When literacy can mean life - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jeff McMullen
WHEN MY AMRICAN-BORN WIFE, KIM HOGGARD, TRAVELLED THROUGH the heartland of Australia, she too found it hard to believe that we expect Aboriginal children to somehow learn and thrive living in Third World conditions. My children, Claire and Will were astonished to discover that most remote communities had no doctors, pharmacies or even decent, affordable food. A shack with a broken stove and fridge, plumbing blocked and in disrepair, a shower in a lean-to at the rear and sometimes fifteen to twenty people sleeping on mattresses inside, is not a place most of us would like to call home.
For children who have always had books and library cards, it was unsettling for Claire and Will to discover homes without books and no public libraries in many Aboriginal communities. Without any prompting from Kim and me, they went looking for suitable books for the youngest children. They painted boxes and wrote letters to the kids and sent them off to an Aboriginal teacher, Lorraine Bennet, who used an old tin shed to start the first preschool in Wugularr. Soon after, the children followed up with more books, early-learning toys and sporting goods sent to Mavis Jumbiri and Yve Weinberg, teachers staffing a new school at Manyallaluk, further east on the dirt track.
Publishers and booksellers began to join this effort. In 2004, Suzy Wilson from Riverbend Books in Brisbane heard of the children's actions and approached me with the idea of establishing a Reader's Challenge to try to build a bridge between children in remote communities and other young Australians. The Readers Challenge was started with the support of the Fred Hollows Foundation to help get books into remote communities, at the same time as encouraging children to read. This extends nationwide in 2006, when the Australian Readers' Challenge is launched in March (www.readerschallenge.com). What the schools in remote areas still desperately need is more helping hands and, in particular, more tutors to give Aboriginal students the time needed to catch up on so much learning. We could do with a whole peace corps if only suitably qualified people could be trained and then display the commitment to pitch camp to help Australia's forgotten children discover the power of literacy.
After the Sydney Olympics, Ian Thorpe established a foundation to support research and treatment to alleviate childhood illness. It soon became clear to him that for indigenous children the key to good health was education. Providing appropriate resources for early learning and for young mothers in remote communities has become a focus of Ian's Fountain for Youth trust. With over half a million dollars raised from the public, another one million has been committed to this education work by the federal government. A new project is Literacy Backpacks for the Jawoyn communities. The backpacks are filled with good reading for all members of the family and include newspapers, magazines and audio books (www.ianthorpesfountainforyouth.com.au).
There is a challenge here, of course, that goes well beyond the first steps of providing the tools to increase literacy. First you have to dismantle the system of silent apartheid that keeps remote communities separated, isolated and impoverished. While the incoming federal president of the ALP, Warren Mundine, argues for a move to far greater private land ownership, Mick Dodson counters that communal land ownership is a central tenet of Aboriginality. Each man commands respect in what is developing as another crucial debate over how to change the structures of disadvantage.
But consider this. Both men have the power to articulate these choices in the future course of indigenous life because each has had a first-rate education. The unfinished business of treaties, land ownership and rights to resources no doubt will be passed to a new generation of indigenous men and women. While governments of the day and society itself may swing between the usual inflexible policy choices of assimilation or separation, only indigenous leaders of great power of mind and the very best education have any chance of successful negotiation. With this in mind, we must not delay in taking action to improve the education of indigenous children, because literacy will mean life. ♦