, 'two-way' curriculum to a model that was held by two black hands (Hulcombe 1988, 3).l They argued then that the nonyapmgu hand did not hold the yagangu in the same way - it could not. They said that it did not maintain strength, that it tore things apart rather than held and looked after them. This is the begining of a development of a specifically y a T n g u form of Aboriginality-as-resistance. Nobody can say where it will lead, or what people will choose to do. The negative side of such resurgent cultural politics is clear at the local level in the form of extreme and seemingly intractable staff antagonisms. There is the further dimension of a loss to energetic production of a large section of the staff. Most acutely, there is a loss of clarity in the provision of the skills and knowledge required for individual learning beyond the narrow confines of the local community and the specific culture. There are direct social benefits in local bicultural curriculum development when these questions are resolved. By taking learning out of the restricted situation of the school, other points of human access, meaning and significance open up (Inglis 1975, 44). A bicultural curriculum recognises the legitimate authorities of Aboriginal life, giving parents and grandparents power and intellectually satisfying work; it stimulates purposeful and functional literacy and, in working from the base of the known to explore the unknown, offers the key to useful and empowering learning. Such learning is not defined as passive consumption of an externally manufactured product, but involves the active development of an internally dynamic process. As a result, the sources of coping with rapid change grow from within the society, rather than being legislated from without. A bicultural curriculum, developed with community participation and involvement, is a necessary component of any educational strategy for remote Aboriginal schools. At Walungurru the responsibility and authority for this step is in the hands of the y a n 0 . w teachers. Importantly, they have received support and recognition from their walypala colleagues, the other sectors of the community, outside teacher education bodies and departmental officials. This process has not been without strain, tension and political effort. In the time since the workshop series took place, they have developed, applied and adapted their

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curriculum approach to suit their perceptions of the changing needs of the school. They are sharing their ideas with other Aboriginal teachers, and have explicitly encouraged the wider dissemination of these ideas. I would argue that the principles and benefits of local curriculum development, centred on content of local significance, and engaged with issues of community concern, are the same for many communities and their schools, in places that are truly remote from Walungurru. A community-based (rather than simply school-based) inclusive curriculum is fundamental to any education that aims to empower minority groups in the society. The Yagangu teachers have much to teach all of us about ways to think about holding and looking after the young people in any of our schools.

NOTE

1. This brief discussion is based on reports and a draft publication from Jeff Hulcombe, the RATE (Remote Area Teacher Education)tutor at the time, a video taken by FR Myers, and especially discussions in Canberra with some of the key yan0,ngu teachers involved.

CULTURAL AUTONOMY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

CHAPTER

9

AUTONOMY AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY

A TWENTY-FIRSTBIRTHDAY In the giddy rush of Australian bicentenary birthday celebrations, one anniversary that took place in 1988 passed virtually without comment. The twenty-first birthday of full Aboriginal membership in the Commonwealth of Australia took place in that year. On 27 May 1967 a record 91.77 per cent of Australian citizens voted to recognise Aboriginal Australians in the census, and to give the Commonwealth the power to legislate on their behalf (Bennett 1985). This date is generally used to mark the advent of the contemporary era of Aboriginal political history. For non-Aboriginal Australians, it was the beginning of a process whereby the nation recognised and moved to correct a troubling anomaly. The constitutional aspect of this anomaly excluded Aboriginal Australians from special Commonwealth legislation, and from being counted as people. The historical origin of this lack of recognition is that Australia is a country built on top of another country, without legal concern for the rights of those whose land it was. A quarter of a century ago we began the difficult process, through our Commonwealth Government, of giving substance to the belated recognition of Aboriginal rights. A twenty-first birthday in Australia retains the cultural significance that most regulations have attempted to shift to the eighteenth birthday. The party, the cake, the keys, all symbolise the social acceptance of individual autonomy and adulthood. They ceremonially mark the transition to a recognised mature, selfdetermining role in the broader society. Many of the events in the last twenty-one years of Aboriginal political history can be seen as positive signs of growth towards such a recognition of Aboriginal autonomy by the dominant society. While many Aboriginal people see the struggle to maintain an unyielded sovereignty as perpetual and ongoing, social acceptance of the legitimacy of their claims has been, at best, gradual and uneven. It is useful to survey briefly some key events in this growth towards a recognised autonomy and explore how the writing of Aboriginal Australian history and the way it is taught in schools reflect this growth.

PERSONAL AUTONOMY IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETY Personal and social autonomy is highly valued in 'traditional' Aboriginal society, as it exists today, and as it can be reconstructed from the records of the past. For

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example, Myers has analysed autonomy in the form of a reluctance to permit others to impose their authority over oneself, as one of the key concepts which underpin the egalitarian nature of Pintupi social life (Myers 1986, 22). A respect for personal autonomy characterises Pintupi social interaction, child rearing practices, religious life, land use and traditional economy. In order to function competently in Pintupi social life, it is essential to learn to accept and to live with the way other people are. No Pintupi individual has the right to tell another how to mind his or her own business. Anthropological reports from other parts of Australia1 would tend to confirm that a stress on the value of autonomy in social relations is widespread, for instance in gender relations (see Bell 1983),while historical reports indicate that a loss of personal, economic and political autonomy has been a major characteristic of the colonial process. In the last twenty-five years we have seen numerous attempts to retrieve, recover or protect this Aboriginal sense of autonomy, this declared right to be 'bosses for ourselves' (Gale 1983). Efforts have been made in every domain in which Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies have interacted - in politics, in law, in education, in art, in literature and in the writing of history. This striving for autonomy sometimes reaches hard against limits set by the dominant society, or the capacity of the state or the nation to recognise and understand Aboriginal actions. In such cases, restriction takes place and there is a contraction on the expression of autonomy. At other times, Aboriginal quests for autonomy are constrained by the internal checks and balances within the Aboriginal society itself and the limitations become self-imposed. Nevertheless, a pattern has emerged in the last decades that bears examination for its effect on the curriculum.

AUTONOMY THROUGH LAND RIGHTS In recent Aboriginal political history, there is a consistent pattern in key events. In most parts of Australia, Aboriginal politics has started to move away from the tight legislative and social controls that have shackled Aboriginal self-determination and autonomy during the assimilation era. The major attempts have been to move from welfare dependency to self-management, from control to consultation, from institutionalisation to independence, from colonisation to a sense of sovereignty. Every move has required recognition, however grudgingly and unevenly given, by the institutions of the dominant society. Every move has required both Aboriginal action and state acceptance to substantiate a claim. Every successful move has also demonstrated that Aboriginal people recognise the reality in which they live - the constraints on their autonomy. The pattern is there, despite the

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confusion, the contradictions, the defeats and the mistakes. The recent history of the land rights movement can be used to illustrate the pattern in operation. In 1966, the year before the referendum, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill station walked away from their atrocious labour conditions and went on strike. From their position of strength in their own country, they petitioned the GovernorGeneral for transfer of part of the Wave Hill lease. One of their leaders, Vincent Lingiari, addressed his fellow Australians, saying: 'We address you as fellow citizens, but our citizenship has not brought us the opportunity to lead a decent life.. . . For 85 years our people have accepted these conditions and worse, but on August 22nd 1966, the Gurindji tribe decided to cease to live like dogs' (quoted in Rowley 1971, 341). For the Gurindji, a life of restrictive dependency and exploitation is the life of a dog. They demanded the autonomy that recognition of their rights could bring. They appealed to common citizenship, and the rights of equality and social justice that should flow from it. What is significant is that what began as a labour strike evolved into a land claim, much to the puzzlement of onlookers such as Frank Hardy. As Stuart Macintyre has noted: It was the Gurindji who stressed their larger aspirations to autonomy and the Gurindji who made the decision to move to Wattie Creek.. . . While the immediate and ostensible issue was wages, the walk off from the stations heralded an attempt to construct an independent way of life (Macintyre 1985, 127). The Gurindji campaign, beginning as a move for grounded local autonomy, expanded into a national campaign for Aboriginal land rights and the recognition of prior ownership. A national voluntary body, the Federal Council of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), spearheaded this campaign, establishing a national network of political association. Eventually, Aboriginal people took over the management of this body, asserting their right to direct organisations acting on their behalf (Rowley 1985, 24). Inevitably, the rights underpinning Aboriginal law come to be discussed in the courts of European law. One significant case was that of Milirrpum (Milirrpum and others vs Nabaico and the Commonwealth of Australia) in which Yolngu people of Arnhem Land brought an action to prevent mining on their land. Where pastoralism had stirred the Gurindji to declare their rights, mining stirred the Yolngu to make similar claims. In 1963 the Yolngu people of Yirrkala had sent a petition to the House of Representatives calling on the Commonwealth Government to refuse mining leases to Nabalco. Their petition, in their own language and placed on a bark painting, was an appeal for recognition, expressing

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the fear that 'our needs and interests will be ignored as they have been ignored in the past'. For the first time, the government, through a select committee, was put in a position where it had to listen to Aboriginal people, in their country and in their language, and using their own cultural practices to express the message. The select committee, however, failed to prevent mining and Justice Blackburn in the Gove case ruled that the Aboriginal people had no doctrine of property that could be recognised in law. The chairman of the Yirrkala council said in response to the court's decision: 'We cannot be satisfied with anything less than ownership of the land. We have the right to say to anybody not to come to our country. The law must be changed' (quoted in Macintyre 1985, 129). The assertion of autonomous rights over land at Yirrkala parallels the Wave Hill action in significant ways. Both groups were stimulated by the appropriation of their land by foreign capital (Lord Vestey's and Nabalco). Both groups asserted their sovereign rights over their land, and appealed to Commonwealth law to support their claims. Both groups widened their specific appeals against pastoral and mining interests to embrace a claim for recognition of full title to land. Both groups used the framework of the legal and political system, and their membership of the Commonwealth, to appeal for recognition of their autonomous status. They appealed to Australia. In 1972 Aboriginal Australians advanced the campaign further by establishing the Tent Embassy at Parliament House in Canberra. Unlike Wave Hill and Yirrkala, this was not a local dispute over a particular tract of land, but a generalised claim for recognition of sovereign status. The strategy was powerful: the symbol of the tent on the lawns, evoking the image of poverty in the midst of wealth; the flag and the embassy symbolising national identity and sovereignty. This action was outside the framework of the discipline of law, challenging the law to change<Eventually the government changed, and the laws also, with the introduction of limited land rights legislation in the Northern Territory. The Aboriginal struggle for autonomy in the land has been difficult and painful, for Aborigines, legislators and for the nation as a whole. It has been matched by a struggle for autonomy in numerous other domains. In the case of traditionally-oriented people in remote communities they have acted to maintain and preserve the autonomy of their religious life, their language use, their land use, the education of their children, and the social cohesion of their communities. For Aboriginal people in country towns and in the city it has been a continuous

AUTONOMY AND ABORIGINAL HISTORY

Plate 13: The Yirrkala Bark Petition

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effort to grasp social, cultural and economic autonomy in the face of racism, ignorance and abuse. It is frequently expressed as an effort to recover ownership of any of the relics of the past. Land rights has provided the flag for all these efforts.

RECOGNISING AUTONOMY IN HLSTORY Australian history, as a discipline, follows the historical pattern hits representation of Aboriginal Australian history. Neglect and exclusion are followed by partial recognition and control, a position from which Aboriginal people strive for an autonomous role. Stanner, writing in 1969, surveyed the position that Aboriginal people held in Australian history, claiming that Aboriginal history was the 'codicil to the Australian story', an afterthought to the already prepared testament. He labelled their neglect and exclusion as the 'Great Australian Silence', pointing out that: Inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant from the landscape (Stanner 1969, 26). Written out of the constitution, and written out of history, Aboriginal people were allowed to be ignored in a period during which the dominance of European interest was 'total, unquestioned and inexpressiblyself-centred' (Stanner 1969, 12). When Aborigines were mentioned in the history curriculum of schools, it was not to give them a role of significance or the characteristics of autonomous actors, shaping their own lives through their actions. They were, as Harrison describes, more often 'regarded as part of the natural environment - like koalas, gum trees or Ayer's Rock - their characteristics being described rather than their actions being narrated' (Harrison 1978, 12). It must be remembered, however, that the official history is not the only history. Another history was being told by generation after generation of Aboriginal people, being passed on to fill the gaps in, and to reject, the official record. It is another history so different that it seems to be that of 'another country' (Rowley 1979, iii). Aboriginal oral history is held by Aboriginal people themselves as a central element in their understanding of what it means to be Aboriginal in this country. Stories from grandmothers and grandfathers give meaning to people's lives through their creation of a 'community of memory'. Oral history tellers use these stories to strengthen their sense of themselves as people with a past to be remembered, while so many official actions have been based on a view of them as less than people, with a past to be abandoned and forgotten.

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Brushing against this oral history of the other Australia is a growing recognition by historians of the importance of the Aboriginal story as part of the story of Australia. It is no longer possible to be silent, to have a partial view, to ignore the reality. As a result, accepted facts have shifted and interpretations have changed. When we view our Australian history from an Aboriginal perspective, the whole picture changes dramatically. This process, in recent years, has become more than a tinkering with the details or an updating of the footnotes. The very framework upon which we construct Australian history has altered, and it is a recognition of autonomous Aboriginal action that has led to the greatest changes. From a young continent, we have become a continent where people celebrated the world's earliest religious practices. We have realised that Australia i s not so much a timeless land waiting for European agriculture before changing as an environment shaped and moulded by deliberate Aboriginal land management practices. We have learned that Aborigines were not simply hunters and gatherers wandering aimlessly in the food-quest but were active agents of their fate, dynamically organised in various polities of land-owning and land-using groups. We now realise that invasion was met with active and prolonged resistance. We know that the response to colonisation has often been resourceful, innovative and adaptable. While we know only a fragment of the stories that could be told we have learned enough to recognise that Australian history can only be accurately written with the acknowledgment of autonomous Aboriginal action. The Yirrkala chairman called on the laws to change, and they were changed. So, too, the framework of Australian history is changing, usually in response to Aboriginal moves to reclaim autonomy. We have seen the publication of numerous texts exploring the other side of the frontier. Stories once concealed in the family are now being told. Oral narratives are being transcribed, edited and published. A rich flow of materials is emerging and penetrating the de facto common Australian curriculum. The silences are over. At Wave Hill, Yirrkala and the Tent Embassy, calls for recognition evolved into actions in pursuit of a broader autonomy. Similarly, the claims for recognition of the Aboriginal role in history have widened t,o claims for the recognition and support of a separate, autonomous, distinctive Aboriginal history. One group of Aboriginal writers (Atkinson, Langton, Wanganeen and Williams) explicitly claim the rights of ownership to their past, and deny that a non-Aboriginal historian can write Aboriginal history. They claim that Aboriginal historians are writing history for Aboriginal people, for their families and children. They are tapping into the other history of the other country for their own cultural and political purposes. They argue that:

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Most of this country has been taken from our people in a little over 190 years of colonisation. In tandem with the theft of our land, has been a cultural repression denying us an identity in Australian history. We, as Aboriginal people, can begin to rectify the white misconceptions about our history by writing it ourselves. Colonisation was not a peaceful process, nor have we conceded defeat (Atkinson and others 1985, 38). Their arguments are echoed by others, and emerge in repeated controversies over Aboriginal identity and national identity in areas such as the rights of ownership of the past, the role of academics in constructing the past, the interpretation of archaeological evidence, the function of museums, the nature of historical discourse and the content of the school history curriculum.

AUTONOMY, LAND RIGHTS AND EDUCATION The early phases of the contemporary campaign for land rights indicate how the events of the time were based on a continuing and developing quest for autonomy. The pattern that emerges is one of a sequence that begins with social exclusion and neglect. Aboriginal actions stimulate public and government awareness and recognition. Using this initial and partial recognition of rights as a basis for further action, Aboriginal demands have focused on the need for a secure base for the autonomous development of the means whereby Aboriginal people can participate in the wider society on their own terms. This process has occurred, it should be emphasised, usually within the general framework of common citizenship, with full awareness of the rights, responsibilities and restrictions that this entails. Even where the politics of rhetoric rejects acceptance of this post-colonial reality, the reality of practice acts within the boundaries of the Australian nation-state. Similarly the writing of Aboriginal history has emerged from exclusion and neglect through public recognition to become the base from which an autonomous indigenous history can be written. In both cases, the process required the dominant society to recognise the survival of Aboriginal Australia. The constitution and the history books changed on the basis of such recognition. The place of Aboriginal history in the Australian history school curriculum has also changed in response to Aboriginal moves to reclaim and recover autonomy within the wider society.

AUTONOMY AND ABORIGINAL EDUCATION Calls for educational change have been coming from Aboriginal groups for a long time. At the 1938 'Historic Day of Mourning and Protest' Aboriginal conference in Sydney, JT Patten described education as the key to equality, and called for

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the recognition of their full citizenship rights, including, 'Our rights to a full Australian education for our children. We not wish to be herded like cattle, and treated as a special class.. . .This is not a matter of race, it is a matter of education and opportunity'. His comments were supported by other speakers, including Bill Ferguson who claimed that, 'If our young boys and girls were given proper education, they would be able to take their place with other Australians in the community'. Doug Nicholls asked, 'Put on reserves, with no proper education, how can Aborigines take their place as equal with whites?' The speakers situated their demands for inclusion in the nation within the general body of citizenship rights. At that time, Aborigines were seeking the dismantling of the legislation that kept them neglected and racially excluded. They saw education as the long-term solution and the rights of common citizenship as the main reason for change. In New South Wales, to which most of the speakers were referring, the reserve system was instituted and policy towards Aborigines first fully formulated in the Aborigines Protection Act (1909). Education for Aborigines at the time was regarded by authorities as an ambiguous good, with children sometimes being excluded from schools, sometimes accepted and sometimes forced to leave family to be resocialised in special institutions (Read 1982, 2). All Aborigines, however, were regarded as 'wards', under the 'guardianship' of the state, and the reserves provided places for surveillance, control and training. The reserves denied and restricted Aboriginal autonomy through tight legislative controls with an explicit pedagogical function (Morris 1985, 101). The curriculum of the schools on reserves was clear, if the capacity of their usually unqualified teachers was dubious. The seven-page syllabus of 1916 decreed that, 'the teacher will, as far as possible, direct the whole of the school work with the object of assisting the boys to become capable farm or station labourers, and the girls useful domestic servants' (NSW Department of Education 1916,3). Such bleak vocationalism was tempered by an encouragement of teachers to take advantage of 'these children's innate love of striking colours in order to train them to see similar but grander beauty in sky, landscape or seascape' (1916,3). By 1940the syllabus had grown to twenty pages. The goals had shifted 'towards the provision of those environmental conditions which will best promote the welfare and happiness of the pupils', but the expectations were the same: 'It is expected that most of the boys will become rural workers but most of the girls domestic workers' (NSW Department of Education 1940, 4). Interestingly, Australian studies were emphasised, from a local level to Australia as a part of the British Empire in geography and history. Aboriginal studies (or a version of it) was also part of the syllabus, through well-known stories about the Aborigines helping the early explorers.

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In some limited ways, the calls of Patten, Ferguson and Nicholls for education changes were being heard by 1940. The report of the New South Wales Public Service Board on Aborigines Protection released that year had, under its section on education and training, a declared policy of maintaining on the reserves, 'under close supervision, those aborigines not yet fitted to be assimilated into the general community' (NSW Parliament 1940, 17). Teachers, however, were to be qualified, and funding and management of education were to be placed in the hands of the Department of Public Instruction, rather than the Aborigines Protection Board? 'Proper education,' it was argued, 'was a vital consideration in the ultimate solution of the Aboriginal problem' (1940, 18). Assimilation came to be regarded as this ultimate solution. Assimilation emerged as the solution in the 1930s and 1940s before being adopted as policy at the Ministerial Council Meeting on Aboriginal Affairs in 1951(Pollard 1988,27).Its effect on the curriculum map of Aboriginal education was profound and has lasted into the present, either in residual form amongst teachers and policy-makers or as a symbol of opposition for Aboriginal political and educational activity. The effect on people's lives was more profound, as can be seen in a great number of oral histories of the period (eg Read 1984; Simon 1982; Bandler 1983). The policy of assimilation was a government policy, intervening in the private lives of individuals recognised by the state as 'different'. At the time, the Australian population was predominantly Anglo-Celtic. Expressed positively, it was seen as a way out of the moral dilemma created by policies that excluded some of the population on grounds of race and others on the grounds of ethnicity. It was seen as a way for these individuals (as individuals) to be given the opportunity to prove that they were as 'good as a white man', economically,socially and culturally when given the opportunity. Education was the central process; abandonment of cultural identity was regarded as the essential price. It is important to see the assimilation argument from the perspective of that time in the past, rather than from the values of the present. Australian society then was unambiguously British in orientation, economically growing and socially coherent. As one of the architects of the assimilation policy has noted, 'the working out of a relationship with the Aborigines in Australia took place while the Australian community was itself growing in size and complexity and being re-shaped' (Hasluck 1988, 5). Rates of academic underachievement, dissatisfaction with school, and school-leavingremain higher for Aborigines than those for any other identifiable group in the Australian population. Our schools are seen, particularly by Aboriginal parents, to be still failing Aboriginal students despite a decade of promises and

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the constant efforts of teachers, parents, education departments and funding agencies. The cultural distance between the home and the school is now commonly regarded as a major cause of these negative educational outcomes. Recognising cultural difference as a major factor in low educational outcomes for relatively powerless minority groups points to the need for a carefully thought-out curriculum change strategy at all levels of the school and the system. Policy-makers, educators and the Aboriginal community are generally agreed that the culture of the student cannot (and morally should not) be forced to change as part of the price for educational and broader social success. The failed years of misguided assimilationist policy and practice, and the cultural arrogance on which they were predicated, have been firmly and consistently rejected. It is necessary, therefore, for the culture of the school, rather than the student, to change. Changing the culture of the school means changing the curriculum of the school into a form that is inclusive in the way that it reflects, rather than rejects, the culture of the home. The development of an appropriate inclusive Aboriginal studies curriculum is a central element of present strategies aimed at reversing low educational achievement patterns, as recognised in numerous Aboriginal reference group statements, research reports and recent Commonwealth, State and Tbrritory education policy documents. Defining the meaning of 'appropriate' in terms of an Aboriginal studies curriculum for Aboriginal students, then putting it into practice, is a daunting task and one that is finally the responsibility of the teachers who are both wary and unready. One barrier to teacher confidence is the fact that there is no set and agreed body of opinion amongst Aboriginal Australians as to the rightful place of Aboriginal concerns in the school. Strategies that are viewed by some Aboriginal educational decision-makers as absolutely fundamental to improving school achievement (for example, bilingual education) are viewed in other places (or perhaps by other people in the same place) as holding students back from mainstream school achievement, thereby denying students access to valued powerful, externally derived knowledge. As a consequence, Aboriginal participation in the broader social, economic and political environment is perceived to be postponed and retarded. It is believed that students are not gaining adequate access to the language of power in Australian society, but are being diverted into 'holding yards' of lower level courses that can keep Aboriginal students interested and controlled. There are no clear lines to be drawn to separate those who differ in their opinions on such issues. Aboriginal people opposed to strategies such as bilingual education may be conservative, radical or politically apathetic; they may

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be remote, rural or urban; they may speak an Australian language or English as their first language. There is no clear Aboriginal community opinion on this issue, simply because there is no such thing as the Aboriginal community, despite the wishful thinking expressed in many policy documents. Aboriginal people, as an identifiable community, are made up of elements as diverse as any other section of the Australian population, and it is often only the voices of elite groups within that population that are heard on issues relating to the content of the curriculum. A second and related reason for the lack of simple definitions of an appropriate Aboriginal studies curriculum lies also in the fact of diversity. In order to represent Aboriginal culture in the curriculum, it is necessary to select the version of Aboriginal culture to be represented, There are a number of versions to choose from, with Aboriginal cultural diversity in Australia being widespread and persistent despite the often homogenising forces of non-Aboriginal culture and society. Although Aboriginality has been stressed as a common, unifying ideology in the 1980s, particularly by the NAEC, the reality of curriculum practice has tended towards a stress on the diverse and multiple. Wherever Aboriginal community groups have been involved in curriculum development tasks they have consistently emphasised their sole interest in the development of curriculum resources that focus on the local and the particular, whether the object of curriculum study is language, culture or history. While the examples of successful curriculum development on a general Australiawide basis are few and far between, there are hundreds of examples of local cultural learning programs, texts on the Aborigines of a particular area or attempts to include the study of the local language in the school. When community groups discuss Aboriginal studies, they are usually talking about such things as Wiradjuri studies, or yagungu studies. While this localised orientation flows from the personal identity support rationale of Aboriginal studies curriculum development, it sometimes slips into a particularised ethnocentrism that denies the place of either a generalised Aboriginal culture component, or any case study of an imported land. Diversity also affects the mechanics of curriculum change, with the Australian education 'system' being composed of a complex structure of unrelated and generally autonomous bodies with variations in educational policy, subject organisation, and the relative roles of schools and systems in curriculum development. These variations must be recognised as an integral part of the structure of Australian education in general. Nevertheless, there are agreements in fundamental objectives at the policy level, particularly since the development of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy in 1989, that are yet to be translated into coordinated and coherent strategies at the program development and delivery level.

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In the particular domain of Aboriginal education and Aboriginal studies at the time of writing, the States and Territories differed in their program approaches to such important areas as staffing in Aboriginal schools, the curriculum needs of Aboriginal students, the role of Aboriginal studies in mainstream curricula, the roles and responsibilities of the Aboriginal community and the resourcing of Aboriginal program areas. Some States and Territories are yet to develop their own formal policies in Aboriginal education, leaving Aboriginal concerns to be addressed in mainstream policies on the general purposes and practices of schools. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy, based as it is on a jointly signed Commonwealth-State agreement, has developed an agreed policy and program platform through which resource sharing and program cooperation can occur. Through this common approach, curriculum development in Aboriginal education should receive the resource injection and rationalisation that is needed to transform policy rhetoric into curriculum reality. Such new policy directions do offer the basis for unifying curriculum development strategies, easing the enormous resource load of catering to a diverse, widespread but relatively tiny population. Only if the issues of diversity are recognised and resolved can such directions be both efficient and effective.

CHANGING THE CURRICULUM MAP In the Australian curriculum map of a generation ago, Aborigines were not absent. They appeared, like figures on a souvenir teatowel, in the empty spaces around Ayers Rock, either poised with a spear or posed with a gunyah (Keeffe and Schmider 1988; Cope 1987). Their location was certain, as was their position relative to the concentrated non-Aboriginalpopulation huddled nervously around the blue-edged, bottom southeast corner. Occasionally Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures were seen together. As Susan Ryan (1986, 17)3has described the map of history: If Aborigines made an appearance it was as they sneaked up on Charles Sturt as he rowed peacefully down the Murray, or by keeping a faithful step behind Eyre as he staggered across the Nullarbor, A generation ago Aborigines were always Australian, always distant, always romantic, but always there. They were essential features of a curriculum landscape that could be drawn with the certainty of the old wooden template maps of Australia that were once so common in our classrooms (Borthwick and McRae 1987). Tbday, the Australian curriculum map is less confidently drawn. The teatowel map is now looked at askance, as the contemporary view regards the old certainties

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as somewhat embarrassing. lkachers today are concerned somehow to represent more accurately the varied dimensions of the Australian experience. lkachers know that the old map was a product of outmoded and abandoned concepfs of Australian identity. It was drawn from the certainty of dogmatic nationalism that was taken for granted - an uncritical and exclusive notion of Australian-nes1that produced a cumculum map full of empty spaces, arid facts, gross inaccuracies and concealed truths. While women were kept decently in the background, non-English speaking immigrants were ignored, the lives of workers neglected, and the countless generations of Australian thought and expe~enceheld by Aborigines were reduced to one seemingly endless corroboree. This curriculum is 'appropriate' for neither the nation we know we are, nor the one we imagine for our future (Castles and others 1988). Schools can, generally speaking, no longer reduce the teaching of history to the chronology of 'great feats performed by great men'. The actions of womenl of workers, of non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants and Aborigines are part of Australian history. Their rightful calls for cultural and curricular inclusion have caused a rethinking of the projections and perspectives inherent, and previously unchallenged, in the old curriculum map. The 1980s were a remarkable period for the reworking of cultural co~igurations in Australian education, particularly in history teaching. Curriculum scrutiny, especially in relation to the portrayal of women, has extended to details of content, l a m a g e and t e a c h i i methods. Students coming from backgrounds or orientations previously unrepresented in the curriculum now have opportunities to see themselves and their communities as a recognised part of Australia and the meaning of Australian-ness. Our concept of the past, and the ways in which students should be taught to interpret it, has changed precisely because our position in the present and the way we see this position have changed. Unfortunately, this optimism is moderated by the recognition that the development of a generally inclusive Australian curriculum during the 1980s has been more a wish than a reality. The decade saw the old maps torn up, but new ones are yet to be drawn and agreed upon. While teacher skills in the areas of detecting gender bias, ethnocentrism, stereotyping and racism in curricular materials have improved dramatically, the development of new curriculum materials, teaching methods and course options has been much slower. The perspective of women, non-English speaking or Aboriginal Australians is not yet taken for granted as either natural or legitimate. As an illustration, while most teachers are women and most students are girls, women's studies is not yet a compulsory or even valued part of any centrally determined secondary curriculum

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at the present time. Aboriginal studies, however, has become identified as a central part of an ideal, culturally inclusive Australian-centred curriculum: one of the ten agreed goals of all Australian schools. Schools have only rarely succeeded in developing a coherent, planned curriculum for their students that reflects an inclusive cultural perspective on contemporary and historical Australian society. Some t e a c h e ~ have written, taught and shared great units, but the bleak and honest view is that, during the 1 9 8 0 ~ ~ yet another generation of young people emerged from Australian schools who regarded those of a different racial or cultural background with hostility and contempt rather than respect and understanding. The curriculum is not the only source of messages about society for students, as education processes interact with shaping forces of home, work and class, but it is an important one. It is also an area in which teachers can and do work for change. This generation of students has generally been denied access to a curriculum that provides more than an inkling of the Aboriginal role in the historical and contemporary development of Australian society. One of the most significant reasons for this is that most students have travelled through school only brushing occasionally past any study that focuses on Australian content and the issues that influence Australian society today. Another reason lies in the way that Aboriginal history, society and culture are represented within the curriculum. The combined result is that the prejudice and ignorance that have historically characterised the Australian attitude to the Aboriginal population is reproduced through the generations. %ache= know this; they just aren't sure what to do about it. The interpretations of Aboriginal culture that have currency in Australia today are diverse, with differing and conflicting versions being channelled through Aboriginal political activity, anthropology, history, the media and the school. These discourses mix with a complex set of assumptions that are held faithfully, if often erroneously, by the community at large (ANOP 1985; Edmunds 1989). As a result there are a number of conflicting views about which version of Aboriginal culture is the appropriate one to be included in the school curriculum. The perspectives are blurry and unfiied. lkacher opinion about the relative value of Aboriginal culture as a are recognised, even celebrated component of the curriculum is mixed. l k a c h e ~ complicated people and schools are complicated places; neither are liable to change overnight. No matter what level of policy might invoke curriculum change, the teacher has the final say about what to include or what to emphasise in the classroom. He or she, in the autonomy provided by classroom walls, makes such decisions on the basis of complicated personal, professional and political grounds.

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In the micropolitics of the school staffroom, the diversity of teachers' opinions on the issue reflect broad differences of opinion and political affiliation and can result in intense acrimony. Some, perhaps many, t e a c h e ~ regard Aboriginal studies as another curriculum imposition wedged into an already overcrowded and unwieldy curriculum. As if they didn't have enough to do! Like environment education, non-sexist education, peace studies, multiculturalism or even Australian studies, they see it as a politically motivated wish-piece for a reformist government, intent either on bowing to the influence of shadowy lobby groups, or on more sinister social engineering. Either attributed motive leads to a dismissal of Aboriginal culture as an unworthy candidate for curriculum inclusion, its utilitarian value as negligible and its intrinsic value as relatively worthless. Others have a softer, apparently more reasoned approach where the rejection of Aboriginal culture in the curriculum is couched in terms that are less political and more professional. For these teachem, the argument against Aboriginal studies is that of relevance and meaning. They question whether, for example, a class of mixed ethnic background in the inner city will gain any worthwhile knowledge from Aboriginal content in the curriculum when there is such an explosion of essential, relevant knowledge to which they are trying to give their students access. The end result - curriculum exclusion - remains the same. 'lkachers, even those providing courses in Aboriginal studies, often comment that they are concerned about the uneven quality of the curriculum in this area. Their general lack of pre-teaching education in the subject nibbles at their feelings of subject mastery and teaching competence. They are worried about 'doing the right thing'. Some choose to do nothing as a result. Bachers are sensitive to cultural change; they are aware that Aboriginal people want curriculum change, along given lines. They are not sure how or where to deliver it. The expectation of a common education for all Australians in the area of Aboriginal studies is growing, at least in the policy documents that direct, if not dictate, curriculum content. In setting ten national goals for schooling in 1988, the Commonwealth Government declared that Aboriginal studies should be recognised as an essential part of the curriculum for all Australian students. In 1989 the State and "Ikrritory governments signed' an agreement with the Commonwealth in the form of the National Aboriginal and 'lbrres Strait Islander Education Policy which stated the development of curricula in Aboriginal studies as a common, agreed goal. An act passed by the Commonwealth F'arliament specifies 'education enabling all Australian students to understand and appreciate traditional and contemporary Aboriginal culture' as an objective to which state funding is tied, and which must be publicly reported on (Aboriginul Education (Supphnentary Assistance) Act 1989, 7fi)J.

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In recognition of past neglects, present inadequacies and future aspirations on the agenda for a multicultural Australia, cultural perspectives have changed. Developing an appropriate Aboriginal Australian studies curriculum is now regarded as a key task in the 1990sfor education systems and schools across Australia. What is rarely recognised is how difficult, and politically loaded, this task really is. In early 1988 it was suggested that the nation would have the opportunity to change the constitution further, and to negotiate with an autonomous Aboriginal Australia about a treaty. This would have had a profound impact on the relationship between non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal Australia, on the nature of the Australian people and place, and eventually on the nature of the Australian studies curriculum. Perhaps we need to remember the way things were before there was any recognition, recalling what Sally Morgan writes in her preface to Mu Place: How deprived we would have been if we had been willing to let things stay as they were. We would have survived but not as a whole people. We would never have known our place (Morgan 1987). Her words are explicitly addressed to her family, but implicitly directed to every one of us. If we had, as Australians, been willing to let things stay the way they werel with a curriculum map of empty spaces and concealed regionsl we would be a weaker and poorer nation, We would each lack an understanding of ourselves as Australians, and our place in Australia. We have changed, granting from a position of power, limited Aboriginal rights in land and rights in history. The process is significant enough to warrant a major challenge from the right, which argues that calls to include Aboriginal history in the curriculum are calls to divide the nation on the basis of guilt (see Chapter 10). Our nation is still working out the possibilities involved in seeing things from the perspective of Aboriginal Australians, but the process is underway in the curriculum.

l. The recognition of the importance of Aboriginal autonomy in individual social action is one of the key markers of a paradigm shift in the representation of Aboriginal societies in Australian anthropology, as discussed in Hiatt (1984).

2. It is interesting to compare the basis. of this decision with the recommendation of the House of kpresentatives Select Committee of 1985, to transfer funds from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs to the Department of Education and Youth Affairs.

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3. Susan Ryan was the minister in charge of education in the Hawke government who introduced and advocated projects in Australian studies curriculum development in all sectors of her education portfolio in 1984-86.

CHAPTER

0

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It is possible to draw a curriculum map of Australian studies in schools, tracing on this the areas in which learning about Australia is historically and presently located; plotting its landmarks, empty spaces, shallow spots, and major boundaries. In 1988Aboriginal Australian history, for so long part of the vast and empty spaces, became the significant landmark of the Australian curriculum. In the decision of the Australian Teachers Federation in January 1988 t o boycott bicentennial celebrations, activities or texts that failed to include an Aboriginal 'perspective', teachers claimed that the old Australian curriculum template was warped. They rejected it as being unable to produce a clear, accurate or useful image. As the opening debate of the bicentennial year, the 'history or guilt' argument was loud, intense and acrimonious. The boycott decision provoked an immediate political response, with the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Mr Dawkins, calling on teachers to correct the distorted history commonly taught in schools, by presenting our black history in a more accurate and positive way. The accusations of historical distortion were fired back at the Minister in a rush of editorials, press releases, departmental denials and professorial protests. A brief headline sample gives some indication of the terms of the debate: Aboriginal row: Dawkins wants history re-written Curriculum revamp on Aborigines 'a fascist act' Opposition says Dawkins 'interfering in history' History not propaganda Dawkins history re-write offensive Dangerous stand on blacks' history Distorted reading of history behind shouts of 'shame'? Public debate over historical interpretation became commonplace in the bicentennial year. Public debate over curriculum content is also commonplace - part of the process through which we develop a democratic curriculum. In both cases, as Stannage (1979) remarks, public dispute is being used to establish truth. Not so commonplace is merger of the debates over historical interpretation and curriculum content. As the opening issue of the bicentennial year, the content of the Australian history curriculum became the subject of intense public, private and professional dispute. 'White Australia has a black history' declared the posters, T-shirts and walls, and teachers were called upon to revise and reconstruct their history curriculum to include an Aboriginal perspective. Public dispute was being

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used to establish the notion of historical truth that should be learned by the students of our schools. The intensity of the debate was fuelled by headlines such as those we have seen, providing media 'grabs' that aimed not to inform but to provoke an emotional response and reader interest. The heading 'Distorted reading of history behind shouts of "shame"' of Professor Blainey's column in a WeekendAustralian*article was such an emotive grab. The subheading carried a quote that read, 'Aboriginal crusade is grossly unfair'. In the column, Blainey offered his argumentsfor the case against a revised history curriculum. It is a statement that privileges, above all others, his own reading of Australian history, and claims the moral, historical high ground. The case for revision is condemned as a crusade that relies on 'distorted morality and distorted history'. Blainey claims that the 'crusade to wring from us a national confession of guilt' is sponsored by a 'medley of politicians, many historians and anthropologists, and a whole army of schoolteachers'. Blainey has clearly articulated the resistance to an Aboriginal perspective in our history curriculum. Unfortunately for those parents or teachers seeking to come to an understanding of the complexity of this issue, he takes a strongly outraged, emotive position. In order to add emotional intensity to his case, he has distorted the rationale and methodology being espoused in the contemporary Australian history curriculum. It is Blainey who raises and then centralises the question of guilt in this debate. 'Why,' he asks, 'should people feel guilty about events that happened so many generations ago, especially if their ancestors had no part in them?' The question is misleading simply because the reasoning behind a revised history curriculum is not centred on the promotion of guilt at all. Australian history teachers generally operate within a framework of historiography that is more rational and interpretative than his accusation implies. The history curriculum does not set out to judge the motives and actions of individuals in the past. Our classrooms are not courts of enquiry to judge and find innocence or guilt retrospectively. Rather, they are more likely to follow the challenge to analyse historical facts. If moral judgment is made it is about events, institutions or policies of the past, not about individuals. As Barwick (1981) and L. Ryan (1986) have pointed out, Aboriginal historians demonstrate a consistent ability to tolerate and not judge deviant behaviour and the vagaries of individual opinion for both blacks and whites. Blarney's description of the contemporary history curriculum as a site for the condemnation of individual acts of the past recurs in his argument that Aboriginal Australians of mixed descent are not qualified to argue for reparations. He claims that, 'Historically, their grievance rests on the injuries perpetrated by

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one side of their ancestry on the other side of their ancestry. Theirs is an odd argument.' It is this argument that is odd: an irrelevant use of the distraction of racial issues from the historical issues that are being actively explored in the modern curriculum. Of more substance, in that he puts forward historical facts that can be usefully explored in the classroom, are his claims that he knows of no evidence for genocide in Australia; that the impact of diseases on Aborigines is underemphasised; and that there is near silence about the violent actions of Aborigines. The historical status of these claims can be argued about, in the classroom or elsewhere. What is beyond argument, in the Blainey view, is that teachers are imparting a 'lopsided version of Australian history in order to build up the Aboriginal cause and to spread feelings of guilt' in Australian students.

THE 'GUILT INDUSTRY' Blarney's claim is part of a push by conservative groups in Australian society, labelled the New Right, to discredit attempts at curriculum reform in Australian schools. This group regards the changes we have described as a threat to their power and is determined to fight a battle of cultural politics to retrieve and hold this power. Like Aborigines, the members are engaged in a battle to define the educational and cultural terrain, and the curriculum is a site for this struggle over meaning. Unlike Aborigines, their critique involves an uneasy amalgam of fundamentalism, cultural elitism and economic libertarian thought that rejects the egalitarian, progressive educationist thought that became prominent under the Whitlam and Fraser governments (cf Johnston 1987, 36-38). The New Right has been active for at least the last two decades in attempting to shift the agenda of curriculum debate on a range of issues which have implications for Aboriginal studies and Aboriginal education. One early example was the banning from schools, in 1978, by the Queensland Cabinet, of two social studies programs. The first of these, MACOS (Man:A Course of Study), was an American scheme, while SEMP (Social Education Materials Project) was produced by the Curriculum Development Centre. At the t h e , the Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen,declared that the two courses 'contain much of the same underlying philosophy which sustains the secular humanism of both th,e socialist and nationalist socialist ideologies'. Such ideologies acted to 'drive a wedge between parents and children' (quoted in Johnston 1987, 49). The 'guilt industry' has been a recurring theme of the New Right, especially in their ideological flagship, the Institute of Public Affairs journal, IPA

Review.

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Throughout 1988 and into 1989, the IPA Review waged a campaign against 'the guilt industry' and the 'blackening of our past' (Hirst 1988, 49). Teachers, however, do not encourage students to explore Aboriginal Australian history so that they will feel guilty. Empathy and compassion are legitimate affective responses to a well-taught history unit, but guilt or pride are generally irrelevant. They have no place in a curriculum that encourages and assists students to analyse the processes of historical forces at work. Some indication of the nature of an Aboriginal perspective in the history curriculum can be gained by looking at work going on in some Australian classrooms in order to see what it is that students are doing when they study Aboriginal history. Such a view is a necessary corrective to the claims made by the New Right about the content of the contemporary curriculum. It is also a necessary corrective view to the editorial writers, columnists and politicians who argue about 'rewriting the history curriculum'. In this view, the curriculum is represented as a set text, bursting with set facts that are to be rote-learned by students. Instead, the curriculum should be seen, first and foremost, in action, with real teachers and real students doing real things. In order to make judgments about the curriculum, it is necessary first to see it in action.

THROUGH SOME CLASSROOM WINDOWS The first classroom is in a western Queensland town, in the heart of cattle country. The students are working on small group projects related to the history of the pastoral industry. One group is comparing brochures from the Stockmen's Hall of Fame with accounts by Hazel McKellar, George Dutton and Ann McGrath in order to develop their own Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen Hall of Fame brochures. The historical question they are working out an answer to is: 'How do historical facts become selected and elaborated as history?' The second classroom is in the Northern Territory, on the edge of sandhill country. The classroom is empty, because everyone in the class has gone to listen to a story being told by some of the older members of the community. The central question for these students is: 'How can an understanding of our past shape our understanding of our present position?' The third classroom is in a large building, shadowed by even larger buildings in an inner suburb of Sydney. It is silent, because everyone in the classroom is reading selections from texts written by and about Pearl Gibbs, Mum Shirl, Elsie Roughsey and Sally Morgan. While the teacher had planned to follow the reading period with a discussion on the way government policies affected the lives of Aboriginal women, discussion will actually focus on the way their individual

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actions, including their acts of making and writing history, have made lives so much better for their communities, despite the most difficult of obstacles. The next classroom is in a provincial town on the banks of the Murray River. The classroom is a buzz of noisy activity, as the children are working to put together a sequence of maps that illustrate the history of people along the river. Their research has enabled them to include evidence of Aboriginal activity, past and present, in each of their maps. Inspired by AustralZam: A HistoricalAtlas (Sydney, 1987), they are engaged in evaluating maps as historical texts. Another classroom is in Canberra. Here students are carrying out a case study requiring the sifting of historical evidence related to the Coniston Massacre. They are learning that this massacre did not happen 'so many generations ago', as Blainey would have us believe, but only sixty years ago. A wealth of primary and secondary source material (including rock music video clips) is available to them, the most difficult of which for the students is the Warlpiri literature production centre booklet by Tim Japangardi and George Jampijinpa. Their narrative of the massacres ends with this account of an event: The two Japaljarris had only shields to protect them so they started singing themselves for protection. The whites started shooting at them. The two Japaljarris stood one in front of the other. The whites shot and shot at them. The two men keep blocking the bullets. Eventually the whites ran out of bullets. They spoke to the two men, 'Well you two are the winners.' They gave them shirts, trousers and tobacco (Japangardi and Jampwnpa 1978). This narrative brought to the foreground for students the questions of historical facts and interpretation. In one sense, students come to realise the elasticity of oral traditions, in their power to reshape the past, transforming overwhelming violent defeat into a victory: 'You two are the winners'. A student in the group supplied this interpretation of the rationale behind the revision of historical events: Maybe what they mean, he said, is that like their, you know, the tribe, and their culture survived, and that because they're still there to tell the story - they're the ones who won! This student has shown, through his analysis of Warlpiri historical narrative, that he is capable of developing historical understandings of a sophisticated form. That it was developed as an interpretation by a sixteen-year-old student shows the possibilities of an Aboriginal history curriculum to develop'insight,understanding and empathy. Alternative explanations of the text could have been developed a stress on the giving of flour, sugar, tobacco and tea could have led into a sound

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materialist interpretation. Students could have explored the implications of the fact that the Japaljarris stood together and sang together - wondering whether the narrative carries the meaning that a shared culture has provided the strength necessary for Warlpiri survival. Again, the students could have compared this account of survival and triumph with other Aboriginal narratives of affirmation and strength that are concerned to recover the past for the purposes of enhancing the present and informing the future. All of the classrooms whose windows we have looked through are learning about history. They are learning the skills and insights of a discipline that constructs truth through historical facts which come to us through interpretative choices made by historians who are influenced by the ideas of the age in which they write. They are learning about history through Aboriginal history. In the process they are learning about their own history, and, significantly, they are making their own history. A rethought Australian history curriculum has the potential, now being realised in classrooms across Australia, to offer students powerful learning in history. Previously teachers wishing to introduce pupils to particular ideas about the discipline of history such as its focus on the actions and words of people in the past, the search for evidence and clues about the past, the evaluation of different types of historical evidence, the problems of interpretation, or the consequences of the past have turned to an excellent history kit produced by the British Schools Council called What is History?This kit actively explores these questions through the stories of the Mystery of lbllund Man, or the Case of Richard

III and the Missing Princess. Why can't we substitute the mystery of the Coniston Massacre? Three steps are necessary. First, Australian history should become an essential and core component of an Australian education. This involves attracting students and teachers back from the content-neutral subjects of social studies and social education, and the present dominant location of Aboriginal studies as an ahistorical study of an objectified and illusory traditional culture. Second, Aboriginal perspectives on Australian history need to be included and further developed in this curriculum. This particularly involves providing students with access to Aboriginal texts which can be used to actively explore the making of the past. Finally, making such a curriculum generally available to all students requires an awareness of the significance of Aboriginal history as the key to making the history curriculum a genuinely Australian cultural construction, appropriate to and originating in our needs as Australians at this time and place.

GUILT AND THE AUSTRALIAN HISTORY CURRICULUM

Stephen Muecke (1982,100)has suggested that the place and meaning of Aborigines in general Australian discourse has shifted because of the political and cultural activities of Aboriginal Australians in the last two decades: Now that Aborigines are becoming more politically powerful, a certain proximity has been forced on white Australians, a cultural and political proximity to a race which has been hitherto kept distant. Political issues such as land rights, access to medical, housing and legal facilities, alternative education, writing of history and so on, have tended to force people into new understandings. Talking about specific issues disrupts the usual way of talking about a totality. The Aboriginal claim for limited power through a revision of the history curriculum is being ideologically resisted by groups who have had a traditional mortgage on the right to determine the content of the curriculum. Such groups have had the economic and political resources necessary to limit the curriculum to an endorsement of the views that support the status quo, a status quo in which Aboriginal exclusion, rather than proximity, has been the norm. Part of the source of such exclusion has been the view that Aboriginal culture and history is a totality,

Plate 14: The author at a curriculum planning workshop, Waungurru, 1987, with Sarah Napangati Bruno

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an undistinguishable mass, easily capable of rejection from the greater totality, that of 'our cultural heritage'. Dame Leonie Kramer has been a spokesperson for the cultural elitist style of New Right educational thinking. This style argues against an inclusive progressive curriculum, and for an exclusive core curriculum defined by elite minorities. She argues for a view of our cultural inheritance as 'not a collection of inert objects, labelled and housed in a museum, but a vital force, a living element in our common memory and ancestry' (Kramer 1988, 54). In this paper she is preoccupied with the British strand of this 'living stream of culture'. Fortunately, students in our schools are beginning to have the opportunity to study not only this strand but the Australian strand of our cultural heritage. In some of our schools, Aboriginal Australia is a 'vital force, a living element' in this Australianised curriculum. Schools are better places as a result.

NOTES 1. Headlines from The Australian 10, 11, 12 January 1988; The Sunday Tfelegraph10 January 1988; The Couw-Mail 11January 1988; The Weekend Australian 7-8 May 1988. 2. The Weekend Australian 7-8 May 1988.

CHAPTER

BRIDGE NOWHERE The student adjusted her rented academic gown as she waited in line for her name to be called. She eventually came forward to receive her rolled and ribboned certificate. Burnum Burnum handed it to her and shook hands, congratulating her for being one of the ten students to graduate that year from the bridging course at the Dirrawongl CAE, Around them, other students, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, watched with mixed emotions. The choice of Burnum Burnum, the highly public and skilful weaver of modernday myths of Aboriginal Australia, to play professor at the graduation ceremony for the sixteen-week bridging course is revealing. Bridging courses for Aboriginal students are permeated by myths and illusions, many of which can be traced back to contradictionsin educational policy and funding arrangements. Myths of 'access, opportunity, success' are not substantiated by the history of these programs. The illusions of academic success, tertiary autonomy and self-managementconceal the reality of program failure. Of the ninety-eight students who have passed the bridging course since 1983, only one has graduated from a mainstream Dirrawong CAE course. A comparable institution in the same region has a graduation rate of 50 per cent at diploma level,2which if achieved by D i w o n g , would have led to approximately thirty graduates by 1988. Retention rates have been consistently low, and the student numbers drop rapidly for each year, often before the end of the first semester. All but a very few students have chosen not to continue, for any significant period of time, in further education. In terms of the specific objectives of the course, which set the goal of the program as preparation for participation and success in tertiary education (NAEC 1986, 31), the only possible, logical, 'rational' conclusion is that the program has failed. The course is a short bridge to nowhere. This is not so, according to the course teachers and coordinators,backed up by a decade of emphasis on the specific and different nature of Aboriginal education. To define educational outcomes from a 'rationalist' perspective is to ignore the special importance of the student's course experience in terms of selfesteem growth, identity development, and cultural knowledge obtained through the emphasis on the Aboriginal studies curriculum and the supportive practices of the institution. To measure success or failure using the same definition of effective education outcomes as non-Aboriginal Australia is culturally inappropriate. 'It would be erroneous to regard Aboriginal teacher education 163

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program withdrawals as "drop outs" or "failures" ' argue Williarns and others (1982, 7), who see Aboriginal students as 'pioneers in alien territory'. They see any attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs only against criteria used in mainstream programs as 'a very common incongruence which must be avoided' (1982, 9). Those who have worked with the students over the years view educational success from real-life stories of people they have known, rather than from the abstractions of centrally determined and statistically verifiable measurable outcomes. They speak, with some feeling, of individuals who are now gainfully and productively employed as an indirect result of their participation in the support program. The program, they feel, must have made a positive contribution to their present successful employment, by giving them literacy, numeracy, research and personal confidence skills which they did not have before. They argue that the program has been a success. The contrasting notions of educational success that operate here bring forward some other, as yet unresolved, issues. The educational issues (equality, equity, opportunity, access, success) are intertwined with specific political issues (academic autonomy, Aboriginal self-management) as well as economic ones (labour force participation, economic stringency). This is the broader contextual frame within which the specific case of one bridging course is situated. It is also the frame within which the specific policy and program changes initiated by the present government in higher education and Aboriginal education can be evaluated. Is the 'dry', rationalist, economistic approach, with its emphasis on efficiency as a means to equity, going to work any better?

THE BRIDGING COURSE The bridging course is intended to prepare Aboriginal students for courses at the Dirrawong College of Advanced Education. The program runs for sixteen weeks during the last semester of each year for entrance into college courses the following year. Students satisfying the requirements of three course units in the program are offered entry into any of the courses at Dirrawong. The objectives of the program are obviously ambitious, given that the would-be students are generally newcomers to adult education, early leavers from secondary school and perhaps trying study as a way of escaping poverty traps. Sixteen weeks is not long to catch up all those missed years. The program began in 1983 and during its short history has seen many changes in curriculum, course structure, methodology, staffing, management and institutional structures. It has been funded, almost exclusively, by 'special course

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funding' under the Abstudy (post-schooleducation related) and TAP (employment training related) programs, on an approximately equally shared basis.3 This is significant in terms of higher education reform and government program strategies. Running the funding of a program such as this through two separate schemes, managed (at the time the bridging course began) through two government departments, is inefficient, clumsy and confuses the objectives of totally different programs. The costs of bureaucratic duplication reduce available funding to institutions, and lead to differentials of student payment, causing problems of division in the student group. As the NAEC have pointed out (and as repeated often elsewhere), 'The problems arising from the multiplicity of funding sources and lack of consistent criteria which plague Aboriginal education are probably nowhere better illustrated than with enclaves' (NAEC 1986, 14). It should also be noted that intake numbers determine annual funding, rather than output or outcomes, or even plans for the future. Funding is allocated at the beginning of the semester, based on the number of enrolled students. This funding generally rolls on, regardless of any student withdrawals. Evaluation of course outcomes has not been seen as the responsibility of any of the agencies or institutions concerned, and the program was not formally evaluated until 1988. The closed-shop nature of the higher education sector makes data on outcomes from colleges and universities difficult to obtain. Many institutions are reluctant to leave themselves open to comparisons in a field in which policy initiatives are relatively recent, untried and unevaluated. It should also be noted that the only published government data on Aboriginal higher education participation do not include specific outcomes, focusing only on the numbers of students who are participating at any level.4 Recasting outcomes to emphasise factors such as cultural enrichment, personal satisfaction, self-esteem or alternative employment opportunities is used as a retrospective rationalisation for outcomes that vary from the intentions of the program (as in Williams and others 1982). While these outcomes are valuable and significant, they cannot validly be used to deny that the program is a failure in its own terms. One of the problems with this slide into claiming credit for student employment success is the fact that the students who apply for a tertiary access program are already a self-selected group, more motivated than the average community member and therefore more likely to seek and obtain employment success. This process means that it is impossible to define exactly what contribution, if any, has been made by the educational process to their employment success. Other factors, especially related to the expansion of local land councils that provide employment opportunities and other government employment schemes, are also relevant.

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Judging program success in terms of retention and graduation rates with an eye to efficiency is not an argument for a service-station model of education, especially when the education process is seen from the viewpoint of students. For them, an experience of failure at the tertiary level can have profoundly debilitating consequences. As Morgan (1988, 16) argues, 'Many of the students, a majority in fact, were failed by an inappropriate and meaningless schooling system, and consequently, another experience of "failure" at the tertiary level was the last thing they expected or deserved.'

T H E INSTITUTION In the case of the institution under study, program failure has never been addressed by the institution or funding bodies because of the 'special' nature of the program. Program failure may have been reduced by greater attention in the institution to mainstream educational outcomes and less emphasis on narrowly defined, specifically Aboriginal outcomes. At a broader political and educational level, the case study suggests that an emphasis on autonomy at the group level has placed limits on individual Aboriginal access to further education, postponing and retarding any chance of educational equality, social autonomy or economic selfdetermination. There are three ways that the emphasis in the college on the 'special' nature of the program has lubricated a slide into inequality. First, the expressed belief that the course should be regarded as an Aboriginal program, not a college program, maintained its non-accredited status, except for entry purposes. The college failed to integrate any aspect of the course into its recurrent funding budget because of the availability of special, external funding that enabled the college to avoid any ongoing responsibility. The Aboriginality of the program provided a convenient rationalisation for this, allowing the college administratorsto declare that, as an Aboriginal program, it should be run by Aborigines, for Aborigines. As a consequence, it remained a special course, an enclave from the real world, a funding ghetto, a demountable option. As a direct result, staffing has always been short term, exacerbated by poor conditions. As an indirect result, the institution has never responded to the needs of this student group, especially in the curriculum and institutional practices of mainstream course^.^ In this case 'difference' was weighed against Aboriginal students. Second, selection procedures for student intake were fundamentally deceiving in encouraging students to enter despite the fact that an objective assessment would give them little chance of being prepared for tertiary studies in one semester. The rationale for this de facto open entry policy for Aborigines

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was expressed in terms of 'equality of opportunity' and the need to give as many students as possible a 'second chance' at education, necessary because of the alien and inappropriate nature of students' secondary school experience. One ex-student expressed the view that this policy served the ends of the course staff to ensure the continuation of funding for their positions, more than the life needs of the students, especially ignoring their needs for informed educational choices. Morgan (1988, 14)has claimed that broad selection criteria are due to a mixture of academic paternalism and institutional guilt. The cruel and phony graduation ceremonies occurring at the end of the bridging course reinforce this strongly critical view. Third - and the issue I wish to concentrate attention on because of its elusive problematics - was the notion of 'support' that permeated the philosophy and methodology of the course. According to Jordan and Howard (1985), who analysed the essential elements of support systems such as enclaves and bridging courses for Aboriginal students in higher education institutions, support systems have four functions: Â They are structured to provide academic support which on the one hand acts to fill the gaps in past educational experiences, and, on the other hand, works towards consolidating the fruits of study already being undertaken.

They provide personal support, introducing the student to social welfare networks, and making available to the student the knowledge and insights needed to exercise a degree of control over those adverse circumstances in life which inhibit motivation and perseverance in study. Â They provide a situation which promotes a positive sense of Aboriginal identity.

They provide institutional support through the organisation of the support system. Â

It is the concept of 'support' which is most repeated in writings about bridging course and enclave programs. It is, of course, neither something I wish to see eliminated from the vocabulary of this sector, nor left out of the toolkit of teachers, but it is a value-laden term that should be used with caution. It evokes images of crutches and patronage. In pedagogical terms, it encourages dependency more than autonomy. Skills development is rarely mentioned, especially the necessary and difficult tasks of developing the working skills of an independent, autonomous tertiary student in a short burst of formal education. The patronising and passive concept of support has supplanted the active dialectical concepts of teaching and learning. A number of Aboriginal students I have spoken to at Dirrawong and elsewhere, talked about the ease with which students could get

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tutors to 'write their assignments for them', and were critical of the condescending way in which predominantly non-Aboriginaltutors and support scheme staff would 'help and look after' students. Is this the education for personal and social empowerment so valued by educationists, especially from the left? Or is this simply the old welfare consciousness of the middle classes in new guise? At the launch of the National Aboriginal Education Policy, the representative of the Aboriginal graduates there, Jackie Huggins, spoke strongly about the need for a shift from 'support' to 'challenge' in the practices of enclaves and bridging courses. Changing institutional practices and the values that underpin them is a complex task. In the area of higher education for Aborigines, the task is made more difficult because of a resistance to external monitoring of outcomes, the 'special' nature of Aboriginal education and the denial of a legitimate role for the state in higher education. Especially significantis the resistance by sectors of the left to recent policy and program changes to higher education.

EFFICIENCY AND ABORIGINAL EDUCATION In reading recent academic critiques6of the Commonwealth Government's White Paper on Higher Education (Commonwealth of Australia 1988), one is left with the conclusion that the concept of 'efficiency' is often not only regarded as alien, but is actively and consistently rejected. Education, it is argued, cannot be measured in terms of efficiency, with performance indicators measuring outcomes; as though education actually produced 'things' - commodities for exchange in a labour market. However, there is strong statistical evidence to suggest that state attempts over the last decade to reduce inequality in Aboriginal education have had limited success because there has been very little attention given to the efficient planning and management of educational programs across the system. While a strong group on the educational left resist the use of effectiveness indicators, strategic planning, and corporate management strategies because they are dry, giving away political ground to the New Right, the possibility of long-term structural change for Aborigines in the unwieldy institutions of education is postponed indefinitely. For Aboriginal Australians, educational enrolment, participation, retention and attendance rates are nationally consistently lower than mainstream participation rates at every level of education from preschool to university. In 1976 only fifty-two Aboriginal students attended Australian universities. By 1980 this number had almost tripled to 138 students and did so again by the 1986-87 academic year, resulting in 383 Aboriginal students attending Australian

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universities (Ohel nd, 3). This dramatic increase needs to be seen in a comparative perspective, relative to the general ratio for student participation. University students make up some 0.2 per cent of the Aboriginal population and 1.1per cent of the Australian population. The colleges of advanced education have also seen a dramatic increase in the number of Aboriginal students enrolled, raising the numbers up to 1,300 students, or 0.6 per cent of the Aboriginal population, approximately half the general ratio (CTEC 1987). Much of the effort in higher education has been in the teacher education area, as a result of which the number of qualified Aboriginal teachers increased from seventy-two in 1979 to 'over 400' at the beginning of 1987 (DAA 1987a, 51). Obviously there is cause for optimism in these figures for improved participation rates. If increase occurs at the same rate, it is possible that equity in higher education participation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students will be reached by the end of this century. According to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (1987a, 51) the number of Aboriginal students undertaking postschool and tertiary education under the Abstudy scheme in 1986 was 20,111 (from 9,861 in 1982, a greater than 100 per cent increase). The university and CAE component of this was some 6.5 per cent. That is, while 1,307 students were enrolled in higher degree, bachelor's degree or diploma courses, another 18,804 students were receiving assistance to study at a lower level or were enrolled in non-accredited courses not leading to a recognised trade or professional qualification. In the same year, there were 9,693students, or 48.2 per cent of postschool students enrolled in personal development courses (DEET 1988, 31) for which government assistance was received. Optimism wanes somewhat in the face of data suggesting that outputs and outcomes, defined by graduation rates and degrees awarded, are drastically below non-Aboriginal success rates. Aboriginal rates of access, participation and success remain far under those of any other identifiable group in the Australian population, despite a decade of special programs, initiatives and supplementary resourcing. The schooling sector is failing to provide Aboriginal students with the choice of entering the higher education sector. The post-school sector has failed to ensure an adequate flow of students into accredited courses of study. The higher education sector has failed to move students out of the special course, bridging stream and into mainstream course options. As a result, unemployment rates and wage-labour participation rates are lower than for any other group in the society (see M Miller 1985). As an indirect result, Aboriginal dependency on welfare programs managed by non-Aboriginal professionals in government agencies or nongovernment organisations is entrenched, preventing self-management from ever becoming more than an elusive political ideal.

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The allocation of Aboriginal education funds by the state is the first point at which inefficiency frustrates equity strategies. One indicator of input equality that can be used is that of allocation of the Commonwealth taxpayer's dollars across geographicaland political regions. One would assume that strategic planning would ensure that the allocation of resources on inputs was relatively evenly spread. Instead, Queensland, with 26 per cent of the national Aboriginal population received only 15 per cent of 1988-89 program spending, while South Australia, with 6.3 per cent of the national Aboriginal population received 19 per cent.7 One consequence of this unequal and inefficient allocation of resources is the fact that any Aboriginal students from Tasmania, Northern Territory, Queensland or New South Wales, have less opportunity, on a per capita basis, than their peers in other States to receive a full education. A closer look at the processes of higher education funding throws a little light on the sources of this inequitable and inefficient resource allocation. Commonwealth funds have been distributed on a submission-based process that is both inefficient in terms of resource input distribution and ineffective in terms of the educational outcomes that result. The submission mode supports the already established, namely those with access to information power and the resources necessary for writing the submissions that can obtain more resources. Such an unplanned funding mode also results in short-term planning, localised low-impact spending, based on ad hoc, bandaid approaches, and a resultant lessening in the quality of the educational processes. Inequality becomes entrenched and systematically reproduced. Education is an expensive undertaking, and mainstream per capita funding quickly evaporates in the face of the high unit costs involved in providing a service to a small, scattered and diverse population. For far too long the supplementary resources allocated to Aboriginal education have been spread haphazardly across different departments, branches and schools with a minimum of strategic planning or evaluation. A multitude of policies and programs with conflicting or overlapping aims and processes have stifled innovation and consolidation. Cooperative planning and cost-sharing is not enough to turn low educational achievement around overnight, but it is a necessary precondition. As a result of this funding maze, improvements made in institutions have had a short and doubtful life. Especially poor is the record on secure Aboriginal employment in education programs. Because programs have been ad hoc, short-term and localised, there has been little exchange of ideas and resources, even between adjacent States serving the same, or an overlapping, population, or institutions with similar needs and services (Hayward 1988). Inefficiencies create ineffectiveness. In the post-

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Plate 15: Tertiary success for QueenslandUniversity'sfirst Aboriginal medical graduates Christine Woolgar and Noel Hayman, 1990 (Courier Mail}

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secondary sector, the problems generated by an uncoordinated policy approach are numerous and have had severe consequences for Aboriginal students (RileyMundine 1988; Morgan 1988). While TAFE and CAE bridging programs in the same town compete for the same group of students, there is only slight evidence of stable course development or consistent educational approaches. There is an obvious need, in particular, for the cooperative development of bridging course material aimed at developing students' independent learning and academic skills, but there are few signs of this approach. Instead, short-term special funding (usually not institutionallysupported) leads to a plethora of disconnected programs based only on someone's latest bright idea. Denying the damage caused by the inefficiency of government programs directed towards Aboriginal students causes a 'blame-slide* towards institutions, staff and students. Institutions have often been criticised by local Aboriginal communities or organisations for not developing an effective education service when they have not gained access to the resources that should have been supplied by the state. Staff are criticised for abandoning their students when they move out of their insecure, short-term funded positions. Similarly, not recognising the inequality of resource provision and the effect that this has on program delivery causes a shift to 'blaming the student'. Aboriginality, rather than inefficiency, becomes the causal explanation for the failure of students and programs. The case for some equalising provision to compensate for and change existing patterns of inequality is unarguable, and there has certainly been a response by Commonwealth, State and Territory governments in the form of ~ national reports have resource injection over the last d e ~ a d e .Numerous particularly identified the need for a collective and integrated effort to strategically address areas of common concern. These include the House of Representatives Select Committee on Aboriginal Education (1985), the National Aboriginal Education Committee (1985,37; 1986,39), the Commonwealth Schools Commission (1987a, 29-30; 1987b, 2) and the Department of Employment, Education and Training (1988, 2). The government response to this challenge is found in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (Commonwealth of Australia 1989), the first national education policy to be developed under the Dawkins ministry, and the first Australian education policy to develop a crosssectoral, strategic, outcome-oriented approach. As such the document is a significant marker for a shift in government education policy away from the 'culturalist*approach of Susan Ryan, an earlier minister, towards an economically oriented, rationalist approach. The shift complements policy directions of both the National Agendafor A Multicultural Australia, and the Aboriginal Employment Development Policy, as well as the

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general move towards program budgeting and performance monitoring in all areas of government inter~ention.~ Where both 'culture' and 'equity' were centralised in the discourse of the Ryan ministry, 'economy' and 'efficiency' are now the key concepts. Whether this new language, and the changed approach it represents, will actually assist the delivery of any form of educational equality remains to be seen. At the least, it will provide a framework for the monitoring and evaluation of educational resource allocations. Resource agreements, tied to institutional equity profiles, may give a greater security to program development and the opportunity for sharing scarce resources across institutions with similar needs. Commonwealth funding to the universities and CAEs for Aboriginal programs amounts to a total of $30 million in 1988-89 terms. The new national policy has announced increased funding for supplementary assistance to institutions to the amount of some $6.9 million in the first year of operation, with substantial increase for the triennium beyond that (DEET 1989, 81)J0 Some of this will be spent on special places, some on research and course development, some on bridging courses, some on lecturing and tutoring staff, with allocations being made on the basis of resource agreements with educational institutions. In the higher education sector, the Commonwealth has a direct funding relationship with the education provider and can work more directly to change existing inequalities. It would seem from the evidence of Dirrawong and other courses like it, that rational, strategic planning including the use of effectiveness measures through performance indicators is a necessary aspect of developing ways in which to move towards educational equality. Arguing for efficiency is one part of the argument for equality.

ABORIGINES, STRUCTURAL PLURALISM AND THE STATE In the last forty years the ongoing attempt by the state to make Aborigines 'the same' as other Australians through the policies of assimilation has failed in the long term, as seen in the continued existence of Aboriginal people as a distinct racial and cultural group in Australian society. Aboriginal Australians have neither become assimilated into the majority mainstream (become 'the same')," nor have they gained equality. Instead of assimilating, Aborigines have forced the state to recognise and accommodate their distinctive and continuing social and cultural identity, through political actions that have emphasised their own sense of autonomy. The strikes, the walk-offs, the demonstrations, the political practices of a range of Aboriginal people, known and unknown, have caused the state officially to abandon 'assimilation' for a policy of 'self-determination'. In practice, this has

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resulted in a limited form of structural pluralism (Jennett 1987,57),through which some sections of the Aboriginal population have gained some control over the way in which state services (such as education, health and welfare) are delivered and policies are implemented. In recognition of Aboriginal cultural persistence, and in response to Aboriginal resistance to mainstreaming, the state has shifted its policy track towards the establishment of policies and programs that maintain and support the cultural identity of Aboriginal people and enhance their dignity and general well-being. The long term objective is to achieve a situation of justice and equality where Aboriginals have sufficient economic and social independence to enjoy their rights as Australian citizens (DAA 1988, 2). On occasions, these objectives are in tension with, and are constrained by, economic realities. Broader Aboriginal claims for autonomy, expressed in calls for 'independence', 'sovereignty' or even effective 'self-management' are constrained by the lack of an independent economic base, a broadly-based alternative welfare economy, a small population and a consequent dependency on the state. These precise and hard-edged limits to Aboriginal autonomy result in the structural incorporation and integration of Aborigines into the body of the state, despite many demonstrative Aboriginal denials about the legitimacy of this process. At the individual level, a more limited set of Aboriginal claims for autonomy are expressed in attempts by Aboriginal people, often under conditions of stress, poverty and alienation, to gain marketable skills, qualifications,jobs and income. Because government and institutional programs have been unplanned, inefficient and often misguidedly separatist, these results have not eventuated. Instead, Aboriginal attention and energy have been captured by the pursuit of limited goals for cultural autonomy, within the structured pluralist framework of the state. By being too often diverted from the hard-edged purposes of specific educational programs, Aboriginal people risk becoming locked into their own enclave of the welfare state.

NOTES

1. Dirrawong CAE is not the real name of the program under study. I give it another name in order to avoid 'blaming' the individuals who have run the program and to avoid a focus on the specific course, rather than others like it, as well as the policies and program management that have resulted in the problems I have identified.

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2. Morgan (1988, 9) indicates that this result is higher than the New South Wales average, showing that there is' enormous variety in the results from different institutions. 3. Abstudy is the Aboriginal Study Grants Scheme, introduced in 1970, and TAP is the Training for Aboriginals Program. 4. NAEC (1986: 60-61), however, provides some results by State, field of study and institution for 1969-82.

5. See the preface by Hughes and West in NAEC (1986, vi). 6. Eg Winocur (1989), Rose and van Ackelan (1989), Havemann (1989), Huppauf (1989), Lonsdale (1989). 7. Figures supplied by the Central Office of the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET). 8. According to figures supplied by DEET, in 1988-89 budget terms, $300 million was spent for the year on outlays on Aboriginal education. Some $80 million on top of this was directed to income assistance through the Abstudy scheme. 9. But this approach is not necessarily that of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission legislation and policies. 10. With an expected student pool of 3,100 students, this means additional funding beyond mainstream educational arrangements of $2,248 per student. 11. Compare the migrant experience of state assimilation policy, as discussed in Rizvi (1986, 20-21).

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Miller, M. (chairman) 1985 Report of the Committee of Review of Aboriginal Ernployrnent and Training Progra~os,Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. Morgan, R.V. 1985 Foreword. In J. Miller, Koori: A Will to Win, Angus and Robertson, Sydney. 1988 Assessment and Selection Programs for Aboriginal Students at New South Wales Tertiary Education Centres: A Brief Overview, paper to National Aboriginal Education Committee Higher Education Conference, Ettalong, NSW. Morgan, S. 1987 My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre, Fremantle. Morphy, H. 'Now you understand.' An Analysis of the Way Yolngu Have Used Sacred 1983

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1989

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Pollard, D. 1988 Give and Take: The Lostng Partnership i n Aboriginal Poverty, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney.

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1981

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1983

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INDEX

Aboriginal and Tbrres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) 81, 175 Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECGs) 48, 53, 93, 98 Aboriginal history 137-53, 155-61 Aboriginal studies curriculum 10, 46, 68-69, 97, 147-53, 157-61 Aboriginality 1, 13, 17, 33, 45-61, 65-69, 71-81, 96-103, 148, 172 Aboriginality-as-persistence 1, 46-47, 48-52, 58-59, 89, 96-103 Aboriginality-as-resistence 1, 46-47, 52-59, 88-93, 96-103, 133 Aborigine's Protection Act 145 absenteeism 57, 98 Australian Council on Population and Ethnic Affairs (ACPEA) 87 Action Research, yanangu way 131 alcohol 26, 34 alienation 12, 29, 34, 41, 90, 98, 100, 115-16, 130-32, 174 Alyawarre 6 Aronowitz, S. 8 art 9, 34-41, 51, 61, 90 assimilation 6, 23-26, 34-35, 49, 58, 60, 108, 112-15, 146, 173 attitudes to Aborigines 65-69 Australian Capital Territory (also see Canberra) 13, 47, 87, 91 Australian cultural identity 13-14, 71, 90, 150 Australian National Opinion Poll (ANOP) 51, 57, 65-69, 151 Australian studies 66, 149-53 authority 29-30, 113 autonomy 60, 102, 108-09, 137-53, 164, 173-74 Bandler, F. 146 Bardon, G. 34, 38

Barker, F. 57 Earth, R. 72 Barunga 40, 43 Barwick, D. 76, 156 Beckett, J. 45, 84 Bell, D.R. 138 Bennelong 52-53 Bennett, S. 137 Berger, P.L. (et al) 86 Berndt, R.H. (et al) 95 bicentennial 4, 38, 90, 137, 155 bicultural education 6, 31, 97, 115-18, 121-34, 158 bilingual education 6, 27, 97, 115-18, 147 Bjelke-Petersen, J. 157 Blackburn, J. 140 Blainey, G. 61, 156-57, 159 Blu, K. 81 Borthwick, A. (et al) 149 Bostock, W.W. 73 Bourke, C.J. 117 Brewarrina 57 Brisbane 5, 13 Burney, L. 101 Burnum-Burnum 163 Canberra 12, 19, 37, 40, 65-69, 78, 87, 112, 159 caring and sharing 50, 59 Carter, J.D. 73 Castles, S. (et al) 150 Central Land Council 90 Charlesworth, M. 79 Christie, M.J. 98, 101 Commonwealth Schools Commission (CSC) 87, 172 Commonwealth Tbrtiary Education Commission (CTEC) 169 community, problems in defining 122, 148 Coombs, H.C. 114

194

Coombs, H.C. (et al) 73-79, 98 Cope, B. 149 Coutts, N. 27 Cowlishaw, G. 86 Crocker, A. 38 Cultural Awareness Camp 1, 12, 45-61, 76, 88, 92-95 cultural comparisons 99 cultural dualism 101 cultural identity 2, 30, 38, 46, 58-61, 95-103 cultural politics 2, 30, 37, 38, 41, 157 culture as dynamic 9, 15, 46-47, 58-60, 80, 90-94, 97, 100-101, 126, 133 culture as inherited 50-51, 58, 84 culture as passive 9, 36, 46, 49-51, 80-81, 85, 95, 101, 133 Curriculum Development Centre (CDC) 157 curriculum development 29-33, 41, 60, 68, 123-34, 147-49 Darwin 112 Davis, K. (et al) 112 Dawkins, J.S. 155 d e Lepervanche, M. 83-84 Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) 65, 76, 81, 153, 174 Department of Education and Youth Affairs (DEYA) 153 Department of Employment Education and Training (DEET) 37, 169, 173, 175 dependency 107, 167, 169 Dirrawong 163-67 diversity 148, 152 Dixon, R.M.W. 114 Docker River 120 Dodson, P.L. 89 domestic domain 109-13, 119 dominant cultural tradition 88 Dreaming (see also tjukurrpd) 21, 24-25, 31, 34, 111, 122

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Dreaming and Aboriginality 77-78 Dutton, G. 158 Eades, D. 50 economic issues 6, 10, 45, 138, 146 education, culture and power 4-7, 95-96 efficiency 170-73 Eipper, C. 80, 83 Elkin, A.A. 95 Elliot, J. 101 emergent cultural tradition 92 employment 3, 6, 9, 12, 29, 67, 85, 90, 103, 108, 113, 145, 165, 170, 172, 174 essentialism 86 ethnicity 68, 71-81, 97 ethnicity, criticism of 83-94, 95-103 ethnography 13, 45, 119 Evans, E.C. 120 Fanon, F. 94 feminism 110-113 Ferguson, W. 145-46 Fesl, E.D. 53 flag 54, 92, 142 Forge, A. 34, 38 Foster, L.E. 84 Fry, T. (et al) 40 funding 47, 93, 170-73 Galbally, F. 87 Gale, F. 138 Geertz, C. 45, 72 gender 28, 103, 108-12, 138, 158 generations 22-26, 28, 29, 41, 115, 133, 142 Gibbs, P. 158 Gilbert, K. 50, 56 Giroux, H.A. 94 Glazer, N. (et al) 72 Glick, L.B.72 government policy 3, 28, 38, 49, 58, 74, 76, 80, 84-86, 96, 108, 112, 118, 122, 137, 140, 146, 148, 158, 165-70

INDEX

Gramsci, A. 83 Grandfather Koori 95, 97 gubba (non-Aboriginal) 13 guilt 155-161, 167 Gurindji 139 Haast Bluff 25-27 Hall, S. 83, 92, 94 Hand, G.L. 51 Hansen, K. and L. 32, 43, 119 Hardy, F. 139 Barker, R.K. (et al) 114 Harris, S. 98, 101 Harrison, B.W. 142 Hasluck, P. 61, 146 Havemann, P. 175 Hawke, R.J.L. 87 Hayward, E. 170 Heffernan, J.A. 27 hegemony 83, 89, 97 Hiatt, L.R. 153 Hirst, J. 158 history and Aboriginality 76-77, 137-53 history, oral 142-43 Howard, M. 10, 85 Huggins, J. 168 Hughes, P. 98, 101 Hulcombe, J. 43, 133-34 Huppauf, B. 175 identity, national 4, 6, 8, 12-14, 40, 51, 72, 90, 137-53, 155-62 identity, personal 3, 9, 14, 32-34, 72, 108-110, 118, 123, 129, 146, 148, 167 ideology 83-94, 97-103, 157 ideology and Aboriginality 83-94, 96-103 Illich, I. 5 incorporation 85-86, 93, 126, 174 Inglis, F. 133 inma (traditional songs, dance) 122 Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) 157-59

Jacky-Jacky 53 Jakubowicz, A. 85 Jampijinpa, G. 159 Japaljarri, Paddy Stewart 35 Japaljarris, Two 160 Japangardi, T. 159 Jennett, C. 174 Johnson, R. 89 Johnston, K.M. 157 Jones, D.J. (et al) 86 Jordan, D.F. (et al) 167 Jupp, J. 73 Kalantzis, M. (et al) 93 kami (grandmotherlgranddaughter) 28 kanyininpa (look after) 28, 110, 113, 119, 128 Keeffe, K.J. 15, 33 Keeffe, K.J. (et al) 149 Keesing, R.M. 83, 85-86 Keyes, C.F. 73-77 Kintore (see also Walungurru) 1, 15, 122 koori 13-14, 54, 61, 95, 97, 102-103 Koori-crab 85 Kowanyama 6, 102 Kramer, L. 162 kulintjaku (to listen) 125, 129 Kungkayunti 124 kunta (shame, alienation) 33, 130 Lake Mackay Reserve 112 land (see also manta) 42, 75, 107137 land and Aboriginality 78-79 land rights 6, 56, 59, 79, 89, 90-92, 97, 138-42, 153 Langton, M. 50, 58, 78 language 53-54, 73, 75, 79, 108, 114-15, 140, 148 Lingiari, V. 139 Long, J. 25, 113, 120 Macintyre, S. 139-40 Mallett, M. 49

196

man& (land) 24, 42 Marcus, G.E. (et al) 98 Marsh, C.J. 132 matupurra (personal property) 119 mayatja (boss) 28, 43 McGrath, A. 158 McGuiness, B. 94 McKellar, H. 158 McNally, W. 5 McRae, D. 46 Miles, D. (et al) 86 Miller, J. 53-54 Miller, M. 169 Millirpum 139 mobility 109 Morgan, R.V. 53, 166, 172, 175 Morgan, S. 153, 158 Morphy, H. 41 Morris, B. 145 Moyle, R.M. 122 Muecke, S. 161 Muga, D. 77-80, 83 multiculturalism 71, 86, 87, 88, 92, 94, 172 Munn, N. 21 Myers, F.R. 7, 21, 25, 28, 31, 34, 109-13, 118, 122, 134, 138

Nairne, S. 40 Nangala, Irene Puntyjina 15, 27 Nangala, Monica Robinson 15, 19, 43, 130 Nangala, Tilau, Parker, 15 Napangati, Sarah Bruno 15, 19, 24, 30, 43, 130 Nathan, P. (et al) 120 National Aboriginal and 'Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (AEP) 37, 149, 168, 172-74 National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC) 47-48, 61, 88, 92, 148, 165, 175 nationalism 45, 60, 96 negotiation 4, 14, 27, 29-30, 36, 41, 60, 71, 102, 132

FROM THE CJLNTRE TO THE CITY

Nelson, F. 49 New Right 157, 168 New South Wales 47, 53, 144-46, 170 New South Wales curriculum 53, 61, 145 ngurra (place) 26, 31, 110, 125, 129-31 Nicholls, D. 145-46 nintirrinytjaku (to understand) 125, 129 Northern Territory 19, 47, 98, 158, 170 Northern Territory Department of Education 116 Northern Iten-itory Welfare Branch 112-14 nurturance 114, 128 outcomes 165-70, 172 outstations 6, 13, 119, 124, 128 Papunya 25-27, 34, 38, 107-108, 112-13, 121-23, 127 Parkes, L. (et al) 77 Participation and Equity Program (PEP) 47 Patten, J.T. 144-46 Pemulwy 61 Perkins, C. 50, 122 persistence 35, 90-94, 174 person 33-34, 41 Peterson, N. 21 petrol sniffing 26, 34 Pierson, J.C. 73, 81 Pintupi art 21-37 Pintupi history 22-29, 107-18 Pintupi values 21-37, 41, 107-20, 121-34 Pitiantjatjara 6 Pollard, D. 146 power 5, 6, 8, 30, 80, 83-84, 92, 101, 126, 147, 157, 161 privacy 109-13

INDEX

Queensland 5, 47, 56, 102, 157-58, 170 race 49, 59, 73, 76, 84, 89, 94, 101, 144, 149, 157 racism 56, 57, 65-69, 142, 149 Read, P. 50, 145-46 recognition 29-30, 68, 100, 137, 140, 143-44 relativism 112 resistance 29-30, 35, 46, 80, 88-94, 102, 142, 174 Riley-Mundine, L. 172 Rizvi, F. 175 Rose, J. (et al) 175 Roughsey, E. 158 Rowley, C.D. 139-42 Rowse, T. 25, 68-69, 79, 85, 113 Rubuntja, W. 92 Ryan, L. 156 Ryan, S. 46, 149, 154, 172 Said, A. (et al) 72 Salamone, F.A. (et al) 73 Sansom, B. 95 Schwab, J.J. 7 Schwab, J. 50 Seagrim, G.N. (et al) 114 self-determination (and selfmanagement) 23, 30, 93, 138, 164, 169, 173 Shirl, Mum 158 Simon, E. 146 Skilbeck, M. (et al) 83 Smith, K. 56 Snowdon, W. 81 socialisation 118, 132 songs 7, 9, 55, 92, 121-23, 159 South Australia 47, 170 sovereignty 56, 93, 137-38 Stannage, T. 155 Stanner, W.E.H. 78, 97, 142 Button, P. 21, 38 Tasmania 170 Ttitz, C. 88

197

tent embassy, 56, 92, 140, 143 Therborn, G. 91-93 Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson 40, 101 Tjamitjinpa, Kaapa, 34 Tjamitjinpa, Paul Bruno 15, 19 tjamu (grandfatherlgrandson, see also generations) 28 tjukurrpa (see also Dreaming) 24, 26, 31, 111 Tjungurrayi, Maantja 109 Tjungurrayi, Victor Robinson 10-11, 19, 43 Tjupurrula, Douglas Multa 15 Tonkinson, R. 7 treaty 153 tulku (songs, things from the Dreaming) 125, 129 two-way curriculum 133 Victoria 47 von Stunner, J. 95 Walungurru (see also Kintore) 1, 10, 19, 107, 118, 121-34 walypala (non-Aboriginal) 12, 21, 24-30, 126-34 walytja (family) 24, 26, 31, 110, 119, 125, 129 wampali (stranger) 110 Warlpiri 159-60 Warlukurlangu 35, 43 Warumpi Band 121-22, 131 Watson, L. 5 Watson, M. 50, 55 Watts, B.H. (et al) 115-16 West, E. 53 Western Australia 19 Western Desert languages 33 Whitlam, E.G. 115 Williams, D. (et al) 165 Williams, R. 5, 8, 95, 119 Willis, P. 14, 90 Willoughby, B. 55 Wilmott, E.P. 53 Windradyne 61

198

Winocur, S. 175 Wiradjuri 148 Woon 73 yanangu (person Aboriginal) 11-14, 24, 26, 29-32, 123-26, 148 yawngu and walypala cultural domains 12, 32, 60, 115-19, 122-34

FROM THE CENTRE TO THE CITY

Yayayi 27 Yeatman, A. 110 Yirrkala 41, 139-43 Yolngu 139 Yuendumu 35, 107, 121 Zakharov, J. 88