Australian Indigenous Education

After just a week in Australia, documentary film-maker Louis Theroux is surprised at how invisible the Indigenous community is.

“I’ve been struck by how I’ve been here for nearly a week now and I feel I’ve clapped eyes on maybe one or two Indigenous people,” the British journalist told Guardian Australia from Melbourne where he is appearing in his first national speaking tour, Louis Theroux Live.

“But the condition of the Indigenous people of Australia is massively fascinating. I’d like to see how they are living; the experience of racial mixing or conflict such as it is and where it is taking place.”

Songlines, sometimes called dreaming tracks, crisscross Australia and trace the journeys of ancestral spirits as they created the land, animals and lore.

The way songlines are depicted vary between language groups, depending on how active language is for the community.

Songlines can be called "an ecological ribbon of knowledge," Monash University's Associate Professor John Bradley said.

Around Australia, young Indigenous people approach their heritage in different ways.

Indigenous youth from Wilcannia are hoping to challenge preconceptions about their town through a hip-hop music video.

Local organisations in the far west New South Wales town are helping students plan, script and record the video, which incorporates the Barkindji language.

Production company Desert Pea Media is working with the Warra Warra Legal Service to help about 15 high school students bring their ideas to life.

Warra Warra Legal Service principal solicitor Eliza Hull said the students were passionate about challenging negative stereotypes about the town.

It’s never been a more exciting time to be a linguist working with Australian Indigenous languages – at least according to linguist Murray Garde.

When the languages of Australia’s first peoples are spoken in prominent public settings, it often makes national headlines. In February the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, spoke Ngunawal to deliver the Closing the Gap report (which showed little progress in reaching targets).

Turnbull’s speech came within days of the Northern Territory MLA Bess Price objecting to not being allowed to speak her first language of Warlpiri in parliament – even if it was just a throwaway retort to the opposition.

The Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair is full of fantastic art, crafts and merchandise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists have created. Consumers can buy these artworks with confidence and with the knowledge that the artworks are being sold ethically and are authentically made.

However if the same consumers were to go into town and into a shop marketed at tourists, it suddenly becomes very difficult to know what is real and what is fake ‘Indigenous’ artwork.

Ayres said that the signed letter outlining these concerns will be sent to Ministers Mitch Fifield, Federal Minister for the Arts, and Senator Nigel Scullion, Minister responsible for Indigenous Affairs.

‘There have been a couple of cases that have come to Court that have identified how weak the laws are.’

A digitised mental health screening program which aims to assess the social and emotional wellbeing of pregnant Aboriginal women is to be piloted in Western Australia.

The program, called 'Baby Coming - You Ready?', invites expectant parents to choose images they strongly connect with from a series of illustrations, to help identify areas of support they may need and to flag mental health issues.

Like jazz and baseball, comic book superheroes are often considered a uniquely American art form, created in the depths of the Great Depression to respond to the challenges of the Machine Age. Today superheroes dominate movie marquees and television schedules.

Yet, while audiences are lining up for the latest Captain America film, a new Australian superhero is coming to our TVs on June 2. Cleverman blends Aboriginal mythology with contemporary superhero style and cutting political commentary. I sat down with cast and crew to talk about Australia’s first Aboriginal superhero.

Australians have become oddly obsessed with our ancestry. Something in our collective psyche as a nation seems to be turning a healthy curiosity about the past into a deep yearning to belong. What’s fuelling…

We struggle with our history because once we admit it, we have nowhere to go with it; no way of rehabilitating our pride; no way of understanding ourselves. As a nation, we lack a national mythology that can cope with our shortcomings. That transforms our historical scars into fatal psychological wounds, leaving us with a bizarre need to insist everything was – and is – as good as it gets.

That's the true meaning of the love-it-or-leave-it ethos that so stubbornly persists. We don't want to be improved in any thorough way, because for us that seems to imply thorough imperfections.

Instead, we want to be praised, to be acknowledged as a success. It's a kind of national supplication, a constant search for validation. And history's fine, as long as it serves that purpose. But if it dares step out of line, it can expect to be slapped swiftly with the Sandilands dictum until it changes the subject: "you're full of shit, just get on with life". Then we can be comfortable again.

Technology is being harnessed in new and amazing ways to bring history and heritage to life for younger generations.

Australia’s Aboriginal people have already been using the tag of “world’s oldest living culture” before given scientific confirmation in a recent study of the DNA of Australia’s Indigenous people. One likely response to the finding from the subjects of the research is a satisfied, “I told you so”.

Scientific research often reaffirms what is in an oral history. This has been particularly so in Australia where cultural stories – often referred to as Dreamtime stories – that describe land movements and floods fit in with what later becomes known about seismic and glacial shifts from the geological record. For example, Associate Professor Nick Reid and Professor Patrick D. Nunn have analysed stories from Indigenous coastal communities and have seen a thread of discussions about the rise of tidal waters that occurred between 6,000 and 7,000 years ago. And these are the newer stories.

Sydney’s Balarinji studio will light up the sails of Sydney Opera House with Indigenous designs created for the competition wear of our Rio2016 Paralympians. It is an historic first for any Australian team at an Olympic Games, to define its look with Indigenous imagery. 
 
The Australian Paralympic Committee commissioned the designs from Balarinji, the design team best known for covering Qantas aircraft with Aboriginal art.
 
'It has been a total privilege for Balarinji to create textile designs for Australia’s brilliant Rio2016 Paralympians. We are delighted these amazing athletes will celebrate our nation’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait cultural heritage on the world stage. We hope they will feel the support of the whole country when they see our art lighting up Sydney Opera House," said Balarinji Managing Director, Ros Moriarty.

The first Indigenous person to graduate as a nurse and the man who turned a small Aboriginal dance company into an internationally-recognised organisation are among the Indigenous Australians honoured at this year's NAIDOC Awards in Darwin.

The award for Female Elder of the Year was handed to MaryAnn Bin-Sallik who was the first Aboriginal nurse graduate.

Ms Bin-Sallik began training as a nurse in Darwin at the age of 17 and was the first Indigenous person to complete a doctorate at Harvard University.

There is plenty of evidence to show Australia's Indigenous people had ways of counting big numbers, yet the myth persists they couldn't count more than a handful of things. Why?

A GROWING need for more culturally inclusive mental health services has led headspace Fremantle to develop a new program to help indigenous youth connect with their culture.

The Wellness Through Connection to Country program aims to give local indigenous youth easier access to cultural activities, mentoring and learning their ancestral language.

Abstract


We collapse as a society when we subsume to a capitalist state of apathetic consumerism. Our collective apathy is a contemporaneous colonialism and when we care only enough to re-share a post in online social media of the atrocities happening in our society, in our prisons, in our communities then we have remained assimilated, mute. As hordes of the population trample gardens in the pursuit of Google controlled Pokemon's, as we push ahead in the queue for sauce smothered hot dogs at the Lego convention, there is a failure, a glitch in the reality fabric of our virtual addicted society if the 2016 Don Dale detention saga that continues to unfurl is seen as an isolated incident.

Indigenous model Samantha Harris will launch this year's Face of Cairns Central competition with a selfie signing event on July 5. Photo by Simon Upton.
A CAIRNS shopping centre has recruited the help of one of the biggest names in the Australian fashion industry to unearth the country’s next top model.

Samantha Harris will travel to Cairns next month to launch this year’s Face of Cairns Central competition with a selfie signing event in the centre on July 5.

While the Australian Law Reform Commissions’s 1986 report on the use of customary law for Aboriginal people was a great initiative, it was, in hindsight, a notion well before its time. Although 30 years have elapsed since the report was published, its recommendations have, by and large, been ignored.

Few in Australia understand the context and true meaning of customary law. Denials of its validity are often based on ignorance or on specific examples devoid of context; the severity of “spearing” for example, as being contrary to human rights norms.
This is akin to rejecting the common law based solely on, say, the use of lethal injections to execute prisoners in the United States.

Indigenous people in Australia and New Zealand, despite the distance separating them and varying histories, have one disturbing issue in common: poor health.

Across Indigenous Australia, innovation is occurring locally, under the radar of government policies and support. We can look to this innovation and stop fixating on finding the elusive policy solution.

The app. uses the GPS function of the iPhone to deliver a Welcome to Country video (or text/image version) to the user via a push notification. Where available within a tribal boundary^, the video will be of a traditional owner (or elder) welcoming the user/visitor to their country when the user enters that tribal geo-boundary^.

The app. educates the user on the Traditional Owners' culture and heritage protocols right across the Australia. It gives the user a solid appreciation of the many cultures and languages groups that exist in Indigenous Australia. The app. also teaches users some simple, relevant information about Indigenous culture and the customs of the tribe within that tribal geo boundary. As such, the Welcome to Country iPhone app. can be used by tourists, schools, employers, government departments, by tourism bodies and many other user groups and individuals.