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Strangers in their own land - an extract

By Helen Hughes - posted Friday, 7 March 2008


I met Charlotte's mother, three years ago when she was making a rare visit to Sydney from a remote aboriginal community on a beautiful stretch of the East Arnhem Land coast, 200km from the nearest hospital, police station, high school and supermarket. It is a dry (alcohol-free) community. Let's call it Wangupeni.

Last year Charlotte's parents sent her to an Indigenous boarding school in Melbourne. She had been attending the Wangupeni school for nine years whenever it was open but in Melbourne she was unable to keep up in class. Teased by the other girls, she became miserable and returned home.

Now Charlotte's mother and father were worried about her future. Photographs showed a smiling, pretty, well-developed girl of 16. Could I help? I thought the transition from a remote community in East Arnhem Land to a Sydney harbourside suburb would be easier if Charlotte had a friend to share the experience, so her 15-year-old cousin Margaret is coming as well.

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At 17, barely older than her two pupils, Josephine, who is to tutor the two girls, is settling in. She has experience of remedial teaching in country Queensland where she has just finished high school. A Sydney Rotary Club that has been working in the Wangupeni community is providing support. Charlotte's parents, both urgently in need of medical attention, are bringing the girls to Sydney. They are being cared for by Rotary families who will also be mentors for the two girls throughout their stay.

There's a hubbub at the front door. The girls are very tired after their long journey. Speaking a few words of English is a major effort.

The first week is a chaos of medical and dental appointments interspersed with dinners with mentors and visits from parents to help Charlotte and Margaret adjust to Sydney. The girls have chest infections marked by painful coughs that quickly succumb to antibiotics.

The girls' latest model mobile telephones prove to be a lifeline to parents and friends at home. They can see them as well as talk to them. Recharging becomes critical with pocket money set at $30 a week. The girls are true children of welfare. In Wangupeni there are no jobs. Art is the only source of earned income.

We knew that the girls schooling had been far below mainstream standards. The community had been trying to get fulltime English-speaking teachers for years for its 60 or so school-age children because its own Indigenous head teacher and teaching aides were losing their English literacy and maths skills. “Seagull” teachers who flew in perhaps once, sometimes twice a week or not at all, supplemented the Indigenous teachers. The school operated two classes, one for 5-12 year-olds and one for 13-18 most days of the week.

Charlotte and Margaret had sat side by side in the senior class. Although Charlotte and Margaret were shy, particularly when it came to speaking English, Josephine and I had little trouble communicating with them. We noticed the girls used many English words speaking to each other in their own language. Our attempts to understand their language showed many English words in everyday use including fork, spoon, colours, numbers, non-Indigenous animals and anything mechanical.

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Although the girls had recently tested, together with all the other students at Wangupeni, at no higher than first year of formal schooling literacy, we were astonished by the limited number of words, poor spelling and the indiscriminate sprinkling of capital letters in the few sentences they were able to write to describe their journey to Sydney.

Reading was worse. Only with great assistance could they read The Cat in the Hat. Their capacity to add numbers petered out after about 12. Subtraction was even more difficult. They knew no multiplication tables. They had no mental arithmetic capacity. I had been aware that the Wangupeni school only operated for about two hours a day. Charlotte and Margaret exuded boredom with years of repetitive, automaton lessons.

We break lessons to go grocery shopping. The girls cannot read street signs like “caution” and “no left turn”. Bread, cakes and coffee were only read with help. The girls are embarrassed to be the only people on the street unable to read signs. It is soon evident that shopping for sweets, chips, trinkets, cosmetics, clothes and electronic gadgets is a passion that could take up all their time in Sydney.

Returning to school in the afternoon, their writing is very neat and clear. They have been copying words and numbers from the blackboard and in early childhood and primary language workbooks for years. These were based on large laminated textbooks. Aboriginal children are evidently not entitled to their own copy of a school text. The current text The World That We Want is a booklet about marine life for 5-9 year-olds.

Charlotte and Margaret know phrases and passages by heart from The World That We Want but they cannot read the text. After identifying an initial letter they have been taught to guess a word but not to read it. They are at early primary levels in spite of regular school attendance because they have been badly taught.

The girls have seen many violent films on DVD, they have watched the Fox channel with their families but they do not listen to the English dialogue. They could not remember any of the plots of the films they have seen. A partial exception was Ten Canoes, shown one evening by visiting missionaries. We try watching television, without success. Going to films is not a great success because of the girls limited English. When they watch films in the evening on the computer in their room, they turn the sound down so as not to be disturbed by the English voices.

Writing, reading and arithmetic do not turn out be Charlotte's and Margaret's principal learning difficulties. Years of sitting in undisciplined classes that made no attempt to tailor learning to age and level of learning, and that had no progression of learning, had numbed their minds. They are overwhelmed by a world of signs and print of which they can make no sense and that they have not been led to want to understand. Most of the time it appears that they do not care whether they understand or not: the task seems so far beyond their grasp.

In a bookshop they reject buying Storm Boy because they know it has been made into a film. They say they do not need to learn to read books because there is always a film.

After years of Wangupeni schooling, Charlotte and Margaret have the concentration span of pre-schoolers. How can they ever relate to a normal high school or a job? Yet Charlotte wants to be a teacher and Margaret wants to work in an office.

I buy a map of the world. Charlotte and Margaret find Australia, know some states and the Northern Territory and can find Darwin, Cairns and Sydney. They do not know what capital of Australia means or what and where it is. We find pictures of Parliament House in Canberra. The girls do not know any other country, continent or ocean. They have no idea what these words mean.

The girls know of the equator but no other geography. They have not heard of Captain Cook. They thought a left-over election poster of Kevin Rudd is George Bush.

The Wangupeni school was given half a dozen computers. They were locked away most of the time. The girls enjoy playing solitaire. We trail cables round the house so that we have two computers set up with Internet access and e-mail addresses.

Every day we practise using e-mails and becoming familiar with Google. We use DVDs as learning supplements. Josephine finds a maths game she can play with Charlotte and Margaret, each of the three girls competing at her own maths level. We get multiplication tables on DVDs.

We go to a local cafe for a snack. The mentors take Charlotte and Margaret out for a restaurant meal. The girls are wonderful guests, appreciative of every meal, but they are unable to read menus. They head for the familiar KFC or McDonald's where they can read chips and other items, though not the recently introduced health foods.

Having settled an intensive schooling program, we expand our horizons. To supplement their pocket money I find jobs they can do round the house to earn $12 an hour. Thinking of Margaret's wish to become an office worker, I drag out a pile of neglected newspapers that have been set aside for cuttings to be clipped, dated and sorted in chronological order. The girls are not used to using scissors, just as the Rotarians found that the girls' brothers and cousins were not used to handling hammers, screwdrivers or any other tools and could not read tape measures. The girls cannot read enough of the newspaper titles and columns to know where a topic starts and ends. I have to draw the outline of each cutting to make this office task work. We make a game of filing the cuttings by date.

The girls choose some spotted material to make simple tops because I promised Charlotte's mother I would teach the girls to sew. The girls do not know how to use a tape measure. We put measurements and fractions on the school agenda. The sewing project arose out of the Wangupeni women's expressed desire to earn more money than they can from the attractive, but low-paying, jewellery they make from shells for distant tourist shops. Sewing clothes and silk-screening fabrics have been proposed. Without workshop space that will keep out dust in the dry season and damp in the wet, without dressmaking and commercial art skills, without basic literacy and numeracy, I think this is day-dreaming. Yet Wangupeni is so well situated that with mainstream economic development it could become one of the prosperous seaside communities of the Australian coastline.

We turn to painting boxes and discs for Christmas and other thankyou presents for the Rotary families taking Charlotte and Margaret to galleries, museums and sailing and who will be their hosts on Christmas Day and for New Year's Eve. Although the girls have not had art classes and appear to have almost no experience with brushes and paints beyond kindergarten-level colouring in their workbooks, they take to this like ducks to water.

They produce a range of colourful sets of coasters and knickknack boxes, some with geometric designs and some with traditional trees and animals. I am particularly taken with a bush turkey with a wicked look in its eye. After several evenings work, all these are lacquered and wrapped ready for the festive season.

We make the family Christmas cake. The girls cannot read the recipe but I go through it carefully, hoping they can see that once they can read they can cook anything they like. They are not convinced. I can see the girls thinking: why is this crazy woman going to all this unnecessary work when she can buy a perfectly good Christmas cake in the shop?

The girls miss their families and friends. It is evident that Charlotte and Margaret have been well brought up in loving families. They like to have fun, they can be boisterous, often laugh raucously, and they are warm and responsive. Swimming proves to be a favourite pastime. The girls tell us that strict dress codes are observed. Teenage girls do not walk around in bathing costumes. Social relations between boys and girls, men and women, are regulated. There is no violence. Language and traditions are treasured and taught to youngsters. Wangupeni artists have developed a style that is featured in the Quai Branly Museumin Paris. The community has been mined by anthropologists, linguists, film-makers and others dependent on Indigenous culture for their livelihood.

Charlotte's mobile phone does not work. Josephine digs out the packaging in which the phone came, reads the warranty instruction, looks up the nearest Telstra phone outlet and checks its location on the Internet, and the three young women troop off to the railway station to get the phone fixed. For Charlotte and Margaret, almost the same age, the obstacles to having the phone fixed would be insuperable. They would have to throw the phone away and buy a new one.

Ten weeks of tuition have enabled them to advance two years, though they are still in the early years of primary literacy. We think they have made even better progress in arithmetic. Charlotte and Margaret cannot be asked to sit in a mainstream class of 6-7 year-olds in a real primary school. Equally, they cannot be set up to fail by being placed in the high school Year 11 and 12 classes of their ages. TAFE introductory, catch-up Year 10 classes for youngsters who have dropped out of high school would be too difficult for them until they develop their learning skills and improve their English. Paradoxically, the best way for them to catch up is likely to be to sit with immigrants or foreign students coming to Australia to learn English. The girls are not alone. There are at least 20 teenagers in their situation in their community alone.

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First published in The Australian on February 27, 2008. The names of the girls and their community have been changed to protect their identities. This is an edited extract of Strangers in their own country by Centre for Independent Studies senior fellow Helen Hughes, to be published in March 3 edition of Quadrant.



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About the Author

Professor Helen Hughes AO is a senior fellow of the Centre for Independent Studies.

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