By Warrigal Mirriyuula

There’s a kerfuffle going on at the moment up in The Northern Territory and like a lot of things Territorian it seems this one is also a fundamental disconnect between the whitefellas and the blackfellas.

You see, as part of Rudd’s much-spruiked but as yet unseen Education Revolution it has been decided, in consultation with the NT Parliament, that the kids of blackfellas are effectively illiterate because English is their second language and they don’t do so well on standardised tests used to determine literacy in white schools. Hardly surprising you say and of course you’d be right.

Age appropriate tests in their indigenous languages shows the kids to be just as bright and eager to learn as white kids in eastern schools. Funny that.

So what’s the kerfuffle about? Well it’s now been decided that the previous policy of bi-lingual language classes will be scrapped and all indigenous children will be taught in English exclusively for the first four hours of the school day. For those students for whom English is entirely foreign, and that’s lots of NT blackfellas, there will be indigenous interpreters to help students with little or no English skills. Not so radical you might say, given that if those kids want to integrate into the broader Australian society they’re going to need substantial English language skills.

Early indications however are that in those schools where this policy has already been implemented the children are voting with their feet. By the end of those four hours the classrooms are almost empty. In those schools, which are resisting the introduction of the policy, attendance is up

Where the children are taught in their first language and English is only taught after the kids have a sufficient grip on the grammar, vocabulary and narrative development of their own language, the literacy outcomes for both their own languages and English are improved significantly with students fluently using both their own language and English better. Sounds “win/win” to me.

So why, as Professor Charles Grimes and The Australian Society for Indigenous Languages suggest, has this anti intuitive course been charted. Beats the shit outa me, and the good Prof. too. Apparently it also caused Marion Scrygmour, The former NT Education Minister, some trouble. She admitted to Dr. Brian Devlin of Charles Darwin Uni.’s language department that the policy was made too quickly.

She said, ‘Look, I fucked up’,” Dr Devlin reported, but apparently not so badly that this dumb and damaging policy be dumped and the former bi-lingual process be reinstituted.

” I think what she was referring to is that there was a lack of consultation beforehand and that the application of her four-hour English directive of October the 14th had many unintended consequences.”

“It had certainly put her offside with traditional Indigenous people out in the communities.” the good Prof went on to say. Scrygmour is an indigenous woman herself, so this just gets curiouser and curiouser.

There is a groundswell of opinion suggesting that there are many factors not related to education including health and home conditions that affect school results.

“You could say as a ballpark figure that 80 to 90 per cent of the kids at this school would have a hearing impairment of the middle ear, infections or perforated eardrums at some time in their school career,” said the acting principal of the Lajamanu school, John Lane.

“The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People says that Indigenous people, minority people, have the right to decide the way that they have their own education, including the role of their own language in that.” Says Prof. Grimes. Pity policy makers haven’t read that declaration recently.

As any one who has ever had to learn a language will tell you, learning a foreign language is difficult because you have to understand it by deconstructing your understanding of your own first language. If, however, you have little or no understanding of the structure and dynamics of your own language, learning another will be effectively nearly impossible

At this time there are very few surviving indigenous languages that are used in a traditional cultural and social setting on an everyday basis and most of these are in the NT. Recent studies have shown that at this time indigenous languages are just managing to hold their own against English, but there can be no doubt that if this “English First” policy continues the number of languages and the speakers of those languages will decline.

As well as being comprehensively ill informed, this policy is simply racist. It’s more “pillow softening” and seems to assume that indigenous languages are somehow second rate. It constitutes a fundamental attack on what it means to be indigenous in this country. It is Orwellian in that it seeks to limit and control the language tools available to describe the complex relationships in indigenous society and the relationship between indigenous society and the broader Australian society. Something which their own languages do very well, certainly better than English ever could.

There are many aspects of indigenous life and experience, religion and cosmology, let alone their prodigious understanding of Australian ecology, that simply cannot be translated directly into English without losing depth and complexity. Should the day come when there are simply no indigenous speakers left we will all, whitefellas and blackfellas, be forever and irrevocably separated from that experience and cosmology, that understanding. Its meaning and utility will be lost forever.

The indigenous people of this continent have, over more than 60K years, made Australia penetrable, open to understanding and it is in their languages that the last vestiges of that understanding are to be found. To allow this policy to contribute to the continuing decline of indigenous diversity and self expression would seem an act of the most heartless and stupid “ethnic cleansing by neglect”, and the very people so cleansed would have no means to critique their circumstances, except of course in English.

What would it then mean to be a blackfella, if you had no way of accessing the fundamental tools that make that meaning real and define who you are?  By making English the de facto indigenous language we are saying that there’s nothing worth saving and keeping in any of the remaining indigenous languages struggling to be heard against the white paradigm; and that’ll break blackfellas hearts all over again, all over the country.

Like I said, it just beats the shit outa me.