Two-Way Aboriginal Schooling: Education and Cultural Survival

TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

STEPHEN HARRIS

TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING EDUCATION AND CULTURAL SURVIVAL

m ABORIGINAL SE

STUDIES PRESS Canberra 1990

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1990 BY

Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies GPO Box 553, Canberra A m 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; nor the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training that generously supported the research on which this book is based. 0 STEPHEN HARRIS 1990.

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 AUSTRALL4 CATWGUINGIN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Harris, Stephen, 1942Two-way Aboriginal schooling: education and cultural survival. Bibliography. ISBN 0 85575 218 1.

[l]. Aborigines, Australian - Education. 2. Intercultural education - Australia 3. Biculturalism - Australia. I. Title.

DESIGNED BY Aboriginal Studies Press. TYPESET IN Compugraphic Century Schoolbook by Aboriginal Studies Press. PRINTED IN AUSTRALL4 BY Griffin Press, Netley SA.

Foreword Preface Acknowledgements CHAPTER I

CULTURES IN CONTACT

CHAPTER 2

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

CHAP~ER 3

BICULTURALISM EXAMINED

C

~

E 4 RORAL

LANGUAGE USE

CHAPTER 5

BICULTURALISM, SEMANTICS AND LITERACY

CHAPTER 6

THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF CURRICULUM PLANNING

C m E R7

CURRICULUM DESIGN

CHAPTER 8

OUTSIDERS IN SOCIAL CHANGE References

MAP 1 ABORIGINAL RESERVES AND REMOTE COMMUNITII Bathurst

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ABORIGINAL RESERVES REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

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For Nell Harrig pioneer school teacher in Arnhem Land.

FOREWORD

BEFORE SETTLING DOWN TO READ a book it is often useful to discover how it came into being. We think it especially important for readers to understand how this book came to be written, and so we share the story of its origins. Staff of the South Australian Education Department and the School of Education at Flinders University have been working together on research and development projects in Aboriginal education for over twenty years. On the occasion of one of our joint planning meetings in 1985, the question came up informally during a coffee break: Whose writings have had the greatest impact in the field of Aboriginal education? There was surprising unanimity around the table-we all agreed that during the preceding five years the work of Stephen Harris had provoked the most debate, analysis and change. In some ways Stephen is an unlikely candidate for such an accolade. Of unassuming demeanour and disarming honesty, he readily admits that he would far rather be out riding a horse and mustering cattle than sitting a t a desk writing papers. Furthermore, he has little formal classroom teaching experience, having entered the world of education initially through vernacular literacy programs and later as an educational anthropologist. Yet the outcomes of his doctoral research at Milingimbi and his subsequent work in bilingual education were having a very significant educational impact during the early and mid-1980s. As the meeting resumed and the coffee cups were cleared away, someone else raised the question: Why couldn't we invite Stephen Harris to Adelaide for a few months, to join us in ongoing research? There was general nodding of heads around the table, but the idea quickly became submerged in the business of the day. Some weeks later, however, one member of the group, Professor Colin Power, happened to be visiting Darwin and called to see Stephen to raise the idea of an Adelaide-based project. The response was positive, and during the course of the following year plans took firmer shape. After some discussion among the Adelaide group about possible projects, we decided to ask Stephen himself what he would most prefer to do. The response was immediate-he would like to explore the theoretical analysis of the concept of Aboriginal bicultural or two-way schooling and its implications for classroom practice. There was strong support for this idea, so together we developed a detailed project proposal. To our delight the Commonwealth Schools Commission responded positively and after the inevitable bureaucratic delays a grant was made available through its Projects of National Significance program. The Flinders University

Research Committee also recognised the potential of the study and provided supplementary funding, thus allowing us to offer Stephen a full-time position as Research Fellow in Education for twelve months in 1987. A small support group was formed to work with Stephen, and regular workshops and discussions were held as the year progressed. Our chief concern was to encourage Stephen to write from his own experience. We did not want yet another learned academic treatise based on the reworking of others' ideas. Rather, we hoped to give Stephen the freedom to document his own theories and intuitions about Aboriginal education. The finished manuscript, we suggested, should be a personal account drawing on his own experiences as the primary data source. It was not until we started working with Stephen that we realised just how unique and varied his life experiences had been. His parents worked for over thirty years with the Church Missionary Society in northern Australia; his father as a stockman, buffalo shooter and sawmiller, and later as an Anglican priest; his mother as a teacher. Stephen spent most of his childhood in Aboriginal communities at Oenpelli, Roper River and Groote Eylandt. After secondary school and university in Sydney, Stephen returned to the north where he managed a cattle project at Oenpelli, spending most days working in the bush with the stockmen. It is these early experiences that undoubtedly nurtured Stephen's commitment to Aboriginal people and give his writings such authenticity and authority. His perceptiveness and sensitivity when crossing cultural boundaries are quite remarkable. At a wider level Stephen also trained as an applied linguist and spent some time in the highlands of Papua New Guinea as a literacy worker. Graduate study took him to New Mexico where he had extensive opportunities to visit American Indian communities and learn of their approaches to education. These broader cross-cultural experiences have provided a comparative perspective that gives depth to his analyses of Aboriginal education. Stephen developed the line of thinking which emerges in this book during eight years as an adviser in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal bilingual education program between 1978 and 1985. During his time at Flinders University, Stephen worked in a sustained and disciplined way, and by the end of November 1987 he had produced the first draft of the present volume. He then returned to the Top End where he is now Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Education and Applied Linguistics in the Faculty of Education, Northern Territory University. Regrettably there have been several delays in revising the manuscript for publication, and we are grateful for the continued support of the Department of Employment, Education and Training and Aboriginal Studies Press in seeing it through to its present form.

This book is an important one. It is in tune with the directions being taken by many Aboriginal groups in central and northern Australia, especially those that have assumed full control over their children's education. The concept of twoway schooling is a slowly emerging reality in many places, one of the exciting features being the diversity of the two-way models that are developing. We believe this book is worthy of careful study by everyone involved in Aboriginal education, not as a recipe for successful schools nor a blueprint for curriculum development, but as a catalyst for further discussion and debate. We hope it can help to affirm and empower Aboriginal people by opening up a wider set of options as they make decisions about school organisation and curriculum content and process. PAUL HUGHES AND BOB TEASDALE Adelaide, December 1989

PREFACE

THE IMPETUS FOR WRITING THIS BOOK book gradually developed over a decade of involvement in the Northern Territory Aboriginal bilingual education program. During that time awareness grew that bilingual education, while a marked improvement on previous schooling approaches, was neither structurally nor theoretically sufficient to deal with the major dilemma of Aboriginal schoolingthat academic success in the Western school system could seriously undermine Aboriginal identity. During the decade of this book's gestation, Aboriginal education has become a minefield for non-Aborigines who wish to write about it in any potentially controversial way. This is a positive change because it results from increased power on the part of Aboriginal people who have come to openly resent whites speaking on their behalf or telling them what's best for them educationally. The main intended audience for this book, therefore, includes non-Aboriginal teachers, teacher trainees and educational administrators. While Aborigines need to become and should be the main players in Aboriginal education, they still make up, in the Northern Territory for example, less than 10 per cent of the fully-qualified teachers in Aboriginal schools. Thus the further preparation and informed cooperation of non-Aboriginal educators remains crucial. Very little has been written in English language scholarship about bicultural education except in a shallow form as an automatic part of bilingual education, which is so often referred to simplistically as bilingual/bicultural education. This book is designed to stimulate discussion and debate, mainly between non-Aboriginal educators, about a deeper form of bicultural education, and especially to help teachers in Aboriginal schools clarify their roles and priorities in ways that will promote greater Aboriginal influence over their schooling. This book, then, is primarily theoretical. It implies that a theory of biculturalism which would apply to representatives of two major world cultures in contact which have similar world views and economy, may not be an appropriate theory for two cultures in contact where the population size, world view, political system and economic structure are highly divergent. It is not a book about Aboriginal education as such, nor even a book about Aboriginalisation of schoolsan issue which is of great current interest and importance. It does not even attempt a comprehensive survey of those schools trying to be 'two-way'. It is selective, aiming merely to develop the theory of a schooling for simultaneous Aboriginal cultural maintenance and academic success.

This study is limited to schools in isolated, remote areas where Aboriginal people, while changing, still experience varying degrees of traditional orientation (see Map). It includes schools in communities in which Aborigines are in the majority; where an Aboriginal language is spoken by all age groups; where social organisation still largely determines appropriate behaviours, such as marriage arrangements; where religious consciousness and its supporting ceremonies are still present and practised; and where the group still lives on or has unrestricted access to its traditional land. At the time of the 1986 Census, there were 227,645 Aborigines in Australia, slightly more than half of them under twenty years of age. About 66 per cent or 150,000 were living in urban centres, the remaining 34 per cent or 80,000 were in rural or remote areas. Roughly half of the latter might be said to be in remote areas and fall within the scope of this book. This book is a distillation of personal speculation and intuition resulting from lengthy personal experience in remote Aboriginal settlements and Aboriginal education, a broad but selective use of well-established educational, sociological and sociolinguistic theory, and anecdotes related to Aboriginal schools. It is thus a fairly subjective book, but I believe one which reflects a trained and well-advised subjectivity. The late Miles Zintz, one of the first to write about cross-cultural education in the USA, said to me a couple of years ago: 'It's time you stopped depending so much on what various "experts" write. Just go ahead and write what you believe yourself.' That has been done. But where research evidence is available, full use has been made of it. While admittedly unsatisfactory, the terms 'remote' or 'traditionallyoriented' Aborigines and 'urban' Aborigines are used simply because no satisfactory contemporary generic terms have been developed which fit all over Australia. Noone has found terms which meet the old urban-traditional-ruralAboriginal naming dilemma the way Koori, Murri and Nyoonga have met regional naming needs elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT not only of my experience and effort but also of the goodwill of a number of people. I wish to record my gratitude for all Providential oversight in every activity, personal contact and financial provision which made this study possible. I especially thank my wife, Joy, for all her support and particularly her thorough editing of the manuscript at the end of 1989 after the book was accepted for publication. I thank Bob Teasdale for seeing through the application for funding for the year's Research Fellowship at Flinders University of South Australia in 1987 which allowed this book to be written, for checking the final draft and for bothering about my personal welfare in a strange city. The larger portion of the Research Fellowship was funded by the Commonwealth Schools Commission Projects of National Significance, and the balance by research fellowship funds from the University itself. I am grateful to both sources of funding. I was fortunate in my advisory panel: Dr Bob Teasdale (cross-cultural education and developmental psychology); Professor Colin Power (curriculum theory and evaluation); Dr Deirdre Jordan (sociology and sociology of education); Paul Hughes (administration of Aboriginal education and Aboriginal perspectives on schooling) and Dr Ross Bensley (anthropology and cross-cultural communication). The panel reacted to the drafts of my material helpfully and they were approachable people who cared about Aboriginal self-determination. More importantly to the task in hand, they encouraged me to write as much from my own experience, convictions and intuitions, as from theoretical precedent. A number of friends who have worked in a range of remote Aboriginal settlements read part or all of my first draft. I thank John Bucknall, Cos and Sue Russo, Michael Christie, Christine Walton, Mary Macken, Beth Graham, Mary-Anne Gale, Rob Amery, Brian Devlin, Fran Murray and Merridy Malin for their critical feedback. I thank Margaret Allen, John Greatorex, Paul and Anne Eckert, Jirn and Marj Marsh, John Heffernan, Noel Coutts, Peter Jones and Greg Jarvis for the valuable information they provided about contemporary remote Aboriginal priorities. I also thank Charlie Djordila, Milak Wynungqj and Charles Missi, students at the South Australian Institute of Technology, for their views about two-way education. I am grateful to Michael Hays for doing considerable background reading in search of precedents for people living satisfactorily in two cultures. I was encouraged by the number of scholars both in Australia and North America whose work I had found helpful in the past, who replied to my letters or shared their own views and provided helpful references related to my topic. XV

I wish to express special appreciation to the late Miles Zintz, whom I loved as a mentor, Joshua Fishman, Christina Bratt Paulston, Ruqaiya Hasan, Rudolph Troike, James Cummins, Nancy Hornberger, Shirley Brice Heath, Bernard Spolsky, Michael Halliday, Frances Christie, Barbara Sayers, Patrick McConvell, Paul Black, Marta Rado, Courtney Cazden, Wayne Holm, Ann Daniel, Lillian Weber and Mitsuru Shirnpo. I thank Margaret Sandow, Paula Bracken, Laurel Davies, Margaret Douglas, Beverly Palmer and Angie Padfield for their patient typing, and Debbie Canty for drawing the map; and the staff of Aboriginal Studies Press for their careful editing and production work on this book. In spite of the assistance given by those recorded above, I take full responsibility for the views expressed in this book.

CHAPTER

CULTURES CONTACT THIS BOOK HAS THREE MAIN THEMES: a recognition, a dilemma and a vision. The recognition is that Aborigines are not migrating, they are here to stay and they want to retain their identity. The essence of this continuity is expressed powerfully by Stanner (1979, 60) when he says: 'The Aborigines are widely in an obscure struggle with us...the essence of their struggle is to go their own way.' The dilemma is that Aborigines in remote communities want their children to learn the three Rs and to grow up Aboriginal. But if these children succeed in the Western school system, this is likely to be at serious cost to their Aboriginal culture under the present school structure. The vision is that schools can be structured so that the new skills learned from another culture can be added to a person's primary cultural makeup, rather than displace it. This vision of a bicultural person who does not necessarily become less of a person in terms of the first culture is expressed in graphic terms by McFee (1975, 21) when writing about Blackfoot Indians: a man [or woman] is more than a culture container. If, by one measure, he scores 75 % on an Indian scale we should not expect him to be limited to a 25% measure on another scale. Contemplation of this 'container' metaphor led me to call these bicultural cases the 150% men. The struggle against cultural absorption, the felt need of Aborigines to live in two social worlds, and the search for a design of bicultural school which allows the learning of a second culture without destroying or demeaning the first, are the interests of this book. It is true that sound theory leads to sound practice, but theory should be altered in the light of experience. If an approach is not producing the desired results, it is hardly wise to redouble efforts in the same direction. Some of the major axioms derived from this current body of experience are that Aboriginal culture, while changing, is not a temporary or passing phenomenon. Also, Aboriginal groups vary in the degree to which their culture operates as a source of positive identity, happiness, stability and self-determination. Furthermore, schools can be a powerful positive or negative influence in this context and teachers in Aboriginal schools, usually European Australians, are one of the largest Western influences in even the most remote Aboriginal settlements and potentially one of the most destructive of Aboriginal culture. Experience has also shown that Aboriginal schools, in spite of much genuine effort, are generally failing to produce students competent in the three

2

TWO-WW ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

Rs to the level of Year 10 high school and beyond. Yet, Aborigines cannot avoid learning Western skills if they are to become less dependent in the Western world. In addition, both parents and teachers are generally ambivalent in their attitudes to schools, at times optimistic, at others confused and frustrated. Schooling is only part of the problem of maintaining Aboriginal cultural identity, and this book contains only some of the possible solutions. It records a search for a type of school which will meet the aspirations of Aboriginal people living in remote areas, and fulfil the responsibilities of governments in providing schooling for Aboriginal children. What Aboriginal parents are asking for is bicultural schooling. But bicultural schooling, which will be called 'two-way schooling' in this book, unlike bilingual schooling, is neither a well-defined nor a well-theorised pursuit. Aboriginal schools, in other words schools where most of the students are Aboriginal, are nearly always on Aboriginal reserve lands or on pastoral properties. In Queensland there are about fifteen Aboriginal schools ranging in size from 50-100 students to 200-400 students. In South Australia there are eight main Aboriginal schools, each with 50-120 students. In Western Australia there are thirty government, thirteen Catholic and eight or so small independent Aboriginal schools. Most of these schools have less than 100 students, ranging from one-teacher schools to those with 35-65 students, and about six have 150-300 students. In the Northern Territory there are seventy Aboriginal schools in remote areas, three of them Catholic. Many of the smaller schools are on pastoral properties, and the larger ones on Aboriginal reserves. About twenty have less than twenty students, twenty have 25-50, twenty have 50-150 and fifteen have between 150-400 students. About twenty of the larger schools are bilingual. This study is confined to remote communities, because they are the places where the notion of 'two-way schooling', or interchangeably 'both-ways schooling', is being talked about. But because there are significant continuities within all Aboriginal groups in Australia, it should help focus on what schooling potentially holds for all Aboriginal people in terms of culture destruction or culture maintenance. Having said this, it is recognised that there are always dangers in overgeneralising even from one remote Aboriginal group to others. Thisjustifiably angers the Aborigines concerned. Yet it must also be said that the very value of a study of bicultural education such as this should be that its insights can more or less be generalised to all groups which fall within its defined focus. To this purpose a distinction can be made between cultural content and cultural processes. There are many definitions of culture which make legitimate fine distinctions but I have formulated a very simple definition for reference in the context of the argument in this book. Culture includes everything a people does and believes, and the ways in which these are done. It is a conventional design

CUL3UR.ES IN CONTACT

3

for group living which is system-centred,rather than individual-centred. It includes the content and process of the way of life of a group, and is passed on by learning. Culture is never static, but evolving; and in this process it remains recognisably distinctive. There is much variation in cultural content across different traditionoriented Aboriginal groups. On the more fundamental matter of cultural processes all tradition-oriented groups share much in common: personal development is marked by formal rites of passage; all have a technology which is immediately recognisable as 'Aboriginal' and which relates to a similar economy; all have a classificatory relationship system which places everyone in specific relationship to everyone else; all have creation stories which are closely interrelated to the ceremonialheligioussystem, land ownership and personal identity through totems and kinship; art is related to religious and ceremonial themes; and so on. One important variation between remote, tradition-oriented groups, however, is in their different experiences of, and responses to, Western culture contact. I see, roughly speaking, three categories here. The first has had a less destructive contact with Western culture. While culture change is evident, it has not been to such a degree that its members have become highly conscious of the threat of culture loss. They take their culture and its continuing strength largely for granted. The Central Reserves of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory and much of Arnhem Land, would fall into this category (see Map). These could be characterised as confident and unconscious carriers of traditional culture. The second category has experienced more destructive contact and social upheaval. While the members retain many significantfeatures of traditional culture, they are now starting to consciously modify those features in their own unique way and are deliberately fighting to build and hold Aboriginal identity. Some groups in the Kimberley and the Pilbara regions, and perhaps some in the ALice Springs area, would fall into this category. The most obvious examples would be Strelley and Yipirinya, and some settlements in the Central Reserves or Arnhem Land. These could be characterised as defensive and conscious carriers and restorers of traditional ways. It could be expected that initiatives towards twoway schools would mostly come from these groups, although there are as yet very few who fit into this category. The third category, while still distinctively Aboriginal and still relating in an Aboriginal style through an Aboriginal world view, is not effectively fighting for the maintenance or restoration of traditional ways. The main differences between the second and third categories are the degree of scattering of language groups, strength of local leadership, and the capacity to theorise about their

4

TWO-WW ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

condition and organise together to defend it. Those living in or near larger towns, some groups in the cattle belt across Queensland, the mid-Northern Territory and northern Western Australia, and even some groups on Aboriginal reserves, fall into this category. These could be characterised as a depressed and psychologicallly overwhelmed group. Most of my knowledge about schools in remote Aboriginal settlements comes from the Northern Territory because that is where I work. A good deal of the information about what Aborigines are trying to tell us about schooling comes from independent or semi-independentAboriginal schools in the Northern Territory and Western Australia because it is in these schools that Aboriginal people have managed to tell European Australians what at least some of them really want. It is there we see Aborigines voting with their feet. In most of the other schools, I don't believe Aborigines have yet managed to articulate to policy makers what they really want. This is partly because the schooling system is too persistent, too unstoppable and too untrained at listening to Aborigines for them to get a tentative idea through. Moreover, most Aborigines have not managed to articulate a solution because the dilemmas are so confusing.

THE MAJOR DILEMMA OF ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING The crux of the major dilemma is that Aboriginal parents want success in the three Rs for their children. This means that they want them to become fluent speakers of English and to be able to operate effectively in the Western technological, financial, bureaucratic, legal and political systems which impinge on them every day. Aborigines want to have less dependence on European Australians, but schools are largely failing to produce these results in remote Aboriginal settlements in spite of a great deal of effort on the part of many teachers? One source of evidence for school failure is vacillating parental support as demonstrated in school attendance figures. For example, in remote Northern Qrritory Aboriginal settlements during 1986-87 the average primary school attendance rate was about 71 per cent. In fact, attendance is effectively much lower than this figure indicates because it includes a large number of intermittent attenders. An educated guess would put the percentage of regular attenders (say, attending all day at least 80 per cent of the year) at probably nearer half the recorded rate. Another source of evidence of school failure is the widespread observation that the vast majority of Aboriginal children never progress beyond an academic plateau of Grade 3 to 4 primary, in spite of the fact that many of them have attended school for up to ten years. This is the situation even though schools have been in place in most remote Aboriginal settlements for twenty to

CULTURES IN CONTACT

5

twenty-five years, with a few mission schools much longer (see Watts and Gallacher, 1964). Another, and even more telling, source of evidence of school failure is that schools do not seem to have produced students who behave intellectually like those in other societies who tend to be successful in school. The best evidence of this is Christie's (1984a) study, which among many other things demonstrates that at Milingimbi, Aboriginal children perceive school learning very differently from non-Aboriginal children. In a recent paper Christie (1987, 4-5) summarises some of his findings as follows: The children were asked specifically how they should behave if they wanted to do very well academically at school. The three most recommended ways to achieve this are to attend school regularly, sit quietly, and listen constantly to the teacher. Underlying this was the universal interpretation of school as a modern ritual. The mechanisms of school success were seen to parallel the mechanisms of ceremonial initiation. Ongoing physical presence at school (regardless of participation), was seen as primary, as in Yolngu ceremonies. ...I saw the lamentable academic failure of Yolngu children not in terms of depleted motivation, intelligence, language or whatever, but simply in terms of their quite different understandings about what school is, how it works, and the appropriate behaviours that attend it. However, even with school failure, Aboriginal parents know that real success in the Western school system brings with it a certain kind of power and independence within the wider Australian society. They still want their children to achieve well in at least English and arithmetic. Matjarra and others (1987, 145) express their goals as follows: we don't want to lose our culture with too many Balanda [white] ways of living. In other words we don't want to learn more Balanda education and less Yolngu [Aboriginal] education, or more Yolngu education and less Balanda education. We want to learn both, with even understanding. The other side to the dilemma is that there are some un-Aboriginal thinking processes embedded in school procedure which present a threat to growing up Aboriginal. These include transmitting knowledge by verbal means alone, away from any real-life context to which the talk is related; transmitting knowledge through hypothetical problem posing; acceptance of the question-andanswer technique for transmitting, reinforcing and testing knowledge; and accepting that knowledge is not personal property but is objectively available to anyone. As Kolig (1981, ix) says:

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TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLDIG

the naked fact of the matter is that Westerners believe that intellectual enterprises do not stop at arbitrarily drawn borders. They believe that knowledge should be thrown wide open to dissemination, discussion, speculation, and critique every bit as much as the Aborigines staunchly adhere to secrecy and the nondisputability of established truths. Regardless of which side you may favour, basically no compromise is possible. The kinds of Western thought processes which are central to the positivisticlscientific outlook and which allow a great deal of control over the physical world through science and technology are distinctly un-Aboriginal. These un-Aboriginal thinking styles mostly involve ifiagined situations of no personal or immediate relevance to the student and include: extensive verbal comparing and contrasting; extensive generalising; hypothesising unrelated to a practical task; evaluating objectively other people's or culture's beliefs and extensive summarising, enquiring, justifying, clarifying, interpreting and challenging. The Aboriginal orientation to people rather than knowledge and their respect for older people as the legitimate carriers of knowledge are relevant to these contrasts. Aborigines are becoming more and more conscious of some of these points of difference. School thought processes can be characterised as being purposeful as opposed to the preferred Aboriginal thought style of focusing on what is personally meaningful (Christie 1984a, 1984b). I would prefer the phrase 'academic purposefulness' because it keeps the discussion in the domain of schooling. While Christie's observations were made at Milingirnbi, the responses of many teachers to them indicate that his main ideas about purposeful learning can be generalised across many remote schools. Christie has shown that the essential features of academic purposefulness are contained in the following three-stage cycle. Fitst, students must have a clear goal of what is to be learned. In Christie's study the students had a ritualistic approach, where the main aim was simply to attend, do lots of busy work, behave well and pass up through the grades in order to be transformed into a schooled person. Christie also found that teachers, quite illogically, expect Aboriginal children to identify the implicit goals of classroom learning. Second, students must perceive and exercise control over the learning tasks in the sense that they know that they alone are responsible for learning and believe that they can do it. The students in Christie's study often sought assistance, confiiation or information from outside. This is consistent with the Aboriginal world view that the environment is something to be cooperated with and related to, rather than dominated. Third, students must be able to accept and utilise feedback positively to adjust learning goals and methods in the ongoing cycle of learning. Many Aboriginal students interpret feedback as personal dislike by the teacher or at best interference or lack of personal acceptance.

CULTURES IN CONTACT

7

I am not suggesting that Aborigines are incapable of managing all those ways of thinking Listed above, and of learning and behaving in schools in the ways discussed. Many older Aborigines do think in these ways where it is culturally acceptable for them to do so. In the main, Aboriginal culturally-preferred ways of going about things or getting things done are very different from the school mode. Schools need to support Aboriginal parents' desire that their children grow up to be Aboriginal. Although schools are in general failing Aboriginal people in terms of producing power-giving levels of academic success, if those schools, as presently structured, succeed in academic terms to the point of producing high school graduates they will have failed Aborigines in more serious ways-they will have taught them to think in un-Aboriginal ways and failed to help them grow up to be Aboriginal. Christie (1984a, 387) expresses the point graphically: It is clear that [academically]purposeful behaviour is the means and also the goal of formal education, and also that it represents the antithesis of what is valued and preferred by Yolngu in their own culture. It is possible that the two are incompatible and that to learn one means to relinquish the other.. . . Yet if they wish to succeed academically beyond about mid-primary school levels, there is little choice open to Aborigines other than to adapt to the school mode of learning and thinking. In that context even Aboriginal control of conventionally structured Western-type schools cannot prevent the erosion of Aboriginal values and priorities. Also in that context even bilingual education, if it is structured primarily to achieve Western academic gains, will undermine the Aboriginal world view. And furthermore, even the use of Aboriginal staff in schools, if their task is to teach only Western academic thought, will continue to erode Aboriginal world view. THE HIDDEN VUUES CURRICULUM

Another way schools are failing Aboriginal communities is through the hidden values curriculum. The term hidden curriculum is used in quite different ways by various educators. It has at least two important meanings, one of them very harmful to Aboriginal identity and one of them essential for Aboriginal student success. The essential aspect of the hidden curriculum is what is sometimes called curriculum genre or culture capital-all those mostly verbal skills for interaction with the teacher which seem so central to successful school learning (see Richer 1982, 352). The harmful aspect has to do with values and behaviours implicitly promoted by schools. The hidden curriculum of schools inflicts direct social damage on Aboriginal culture. For example, in 1976 the most senior Aboriginal elder at

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TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

Milingimbi blamed the school for undermining the Yolngu 'promise' marriage system. By making chaperoning of teenage girls impossible, there was an opportunity for relationships to develop which would later form 'love marriages' and sometimes circumvent the social network of the promise system. This is just one practical consequence of the hidden curriculum. It represents an underlying threat to Aboriginal culture as a whole. A leader at Strelley has been heard to say: 'Our kids go away to a government school and they don't return to us. And if they do they are broken people' (Bucknall1982, 83). Of course many Northern lkrritory Aboriginal parents have supported Aboriginal residential colleges in larger towns because they recognise the necessity of advanced skills in Maths and English. However, even when there is some attempt at culturally sensitive school programs, parents appear to have serious misgivings about the results. The hidden curriculum includes what rubs off over time onto students during the school experience although it may not be deliberately taught. It includes such important elements as values, priorities, attitudes and what is viewed as normal. The hidden curriculum undermines Aboriginal values in a variety of ways apart from those given above. The values held by non-Aboriginal teachers, and the values implied by school organisation, such as being on time and keeping strictly to a program, can be unconsciously imparted if the rapport established by those teachers is reasonably good. The English language embodies Western values if it is learned at all well, and these too can be unconsciously learned. Teachers often organise their classrooms, the seating arrangements of students or the composition of classroom groups in ways which ignore social avoidance rules and preferred Aboriginal age and sex roles. They may accuse students of cheating when they are actually cooperating with each other in ways praised in Aboriginal society. And teachers can continue to use students' names or English words which are unacceptably like the name of a deceased community member. Such teacher behaviour carries the message to the children that Aboriginal rules are not important and can be broken without harmful consequences. The hidden values curriculum has its effect through almost every aspect of the school system. When European Australian teachers voice their concerns about the many days per year Aboriginal children spend at funerals and away from class, they are implying that funeral ceremonies are not as important as school. Furthermore, when all significant learning is supposed to take place inside buildings, the importance of Aboriginal knowledge is devalued. When European Australians hold the most senior positions in the school, a negative message is sent to Aboriginal children about the status or respectability of Aboriginal authority. Even a program such as bilingual education which requires significant Aboriginal involvement can have its hidden Western curriculum, for example in

CULXURES IN CONTACT

9

the very ordering of its basic aims when English is placed higher on the list than the Aboriginal language, or when the Aboriginal language is used to teach Western thinking styles, or when what is tested in the program reflects, often for good reasons of political survival, what is seen by European Australians as most important. (See Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon 1983, 162-87, for a more detailed analysis of the hidden values curriculum in Aboriginal schools.) The effect of this major dilemma can be quite profound on the more discerning and caring non-Aboriginal teachers. If they are successful teachers, the awareness that they will be contributing to the destruction of Aboriginal society is debilitating and saps their drive. The ambivalence produced by the dilemma prevents many of them from being uncompromisingly high in their academic expectations of their students. It should not be assumed that discussion of low academic achievement and substantial teacher effort adds up to a 'blame the victim' argument. At one level, many people and institutions are to blame: research institutions, teacher training institutions, policy makers, economic structures and even Aboriginal parents. Many parents seek school success for their children but to what extent do they support the efforts of the school? However, on a deeper level the 'blame' lies in the fundamental cultural and political differences between Western and Aboriginal society that are expressed in different priorities for living, different views about the human function on earth, and different views of knowledge, work and learning. The political dimension lies in the fact that groups of lower perceived status and political power tend to perform more poorly in school than do groups of higher status and power. Most schools have not yet been able to deal with these issues of the sociopolitical prerequisites of academic success in relation to Aborigines.

CULTURAL INCOMPATIBlLITY AhD DEGREES OF DLFFERENCE The nature and degree of the difference between Aboriginal and European culture is so great that the only honest conclusion we can arrive a t is that they are largely incompatible. The two cultures are antithetic-consisting of more opposites than similarities. They are warring against each other at their foundations. Recognising and accepting the truth of the term incompatible was for me in this study the point of theoretical liberation and the starting point for a more effective educational theory to be applied in Aboriginal schools. This degree of difference is so great that it is harder to find what they have in common in cultural terms than it is to see the differences. Even the universal human traits such as love, hate, fear, hunger, pain and laughter may be culturally conditioned, or culturally contexted, and do not deny the point of incompatibility.

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TWO-WW ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

I remember an older and experienced educational administrator in the Northern Territory saying to me, 'Why can't we focus on what we have in common?' It is here that the difficulty with the concept of multiculturalism surfaces in relation to Aborigines. The official view that Australia is a multicultural society implies that every cultural group is of a similar, or at least workable, degree of difference. Multiculturalism assumes a large core of shared Australian values, with the various cultural differences and enrichment experiences supplementingthe major culture. For remote Aborigines to adopt all the shared overarching values such as democracy and freedom of the individual, an economic system based on private enterpriselstate initiatives, a legal system which protects the rights of individuals, and the English language, listed by writers such as Smolicz (1981, 151; 1985, 19) as being the basis of a common core Australian culture, means giving up much of what makes them distinctively Aboriginal. Bucknall takes democratic elections as an example. Aboriginal society is not a democratic one in the Westminster definition. It has its system of checks and balances which controls tyranny and redistributes resources, but the differences between the two systems are great and result in situations such as Bucknall (1982, 92) describes: I have witnessed on numerous occasions the frustration and bitter anger of older men returning from nearby mining towns where they went to retrieve daughters and wives prostituting themselves in the streets, bars and single men's quarters. Frustration and helplessness when faced by the police with the bald statement that, 'They are over sixteen, there's nothing we can do! They are free to live their own lives'. How does an individual or group of individuals faced with the full weight of Her Majesty's law explain that this is simply not true? As an Aboriginal there are mutual responsibilities and obligations that stretch before you all the way to the grave.

There are insufficient shared values between Aboriginal and Western society to make a common core real. BucknaU(1982,92) notes that the only shared value that has been endorsed by some Aboriginal groups is the acceptance of English as the universal language for all Australians. The fact that there are qualities such as generosity, pity, courage and love of children that are widely observable in both societies, and the fact that Aborigines want to live in harmony with other Australians, does not alter the fact that the two cultural systems and institutionalised sets of values do not have enough in common for us to say that there is a potential common core. This is not a situation where 'meeting halfway' or 'creative compromise' can be positive for Aboriginal people. Firstly, the radical and fundamental nature

CULTURES IN CONTACT

11

of the differences between the two cultures means that values and cultural traits are not entities which still exist after substantial compromise. Compromise, which in this context implies a new form or amalgam which draws on two cultural sources, infers a loss of distinctive Aboriginal identity. To meet European Australians halfway is to self-destruct. In the Aboriginal case they have adapted greatly since European contact, but these adaptations, where t;he people still remain distinctively Aboriginal, are variations on Aboriginal themes more than movements towards Western society. It is important to point out here that I am not denying the reality of cultural change, development and regeneration. Both Western and Aboriginal cultures are developing and affecting each other. The argument is that adaptation, change, development and regeneration are positive but only if Aboriginal cultural identity and distinctiveness remain intact. The second reason why creative compromise may not be positive for Aboriginal people has to do with the relative sizes of the two cultures in contactthe very small group obviously will be drowned by the very large. For Aborigines to fail to hang on to their own cultural system is to exchange a culture of identity for a culture of anomie-one without norms to live by. Why is the idea that Aborigines should have the option of leading an existence of separate cultural domains forever into the future so shocking to many European Australians? At the worst one could speculate that the reaction is probably pure racism-anyone who wants to be different must be opposed. Yet with the degree of difference so great, the two cultural groups will live more happily together in a form of partnership rather than of marriage. Difference doesn't cause conflict so much as disrespect for, or an attempt to eradicate, the difference. That the official government policy towards Aborigines is no longer assimilation does not alter the fact that by its very nature a Western school is inherently assimilationist. And, as Stanner (1979, 50) says: Assimilation means that the Aborigines must lose their identity, cease to be themselves, become as we are. Let us leave aside the question that they may not want to, and the possibility...that very determined forces of opposition will appear. Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves? People who brush such a question aside can know very little about what it is to be an Aboriginal.

THE INTUITIVE ABORIGINAL SOLUTION What do Aboriginal leaders say about the dilemma in relation to schooling?In fact they have been saying something quite radical and creative for well over a decade. Yet European Australian policy makers haven't heard them, partly because they are such bad listeners and partly because Aborigines haven't presented the details

12

TWO-WAYABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

of implementing their preferred type of school in a form acceptable or persuasive to non-Aboriginal educators. Some notable exceptions have been Strelley and Yipirinya, and more recently Yirrkala and Walungurru (Kintore), as well as a handful of others that are moving in that direction. But even in these cases, the reasons were not articulated in a way that any but the most receptive could understand. The whole outstation movement and the types of schools they generally seek says something about the dilemma. Nearly 500 small remote Aboriginal homeland groups are using geographical separation from larger settlements as a means of reasserting Aboriginal priorities. Where outstations have schools these normally concentrate on basic English and Western Maths. Western hidden curriculum influences are minimised by Aboriginal people doing most of the teaching, by classes lasting less than the full school day and by social education being left largely to outside school experiences. A specific solution which has been put forward by Aborigines for some time is the two-way or both-ways school-now talked about across remote Aboriginal Australia. The earlier seeds of this solution can be seen in the thinking of Yunupingu and Djuwandayngu (1978) or Ngurruwutthun (1980),although they are now stated much more specifically. As Yunupingu (1987) writes in the Centralian Advocate of 28 August: The [Yirrkala Aboriginal] action group began working towards a Both Ways curriculum last year. If you have control of both languages you have double power. The emphasis should be put on Yolngu language and culture so they are respected equally. We want to have control over both sides of the curriculum and we want our children to learn Yolngu culture and history from the Yolngu point of view. We want to preserve our language and culture through reading, writing and making books, but we know we need English to help us fight to keep our traditions, and sometimes we need to use English as a language of convenience. And in an interview recorded by Sykes (1986,89-90) Yipirinya School elders said: This [School] council had a meeting. Now what we going to do [with] our kids at [Yipirinya]School? Which way are we to learn them? Is it to do this white man's way? White man's culture? No. We think two ways. Aboriginal people think two ways. First, we got our own culture, Aboriginal culture f i t . That's the first thing, and we can't lose our culture. Culture been coming up again. Then, after they got hold of that, they learn English. They can learn the white culture. Lanhupuy (1987,32), a member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly and from Arnhem Land, states the dilemma clearly:

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13

Schools, as places of education for our children, have been a mixed blessing for Aboriginal parents. The dilemma for the Aboriginal communities has been whether to support schooling and expose our children to the processes of cultural alienation and confusion, or to turn our backs on these Balanda [white] schools altogether. The dilemma arises from the recognition that our communities need young people trained in the Balanda way for the employment positions now available in Aboriginal communities and to fulfil our aspiration of self-determination. But the history of the term two-way school goes back at least to the early 1970s. The first documentation of the idea and the term is to be found in McConvell(1982,61). He heard the term at Daguragu, also known as Wattie Creek, near Wave Hill, in 1974 before bilingual education was known in the area. The term was used in contrast to the government school which was a one-way school. Pincher Nyurrmiyarri, a Gurindji elder, went further than most in working out the concept. His vision had three main components (McConvell 1982, 61-62): 1. Two-way schooling would be a matter of fair representation of cultural content. Both Aboriginal and Western culture should be taught, including the three Rs.

2. A school should reflect a spirit of exchange between the European Australians and Aborigines involved, in terms of equal power relations. There should be a twoway flow in reciprocity and recognition of equality; a two-way exchange of knowledge. 3. A two-way school should help re-establish a healthy relationship between the younger and older generations of Gurindji. Two aspects of Aboriginal judgements about schools should be recorded in the context of Pincher's desire for a two-way school. The first is that all the Aborigines I've met seem to see the three Rs as directly connected to Western political, technological and economic power. Furthermore, they want to have access to that power and they believe that schools are the source. European Australians have told them so often enough. They are also quite confused and sometimes bitter and angry about why schools haven't given them that power. Some go so far as to believe that non-Aborigines conspire to withhold the secrets of success in English and the three I& from them, as a way of keeping a monopoly over power (see Kolig 1972, 4-5; Bain 1979, 113). In a visit to Strelley in 1987 I was impressed by the fact that while the leaders saw their own school as a means of Aboriginal socialisation and identity building, and saw the conventional high schools and vocational training institutions in towns as very destructive of Aboriginal society, they were still searching for ways in which their young people could obtain

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sophisticated levels of Western skills without 'losing themselves' (Bucknall, personal communication 1987). The second aspect of Aboriginal thinking about schools is the belief that schools should be able to do something significant in terms of Aboriginal language and culture maintenance. That is the main basis for widespread support of bilingual education (see Walton and Eggington 1990). One of the main features of a two-way school is that it recognises the idea of teaching Aboriginal language and culture as a legitimate end in itself, and not merely as a means of creating a more effective atmosphere for learning or a more efficient way to learn English. Of course this is not a radical expectation of schools. Most European Australians are quite unconscious of the degree of culture maintenance entrusted to schools in Western society. Much of the history, geography, economics, home economics, music, literature, art and drama experiences impart Western culture and values. A two-way school should provide for the skills and knowledge from both cultures to be learned; all involving a source of knowledge, a style of doing things, and learning contexts which authentically match each body of learning. Teachers and students must know in which of the two ways they are engaged at all times, otherwise too many grey areas and confusions will eventuate and lack of direction and teacher ambivalence will set in. The best conceptual framework I can think of for school organisation and curriculum design to meet all the requirements of a two-way school is culture domain separation within the school. The notion of domain, taken from sociolinguistics, has connotations of content, physical space and the ways things are done which makes it an appropriate term for this context. The picture I have of a school following a policy of culture domain separation includes separate places for teaching, separate bodies of content and separate teachers for each culture domain. The aim in each separate domain would be to teach language, skills, content and behaviour relevant to that domain. Because the ways of teaching in each domain would be part of the cultural content and message, teachers in each domain would need to be fairly autonomous. Each two-way school is likely to be different if it is responsive to local wishes, but Aboriginal management should be common to all. Local Aboriginal people, chosen in an Aboriginal style, would need to form an overall governing body over both domains of the school. This would provide a mechanism for resolving culture demarcation disputes in the school. Aboriginal people would need to take this governing role because they own the children more than teachers do, and teachers only need to be in loco parentis if the parents are not there. Because Aboriginal children, even while learning to become biculturai people, must retain a primary identity as Aborigines if they are to grow up to be Aboriginal, it is important that their parents retain primary control over the whole of what is an Aboriginal two-way school.

CULTURES IN CONTACT

15

A simple anecdote illustrates the importance of this. Recently a Yolngu man from northeast Arnhem Land, studying in Adelaide, said to me: 'If the Yolngu children are in the classroom or on an excursion they will be marked present on the roll. But if they are at a funeral learning Aboriginal things they are marked absent. How is that fair?' In a two-way school, if the children were at a funeral ceremony by the school's design, the school would legitimately be able to mark them present. To give Aboriginal parents ultimate control over the whole school is not only necessary for Aboriginal culture maintenance but necessary if the children are to take learning in either domain seriously. We know that learning at school is powerfully influenced by attitudes established at home and enhanced when the student's social group has high status and political power. What most existing Aboriginal schools lack is significant parental authority, invohement or personal commitment to the goals of the school. Teachers in the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school would need to be Aboriginal people who were regarded by parents as being strong models of Aboriginal language and culture. The Aboriginal organisers of this learning domain would need to have the freedom to spend substantial school time in Aboriginal contexts, details of which would be defined by each local group. Such a context could be on their inherited land where the topography would act as a mnemonic device for the teaching of history and the interrelatedness of different aspects of the culture. Physical presence on the land would allow it to work as a resource library, stimulating details of knowledge which would lie dormant away from that setting. It is important to avoid the dangers of trivialisation in culture teaching, and this would be achieved by ensuring that the school's Aboriginal domain was an authentic Aboriginal context. Rachers in the Western domain would be expected to foster the learning of English, Western culture content, skills and behaviour without ambivalence. Whether these teachers are Aboriginal or nonAborigina1will depend on the preferences of the school councils and on availability. In any case they would need to be sufficiently well-qualified in the Western world to be able to be clearly representative of that culture. Intricate knowledge of Western culture is crucial because one of the requirements for success at a Western high school is the students' ability to handle so-called decontextualised thought. However, what we mean by decontextualised here is really 'Western context-taken-for-granted' or 'Western context-imagined' (Macken, personal communication 1985). The purpose then of the Western domain in school would be to teach the three PZs in English and to open real options in the Western world to high school and beyond, training those Aborigines who wish to be able to communicate on a basis of equality with non-Aborigines.

16

TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLJNG

The Western domain of a two-way school has something in common with the 'old days'teachers would be expected to unswervingly and demandingly foster English language and culture learning, while students would be expected to be regular attenders and on time because that is part of learning Western culture. The biggest difference would be that in a two-way school, the Aboriginal parents and community would be in control. This would change the status of parents and the power relationships in the school. There is some evidence from Finnish students in Sweden and Australia, and from working class Japanese in California, that this has a profound influence on academic results (see Cummins 1986; Ogbu 1982). The only children who should attend the Western domain would be those whose parents specifically wanted them to. The right of parental choice and responsibility regarding attendance would be public and considered legitimate. Other differences from the 'old days' would be that teachers in the Western domain would be specially trained in pedagogy suitable to Aboriginal children. Also, staff in this domain would be expected to guard against Western value aspects of the hidden curriculum. They would do this mainly by making the hidden curriculum explicit, emphasising that Western skills are being learned so that Aborigines can function effectively in the Western domain-they are not learning these skills because such ways are better. Thus the Western content and skills part of the school would be a kind of giant role-play-to be learned but not believed in as necessarily representing the best way to live. Finally, unlike the 'old days', Aboriginal language and knowledge would be learned in the Aboriginal domain of school, which should have important effects on students both in terms of identity and through some of the cognitive gains of being bilingual. In fact two-way schooling, rather than causing the Western domain to be a reversion to pre-bilingual education days, should be seen as structuring the place of the two cultures into what could be seen as a different type of bilingual education. A NEW THEORY OF TWO-WAY SCHOOLING

It remains in this chapter to propose an educational theory which logically arises out of the foregoing. If a school is to be an agent of dynamic minority culture maintenance as well as of academic success in terms of the majority culture, then the smaller the minority language group, and the wider the difference in world view between the two groups, the greater the need to promote culture domain separation in school. A culturally compartmentalised two-way school would support students learning to adopt appropriate roles in each cultural context, while maintaining personal and primary identity in the home culture.

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17

It is in the context of small or embattled groups that Joshua Fishman's emphasis on societal biculturalism, with necessary group loyalty, is so important and where his insistence on the need for culture domain separation, or compartmentalisation as he calls it, is so useful in the Aboriginal context, even though it may seem extreme in the eyes of bicultural members of very large societies. It is here that the term bicultural is shown to be quite vague in the sense that the 'bi' gives no hint as to whether the two cultures form a new amalgam in a person or whether the person incorporates aspects of two cultures in a compartmentalised way. In this book I argue that because of the small size and fundamental cultural differences of remote Aboriginal groups, culture maintenance will be promoted by compartmentalised biculturalism supported by choices made on a societal or group basis. A comment by Fishman (personal communication 1987) sums it up: it is possible to live in two cultures, and it is sometimes exciting and stimulating as well. But people cannot live in two completely inter-penetrating cultures and still maintain them both, particularly when the balance of power between them is great. Cultures need to have their own breathing space, so they can try to be different ('themselves') too. If the school values 'cultural differences' then it has to respect and even strengthen cultural boundaries as well. The weaker culture has a chance (no guarantees) only if differences and boundaries too are provided and reinforced at the same time that bicultural exposure and expertise are provided. It may be that no single theory of sustainable biculturalism is suitable for all situations where two cultures are in contact. A different theory may be demanded in different situations, depending on whether the minority group is small or large, whether it is a voluntary migrant group or an indigenous group, whether it is high or low status in relation to the dominant society, whether or not there is a great degree of difference in value systems or world view, or a greater or lesser degree of physical difference from that of the dominant society, and whether it is economically or politically strong, or even different historically or technologically. In the case of remote Aboriginal groups, they lack critical population mass, they are very different in world view and the cultural protection previously provided by geographic isolation is being rapidly eroded by opportunity for travel, better Western educational opportunities and the encroachment of electronic media. With this context in mind, we are now ready to attempt to define what a bicultural Aboriginal person might be.

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Bicultural Aboriginal people have primary identity as Aborigines, but have the ability to operate effectively in two sets of culturally appropriate roles, adapting responses to the situation in which they find themselves. Such people have access to and are able to empathise with the points of view of both cultures without losing their primary identity or commitment to those fundamental Aboriginal values which may be mutually exclusive of certain Western values. Bicultural Aboriginal people will assert Aboriginal values and express Aboriginal behaviour in the Aboriginal domain, but will adopt Western roles in the Western domain. Because Aboriginal culture is constantly changing, Aboriginal people will integrate Western elements into their culture-not in order to become more like European Australians but as acts of pragmatic adaptation within contemporary Aboriginal culture. A bicultural Aboriginal person is not 50 per cent Aboriginal and 50 per cent white; he or she is fully Aboriginal and competent in Western roles in the Western world-hence the possible vision of the 150 per cent Aboriginal person (see McFee 1975). Of course, in real life being bicultural in this sense will at times involve grey areas, be confusing and frustrating and stressful; but nowhere is it implied that survival of small cultures is easy. DEFINITION OF A TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOL

The ways members of different cultures do things and where they do them is as integral to cultural expression and learning as are the particular people from whom learning is gained and the content learned. The Aboriginal-invented term, twoway school, probably has more explanatory power than the term bicultural school. A two-way Aboriginal school might, therefore, be defined as one which is designed primarily to assist in the socialisation of Aboriginal children into becoming bicultural Aboriginal people. It is one where at all levels of staffing, the teachingflearning content, languages of instruction, teaching styles, contexts for teaching and timing of teaching are separately responsive to each culture. In order for them to be authentic expressions of their respective cultures, each group of teachers would need to have considerable autonomy. The compartmentalised structure of a school would be conducive to this. But because the school is a twoway Aboriginal school, an Aboriginal school board or other legitimate source of Aboriginal authority would need to influence strongly the hiring and firing of all staff members and have the power to settle demarcation disputes about what was appropriate within each teaching domain. A two-way Aboriginal school is one where any non-Aboriginal staff think of themselves as servants of the local community, holding delegated authority, rather than being a direct source of leadership in the process of adaptation and social change. The Aboriginal community would have the ultimate

authority to define the aims and purposes of the school, except for a State education authority's responsibility to require that one of those aims include the successful teaching of the three Rs in English, in usable form, before the students leave school. This implies a bi-authority. The local Aboriginal community would also be centrally involved in such matters as the design and siting of school buildings and the use of the school's locally controllable financial resources. To allow for stable Aboriginal identity-building within the school the majority culture, particularly non-Aboriginal teachers, education advisers and government department policy makers, would need to accept the long-term viability of the minority culture and through its dealings with the school 'read back' that acceptance to the minority culture. This definition primarily concerns the type of two-way school where the school takes a responsibility for both culture domains, such as we see beginning in Strelley, Yipirinya and Yirrkala. However, the principles it contains also remain consistent with that type of two-way school where the Aboriginal domain is not a responsibility of the school but of the family, such as we see at Hermannsburg homeland centres. Two-way schooling is not something well-meaning non-Aboriginal teachers or administrators from outside can implement, though they can assist in many ways. By definition two-way schooling is an internal Aboriginal initiative. The main difference when compared with bilingual education (the next most positive educational strategy to two-way schooling) as it now exists in some Aboriginal schools is that bilingual education can be implemented by nonAboriginal educators working in tandem with Aboriginal staff; two-way schooling cannot be implemented in such a way.

CONCLUSION Some cultures in contact are more compatible than others and the nature of positive biculturalism is dictated by the nature of the differences between them. In the case of Aboriginal and Western culture, they are basically incompatible and therefore, if Aboriginal languages and cultures are to survive, culture domain separation is the most positive form of biculturalism for them. Living in two separate culture and language domains is possible and is described by some Aborigines, in English, as living 'two-ways' or 'both-ways'. Two-way schools can be used to promote long-term biculturalism if they are structured to reflect and promote living and learning in two culture domains. Designing two-way Aboriginal schools to build 150 per cent Aboriginal people should not be seen as a move towards segregation in any political or

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compulsory sense. It is a move towards voluntary compartmentalisation of incompatible cultures to allow sensitive but effective learning of both. Two-way living proposes that the small culture should have free access to the majority society but restrict access to its own. The theory of two-way schooling does not seek to freeze Aboriginal culture in the past or to imply that there is an older, better form of Aboriginal culture which should be p r e s e ~ e d .Change and adaptation is inevitable and two-way schooling seeks to keep that adaptation more in the hands of .Aboriginal people. Advocating two separate worlds-and being conscious of which domain one is in at any one time-does not ignore the inevitability of some conflict of value systems between two cultures in contact. It merely seeks to minimise the conflict and reduce the grey area where no-one is sure what behaviour is appropriate and where most conflict arises. Two-way schooling makes pedagogical and administrative sense in the context of remote Aboriginal settlements. It should not be seen as a threat to national unity but as a potentially powerful means of handing authority over Aboriginal children back to their parents. It is a strategy for formalising what are already informal but struggling Aboriginal efforts to cope with the major dilemma of schooling. A two-way school is designed not so much to limit the choices of Aboriginal students but to clarify what the choices are and to provide the training necessary for making living in both domains a real possibility in adult life. Twoway schooling will take different forms in different communities. I see no more hopeful way to prevent schools, if they are to be at all academically successful in English, from being inevitably and unwittingly assimilationist. I see no more hopeful way of structuring schools to be supportive of the long-term maintenance of Aboriginal culture.

NOTES 1. To talk about failure in such a blunt manner can be quite hurtful to teachers working in Aboriginal schools and in the sense that it implies that there is no progress, such a statement is also inaccurate. There has been some real progress, as proven by the experience of European Australians living in Aboriginal communities over long periods of time and the tertiary qualifications obtained by Aborigines in fields such as nursing, teaching and theology. School educational systems have also improved; curriculum guides are far better than they were and many non-Aboriginal teachers know a great deal more about their educational and cultural context than did their counterparts of even a decade ago.

CHAPTER

2 1

ABORIGINAL

AFTER FAIRLY EXTENSIVE CONTACT with remote Aboriginal people I think that European Australians and Aborigines don't understand each other very well. Even when there is a high degree of mutual understanding, there has not been, so far, much desire on either side to change their ways of seeing the world. This seems true even in communities where there is a history of contact for well over one hundred years. Part of the reason European Australians and Aborigines don't understand each other better is because the differences between their cultures are not merely ones of degree, but are more fundamental. Neither group has generally understood the nature of these differences (see Kolig 1972). European Australians tend to see Aborigines as 'delinquent' European Australians who need to be changed, while Aborigines tend to see European Australians as 'delinquent' Aboriginal people, and therefore deserving of patience. That is probably why they haven't objected more strongly to how European Australians try to change them (Christie, personal communication 1987). The differences are ontological and epistemological-they lie in the ways that the two cultures conceptualise how people relate to each other and how people relate to the universe. To say remote Aboriginal culture and Western culture are on two different thought paths is more accurate than to say they are at different ends of some kind of values continuum. Aborigines have an alternative way of seeing reality. As Stanner (1979, 324) says, 'We are dealing with two distinct logics of life'. This truth becomes plainer as Stanner (1979, iii) quotes Muta, a Murinbata man: 'White man got no dreaming, Him go' nother way. White man, him go different. Him got road belong himself.' The focus of this chapter is on belief systems because the basis for the conviction that a two-way, two-domain school system is the most positive and workable response to the major dilemma presented in Chapter One, is the view that the difference between the Aboriginal and Western cultures is so great as to be irreconcilable. This chapter seeks to explain briefly the fundamental nature of some of the differences. They are broken down into what I consider to be key divergences, although these are somewhat arbitrary, and examples are given to show how these differences operate within the schoohg system. Discussing aspects of Aboriginal culture is difficult because of the degree of overlap between different aspects of that culture-a discussion of land becomes a discussion of religion or kinship and so on-but as far as possible the various aspects will be treated separately, and of course, from a European Australian male outsider's point of view.

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RELIGIOUS VERSUS POSITNISTIC -G

The Dreaming, the Law and the Aboriginal Way are all Aboriginal English terms for world view! The Dreaming seems to be the best English term Aborigines can adapt to explain their view of the world. It does not primarily refer to history or time but to the origins and current maintenance of human life. The other English term, also used widely and with the same all-encompassing meaning, is the Law, which has the connotation of the Dreaming applied firmly today. When Aborigines refer to the Law rather than to the Dreaming, it is often because they have become conscious of threat to the Dreaming and they want it enforced. In northeast Arnhem Land the term Aboriginal Way tends also to be used along with Aboriginal Law (Yolngu mm).These Aboriginal English expressions contain differences in perceived causation, and in perceptions of time, how to view space, the nature and origin of human relationships, the nature of belief and the nature of the earth. The Aboriginal world is characterised by religious rather than scientific attitudes in the sense that what they believe is more important than what they can prove or understand, but of course it merely involves a different basis of proof and understanding. Aboriginal society has probably rightly been called the most religious society in the world, because it does not separate the religious and the secular to the same extent as do many others. One indicator of the pervasive religious nature of Aboriginal consciousness, or of the degree of integration of religious thinking and human activity, is the absence of prayer in traditional religious ceremony. Aborigines do not see sources of religious power and humans as a them and us situation. Therefore prayer is not needed to bridge a gap. Christie (1984a, 263) explains it like this: in Aboriginal ceremonies the ritual enactment is, of itself, sufficient and effective. The power of the ceremony is contained in the words and activitiesthemselves. This is why, says Strehlow (1971), there is no prayer. The ritual behaviours are held to be causative because they use the actual and effective behaviour instituted by the original creating supernatural beings. Aboriginal beliefs about the causes of illness illustrate religious thhking (Reid 1983). Except in the case of the very old, no death is considered natural in the sense of being unrelated to some person's behaviour. In the Pilbara I was told that even in the case of the death of very old people, sorcery is sometimes thought to have weakened them and caused them to die prematurely. The causes of death or illness could be many, including encroachment on sacred ground of one kind or another, but more often it is thought to be caused by sorcery, either to punish a misdeed or simply as payback to a clan which is believed to have caused

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

23

the illness. Today the germ theory of illness is given some kind of assent, but mostly in conjunction with a sorcery explanation. On a visit to the Pilbara district in 1987, an acquaintance of mine reported that in 1986 a teenage boy told him that he saw a Maban-a traditional healer or magic man-cause a person who had been bitten on the finger by a poisonous snake to be healed. That Aboriginal people in the Western Desert are not surprised by such occurrences as the powers of Maban is also recorded by Tonkinson (1978, 108-9). In another recent example a white man was travelling with a group of mostly older Warlpiri men in roadless country west of the Stuart Highway, close to the centre of the continent between Lajamanu and Warrabri. They skirted numerous dangerous places. One night, camping near but supposedly far enough from such a place, they all heard a roaring, gushing wind sound in a still atmosphere. These Warlpiri men obviously believed in the activity of the timeless creator beings; they called out to the noise, apparently to establish the legitimacy of their presence (McClay, personal communication 1985). To an Aboriginal person the earth, or nature, is alive with religious or spiritual potential and this vitality has a religious causation. It is easy for a non-Aboriginal to see that a blade of grass, or an earthworm, is alive in a different way to a dog or a human. To speak very roughly for the sake of conveying a feeling, to an Aboriginal person the earth is alive to about that degree of difference. They may not express it this way, but particular parts of the earth come closer to having ears and eyes and feelings which can be offended or supported, and a conscious intelligence, than is the case in non-Aboriginal perceptions. Anecdotes confirming the reality of this old system of belief are not difficult to find. In 1975 while I was doing fieldwork at Milingimbi, a white construction crew began work on the foundations of a new classroom, which had been sited by means of a plan drawn in Darwin without due consultation with local Yolngu people. The area consisted of red rock close to the surface. When a number of small explosions were set off to blast holes for the building's foundations the major ceremonial leader went into a state of collapse which lasted for about two days. The rock was the home of the barramundi fish-this elder's personal totem. These types of occurrences are not rare at Milingirnbi, for example, Christie (1985a, 3-4) reports three Yolngu people meeting a giant spirit dog in that area. Near Yalata in the west of South Australia, White (1975, 133) witnessed an occasion when Yalata Aboriginal women were performing a secret women's ceremony and Dreamtime activities. In the middle of a ceremony three small snakes appeared in the sand between the feet of the dancers. Immediately the women interpreted the snakes as supernatural beings come to tell them that men were

24

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coming close enough to see the secret ceremony. The women immediately raised a dust screen, killed the snakes and stopped the ceremony. What is significant about these happenings in terms of different world views is not so much that they happen but that Aborigines are not surprised by them. To people who are comfortable with religious or spiritual causation such occurrences are normal; to those who are comfortable with empirical, positivistic causation such occurrences are abnormal. 'Ib the empirical thinker, reality is what the senses can perceive; what can be measured, controlled and repeated. Empirical or scientific thinkers are trained to be suspicious of mysticism, intuition and spiritual assumptions. It is primarily this kind of thought that the Western school system is designed to reproduce, and under which Aboriginal children will not grow up Aboriginal.

RELATEDNESS VERSUS COMEARTMENTALISATION

... .

In the Aboriginal view the vitality of the earth is consistent with the degree of relatedness between particular places, people, kinship and religious belief and expression. People are physically alive because they were always existing in spirit form, and living in a particular locality, and they became manifest by entering a woman to begin the process of normal human life. In isolated Aboriginal societies modern knowledge of the physical origins of conception adds to this belief rather than superceding it, for example, in the view that husbands influence the timing of conception more than actually causing it. Conception seen in this light establishes a relationship with the land because the spirit-embryo belongs to particular parts of the land. Because the child's father also has a similar relationship with a part of the land, the child is related to the father through the land and not just through parenthood. The child thus has a human father, and some land as a father. The logical extension, by this way of thinking, is that a child has a piece of land who is his or her father, mother, brother, grandmother and so on. When Aboriginal people say this land is their mother, they mean it literally, not metaphorically. In effect the land owns them as much as or more than they own the land. This is a mode of perception which 'in an important sense, is really not accessible to the Western mind' (Christie 1986b, 9). Furthermore, those pieces of land have ceremonies which both commemorate and re-enact the event of their creation. This involves everyone in a ceremonial role which keeps the creation cycle going. A ceremony is a sign that the earth is fertile and causing birth and continued growth; it is a demonstration that the earth is alive and that the creator beings are still doing their work. The circularity in this thought seems perfectly sound to the Aboriginal mind.

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

25

In a sense then, Aboriginal people have less pure symbolism in their lives than non-Aborigines do, because the symbols have a tangible life in continuity with what they symbolise. Thus a dancer miming the role of a kangaroo in the Dreamtime becomes that kangaroo during the dance. People are named after places, and in northeast Arnhem Land, at least, ceremonial songs are often made up of long lists of place names which are shorthand for events at another layer of meaning. The symbolic connectedness of a person to his or her land is so real that in northeast Arnhem Land men often greet their close relations by calling them, in English, 'Country' (Christie 1984b, 5). It would not be stretching an analogy too much to say that a group of Aborigines who have been removed entirely from their land and from any chance of returning to it is like a whole group, or small society, of orphans. Nor is it stretching perceived realities too much when Aborigines say about the threat of oil drilling rigs and mining excavations on their land: 'Can't you see? You are killing our minds' (Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon 1983, 38). The evidence that Aborigines are preoccupied with the relatedness of land, kin and religious ceremony is so conclusive (see Keen 1978) that it is a mystery why some groups voluntarily left their land, such as some at Yalata (see White 1985, 218, 226); those from the Fitzmaurice described by Stanner (1979, 46); and those living on larger settlements in Arnhem Land, when they had, and still have, the very real option of staying where they were. As Stanner and many others have observed, the attractions of stimulants such as tea, sugar and tobacco seemed just too strong. These Aborigines probably didn't see themselves as abandoning their land because they kept thinking about it, telling stories about it, and kept the kinship system and ceremonies related to it. I put this question to a middle-aged man in the Pilbara region recently and he said: 'It's alright, our singing looks after the land. We can do it from a long way.' It is impossible to talk about any one aspect of Aboriginal land, kinship, religious or ceremonial life without also talking about the others. This degree of relatedness is in contrast to the compartmentalisation in Western society, where any one of the topics of land, kinship, or religion can be discussed easily without entering into the others. It is also impossible to talk about this interrelatedness without seeing that Aboriginal perceptions of time and space are not constrained in the same way as those of non-Aborigines. Not only is the past also the present in the form of creator beings, but the spirits of dead people are constantly present. For example, mokoys (spirits of dead people) are sighted constantly today in northeast Arnhem Land. This freedom from the constraints of time and space, as all of us are free while dreaming, is probably the origin of the English word Dreaming as applied by Aborigines to their world view (Christie 1984b, 4).

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This view of the world is internally consistent. Because value lies in relatedness rather than in quantity or number, Aboriginal languages do not have many number t e r m s . 2 Also, value lies in one's position in a group, and an individual's sense of worth is 'read back' to them from this relatedness and connection with the group. Thus, while there is competitiveness in Aboriginal society, most noticeably in male competition for wives and for reputations as singers, dancers or providers, it is not as strong or as pervasive a feature of their society as is cooperation. While there is training for independence, and much individualistic behaviour in Aboriginal society (see Hanis 1980a, 33), this is expressed only within prescribed channels and does not threaten the priority of the group or extended family in terms of loyalties. There is no cult of the individual in Aboriginal society which matches that which produced the 'local boy makes good' and 'log cabin to White House' myths praised so much in Western society (Christie 1984b, 4). For Westerners, compartmentalisationis a major organisational factor of society. We draw distinctions between work and play, sacred and secular, a person and their office or role, home and school. Aboriginal children are presented with all these Western distinctions in school; for example, non-Aboriginalteachers expect the children to relate to them in terms of their role and the skills and information they can impart. They do not see personal character as highly relevant, while to Aboriginal students it is central-information is often valuable in terms of who is giving it. This priority of relatedness is an aspect of world view out of step with the priorities of Western sch~oling.~

CYCLIC VERSUS LJNEAR CONCEPTS OF TIME Part of the Aboriginal religious perception of the vitality of the environment comes from the fact that the creation journeys when the creator beings travelled across Australia making the hills, rivers, springs, people, flora and fauna, occurred in the cyclic time frame of past-continuous. It happened in the distant past but also is still happening today. The Aboriginal sense of culture as having great antiquity and at the same time being recent and ongoing, is conveyed by Maddock (1984, 23) in the following:

The past in which the foundations of Aboriginal religious life were laid was not all that long ago-as Europeans understand time. A young man who explained the structure of his patrilineal clan to me had no names for persons before his paternal grandfather, and from what he said it seemed that a mere two or three generations lie between that oldest named figure and the Dreamtime. Some other men, talking about the culture heroes who spread a religious cult through the region explained a detour

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

27

which the heroes took by suggesting that they may have seen Billy Farrer's campfire in the distance and wished to avoid it. Billy h r r e r (as Aborigines say the name) was an early white settler. If we take such statements at face value, we would date the creative period somewhere about 1850 or 1900. The Western linear view of the past creates a very different sense of time. Western carbon dating evidence places an Aboriginal presence at Oenpelli more than 20,000 years ago and at Milingimbi, through the dating of shell middens, at around 2,000 years ago. Neither of these places is very far from where Billy Krrer worked, and his wife, Judy Djagabu, was a vigorous old woman living at Ngangalala on the mainland south of Milingimbi in the late 1970s (see Walipurruwung 1974, 15). Reference to Billy Farrer's campfire in the context of the creation period in no way undermines the age of Aboriginal culture and occupation of this continent. It does, however, indicate that whether something took place 20,000 years ago or 200 years ago is not apparent and does not impress itself on Aboriginal consciousness as especially relevant. What is relevant is that it happened and is still happening. This time orientation is in stark contrast to that of Westerners, particularly the better educated, upper middle class groups, who not only have a linear, quantified view of the past, but think and plan a great deal and a great distance into the future. Aborigines do plan into the future, particularly in regard to organising marriages and ceremonies, but still nowhere near as much or as far ahead as non-Aborigines. To Westerners, time has become more like space, something linear and something to be filled up. Another way of describing remote Aboriginal time orientation is that it seeks harmony in a cyclic context rather than progress in a linear sense. When non-Aborigines picture their grandparents and the future generations, they see a straight line cut up into equal pieces, each a year long. When Aborigines picture their history and their generations they say, as Durmugum, Stanner's main informant on the Daly River, does: 'It keeps coming round' (see Stanner 1979,98). For example, at Oenpelli the same subsection names come around again in three generations, and at Milingimbi the same kinship categories on the chart of over seventy kinship terms come around again every seven generations. The Aboriginal world view contains a greater sense of the current completeness of existence than does the Western view. Rather than focusing on time as a straight line cut up into equal pieces of weeks, months, years or centuries, remote Aborigines tend to focus on events. This has been observed by many European Australians living in Aboriginal settlements. For example, at Ernabella a linguist said (Eckert, personal communication 1987):

TWO-WW ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

28

Rather than cut the day up into periods, Pitjantjatjara people cut it up into events-especially Pitjantjatjara affairs. They sometimes see whites as controlled by the watch: always wearing one and looking at it or asking someone else the time. Another observer (Kinslow-Harris, personal communication 1985) records that, at Nungalinya College a man from Elcho Island said how it seemed very rude to Yolngu that they could be in an absorbing conversation, to them a meaningful event, with a European Australian and the latter would suddenly look at his watch and excuse himself as being late for some presumably much more important commitment. Sansom (1980, 3) observed a similar focus on events in his study of Darwin fringe camps, where Aborigines referred to events as happenings: The events I describe are all exemplary for each is an occurrence of what Aborigines of the fringe camps call a 'happening'. They recognise happenings as the basic unit of social action and one proof of this is that their 'happenings' are labelled entities. Say: 'Somebody bin take beating' and, if your hearer knows the Aboriginal English of the camps, the phrase will evoke for him a total procedure, a staged performance with a typical beginning, painful middle, and standard ending. This event orientation affects how history is retold. Aborigines will tend to say what took place, where and to whom in detail, without any felt need to be specific about when, either in an exact linear time or chronological sense, although these can sometimes be worked out quite closely in reference to other events. What European Australians term the past is, for most remote Aborigines, both the present and the past, and is something substantial from which Aborigines can draw the strength of identity necessary to negotiate with the Western world. This is what the more self-managinggroups are doing. Aboriginal time orientation and the religious and ceremonial system allow them 'the possibility of personal experience of the remote past' (Jordan 1986, 9). It should be said, however, that not all Aborigines raised in the traditional way want to 'experience the past as present' (Jordan 1986, 11) and have preferred not to live in remote settlements and outstations. These people have chosen to live in urban centres, and are thus beyond the scope of this study.

BEDUG VERSUS DODUG The Aboriginal world view emphasises being rather than doing; maintaining rather than developing, changing, making or storing. Bain (1972, 1979) has made an insightful analysis of Aboriginal world view. Her summary is that (1979,327-73):

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

29

the difference between Aboriginal and White is not so much one of attitude and value or of a preference between conceptually valid alternatives but, instead, is rooted in contrasting worldview and ontology. ...The essential element of this is the interactionaLitransactiona1 dichotomy. By the term interactional Bain means something similar to an emphasis on being, on relatedness, on the personal. By transactional she means that Westerners draw a distinction between one's professional or working life and one's personal life. An element of quantification is implied in transactional behaviour; it is seen as a series of completed transactions which end any personal responsibilities to one's fellow employees or employer. The Western emphasis is on doing; and in the context of work, personal relationships are seen as important not so much as ends in themselves but as means to getting the job done. To Aborigines, shared experience, or working together, is the basis for continuing personal relationship. (See also Bain 1990, for a further analysis of her material.) The distinction between interactional and transactional in Bain's dichotomy is very similar to Christie's distinction between purposeful behaviour and meaningful behaviour. In the context of formal classroom learning Christie sees purposefulness as a three-stage cycle; that is, setting a clear goal about what has to be learned or achieved; having a sense of personal control over the achievement of the goal; and accepting feedback or correction objectively as necessary to more efficient achievement of the goal (Christie 1984a, 19844 1985b). The importance of academic purposefulness to Western schooling is discussed elsewhere in this book, but the implications of the distinction between a purposeful orientation and a meaningful orientation are illustrated by Christie (1985b) in terms of different approaches to current everyday responsibilities. He contrasts the purposeful activity necessary to decide on and find a job in terms of a clear goal, sense of personal control and use of feedback, with the meaningful behaviour of a person who has decided to visit his grandparents, where goal-oriented behaviour and a sense of personal control over the situation would inhibit rather than increase the value of the relationship. In such a relationship the only feedback received will be approval or disapproval, rather than the much more specific feedback inherent in purposeful behaviour. Christie (1985b, 8) concludes: Meaningful behaviour is ... not a watered down version, or a pale imitation of purposeful behaviour. It is behaviour that is directed at developing and maintaining the meaningfulness of one's life and, in fact, personally controlled, goal directed, purposeful activity will interfere with the practice of meaningful behaviour.

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Liberman (1978), Bain (1979, 1990) and Christie (1985a) demonstrate how Aboriginal languages reflect this dichotomy between being and doing. Some of Christie's examples for Yolngu languages in northeast Arnhem Land are described in Chapter 5 of this book. Bain (1979, 125, 294) provides detailed examples for Pitjantjatjara, of which only two will be recorded here: Central to the Pitjantjatjara concept of learning are two words and a suffix: ninti, 'knowledgeable, knowing', ngurpa 'ignorant', with ringanyi, 'become' (present indicative). If a person is asked to do something that they have not done before.. .they may well say they are ignorant. Reference is to the fact that they have not done this previously-it is not to a lack of ability to do the job, nor to lack of knowledge about how to do it. After they have [done it] they are knowledgeable. Here the salient feature is the way learning has more to do with participating and experiencing than with active cognition. Bain (1979, 126) also notes: There is no way to differentiate the concepts of thinking, listening and heeding in Pitjantjatjara. The same verb kulini does duty for all.This...may be an important feature, for thinking originates in the self but one listens to, or pays attention to, or heeds, something that originates in the other. In economic contacts between the Aboriginal and Western worlds the contrasts between beingldoing and interactionaWtransactiona1ways of viewing behaviour are further confirmed. Various examples recorded by Bain (discussed in later chapters) demonstrate how maintaining personal relationships is a much higher priority in Aboriginal culture than handling quantities accurately, or of keeping to prior contracts. Bain further demonstrates that these differences are not a matter of poor communication but of different priorities in terms of world view. As an Aboriginal man said to Bain (1979, 299) that to operate in a transactional manner is like having no relations. There are basically two ways for people to live in relation to the environment-to make things happen or to fit in with what's happening. The former could be called a manipulative approach and the latter could be called a responsive approach. This is consistent with the beingldoing and interactionaUtransactiona1contrast. Aborigines in Australia chose or were forced by their technology to be responders. This hunting and gathering response choice was a rational matter of survival in the driest continent on earth. Many parts of Australia are only open to successful agricultural use with high levels of manipulation. To a group which has decided to be responsive to nature rather than manipulate it, good relationships with supportive kin become crucial to survival

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

31

because that will sometimes make the difference between hunger and plenty. Thus Aborigines focus more on personal relationships than on controlling nature. This sumival-based practice has over time become an ethic, so that Aborigines not only do not manipulate nature but are opposed to such an approach (Christie, personal communication 1987). It is clear that the Western preference for transactional and purposeful behaviour with its associations of doing, quantifying and manipulating is fostered in the Western school system. How successful remote Aboriginal children are at school partly depends on their willingness to adopt these behaviours and their parents' willingness to allow such behaviours. The potential for conflict in world views inherent in this process is clear.

CLOSED VERSUS OPEN SOCIETY The really significant event of Aboriginal history occurred when people, the land, the ceremonies and the social system were created. It has already happened, so it is no longer necessary to strive to do, to invent and to develop. For Aborigines, the future does not contain the stimulating prospect of progress, it ideally should consist of more of the same thing. The contrast between a closed and an open society, an analysis developed by Horton (1971) in relation to African traditional thought and Western science, is an important one in looking at Aboriginal society in relation to Western society. By definition all primarily religious societies are closed-that is the nature of religious belief. Only secular society is open. Of course the contrast should not be exaggerated. All societies are regulated by a high degree of agreed behaviours embodied in cultural norms and without a high degree of conformity no society could function. In speaking of Aboriginal society as a closed society I am referring to a relatively greater degree of organic conformity than exists in Western society. However, the rigidity of the workings of Aboriginal society should not be overemphasised. For example, Hiatt (1965), was probably the first to demonstrate how Aboriginal people manipulate their own highly prescribed system. One illustration he gives is that while everyone has an ideal marriage partner category, among the Gidjingali group he studied a proportion were married straight, some were married to the next best category, and others married wrongly to varying degrees. The main point is that in Aboriginal society there is a prescribed network of relationships and ways of believing and operating. Although there is deviation from this system, the ideal and the norm are much closer than in open societies in the sense that the ideal and prescribed system dominates consciousness. Another way to express this is that while members of a closed system may not always

32

TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

conform completely to its ideal, they would never even think of questioning the validity of that ideal. Human experience is not as important as development achieved by travelling through a series of prescribed stages. The universe and the human place in it were set up once and for all so that life is ideally a 'one-possibility thing' (Stanner 1979, 29). In Aboriginal society there is room for creativity and individual differences (for example, in art, songs and dances), but all creative activities are variations on an accepted theme. In simple terms, there is no room for a counterculture, or alternative lifestyle within Aboriginal society. Enjoyment of activities from outside the closed system of the culture, such as Western music, does not challenge this if the values and system of relatedness are not touched. There can be no atheists in Aboriginal society, although Kolig (1981) notes a few in the Kimberley, which is a startling development within an Aboriginal world view. There is no democracy offering possibilities of fundamentally different ways of organising people: there is one religion; one way of explaining life; one way of relating to other people, all going back to a given social organisation. There is no interest in evangelising other cultural groups to think their way; although the Strelley Mob see some need to do that with neighbouring groups in terms of maintaining the Law. There is no real interest among remote Aborigines in articulating why they believe what they believe, probably because they assume others are as established in their one-way, their Law, as they are. Aboriginal membership in a closed society is consistent with their philosophy of being rather than doing, their value of live and let live. This leaves them poorly armed to deal with any aggressive outside culture which believes in the virtue of changing other societies and converting them to other ways of believing and living. Aborigines do not see life as full of alternative possibilities, where the sky is the limit, where obligations to family and religious belief itself are optional. A value such as generosity is not based only on moral obligations to one's fellow man, as it is when European Australians donate to charities, but on reciprocal obligations to particular and known relations. In a closed society knowledge is bound to situations or occasions, not to theories and ideas. I refer to this as context-specific thought versus contextfree principles (Harris 1980a, 95). Spear throwing will illustrate the point. The use of a woomera indicates a knowledge of leverage. The selection of different designs of spears for different tasks indicates a knowledge of the fact that force equals mass times acceleration, and of the relationship between angles of trajectory and distance, and so on. But these physical principles are not articulated as such and are not freed up to be applied to all conceivable situations.

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

33

The word fatalistic is probably too strong for the philosophy of acceptance of life as learned under the Aboriginal world view. But Aborigines go close to being a stoic people-they do not express much self-pity,because such feelings can develop only if life presents real alternatives. As Stanner (1979, 35) says:

I do not at all say that pain, sorrow and sadness have no place in Aboriginal life, for I have seen them all too widely. All I mean is that [the Aborigines] seem to have gone beyond, or not quite attained the human quarrel with such things. The locus of control is outside themselves more than inside. It is only when people feel a degree of internal control over their destiny that they begin to quarrel with it. It should be said, in concluding this discussion of the Aboriginal closed society, that there are now emerging signs that some of the features of the Aboriginal world view listed above are beginning to change, and change in the hands of people who would otherwise be regarded as very traditionally-oriented Aborigines. At least three changes are noticeable. Firstly, a few Aborigines are beginning to feel responsibility for other Aboriginal groups to whom they are not closely related. The Strelley Mob from Port Hedland is notable here, having financially assisted groups as far north as Fitzroy Crossing and as far east as Docker River and Kintore. This is not typical Aboriginal behaviour, where loyalty or concern normally only extend as far as the clan or extended family. Humanitarianism was not a traditional Aboriginal ethic, though there are many examples of Aborigines being humane to early white explorers and to contemporary European Australian workers in their midst. Secondly, Aboriginal groups have begun to articulate their Law, their values and their priorities, and groups such as the Strelley Mob theorise strongly about their situation (Jordan 1983, 1986), as do adult students at Nungalinya College in Darwin. In the past Aborigines lived out their world view, and as everyone around them was doing very much the same there was no need to explain the values behind it. Because of this lack of practice in explaining their Way, Aborigines have taken some time to learn to express it. Thirdly, Aborigines have begun to want to influence the religious belief of other groups. One example is evangelists, mainly from northeast Arrthem Land, who have travelled to other parts of the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland preaching. One interesting feature of this Christian revival is that the most dynamic preachers have come from very tradition-oriented ex-United Church Missions in Arnhem Land, and are people who maintain a passionate commitment to the Aboriginal Way. Preachers from other Aborignal areas, particularly towns, have tended to see Christianity and Aboriginal culture in confrontation until relatively recently.

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TWO-WAY ABORIGINAL SCHOOLING

These three examples illustrate how some highly selective changes are initiated by Aboriginal people in response to their contemporary situation. These changes often represent Aboriginal intentions or desires, more than merely being responses to outside pressures. They do not indicate a general desire to create an open society in a Western sense. (This theme, mainly illustrated from Kolig's work, is discussed in more detail later in this chapter.) CONTRQSTING V ' W S OF WORK AND ECONOMICS

In Western society there is seen to be a close causal connection between land, labour and wealth. While ethics which have their origins in religious beliefs may influence the Western economic system, that system is seen as entirely secular, impersonal and mechanistic. Luck may be seen as a component but is not viewed as religious or personal in any sense. To European Australians the government's resources are also seen as being entirely secular and impersonal and an aggregate of the people's resources. Many remote Aboriginal people appear to view the government very much as a creator being in the sense that it can cause goods and cash to materialise. The connection between land use and individual effort as the source of a government's resources is not perceived. Thus Aborigines may on the one hand try to retain control over their land to the exclusion of mining,fishing and tourism, and on the other hand expect government grants and money to meet their physical needs and employ their people. The connection between the two, so obviously logical to the non-Aboriginal administrators, is not seen by Aboriginal people. Houses, pension cheques, water supplies and Toyotas are seen to come from some kind of government flow, from some kind of creation, and not from human effort which 'has to be paid for by someone' (see Trudgen 1986). This view of provision has similarities to cargo cults in other cultures. The thought processes which lead Aboriginal people to have this view are logical. Because of the isolation of remote Aboriginal settlements, supplies arrive in bulk and appear to be surplus (see Bain 1979, 295-311). Such surplus could not be the result of individual effort; it must come from some spiritual or creator source. The European Australians who distribute these goods seem to have free access to a great surplus and are often seen as rich, stingy and greedy. The impersonal, professional role of a storekeeper, for example, is not discoverable by logical observation. What observable logical connection is there between writing a letter or signing a cheque and the arrival of large quantities of goods? Trudgen (1986, 14) records that for years Yolngu at Ramingining thought that social security cheques were somehow made in the local office-a logical deduction. If there is any purely human factor in obtaining money and goods from outside it is through

ABORIGINAL WORLD VIEW

35

relationships; the council bookkeeper must have a close personal relationship with people in the government who have access to a limitless supply. The payment of taxes is almost inexplicable; it is certainly not directly connected to land or labour as defined by Western culture. Aboriginal society does have an institution of contracts and of debts and credits, and these can be very strictly entered into and enforced. But the practice is not confused by apparently enormous surpluses; it is between personally known and understood people for specific services. Also, personal relationships are seen much more as a currency in Aboriginal society than in Western societyalthough that happens in the latter to some extent too. Western perceptions of time, evolution, and the value of progress have turned work into a moral imperative. The Western work ethic is founded in a sense of historical time (see Liberman 1978). Most European Australians are working to better themselves. They are very future-oriented, hoping that by hard and intelligent work a better future will evolve. Remote Aborigines, on the other hand, have a mostly past-continuous time orientation. They believe that a perfectly acceptable social order is already present without need of further evolution or progress and that work is only a means to social or religious ends and never in itself a moral matter or matter of personal identity. Aboriginal perceptions of work are quite different from Western perceptions where work is one of the major components of the latter's economic system. Aborigines do not draw a clear distinction between living and working. In northeast Arnhem Land the word for work is djaama which is a word introduced from the visiting Macassan trepang fishermen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today it is still used mainly to refer to work done for European Australians (Christie 1985a, 21). In the Aboriginal view work is very close in meaning to participation. That they may work very hard while participating is not salient; one who outlays a lot of effort on a job participates as much as one who outlays less. Just as in ritual, participation rather than productivity, is crucial. In more traditional times, and even today, a high proportion of the work of mature males involves ritual activity, It is therefore no accident that the Aboriginal English word for ceremony is business. This also helps explain why Aboriginal children have a largely ritual view of school-learning is a matter of participating. The Yolngu word for school is wukirri which is an introduced Macassan word meaning 'write'. RI Yolngu children schooling is a ritual they participate in by lots of noncognitively demanding work, such as copying lots of writing from the blackboard. The Western view of work, economics and schooling is that each has a lot to do with the other. School is an adaptive institution to prepare children to work in an economically productive way. Work, economic activity and school

36

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learning are all positivistic, purposeful behaviours more associated with doing than with being, and with control over nature very much in mind. In the Aboriginal view these activities also have much in common, but in the direction of participation, maintaining meaningful relationships, ritual activity, and cooperation with nature.

CONTRASTNG VIEWS OF AUTHORITY An important contrast between remote Aboriginal society and Western society is the notion in the latter of a bureaucracy and government with its agencies, all with individuals filling roles on an impersonal and temporary basis. What is permanent is the office, which may be filled by different people, either elected or promoted to these positions. In theory a private individual's needs and rights are equally well met regardless of the personal attributes of the individuals filling the public roles (see Berger, Berger and Kellner 1973). While Western society has the saying: 'It's not what you know but who you know', this is not a structural ideal. Aboriginal societies are small-scale societies. For example, approximately one-eighth of the males in a remote Aboriginal social universe may be classified as one's fathers, one-eighth of the females as mothers, and so on (Hiatt 1986,5). Important differences in attitudes towards authority follow. Westerners accept a large hierarchical bureaucracy and try to understand and apply the arbitrary points of beginning and ending of all the impersonal roles as they affect individual lives-society is highly organised, highly structured, highly impersonal and quantified. The basis of authority is delegation from the people to the government or bureaucracy. Governing entails the power to make laws and have them obeyed. In contrast, Aboriginal society is a state of ordered egalitarianism, organised by religious or ritual authority on the one hand and affections and obligations of kinship on the other. In such a small-scale society virtually everyone in the social consciousness is known. Much of the organising tension in Aboriginal secular society is between intense personal independence, egalitarianism and autonomy on the one hand, and obligations to kin, rights to areas of land, and an ethic of generosity on the other (Hiatt 1965,1986;Myers 1986). The organising force in Aboriginal religious life is basically a theocracy or gerontocracy with authority originating in relationships to the land which give ownership of ceremonies. Fbctors such as birth order, intelligence, forcefulness and singing voice decide who has the legitimate rights to lead. Authority in the ritual domain originates in a shared external code-the Dreaming or the Law. It is not man-made, and is the only authority in Aboriginal society that can supersede loyalty to close relations. Authority from the ritual world is not directly portable to the secular

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world and vice versa, although seniority in the latter may enhance chances of success in the former. Influence on a wider regional scale is on the basis of outstanding ability, is temporary and is not structurally maintained after the individual dies. Whatever the source of remote Aboriginal authority, it is primarily localised and thus the development of any kind of pan-Aboriginal movement is not indigenous, although this is beginning to change (Kolig 1981). The fact that there are three land councils (instead of fifty) in the Northern Territory is, therefore, a considerable adaptive achievement, but there are constant threats of rebellion of individual groups from within them on the grounds that the council cannot speak for local groups. In terms of the daily experience of Aboriginal people in their formative years, a major aspect of authority is nurturance, both in terms of ritual and secular life. To Aboriginal people authority is perceived ideologically as 'looking after' (Myers 1980). This is true for areas of activity ranging from care of children to induction of males into the ritual hierarchy. For example, in contributing to a young man's development by providing the ritual knowledge that was a precondition for marriage, a ritual leader was seen as 'looking after' that man. This attitude has been transferred to secular authorities and employers in the Western culture domain (Bain 1979; Myers 1986). Two examples of how this works, or doesn't work, in the secular world can be seen in relationships with local community councils and with European Australian bosses. The local council, designed by European Australians to promote Aboriginal self-management, creates a complex situation for Aboriginal councillors and the community. Having been given authority, the councillors are seen logically by Aborigines from all clans in the council's area to have taken on a nurturing responsibility. However, only one of these groups, the councillor's own family, sees any requirement for personal loyalty in return, because this is owed only to close kin. So when a councillor tries to exert his man-made authority over groups other than his own, the autonomous and egalitarian members will find it difficult to accept (see Myers 1980, 1986). The checks and balances between the forces of individual autonomy, author it.^, kinship loyalties and the ethic of generosity and cooperation, which counterbalance each other at the family or small group level, are not strong enough to operate effectively on a wider scale. The result is often misplaced nepotism, and feelings of frustration, stress and powerlessness on the part of council leaders. When a European Australian employs Aborigines he becomes a boss, or an authority figure. To the employees authority implies a responsibility to nurture. In the mind of the boss, the arrangement is basically impersonal and the amount and quality of work is strictly quantifiable. When the boss pays the

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employee, the transaction is complete. In the mind of the Aboriginal person they have related themselves to the boss and are doing something personally for him. So while the boss may have paid wages, a personal relationship is still perceived to exist, and may be called on in the future along the lines: 'I did that for you then, you should be able to help (nurture) me with an airfare to Darwin now.' The fact that the previous employee may also expect to do something more for the boss in the future is irrelevant to the boss. There is clearly room here for both parties to feel cheated or to feel the other is taking advantage. These are just two of the views of authority existing in this small-scale society in contrast with those held in Western society. The Western school system is designed to train a child to fit into a large-scale, bureaucratic society where authority resides in the office, and where the individuals filling the roles of the office have no residual loyalties to people with whom they have completed transactions. CULTURALLY DISTmCllVE STYLES The ways people do things are central to cultural distinctiveness. Too often the description of social institutions and the content of a culture take precedence over the ways or styles people have of doing things. These are central to cultural expression and identity and are extremely resilient to social change. Eades' work (1983) on Aboriginal communication styles in southeast Queensland demonstrates thise4Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983) and Christie (1984a) also focus on cultural processes as they are related to learning and give fresh insights into Aboriginal distinctiveness. Rules of interpersonal communication in remote Aboriginal societies are illustrative of distinctive Aboriginal styles of doing things. Only a few of these will be discussed here. (More detailed analysis is available in Liberman 1978; Harris 1980a, 1987; Von Stunner 1981; Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon 1983 and Eades 1982, 1983.) Aboriginal people reserve the right to speak but they also reserve the right not to listen. The right to speak can make a decision-making process quite lengthy because it is consistent with decision-making by consensus. An acknowledged leader will tend to hear everyone out, try to gauge the weight of opinion, add his or her own judgement and then, without criticising any other opinion or pointing out where anyone else was wrong, say: 'Well, I think we should decide this way.' This rule of the right to speak also explains why it is acceptable for an Aboriginal person to harangue the whole camp in the dead of night if he or she feels that a just hearing has not been given. And the right not to listen explains why a public speaker is not offended or unduly put off by listeners going for a drink of water or holding their own conversation in the midst of the speech.

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Aboriginal people regard everything as personal, so there is an absence of an impersonal debate form. A strong verbal debate from their point of view only occurs during a very angry argument. This explains Aboriginal tenseness during a Western-style debate, because such intensity of argument in their world would only occur just prior to physical blows. Closely connected to this ethic is Aboriginal distaste for strong talk and speaking roughly. Strong talk is more associated with personal dislike than with discipline. As a result a European Australian's harsh-talking discipline is often considered by Aborigines as a more serious offence than the original misdemeanour. Also connected with these traits is the Aboriginal avoidance of direct verbal confrontation. This accounts for the socially acceptable euphemisms or vagueness or reluctance to refuse directly, when a refusal is the clear intention. Such behaviour is not considered dishonest by Aborigines, merely good manners. Finally, Aborigines have their own special styles of responding to questions. General information questions such as what, where and when are acceptable provided there are not too many of them. 'Why' questions are, however, infrequently asked. It is bad manners to be too inquisitive in a society which has ways other than walls and fences of maintaining privacy. lbo many or inappropriate questions will meet passive resistance and it is socially acceptable to ignore a question if it breaks the above rules. Unlike Westerners, Aborigines feel no obligation to answer all questions even by a neutral evasion. Aborigines do not use the question and answer teaching technique when they are instructing verbally, and they see no sense in a person asking a question when they either already know the answer, as in the case of teachers in classrooms, or when in the Aboriginal view they ought to know the answer, as in the case of a European Australian who has lived in an Aboriginal community for some time. Different styles of interpersonal communication are manifestations of underlying differences in world view and there is clear potential here for conflict in Aboriginal classrooms. CONTlIVUITY LV CIZANGE A strong continuity in the midst of change is a recurring theme to close observers of remote Aboriginal society. The durability and continuity of Aboriginal distinctiveness in the face of both extensive change and enormous external pressure for further change is remarkable. This has been made possible by a value of pragmatism, or accommodation-a capacity to change and innovate under pressure without loss of an important underlying belief. This is the ethic of survival, of adaptation; the capacity to be flexible within immutable limitations. A detailed study of this pragmatism without loss of core principles is Kolig's (1981) study of the effects of changes in the pastoral industry on Aboriginal religious expression

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in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Because Kolig's study seems particularly relevant to the theme of this book, it will be given prominence here. Kolig (1981, ix) demonstrates that 'Aborigines usually have the stamina and wit to strike practical compromises'. While change, often extensive change, occurs in response to new economic conditions introduced by Western society, that change is often not towards Western ways, but towards new versions of Aboriginal ways. Prior to 1967 most Aborigines in the Kimberley region lived on pastoral properties. This allowed them to continue living on or near their traditional lands. In the off season they were free to maintain both physical and ceremonial links with their ancestral lands. When the Aboriginal Pastoral Award of 1967 granted these stockmen award wages many of them were sacked. They moved into the areas around Derby, F'itzroy Crossing and Halls Creek, to primarily live off social security payments. In addition, Aborigines from the Great Sandy Desert, many of them Wolmadjeri, were continuing to move north and northwest into the same area. Because of the proximity of different groups, new pressures on marriage, traditional language maintenance, and the disruption to religious ceremonies, some very radical changes took place. Even in the face of these complex changes, those concerned maintained a distinctive Aboriginality and still view themselves as traditionally-oriented people. Where religious expression was previously a mechanism for highlighting and recording the details of the differences between various groups, innovations and new lines of organisation began to unite rather than separate groups. Where before there were a multitude of different cults or lodges, now two, the WandjiDingari and Dyulara, have become dominant and have expanded to include 90 per cent of the people. Where traditionally the Law covered virtually all customs, including the complex of myth and ritual and all the secular rules, prohibitions and obligations associated with kinship relationships, today it has partly shed its secular, social aspect in favour of whitefella law. Today Aboriginal Law has emerged as predominantly religious. Even with this narrowing the Law still shapes the Aboriginal picture of reality-their image of the world (Kolig 1981,7).Among many Aboriginal groups there is now a strong interest in and greater acceptance of the Law and the ways of neighbouring groups. The new alliances and congregations are called mobs by the people themselves. The mob has assumed many of the religious functions previously held by clans (Kolig 1981, 29). Traditionally, membership in clans was inflexibly determined by patrilineal descent and conception, and changed only by death. Due to new marriage rules and distance from conception sites, clan membership no longer applies. Mob membership is fluid and primarily based on residence. Belief persists in the mythic or totemic origin of conception, but whereas

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before it was a matter of clan and totemic identity, now it is a more political matter consciously linked to rights to land in the Fitzroy region. All this recognises a new arrangement of loyalties, but strong, Aboriginal loyalties nevertheless. The changing economic conditions and reliance on the dole rather than working on cattle stations, have had several major effects on religious expression. Ceremonies can now cater for larger numbers for longer periods because the group is not dependent on the local environment for food. Pooled funds also allow movement over longer distances by modern transport. Also, religious knowledge can no longer be a currency or source of control to the degree that it once was, partly because of alternative sources of currency and authority coming from the Western world. This means that older men can no longer impose a series of very painful rites of passage on younger men as they progress up the pyramid of religious authority and knowledge. Knowledge is still property and still bought and sold, but increasingly currency is money rather than kangaroos and spears (Kolig 1981, 149). Nowadays circumcision alone is considered sufficient to allow a man access to as much religious knowledge as he is prepared to apply himself to. The nett result is a much broader, flatter authority pyramid, with more egalitarianism, democracy and uniformity and with no one individual recruited to the very highest levels. But there is still an authority structure in the religious and ceremonial sphere. With the narrowing of the Law and its authority to the religious sphere, and the weakening of recruitment to higher religious levels, there is increased recourse to sorcery as a means of social control. Although its practice is almost certainly now more open to personal abuse (Kolig 1981, 85), its powers are still being learned and used. For much the same reasons, movement away from traditional land has undermined the meaningfulness of the kinship system. Thus the classificatory kinship system today is giving way to section or sub-section classifications, which are better suited to current residence patterns. In the long run the loss of the classificatory kinship system will allow an increase of autonomy for the individual, but even so, the kinship system is being replaced with another broader Aboriginal system. The new marriage laws are thus much simpler: you shall not marry within your own sub-section, and you shall not marry outside your generation level (Kolig 1981, 99). They are a pale likeness to the old system, but still prescriptive in a way very different from the Western system. In the Kimberley region, religious leaders traditionally exercised religious as well as secular political power. %day the lodge leaders exercise strong religious leadership, but managerial skills have become so important in the ceremonial sphere that a more fitting description of their role is as a religious broker. So today, rather than one form of leadership, there are two: the religious

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lodge leader, and those who have the English language ability and understanding of the Western world to allow them to be their group's representatives in that world. Normally both types of leaden complement each other well. That Aboriginal distinctiveness lives on even after radical change is increasingly well documented (see Keen 1988;Beckett 1988). However, Kolig (1981) who has written in more detail than most, seems to imply the question 'how much longer can they keep it up?' Kolig's mood changes from the following position (1981, 177): Aborigines themselves have progressively taken the initiative and been creatively revising the old religion and shaping it into a new structure.. .with its importance to Aborigines remaining unimpaired. ...Aboriginal religion is booming, gaining in elasticity and fluidity all the while.

To this (Kolig 1981, 177-78, 180): What has changed is the traditional emphasis of this religion, the purpose and aim of the religious exercise. Its cosmic significance has diminished and is dwindling further, while its social relevance is increasing proportionately. Religion is no longer an awesome tool used to prop up the universe... . As Aboriginal religion becomes more harmlessly pleasant, catering to a sense of esthetics and enjoyment rather than stern duty, this may be in fact a concealed admission of defeat. Kolig, along with many other writers, affirms Aboriginal resilience during change. Aborigines are changing, but not towards Western ways so much as towards new and still distinctive forms of Aboriginality. He summarises the Kimberley situation this way (1981, 180-83): now that [Aboriginal religion] no longer performs its traditional functions it can assume a new purpose; it can become the vehicle of a newly emergent identity. ...Once individualised, people find it easier to accept others equally individualised and to form flexible, less strictly defined associations of a wide order. ...On the level of human interaction, the new religious practice swings away from parochialism and instigates a broad sweeping move toward the enfranchisement of an ever increasing number of Aborigines. The logical end point of this process will be the full recognition of a pan-Aboriginal identity in a form that traditionally would have been impossible. Sansom's (1980) study of fringe camps near Darwin, Eades' (1983) study of language use in southeastern Queensland or Malin's (1989) study of socialisation and early schooling in Adelaide would have served equally well to demonstrate

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continuity in change. Gerritsen's (1982)analysis of an aspect of modern Aboriginal politics reveals the same phenomenon in change. Shimpo's (1985) study of young Aborigines and unemployment examines the strength of cultural continuity, and is a valuable study in this context. Keen's (1988) and Beckett's (1988) collections of papers also provide a valuable contribution to this theme. This capacity to remain distinctively different even in the midst of change is the ongoing source of differencebetween the Aboriginal and Western cultures, and European Australians need to accept that Aborigines are here to stay. CONCLUSION The traditional Aboriginal lifestyle was largely a satisfying one. It is true that there are superficial aspects of Western material culture which remote Aboriginal people now find irresistible: tea, sugar, flour, a few steel tools, blankets and tobacco; and more recently, some medical drugs, alcohol, l'byotas, electronic entertainment, and the greater opportunity to travel. Other features such as clothes, lockable dwellings for storage; and literacy for some are useful. It is not very flattering to notice how short any list of Western attractions is, the irresistible being limited to a handful of items. It is even less flattering to know that some of the items on the list are there to solve problems created by Westerners. Aborigines find very little in our world view attractive, with perhaps the main exception being that some Aboriginal women value the free choice in marriage which European Australian women enjoy. Another exception has been the adoption by some people of Christianity; but on the part of many this has not meant the rejection of their first religion. None of the above is important in the face of the main aspect of Western society that Aborigines want which is equal power-not so much for personal expression, but rather to withstand Western pressure, and protect their own land and their independence. They eqjoy money and some material things, but to not have them in great amounts is no cause for distress. In the light of all of this it is either naive or arrogant of European Australians to assume that Aborigines either want to, or will, eventually adopt the same world view. This chapter establishes how different contemporary remote Aboriginal culture and Western culture are; in fact most of the time it is more a matter of irreconcilable incompatibility than of degree of difference. This chapter on Aboriginal world view does not imply that all that happens to Aboriginal people is to be understood in terms of Aboriginal culture. Understanding the world view of the dominant society is at least as important as understanding Aboriginal world view; and historical events and their repercussions, economic pressures, racism, and political expediencies are also part of what is happening to Aboriginal people.

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But an understanding of contemporary remote Aboriginal world view has considerable explanatory power in understanding happenings in contemporary Aboriginal Australia where the two cultures meet. Aboriginal culture will change, but will not lose its distinctiveness. It will survive in some form as far into the future as any social scientist can see. European Australians need to absorb that fundamental fact and decide what the response should be. The other fundamental fact is that at least some remote Aboriginal people need to be able to operate at sophisticated levels in Western culture. Are these two realities mutually exclusive? The theme of this book is that they are not, provided that some fairly radical measures are taken in terms of Aboriginal people keeping primary identity in their Aboriginal culture and learning to adopt appropriate roles in Western culture when necessary. Aboriginal schools are seen as having a primary responsibility to prepare Aboriginal children for living in two worlds.

NOTES 1. The term world view, now used by some anthropologists, is admittedly a general term but will be used here because it is more allembracing than terms such as attitudes, values, priorities, differences, styles or perceptions; all of which are relevant but not broad enough for the task in hand. A simple definition of world view would be the ideas and beliefs a group of people (consciously or unconsciously) holds about its world and the people and things in it (see Christie 1984b, 3). 2. Aboriginal languages do, however, have more number terms than is commonly assumed. See Stokes (1982) and Harris (1982). See also Sayers (1982) and Harris (1984a, 1984b, 1989) for examples of how studies of Aboriginal mathematics provide insights into Aboriginal world view. 3. It is revealing how, when Westerners, especially males, meet, they immediately try to establish what job the other person does. Without knowing what they do they almost have no identity. In contrast, an Aboriginal person will be trying to find out what to call the other person, that is, what kin term to use, and who they know in common. 4. The following personal anecdote illustrates the same resilience in style. A Tasmanian Aboriginal, highly-qualified and competent in the Western world, once said of my book Culture and Learning, which contained observations of a very traditional group in Arnhem Land (Harris 1980a): 'When I read that book I felt I was reading about myself and my family.' He could say this because the book focused on the ways Aborigines go about things; in this case, how they go about learning and communicating.

CHAPTER

3

BICULTURALISM EXAMINED

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE in remote Australia are unique, and the outside forces impinging on them are unique. On the other hand, Aboriginal experience has much in common with other ethnic minorities in contact with numerically and technologically dominant societies. In this chapter some examples of minority culture survival which seem to have continuing success are briefly discussed. 'h give a breadth of reference, examples will be cited from outside Australia along with some fairly recent attempts at conscious culture maintenance within remote Aboriginal Australia. The concept of biculturalism is central to any discussion of ethnic minorities within a dominant society, but it is seriously undertheorised! One useful theoretical distinction is that there are two dimensions of biculturalism-individual and societal (Fishman 1980). Analysis of individual biculturalism will help determine whether it is possible for people to live in two worlds satisfactorily, and to what extent. Paulston (1978, 374-79) divides the concept of individual biculturalism into three aspects: cognitive, affective and active; each with a number of levels from simple to profound. Being bicultural in the cognitive sense involves learning encyclopaedic facts about the second culture. This is the level of reality of most so-called bilingualbicultural school programs. Learning here is a matter for the head, without involving feelings, values or actions. Examples of actions would be having to actually live through embarrassing misunderstandings or work through clashes in values, such as competing definitions of honesty or punctuality. Cognition involves information, analysis/synthesis, comprehension and insight; as Paulston (1978, 374) phrases it: Cognition deals with knowing the what and why about another culture and can partially be learned outside the culture itself. ...The ability to look at the same phenomenon, or rather to be able to interpret what the same phenomenon means from the viewpoint of two cultures, is a hallmark of the bicultural individual. Being bicultural in an affective sense involves perception, appreciation, re-evaluation, re-orientation and identification. Perception and appreciation involve coming to know and to accept aspects of the second culture, such as food or music; as well as aesthetic and non-core moral values such as attitudes to leisure, reciprocity in lending items, or levels of punctuality and courtesy. Paulston (1978, 375) suggests that:

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It is, at superficial behaviour levels, perfectly possible to understand and even to be able to behave in ways one still dislikes. ...Many aspects of culture are within the bounds of modification: one can learn to be half an hour late and not consider it moral slackness; one can learn to eat with one's fingers and still feel like an adult. But such moWications mainly concern surface behaviour, behaviour one can switch off and on. In Paulston's terms, re-evaluation is the process of changing one's values, shifting priorities or enlarging one's value system. Re-orientation means changing the direction of one's life, spurred by values adopted from the second culture. Identification is becoming one with the people of the other culture, a kind of changing of citizenship. Paulston (1978,376)says: 'At these levels [re-evaluation, re-orientation and identification] I don't believe it is possible to be bicultural.. .[for]...some aspects of culture are beyond modification'. Being bicultural in terms of action is not spelled out in detail in Paulston's analysis. I think she is saying that on this level, where non-negotiable values are not impinged on, a bicultural person picks and chooses, often according to individual temperament. In the context of the long-term survival of Aboriginal cultures, their need for societal biculturalism is more important than their need for individual biculturalism. Thus the idea of learning the roles of the majority culture and learning how to adopt them appropriately is more useful than that of picking and choosing in a way that only members of large world cultures can afford to do and have their cultures still survive. Faulston (1978, 377) discusses briefly the situation of an individual who cannot choose between two sets of conflicting values imposed on her/him, where the result is some form of psychopathology. In the case of a Japanese Nisei boy a nervous breakdown, which might be the inability to function with any cultural rules, was brought on by the stress caused by his desire to espouse modern egalitarian values, and the imposition of his father's strictly Japanese values. The stress is caused by the inability to pick and choose. My intuitions are that a person who accommodates to living in two deliberately separated culture domains, where primary identity is in one and the adoption of appropriate roles is learned in the other, will defuse a good deal of potential stress. In other words, the stresses of choosing are reduced for those individuals who are part of societal biculturalism. Individual biculturalism is often written about in terms of the process of a person bridging cultures. Several writers, for example, Adler (1974) and Useem and Useem (1967) focus not on the survival of a minority culture group but on adaptive measures taken by individuals or small temporary groupings of expatriates. Typical members of the bridging biculture are academics who travel

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widely and work in training institutions in various countries, members of the diplomatic corps or foreign aid agents, members of various religious missions, or upwardly mobile members of an ethnic ghetto who take up formal education or employment opportunities and who make rare contact with their parent culture. In any case the notion of a bridging-culture individual does not offer a solution for the survival of a very small cultural group. Also on the issue of individual biculturalism, Kalantzis and Cope (1980, 1984) emphasise the value of a rational approach to cultural difference. They argue that culture is largely a rational adaptation to environmental and technological realities, and that all cultures, especially on the level of adaptation, have much in common. There is insufficient space here to analyse their stimulating approach to the topic, except to say tentatively that they seem to underestimate the a-rational aspects such as the importance of religion and value systems. Their approach may be more appropriate to relatively large voluntary migrant groups than to small indigenous minorities, and to the reduction of racism within the dominant group, rather than to the long-term survival of small groups. In arguing against the idea of a bridging person as a useful notion for remote Aborigines in terms of culture survival, I am not denying the necessary function of mediators. But these intermediaries do not need to be an alloy of the two cultures in order to be effective; such people can retain their primary identity in one culture and become very proficient in adopting roles in the other culture. Bochner's (1986, 350-51) use of the term 'sojourner' encapsulates the meaning because they are: not expected to adjust themselves to a new culture. Rather they learn selected aspects of it for instrumental reasons. These new practices need not become part of the permanent repertoire of the person but will be discarded when they are not functional, as for instance when the sojourner is among fellow nationals or after returning home. Unlike the concept of adjustment, c;lture learning does not imply that a person must undergo a basic shift in values and conform to a new set of norms. Culture learning makes a distinction between skills and values, between performance and compliance. Intermediary biculturalism (for example, as practised by diplomats, interpreters, business entrepeneurs or foreign aid agents) seems to be more a matter for individuals who have taken the step voluntarily, secure in the knowledge that there is a stable primary culture to go back to if necessary, and their situation is temporary if need be. When whole groups involuntarily join a middle culture, or have their cultural roots denied to them in some way, the results are not examples

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of triumphant multicultural people but of anomie, such as Aborigines who lived around Sydney Cove after the first fleet arrived or Amazonian Indian groups disrupted by the Amazon highway. Often, if alive at all, they are confused, bitter and broken people. Of current relevance to the Aboriginal Australian scene are some of those teenagers who have been away to high school, whom the Strelley leaders refer to as people who have lost themselves. They have often failed academically but later can fit into neither culture. Those children of Aboriginal mothers and European fathers who were forcibly taken from their families in the 1930s and 1940s are nowadays mostly resentful of the in-between status to which others allocated them (see Jordan 1985), and have found strength in deliberately seeking to rebuild their Aboriginal identity. At the same time, I recognise that care must be taken not to deny Aboriginal people the right to follow up opportunities in the Western world. The temptation of those sympathetic to Aboriginal causes to be attracted to remote Aborigines as living museum pieces, as people in a time capsule, must be guarded against. But it should also be said that it is normal for members of any cultural group to congregate together. After a detailed review of the relevant research Bochner (1986, 348-49) states: Virtually every one of the major theories in social psychology implies that people prefer to interact with similar rather than dissimilar individuals. ...Even in culturally mixed residential settings such as International Houses, where there are explicit pressures to form cross cultural friendships, studies in the United States, England and Australia have shown that the various groups prefer the company of their fellow nationals. Two-way Aboriginal schooling is a strategy to help make the matter of choice real in both worlds; to provide opportunity for the primary Aboriginal identity to stay strong, though changing, and thus continue to be the source of inner strength and security necessary for dealing with the Western world. Twoway schooling should help to keep the option of living in an Aboriginal world more truly open. Aboriginal people today are increasingly interested both in being empowered in terms of the Western world and in retaining or rebuilding Aboriginal identity as a primary identity. It seems that few consciously want to become bridging or universal people, because that seems like being something in-between, or like falling in a hole as Strelley people say (Bucknall, personal communication 1987). The discussion so far has focused on individual biculturalism, but the notion of societal biculturalism is central to this book, which is concerned with the survival of whole societies. The strength of societal biculturalism is the

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corporate determination of an embattled, usually small, culture soup to preserve its culture into the future. The end result of individual biculturalism, with its idiosyncratic nature, can only be culturally tolerated in a large unthreatened world culture where the individual would represent one out of 3,000,000 or 300,000. In a language or culture group with a total membership of 200 to 1,500 people, which is the general case in remote Aboriginal Australia, the repercussions of too many cases of individual idiosyncratic biculturalism, in terms of the primary culture, would be fatal over generations. It is in this context of embattled groups that Fishman (1980, 1985) emphasises societal biculturalism, with necessary group loyalty and the need for culture domain separation (or compartmentalisation), even though it may seem extreme in the eyes of bicultural members of very large societies. BICULTURALISM IN CURRENT BILINGUAL EDUCATION As discussed above, one way for members of an ethnic minority to look at biculturalism is to focus on academic study of the mainstream culture, and even one's primary culture. The vast majority of references to bicultural schooling overseas are of this type and are almost invariably linked directly with bilingual education in slogan-like fashion. The automatic linking of bicultural/bilingual education is partially valid to the extent that a language cannot be used without also using concepts and content related to the culture i t represents. But when we look beyond the language itself to the ways in which the language is used, the purposes for which it is used and the contexts in which it is used, assumptions about the automatic linking of language and culture are simple-minded and potentially dangerous. Fishman (1985, 50) voices the danger like this: The term 'bicultural' is often introduced quite innocently in connection with.. .bilingual education in the U.S.A. Neither the institutional stability nor the functional compartmentalisation of this phenomenon (i.e., being bicultural), if it is to be pursued seriously and societally, is recognised. Indeed, unknowingly, the arrangements entered into usually foster biculturalism in the most dislocative sense, i.e., they are transitional. ...They are commonly condescending, trivialising and peripheralizing in connection with the marked (home) culture ('thingification' I have called it elsewhere) and Anglo-Americanising even when they least suspect. In the Aboriginal context there are two very real dangers which are similar to those mentioned by Fishman. The first danger is the possible conflict between the various potential advantages of bilingual education. Bilingual

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education (since its introduction after the Labor Party came to power in 1972) in parts of the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland, wherever it was reasonably well-implemented, carried several major benefits to Aboriginal people (see S Ha& 1982; H a d , Graham and Buschenhofen 1984). The main benefits have been the fostering of increased status and the professional involvement of Aboriginal staff; increased academic performance by Aboriginal children; and a tangible contribution to Aboriginal language maintenance (see Cataldi 1990; Graham and Harris forthcoming). But the major dilemma, that Western academic success is likely to be destructive of Aboriginal culture, potentially holds good even for bilingual education. Bilingual education as currently structured is primarily an academic program in a Western structure. This is true even in a maintenance model where serious attempts are made to use the home language in educationally significant ways at all levels of school. Bilingual programs use Aboriginal languages much of the time in Western ways. For example, a bilingual program can use the twoedged sword of literacy to foster decontextualised thought in young children. It will also probably urge children to learn through hypothetical problem posing and adopt a question-and-answer teaching technique. It will tend to teach children that the avenue to learning is open-ended and not ritually governed, and that they can control their own learning rather than leave the getting of higher knowledge to older people. In other words, an Aboriginal language in a school context inevitably becomes part of the socialisation of students into the sub-culture of school-that is, inevitable if the students are to be academically successfulbeyond mid-primary levels. (See S Harris 1984, 1985; Christie 1984a, 1985a. See also Seagrim and Lendon 1980 and Musgrove 1982, for more controversial analyses of this issue.) The theory developed in this book, however, indicates that Aboriginal culture has a better chance of survival if this socialisation to the higher levels of the Western, formal schooling process takes place in English, and not in the Aboriginal language. The second danger referred to by Fishman and relevant to Aboriginal bilingual/bicultural education is his concern about 'thh@ication' or trivialisation. When aspects of culture are taken out of their functional context and are used in artificial ways, they become artifacts. An intuitive Aboriginal wariness of trivialisation probably accounts for the fact that no Aboriginal dance, weaving, carving or traditional art class I know of has lasted more than a short time in bilingual schools. Part of the reason might have been that Aborigines did not really control the timing or situation of these classes. I do not wish to be overcritical here, because where an Aboriginal group has actually lost these skills or no longer uses them regularly in group life but wants to maintain them in some form, it may

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have no choice but to express these activities in somewhat artificial contexts. Moreover, there is nothing second-ratein using what was once, say, a survival skill, as a form of arttraditional' Aboriginal culture is not the only authentic expression of Aboriginal culture. Perhaps the key term is authentic. The dangers of artificiality are avoided if the expression is carried out by leaders who are legitimate, and in a manner and context that is perceived as authentic and one of Aboriginal choice. This is Fishman's functional compartmentalisation, or what I am calling culture domain separation, where the relationship between learning and 'context of situation' is so important (see Malinowski 1923; Halliday and Hasan 1985). Because I am familiar with the Northern Territory bilingual program I will discuss its bicultural components rather than those in bilingual schools elsewhere in Australia, but I suspect they are all fairly similar in design. I think that at their worst they are firmly within the trivialisation danger zone, and at their best they fall within the deliberate and perceived-as-authentic Aboriginal identity building possibility of school-sponsored bicultural education. The Northern Territory bilingual program began in 1973, very recently for such an educational innovation. Most teacher effort went into the production of reading schemes and a substantialwritten Aboriginal literature in each of the twelve languages involved; into the promotion of Aboriginal language maintenance through stimulating oral vernacular activities; and into the training of Aboriginal staff. We hoped that using an Aboriginal language and having students face Aboriginal teachers for half of their total time in primary school would be major steps towards bicultural schooling. As the program became better established we also were able to develop what could fairly be called a very enlightened social and cultural education curriculum guide (Northern Territory Department of Education 1986a),where for every item of study of Western geography, history, economics, environment, politics and government we tried to give scope and direction for study of the corresponding Aboriginal item. Isolated efforts were also made in the areas of Aboriginalising early primary mathematics in some remote schools, which included such measures as counting with leaves or stones or shells rather than with factory-made blocks, or developing Aboriginal words for the names of numbers. Other efforts were made towards hands-on local environmental science (see Northern Territory Department of Education 1982; Davis 1980). Some of these projects were revolutionary and innovative at the time, and certainly were motivated by the need to bring Aboriginal culture into the school. However, I now have resewations about the potential effectiveness of these efforts in promoting Aboriginal culture maintenance, because they were often approached from a Western perspective. Much of this cross-culturalcurriculum development was initiated and carried out by non-Aboriginal teachers. Exceptions to this were Jeannie Egan's

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Warlpiri preschool program at Yuendumu in the early 1980s; and Elcho Island's Yolngu Culture Program which was entirely organised by Aboriginal staff, took place outside school, and saw the children divided into clan groupings. This latter program ran all day every Friday for about three years, also in the early 1980s. On these days the non-Aboriginalstaff were redeployed to assist in adult education activities in various centres outside the school. Another notable early development was the Yirrkala Aboriginal Studies program (see Yunupingu and Djuwandayngu 1978; Ngurruwutthun 1980). The tentative or experimental nature of some of these early Aboriginal culture training initiatives should not be surprising, because the theory and practice of bicultural education is much less advanced than that of bilingual education, for several reasons. Bilingual education involves the role of language in learning, about which educators know a good deal. Language is the medium of the Western classroom, so bilingual education can be adapted to that environment through the initiative of Western educators. Which brings us to the nub of the matterunlike bilingual education, bicultural education depends far more on the authentic carriers of culture-Aboriginal adults. Schools tend not to get that degree of Aboriginal involvement unless Aboriginal people have a significant degree of control. The reason the Elcho Island Yolngu Culture Program worked for three years was that an exceptional non-Aboriginal principal genuinely involved Aboriginal adults in decision-making in the school. Also, it should be noted that the type of bilingualhicultural schooling described here has been mostly located in settlements where Aboriginal culture is still being strongly reproduced outside school. AUSTRALIAN EMBRYONIC MODELS OF TWO-WAY SCHOOLING Representative examples of some developing two-way schools will be mentioned below. Two schools will then be discussed in more detail as representing the more easily definable alternative embryonic models of two-way schooling. It would be fair to state that the academic performance of these schools appears to be at least as good as that of other schools. It can also be claimed that parental and community pride and interest in the schools is higher than was the case prior to the establishment of these new structures. In the Kimberleys, for example, it is only recently that the dangers of culture loss have surfaced, prompting Aboriginal people to become more involved in the education of their children.

1. Yirrkala in Arnhem Land is the most quoted example of this evolving twoway or both-ways process in a government school (see Yunupingu 1986, 1987; Watson 1987,1988; Wunungmurra 1988). Some non-Aborigineswho have written

about Yirrkala would argue against a strict domain separation view of two-way schooling as advocated in this book (see Mdmggart 1988,1989;Watson 1987, 1988). The Yolngu writers, Yunupingu (1988) and Wunungmurra (1988), seem to support both a culture separation approach and a culture bridging approach. There are two domains of activity, but Yolngu control of ideas and agenda in the Yolngu domain is promoting Yolngu control of ideas and agenda in the whole school. Participatory research has been a central part of Yolngu curriculum development at Yirrkala (Marika, Ngurruwutthun and White 1989). 2. More recently Milingirnbi, Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) and Gapuwiyak are moving towards more Aboriginal control and a two-way notion of schooling. 3. Ngukurr could probably be called an embryonic two-way school, but the emphasis there has been on Aboriginal management and teacher training rather than on curriculum development.

4. The ~ermannsburgfamily or outstation non-bilingual schools in Central Australia are an example of two-way schooling occurring in a different form (see Fargher and Ziersch 1982; Schubert 1985). 5. Yipirinya in Alice Springs is an independent school in the Northern Territory which has espoused two-way schooling from its beginning (see Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon 1983, 335; Teasdale and Teasdale 1986).

6. The Ntyarlke Unit of Aranda students in Alice Springs Catholic High School is an embryonic two-way school. 7. Walungurru (Kintore) on the Northern Territory-Western Australia border is probably the most active two-way school in a remote Central Australian community (see Keeffe 1989). 8. Willowra, a Warlpiri school northwest of Alice Springs, is also evolving a twoway approach to schooling with increased Aboriginal leadership. Lajamanu, another Warlpiri bilingual school, should also be in this list. 9. In Western Australia the Strelley group of schools is another small independent system where there is conscious training for living in two worlds (see Liberman 1981; Bucknall 1982; Jordan 1983; Harker and McConnochie 1985, which also contains a brief discussion of Hermannsburg and Yipirinya). 10. The fairly extensive Catholic school system in predominantly Aboriginal communities in the Kimberleys of Western Australia is also trying to follow a twoway approach to schooling, emphasising the importance of Aboriginal language and culture (see Kimberley Catholic Education Language Team 1988).

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11. The few small independent schools in the Kimberleys of which Noonkanbah would be the best known, also try to have this kind of philosophy (see Kolig 1987; Hawke and Gallacher 1989, for background information about the community). Many communities are not yet ready to anticipate the need for bicultural schooling and deliberate Aboriginal identity building or culture maintenance programs cannot be devised and propped up by sympathetic nonAboriginal teachers in the way that bilingual programs can be. Two-way schooling can only be a reflection of broad-based interest and support within the culture group concerned, and can only be initiated by determined and purposeful Aboriginal people. That these examples are largely dependent on non-Aboriginal teachers for the English part of their program does not detract from their capacity to be bicultural. In fact in most of them, deliberate culture domain separation is the central strategy of being bicultural. For Aborigines to be dependent on nonAboriginal teachers to teach English is hardly dangerous; what is dangerous is their dependence on non-Aboriginesin administration and decision-making, which is detrimental to Aboriginal culture maintenance. The majority of remote Aboriginal schools in Australia are either unconsciously confident of the strength of their culture, or defeated, demoralised groups with insufficiently strong leadership to be able to do much about it. In my view positive changes in school structures in both these groups will most quickly come from appropriate training in two-way schooling for Aboriginal teachers and their academic and political empowerment. In regions such as East Africa, New Guinea and the Pacific, teacher training institutions have pioneered the first truly tertiary level of training of local people and have helped them build the capacity for constructive political leadership in the modern context. There are two possible avenues into two-way schools. The first involves the parents and elders, although they may not have any teacher training, taking control of their children's schooling and forming independent schools. Strelley, Yipirinya, Noonkanbah, and possibly Hermannsburg outstations are examples of this approach. The second avenue involves training Aboriginal staff as teachers, to a level which will enable them to take leadership and authority in the school. Kintore, Willowra, Yirrkala, Galiwin'ku and Milingimbi are examples of this approach. (The latter have all remained government schools.) The two main curriculum models of two-way schooling seem to be those in which Aboriginal language and culture have a central role in the school; and those in which Aboriginal language and culture are looked after in the home with school considered a Western phenomenon where only Western subjects and English are taught. Two schools which are representative of these alternative models are Strelley and Hermannsburg.

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STRELLEY The Strelley group of schools in the Pilbara region near Port Hedland in Western Australia is the earliest, most clearly thought-out example of an Aboriginal initiative from remote Australia using the school as a source of identity building (see Bucknall 1982; Jordan 1983; McLeod 1984, for introductions to the school and community). The Strelley Mob have no illusions about the threat under which their culture exists. While the school opened only in 1976, their conscious efforts at reconstruction began in the 1940s. They admitted that they had lost a lot of their culture, and took purposeful measures to do something about it. The Strelley example is likely to be so important in the future as an inspiration to other groups who wish to survive as a distinctive cultural unit, that it is worth recording here something of their efforts. While I have visited Strelley twice, in 1979 and 1987, the following draws heavily on the Strelley section of Jordan's (1983) study of the construction of identity in parts of Aboriginal Australia. Jordan (1983, 203) explains how indoctrination is essential to the building or maintaining of an Aboriginal world in which identity is to be located. In her view, it is crucial that in the social construction of reality leaders use every method possible for continuous inculcation of values, norms and meanings. Theorising, which means putting out an idea to be examined, or making meanings conscious and giving them formal status, is also seen as crucial in this process. As Berger (1971, 98) says: Men not only experience themselves, they explain themselves. Every socially constructed world contains a psychological model. Once formed the psychological model can act back upon the psychological reality. The model has realising potency. This view agrees with one of Paulston's emphases (1978, 371) that the nature of culture is the theory that members of a culture hold about what their fellows know, believe and mean, or what they ideally should know, believe and mean. Theories are talked about, explained and taught in every culture in the process of cultural regeneration. The Strelley Mob's theorising dwells first on the need for contemporary living to be within the traditional norms of the Law, thus contextualising the whole of life within the Law. It requires the authority of older people in keeping ceremonies strong and preaching about the sacredness of the Mob's land and the ,

importance of the family, kinship and avoidance relations. Next, there is theorising about the value of new elements such as Western type work, say with cattle, and the school-introduced elements that, if under their control, will not destroy the identity of the Mob. To this end they support the teaching of English language and literacy and mathematics, but resist the teaching of social studies.

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Another new element is the use in written form of a previously oral language. Jordan (1983, 213) stresses the importance of the promotion and use of the vernacular as the medium through which the 'theorising' of the Aboriginal world is absorbed. She sees this world as 'a "shared" world not easily translatable into English terms and Western concepts'. Adults are taught to read before the children are taught, thus avoiding cleavage between generations. A rich written literature in the vernacular is seen as an avenue of language maintenance and of language development for the holding of knowledge. Bucknall (personal communication 1987) describes the development of Nyangumarta literature: After working with written Nyangumarta for eleven years the people are seeing new potentials, and of their own initiative are trusting more of their knowledge to written form. For example only recently some of the older women have seen it as appropriate to tell Monty the stories of the waterholes. Through written literature the children will learn that if they dip their net more than twice into a certain waterhole the rainbow serpent will come out and discipline them. Of course the people take the children to the waterholes and tell the history on site, but the vision for the scope of Nyangumarta literature is growing. Then there is theorising about the rejection of what they see as harmful elements of Western society such as drinking, going to prison, and unselective interaction with Western culture, including certain people, films, literature, government policies and religion. The Mob sees Christian missions as having threatened Aboriginal religion and the government as having failed to keep promises to protect Aboriginal land and sacred sites against mining or to train their young people. Their conclusion is: 'The mission has failed, the government failed. Their time is finished. It is our turn now' ( M i k u m n y a , 28 November 1979). Recalling the history of the group is a strong form of theorising, which clarifies for everyone their past and present situation in relation to the rest of the world. Finally, and above all, there is theorising about the autonomy of the Mob. The Mob has a model of separate development which embodies an alternative political structure and a belief that their survival depends on isolation, both physical and philosophical, from the dominant society. Strelley leaders sometimes say: 'We can't give way too much', in relation, say, to the Aboriginal marriage system (Bucknall, personal communication 1987). Recently the Mob moved the headquarters of its activity from Strelley, which is sixty kilometres from Port Hedland, to Warralong, another of their cattle stations 140 kilometres from Port Hedland. While the Strelley Mob is implementing a policy of culture domain separation it should be emphasised that it is not a static society totally resistant

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to change. They are remarkably flexible in the way they face up to new challenges. Solutions that are consistent with the Law are worked out and agreed on through lengthy group meetings where everyone participates in defining issues. One example of this flexibility is that the Mob is not against mining, but it must be on terms not destructive to their way of life. In fact they partly survived after the 1946 strike as innovative tin miners. A further example is the way most individuals contribute their social security entitlements to a group fund. This practice not only allows all material needs to be met by the Mob, but gives a degree of economic independence in terms of group projects. The Mob also owns cattle stations which contribute to this economic semi-independence. The above description of Strelley illustrates that a true two-way school is one which is an extension of a group desire for societal biculturalism. While the original charter given by the Mob's School Board to non-Aboriginal teachers in 1976: 'Teach good Nyangumarta and good English' still stands, and English and maths do receive proper attention, the primary purpose of the school is to socialise children into the world in which their parents believe it will be necessary for them to grow up. Apart from a strong Nyangumarta literacy program and the teaching of early maths in Nyangumarta, not much more in an academic sense is done through Nyangumarta in the school. Of course the content of much of the Nyangumarta literacy is Aboriginal, but what really matters in terms of the school's role in the socialisation of the children is the strength of the adults' commitment to the children growing up to be Aboriginal. Aboriginal adults' presence and priorities pervade the school. English is taught, but primary socialisation takes place in the first language. Non-Aboriginal teachers are necessary and welcome at Strelley and free to live a Western lifestyle. They are, however, expected to support the School Board's priorities, at least by not opposing them. I am not implying that Strelley has no problems or disappointmentsit does. One is that today the small proportion of teenagers who rebel against their parents' conservative utopia and want to try out the bright lights of the shops and entertainment in Port Hedland and the associated grog, tend to be thirteen or fourteen-year-olds, where a few years ago they were eighteen and nineteenyear-olds. A second problem is that the Mob remains dependent on Western expertise for some aspects of health care, the administration of the school and some types of communication with the outside world. But they accept, along with control of their affairs, full responsibility for them and are constantly thinking of creative solutions. A third problem is that Strelley, along with all other bilingual schools in Aboriginal Australia, has yet to develop truly indigenous styles and uses of vernacular literacy, But these things take time, and there is no reason why Strelley should not develop in this direction provided its theorising supports that development.

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A model of bicultural schooling where the first culture and identity is deliberately built through the agency of the school is not the only legitimate or valid model, but it may be the most likely to succeed. Such a model can only succeed if the parents really want it to begin with; it cannot be forced from the outside. The lack of authenticity of the latter type of support would do more harm than good and the program simply wouldn't last. Outsiders keen to support Aboriginal culture maintenance through schools must be sensitive to the way Aboriginal adults are voting with their feet.

An alternative approach to bicultural schooling is what I will call the Hermannsburg model.2 Non-Aboriginal workers connected with the Finke River Mission have a long history of respect for Aranda society and support for Aboriginal authority and decision-making processes, as well as a thoughtful approach to social change (see F'argher and Ziersch 1982; Schubert 1985). Even though there is a history of Westerners learning and analysing Aranda language, Hermannsburg has never joined the Northern Territory bilingual program. It has responded to local Aboriginal authority by providing a model of schooling consistent with the purposes for which the community decentralised away from Hermannsburg into outstations in 1973. Briefly, the Aboriginal leaders requested qualified non-Aboriginal teachers to drive to the outstations daily to teach the three Rs in English for two hours, thus minimising Western culture influence as much as possible. The leader of the most distant Hermannsburg outstation, Helmut Pareloutja, has a clear vision of the future for Kulpitara, 110 kilometres west of Hermannsburg. He says the children are safer in the outstation than in larger settlement schools or Aboriginal residential colleges such as Yirara in Alice Springs where they will learn the wrong way. 'I'll put my fence around here so I don't lose my way.' Yet he sees the need to send some children to Western boarding schools, and the need for economic independence through ventures such as a market garden, art sales and tourism (Coutts, personal communication 1989).In all the Hermannsburg outstation schools, Aranda teachers do not have a significant role and the Aranda language is not used-Aranda people look after Aboriginal culture in Aranda contexts. Aranda was primarily an oral culture, and it can be maintained, they say, by keeping to that tradition. It is interesting to note, however, that Hermannsburg people still support the use of written Aranda in the context of Christian religious expression. Other Aboriginal people apart from those at Hermannsburg have the same attitude that Aboriginal culture training is not necessary in school. For example, one man at Jigalong said to me in 1987: 'Two-way education? We've got

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that now haven't we? After rain we go out in the bush and get bush food and the kids learn there.' A group of Jigalong men gave assent to his statement and vigorously denied that hunting skills were being lost among teenagers. A month later a man from Maningrida made almost exactly the same points, but the men in both of these communities said they valued Aboriginal language in school. A significant proportion of parents in South Australian Pitjantjatjara bilingual schools, and a few parents in places like Milingimbi, are also saying schools are for learning English and the home will look after Aboriginal language and culture (see Poulson 1988, for a view of this issue from Yuendumu). How are we to evaluate a school program such as that a t Hermannsburg? It is certainly bicultural in that the two cultures are separated into domains of activity along the criteria of person, topic and language. English is for the school and for Western topics and Western people. What is more important is that if that is what the Aboriginal parents and leaders really want, then that is the only type of program worth having. Even if there is a more theoretically sound approach to bicultural schooling, if the parents don't support it then it cannot be effective. However, some theoretical judgements should be made about this issue because it is important to many Aboriginal groups beyond Hermannsburg. In fact scores of outstation schools throughout remote Australia follow a fairly similar approach, but with less non-Aboriginal teacher input and far more input from Aboriginal assistant teachers. One relevant question in terms of long-term Aranda language maintenance is whether outstation parents in their present-day setting, with the presence of English videos and satellite television, can really look after Aranda culture without the help of extra adaptive resources such as a written Aranda literature. While it is true that a written language is no guarantee that a language will be maintained in the sense of being used, that is, orally and daily, communities such as Strelley are finding that the production and use of written literature is a vehicle for maintenance. Traditionally Aboriginal language was maintained because the economy and lifestyle provided functions for a rich and varied language use. So, only if the contemporary outstation economy and variety of activities is broad and deep enough to make the spontaneous use of that rich language functional, can the people over the long-term look after Aboriginal culture. Social change demands adaptive mechanisms in response to changing learning contexts. The greater the effect of outside forces of change the truer this becomes. One such adaptive mechanism would be written Aboriginal literature, which fills indigenous functions in the Aboriginal community. A written vernacular literature, which in the Hermannsburg case obtains in the local Lutheran Church,

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often increases the status of a small language-it provides another symbolic reward (Fishman 1985, 372). Another such adaptive mechanism would be Aboriginal teachers who have consciously taken the trouble to become models of a rich Aboriginal language and have learned sound language teaching methodology appropriate to the modern situation. This of course is purely academic in the Hermannsburg context. The parents have chosen a model of schooling which they believe is the best response to the major dilemma presented in Chapter One. Because the parents support that model, it is the only model which has any chance of success in that situation. Another relevant question in relation to the Hermannsburg model concerns the long-term dependence on non-Aboriginal teachers because the community has chosen not to have trained Aboriginal teachers. While there are likely to be ongoing difficulties in recruiting the right teachers, a problem in no way limited to Hermannsburg, the use of non-Aboriginal staff for teaching the three Rs in English is consistent with culture domain separation. If the parents are going to look after all things Aboriginal, and non-Aboriginal teachers are virtually the only exposure the children have to Western behaviour and English language and culture, then the role of the English teacher is one which probably can be best filled by a Westerner. Self-manangement does not necessarily mean Aboriginal people need to do everything themselves. I believe the Hermannsburg teaching staff would answer to all this: 'We are seriously trying to respond to what the parents want. When they say something different we will respond.' No-one can argue with that. r~ should make it clear that The Strelley and ~ e r i a n n s b u examples if two-way schooling is forced on an Aboriginal group for whatever motives, it will not be effective because it will lack the authenticity which can only come from the initiative of the parent community. Effective bicultural schooling is likely to be an extension of societal biculturalism. What should also be apparent is that while there may be various models of bicultural schooling, all attempts a t culture survival by extremely small minority cultures depend on some form of voluntary culture domain separation. Hence the idea that culture domain separation is fundamental to two-way schooling. It might be helpful, therefore, to show that Pincher Nyurrmiyarri's historic request for two-way schooling as an intuitive solution to the major dilemma of Aboriginal schooling is part of a respectable but small world-wide tradition of minority culture separation for survival.

CULTURE D O W SEPARATION OVERSEAS Hassidic Jews and, up to a point, other conservative Jews have maintained their cultural and religious identity for hundreds of years by culture domain separation

(see Fishman 1985). While being part of the wider world of mainstream society, they maintain a private world of a separate home language and a religious language; a separate religious and moral system; and separate family life. One key means of culture maintenance is the strategy of separate schools, which also teach the national language. Distinctive items of clothing, networks of loyalties to other Jews and a preference for marriage with other Jews are further measures which help maintain a sense of cultural distinctiveness. A shared history of persecution is another unifying and identifying factor. The Old Order Amish in North America, and the similar Hutterites of northern USA and Canada, also maintain a pattern of societal biculturalism and diglossia. Diglossia is the stable maintenance of two languages or dialects for complementary functions by the same speech community. With the Amish this is Luther German and Pennsylvania Dutch for internal needs and English for external needs. They control their own primary schools where possible (Hostetler 1974) and children learn to become proficient in English so that they can deal with the wider culture. The outside culture is accepted as necessary and their own inside culture is in complementary distribution with it (see Fishman 1985, 49). Perhaps more than any other Western minority group within Western society, the Amish seek to maintain cultural and religious identity by keeping their way of life conservative. For example, they try to regulate the inroads of fashion in clothing by regulating the width of the brim of hats, and they draw arbitrary lines about the use of electricity, modern machinery and transport. Apparently the majority of the younger generation find this lifestyle more supportive than oppressive, but there is a degree of rebellion where, for example, some young people keep cars in town and try to enjoy their use without their elders' knowledge. Other examples from North America of groups trying to maintain their own language and culture through deliberate domain separation are some of the Native Americans. There are about 200 American Indian languages in use today in the USA and about fifty of these have only very few speakers, all over fifty years of age. Only six Indian languages have more than 10,000 speakers; Navajo being by far the biggest with about 120,000 speakers. Those Native Americans most relevant in relation to Australian Aborigines because of the small size of their language groups are the Pueblo, located along or near the Rio Grande River in New Mexico, the Zuni in western New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona. There are twenty-six Pueblo groups with a total population of about 33,000, speaking six languages. The Pueblos were colonised by the Spanish from Mexico between 1598 and 1848, with a Pueblo revolt which lasted from 1680 to 1694. The Spanish secular and church authorities both maintained a deliberate policy of language and culture change. In 1848, New Mexico became a territory of the United States and English

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schools, either government or mission, were being established for most Pueblos by the mid-1870s. Thus contact with the Western world has been much longer than it has for Aboriginal communities, where most mission schools were established during the second quarter of this century and most government schools only in the late 1950s or even 1960s (see Watts and Gallacher 1964). The measures the Pueblo Indians have taken to maintain their culture and language include determined, deliberate language domain separation, strong pressure against marriage with non-Indians, strong secrecy in religious activity with outsiders being barred and a complementary strong anti-Christian stance. Some Pueblo people are Christians, but often they are ostracised and not allowed to have a house within the pueblo. Some Pueblos also reinforce culture domain separation through housing policy-most families maintain a traditional adobe house in the pueblo and use it for distinctively Pueblo purposes, and a modern house outside the pueblo for everyday secular and business purposes. For the Pueblo people owning their own traditional land is an important factor in making culture domain separation work. Following is a comment by an experienced Western observer of Indian social change (Troike, personal communication 1987): Some American Indian groups, notably among the 'Pueblos' and the Navajo, have managed to maintain a kind of split world view, associated with different 'worlds' of participation. But this has been most successful when a high degree of social and physical separation permitted the maintenance of organized community. Probably not everyone can do it, just as it is difficult to follow the Biblical injunction to be 'in this world but not of this world'. ...Some may be able to manage such differences productively, others may emotionally or cognitively opt for one side or the other, while others may be defeated by the complexity and withdraw into inertia, alcoholism, or schizophrenia, or yet react violently. There are probably genuine individual psychological differences which have a bearing on the outcome...I would concur with your thought about the need for domain separation. Societal biculturalism also occurs elsewhere in the world, for example in the Muslim world, and among some groups of Japanese and Chinese in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia and parts of Australia. In Adelaide while writing this book, I met a Chinese shopkeeping family in which the children are required to speak only Chinese at home and to watch only Chinese language television programs and videos, and to speak English at school and to European Australians. Among some non-Russophone ethnic groups in the USSR there is bicultural compartmentalisation. Gypsies living in many countries retain their identity through compartmentalised living expressed through marriage patterns, the

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Romany language, religious belief, economic independence through hawking and trading, semi-nomadic mobility and by largely keeping their children out of school. The above is a very limited survey of cultures in contact in the world, and there are many cases where cultures do integrate or assimilate on contact. However, the examples discussed provide ample precedent for separate culture domain living as a strategy for minority group selective participation in majority cu1tures.sThese few overseas precedents of minority culture and language survival over time are reassuring; but within remote Aboriginal Australia culture domain separation, as much structured by European Australian desires for separate living arrangements and by geographical isolation as by conscious Aboriginal strategy, has historically been the main key to Aboriginal cultural survival.

CULTURE DOMAIN SEPARATdON IN REMOTE ABORIGLWAL AUSTRALXA Outside school hours in remote Aboriginal settlements, cultural compartmentalisation is currently what happens in daily life, and what has always happened. The most obvious domain separation strategy has been geographic separation; but other strategies of culture survival have been consistently exploited whether on ex-government or mission settlements, on cattle stations or in town camps, hostels or fringe camps in places such as Darwin, Katherine or Alice Springs. From 8.00 am to 5.00 pm on weekdays, those Aborigines in employment mostly exercise Western skills and speak a fair bit of English but outside those times they live in the Aboriginal domain, under Aboriginal economic rules and relationship network; more or less holding to Aboriginal values and religious beliefs and speaking an Aboriginal language. While Western culture has had some far-reaching effects on Aboriginal lifestyle, it is still probably true to say that excursions into town or shopping trips in towns are for remote Aborigines a little like excursions to another country, Although some of this compartmentalisation is imposed on remote Aboriginal people through European Australian attitudes, it is also a result of conscious choice supporting long-term Aboriginal culture maintenance. Genuine self-determination surely includes the option to integrate along with the option to live by a strategy of culture domain separation. Longterm minority culture survival depends on whether or not a culture group chooses the latter and determines to have it operate on a group basis and also on how the majority society reacts to the minority group's initiatives. To my mind, both integration and culture domain separation are neutral in ethical terms. What matters in a moral sense is whether or not both options involve free choices and genuine opportunities after the choices are made. However, in terms of culture survival, even the survival of a changing culture, there remains only one choiceculture domain separation.

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LESSONS FOR ABORIGINAL TWO-WAY SCHOOLS The threads of this chapter should perhaps be pulled together at this stage by summarising what is being said and implied about two-way schooling. As Fishman (1985) emphasises, relatively stable biculturalism on a group basis lasting longer than three generations after significant new culture contact is relatively rare. However, as this book is about the possible, rather than the easy, the above examples provide real hope for minority culture survival provided the will and purpose on the part of minority groups is strong enough. Culture domain separation in two-way schools is not advocated as another way to manipulate Aborigines into a disempowering social isolation or to restrict their freedom to participate in Western society. Rather, the proposed attempts at clear-cut culture domain separation in two-way schools, and the curriculum approach in the Western domain of role learning and role adoption, may be the current strategy most likely to preserve Aboriginal identity because the Aboriginal child would not be learning Western culture by unconscious osmosis. In this context, learning a second culture by unconscious osmosis (which is how all of us learn our first culture) is a dangerously powerful kind of learning precisely because the learners do not adopt roles but begin to identify unconsciously with parts of Western culture. Here the learner is not aware of where or how much they have changed. When an Aboriginal child learns consciously to put on and take off Western roles, almost like a set of clothes, these roles can more easily be kept external to their most personal Aboriginal identity. Teachers in the Western domain would always have the responsibility to tell the children that this is how Westerners do things, and that they don't have to agree with it or believe in it. Thus bicultural people are not moving in and out of two cultures but in and out of different roles or sets of appropriate behaviours. In the second culture domain certain roles sometimes will be appropriately filled for temporary practical purposes, even though the actor does not personally subscribe to the values lying behind them. At this stage, the values can be treated with mild indifference. However, from time to time when the values behind some second culture roles are deeply offensive, a bicultural person may have to abstain from filling those roles. Hopefully there can be sufficient crosscultural communication in that context to allow serious embarrassment or conflict to be avoided.

CONCLUSION Groups undergoing rapid social change typically lose most of their language and culture in three generations after contact with a new and dominant society (see

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Fishman 1985, and discussion in the next chapter). During a three-generation language and culture shift the second generation is often actively bilingual and bicultural by accident. The purpose of bicultural schooling is to support a minority group's desire to maintain their first culture beyond the third generation, where that desire truly and strongly exists. To achieve this goal the minority group would need to take a number of measures. A small culture group needs to act purposefully with great determination and willpower. Its members must become conscious of what is likely to happen in the normal course of events over three generations if they do not take what in some cases will be abnormal measures at all generation levels. For example, traditionally Aboriginal child rearing practices (see Harris 1980a, 33) allow a lot of personal freedom, but Aboriginal parents will need to accept the responsibility that their children will often learn what adults model for them. Parents will need to be actively determined to influence their children in matters of language and culture maintenance. As Grandfather Koori puts it (in Gilbert 1977, 304-5): Aboriginality, eh?... I don't care how hard it is. You build Aboriginality, boy, or you got nothing. There's no other choice to it. If Aboriginal languages, storytelling practices, informal singing and dancing and education through songs are to survive, then parents will need to exercise much self-control over their own behaviour so that they are models of culture-maintaining behaviours. They may also need to control some of their children's behaviours in somewhat un-Aboriginal ways. Some of the learning that has been taken for granted in more traditional contexts can no longer be assumed. The group also needs to resist cultural integration and the intrusion of the larger outside world into the inner world (F'ishman 1985, 49). In general, English needs to be excluded from home use and from religious use. As Fishman (1985, 49-50) says: no ethnocultural collectivity can maintain two cultures on a stable basis past three generations if they are both implemented in the same social functions (family, friendship, work, education, religion etc.) and therefore, stable societal biculturalism (diethnia) depends on institutionally protected ethnocultural compartmentalisation. Perhaps the Maoris' experience in New Zealand is salutary in this context in that they demonstrate how it is impossible both to become integrated into the wider society and to maintain Maori culture and language through a broad range of daily activities (see Schwimmer 1968).

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The inner world of the minority group must not become so limited, that is, limited only to formal religious expression or artistic expression, that their language and culture has too narrow a base to thrive on. This means that some modern activities which Aborigines have taken into their domain, such as basic motor mechanics or basic Western preventative medicine, should be accepted by both cultures as being part of the Aboriginal domain and therefore legitimately thought about in the Aboriginal language and in terms of an Aboriginal economy or value system. To be most effective two-way schooling needs to be under the control of the parents of the minority group. This control ideally needs to be a reflection of societal biculturalism and a degree of economic self-sufficiency. This economic independence could be in a direct form such as that managed by Amish groups, or could be of the type where social security entitlements are handled collectively and reallocated according to group priorities. The James Bay Cree in Quebec (see Feit 1982) and Strelley are examples of this latter approach. From the point of view of the members of the dominant culture, in order for Aboriginal identity to be either rebuilt or remain strong, they need to learn to accept a small and very different culture contiguous to them. In some types of activities the minority groups need to be separated from them, and that should be accepted as normal, natural and permanent, and not as apartheid or some other threat. Members of the dominant culture need to see the situation from the indigenous minority group's point of view. As Fishman (1983,132)puts it: 'Who needs all those [different]little cultures out there? They do, and that is enough.' In arguing for the survival value of culture domain separation for small ethnic minorities, I do not wish to oversimplify the complexities and stresses of culture contact situations. Some conflict, confusion and pain at the interface of opposing value systems is unavoidable. For example, it is unacceptable to Aboriginal people to ignore relationship avoidance rules between each other when meeting with non-Aborigines in the Western domain, and the danger is real that separation of the Western and Aboriginal cognitive domains will not always work. For example, Western scientific truth and proof-seeking procedures learned in the Western domain could spill over into the Aboriginal domain and erode Aboriginal faith in their religious world view and beliefs about causality. Domain separation will not always be tidy and safe. All that is claimed is that it seems to offer more hope of solving the major schooling dilemma than any other strategy.

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NOTES 1. Evidence of the undertheorised state of biculturalism is provided by the fact that in a 1987 literature search on the topic with related descriptors like 'biculturalism', out of a 180 item printout only three items went beyond simply linking bicultural with bilingual as in 'bilingual/bicultural'.

2. It should be noted that there is a small government school in the central township of Hermannsburg, not included in this discussion. Also, since this book was written in 1987, the Finke River (Lutheran) Mission has decided to withdraw from schooling. From 1990 government teachers will service these outstations but that is no reason why their current design should not continue in principle. 3. Some of the ramifications of culture domain separation and attempts at integration in New Zealand and Canada, too complex to be discussed here, are analysed in Schwimmer (1968) and Barman, Hebert and McCaskill (1987). Philips' 1983 study of Warm Springs Indians and Kleinfeld's 1979 study of an Eskimo school are also valuable in this context. Culture domain separation has not been universally chosen as the best way to deal with contemporary challenges. In many cases no strategy at all has been consciously chosen by the small culture beyond ad hoc individual reactions.

UNLIKE MANY INTERNATIONAL MINORITY LANGUAGES, Aboriginal languages lack critical language mass (where a language is sufficiently large for migration or changed language loyalties by many individuals to not threaten its vitality); and if the language of an Aboriginal group dies there is nowhere that subsequent generations can go to renew it. Furthermore, Aborigines in remote settlements are in a new era of contact with English. It is only about twenty years since Aboriginal people gained award wages and only about fifteen years since they began to use that economic capacity to travel extensively and purchase radios, and audio and video cassettes. Tertiary education has been accessible for something like a decade for many, and the struggle with administrative tasks involved in selfdetermination is only about fifteen years old. Satellite television with its attendant flood of English is only now being introduced to remote communities. This introduces two assumptions which underlie the discussion in this chapter. The first is that the chances of traditional Aboriginal language survival are fairly slim and therefore the adage 'desperate measures for desperate situations' is applicable. The second assumption is that schools can profitably engage in some fairly artificial but acceptable social behaviours to achieve particular learning goals, and adopt some rules for language usage which might be naive outside the classroom. In other words, schools can follow the parents' ideals rather than their norms of language behaviour. In this chapter educational and sociolinguistictheory combine to give teachers some language maintenance guidelines to work by, While these suggestions are made in the interests of making Aboriginal language maintenance possibilities more accessible to teachers: I am fully aware that some linguists will view them as unnatural and oversimplified. Yet one of the frustrations of reading about language maintenance is that there seems to be a precedent for why almost every practical suggestion is wrong. The crux of the matter seems to lie in the fact that linguistic research in language maintenance focuses on what are the 'natural' processes of language shift. However, common knowledge tells us that the majority of Aboriginal languages have already died out through 'natural' processes, and we know that if present trends continue, soon only a few newly developing and growing Aboriginal languages will be alive. The school, if cleverly handled, may be one force that by 'non-natural' means could help stem language shift. So we will look at language maintenance research to see how it can help schools be clever and 'get the psychology right'.

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Given this context for planning, I believe that promoting the learning of both the Aboriginal language and English on the basis of flexible cultural domain separation, rather than primarily language domain separation, will prove to be the best contribution of schools to Aboriginal language maintenance in Australia. The most important need is for language to be learned, primarily through oral communication. We know from language learning theory that language is best learned in conducive social contexts. We need to focus on the creation of Aboriginal and Western cultural contexts in schools which will foster learning related to those contexts, rather than striving for language maintenance in a contextual vacuum. BAXVGUAL EDUCATION AhiD LANGUAGE lMALNTENANCE

While there are several valid rationales for bilingual education, in the eyes of most Aboriginal parents the most important is the contribution that it has made to Aboriginal language maintenance. However, after the Northern Territory bilingual program had operated for a few years it was observed that the automatic positive contribution of bilingual education to Aboriginal language maintenance could not be assumed. For example, advisers to the Northern Territory Aboriginal bilingual program between 1980 and 1985became concerned about language mking when they observed some of the more sophisticated Aboriginal teachers, apparently unconsciously, using a mixture of their first language and English with children in class. In this chapter the terms 'code' and 'language' are used interchangeably. The distinction between code-mixing and code-switching is maintained against current practice by some linguists and in the absence of substantial objective data. As defined here code-switching is conscious and deliberate switching of chunks of languages while code-mkhg is unconscious and random mixing of bits of languages. The distinction is maintained because of its practical use in programming in a bilingual school, as will be discussed below. Aboriginal teachers are not the only people observed language mixing in bilingual schools. Some non-Aboriginal teachers, legitimately keen to maintain personal rapport with their Aboriginal students and assistant teachers, were also code-mixing quite extensively. The advisers attempted, therefore, to raise teacher awareness of what they were doing. The same concern was expressed by Brown (1982), who was at the time teacher-linguistin the Nyangurnarta program at Strelley School in Western Australia and by Sayers (1982) who had been involved in bilingual education at Aurukun in Queensland. In the Northern Territory concerns were expressed in the bilingual education handbook produced by the Northern Territory Department of Education in 1986b and in papers by S Harris (1982), and Graham and Harris (forthcoming).

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Within the Northern Territory bilingual program, we were observing two unfortunate ironies. Firstly, the hard-won bilingual education program could unwittingly become a vehicle of Aboriginal language loss through language mixing when teachers did not keep to the bilingual education handbook's rules about the team-teaching where the Aboriginal team member taught in the Aboriginal language and the non-Aboriginal teacher in English. This language mixing did sometimes occur in so-called English-only schools, but that is outside the scope of this chapter. Secondly, the most highly-qualified Aboriginal teachers, possibly because their English was stronger, seemed to be most prone to language mixing which made them poor language-use models for the students. Following Fishman's theory developed twenty-five years ago, the approach to Aboriginal language maintenance advocated in the Northern Territory bilingual program was one of separating language usage on the basis of who is being spoken to (person), the content of the conversation (topic) and where the conversation was being held (place). These measures were viewed as potentially dangerous simplifications by several linguists closely involved with Aboriginal language research and bilingual education, and a profitable debate about the effectiveness of domain separation has ensued (see McConvell 1983, 1985, 1986, forthcoming; Black 1990). POINTS OF AGREEMENT BETWEEN LINGUISTS AND EDUCATIONAL SOCIOLINGUISTS

The issue of domain separation is of sufficient importance to Aboriginal language survival to warrant some fairly detailed discussion. For clarity, the points of agreement between the various views are listed below.

THE VULNERABILITY OF TRADITIONAL ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES Most observers

seem to agree that the situation is desperate, and will become more so when the telecommunications satellite bombards even the most isolated Aboriginal settings with English. Before European colonisation there were about 270 distinct languages in Australia. Today only about fifty Aboriginal languages have more than 100 speakers and the twenty largest have from 500 to 3,000 speakers each. These twenty traditional languages are spoken by 25,000 people, and about 5,000 more speak the remaining thirty extant languages. Little more than a dozen traditional Aboriginal languages are still being learned by children. There are about 15,000 speakers in the two Creoles, Torres Strait Creole and Kriol in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Kriol is the accepted term for northern Australian Creole (see Black 1983, 1985). Black (1985, 22) gives the following prognosis for the survival of Aboriginal languages:

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More than a dozen of the traditional languages and both of the Creoles are still being learned by children and are thus not yet in any danger of dying out; they will be with us well into the next century. The remaining languages will generally die out.. .but usually they are being displaced by the more vigorous traditional languages or a creole, rather than by English. Another experienced linguist, McConvell (forthcoming, 1) is more pessimistic: If nothing is done about it almost all Aboriginal languages will be dead by the year 2000. Even the two most likely survivors, the Yolngu languages of N.E. Arnhem Land and the Western Desert language may not last long beyond that date. Most linguists would agree that language death can occur in three generations after significant contact with a dominant culture, or roughly sixty to ninety years. That seems like a long time but in the light of 40,000 years of Aboriginal history it is alarmingly sudden. A typical pattern of language loss is that in the first generation of heavy contact the smaller group keeps using their home language in their own cultural domain. In the second generation the older people may keep speaking to each other and to younger people in their first language and the younger people understand that language but do not use it with their own age group. They may or may not speak back to the older generation in that language. In the third generation, while many young and middle-aged adults know the traditional language, it is rarely used in everyday life. Some key words and phrases will still be used by all age groups, but the language as a living ongoing expression is virtually dead. The crucial matter in language survival is whether the children are both learning the language and using it among themselves. Several other comments are relevant here. One is that in the case of Aboriginal languages, this death in terms of oral use will be final. With luck there will be a written record of some of the languages held in archives such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and 'Ibrres Strait Islander Studies, by bilingual schools and some Aboriginal churches. There is also a slight chance that the old language could come into use by current young people when they are older. In such cases their passive knowledge of a traditional language would become active, and a Creole or English would be the language of the children. (Exactly the same three-generation loss can take place among, say, Greek or Italian migrant families in Australia, but the loss is not final-the language can be regained through a sojourn in Europe.) In some Aboriginal contexts, in language learning equivalents we are already at the third generation, and in others at the second stage, and in a dozen or so cases still in the first stage.

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Some policy makers, for example in departments of education and health, have in the past assumed wrongly that the loss of a traditional Aboriginal language would increase the likelihood of Aborigines learning standard English. Language shift, however, doesn't happen in that tidy way. Creation of a vacuum does not ensure that it is filled by anything standard. In practice a Creole or a more vigorous larger traditional language (see Devlin 1986) or even a koine, which is a variety originating from dialects of the same traditional language (see Amery 1986, forthcoming), is more likely to become the new Aboriginal language representing in-group identity. The Creoles are likely to be particularly resilient over time. (An observation made of North American Indians is that those who have lost their traditional Indian language do not speak English any more proficiently than those who still speak their Indian language and English.) It is generally agreed that full or balanced bilingualism where all skills in all social domains are mastered in both languages, while positive and manageable on the part of many individuals such as entrepreneurs and interpreters, is not a practical possibility for entire speech communities. This is because equal competence in two languages 'implies languages that are functionally equivalent, and no society can be motivated to maintain two languages if they are really functionally redundant' (Fishman and Lovas 1972, 89; Fishman 1985, 374). Diglossia, where two languages exist side by side in a community and each is used for different purposes, is much more achievable. Another way to express this principle is that if two languages are to coexist they need to carry different functional loads. This is especially true when an extremely small language group is engulfed by a major world language and the languages in contact have very different semantic systems representing very different world views.

THE NEED TO ISOLATE THE CAUSES OFLANGUAGE SHIFT Everyone would have to

admit that the exact causes of language shift and language loss are not completely known, but that we need to learn what these causes are in order to combat language loss (see Pdulston 1986, 1987;McConvell, forthcoming). In his forthcoming paper, as well as in his earlier writings, McConvell has made an important contribution towards an understanding of the process of language shift in the context of Aboriginal languages. Linguists cannot accurately predict from external causal factors, such as degree of geographic isolation or local multilingualism, what changes will occur in language contact situations. For example, Kalumburu in Western Australia and Lajamanu in the western Northern Territory are both extremely isolated

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communities and have only one major language, but both have experienced serious language shift. Yet in Alice Springs, which is less isolated, and Maningrida in Arnhem Land, a large multilingual community, various tmlitional languages appear to be maintaining their position. We do know that sociocultural factors such as the origin of the contact, group size and cohesiveness, sources of prestige, quality of access to the second language, what conveniently carries in-grouplout-group distinctions, what is embarrassingto teenagers, degree of exogamy, access to media and jobs, and the influence of forces such as ethnic-nationalism,are more important than linguistic factors such as the complexity of the verb system-even though these can apparently have some bearing on language shift (see Lee 1983, on Tiwi verbs). However, we still know relatively little about what is decisive in language death (see Paulston 1986,for a brief but excellent summary of some of the separate factors involved). There are at least four theories about language shift as drawn from McConvell (forthcoming). The first is the domain theory. Attributed to Fishman, this is based on the observation that stable bilingualism, or diglossia, seems to occur when two languages are separated into distinct domains of social interaction, for example home versus work, and carry different social functions. Speakers decide in what language domain they are operating on the basis of person, topic and place. Since the person spoken to is the focus for changes that serve social meaning, the effect of person on language choice is the most important (see Bell 1984, for emphasis on the influence of audience on choice or style of language). However, topic is important too because the loss or addition of topics determines the breadth of each domain. Place appears to be the least important factor in most situations but it can play a role in the choice of language. For example, in the light of the role land affiliation carries in Aboriginal rationale or relationships, history and religion, excursions back to the land to allow its features to act as a mnemonic device may give place a special importance in Aboriginal language maintenance. The implication of this first theory of language shift is that where the two languages do not maintain strict separation of domains, that is, where redundancy in language function and extensive code-mixing occurs, transitional bilingualism is in process, and a group's primary language will change from one language to another over a couple of generations. In domain theory, code-switching or mixing is seen in a negative light because it represents the overlap of two languages'in one domain, which is assumed to be a sign of unstable bilingualism. One inadequacy of this theory is that it does not allow for the useful social meaning role (mainly in-grouplout-groupdistinctions, and responses to differing social status) or the expressive role that code-switching can c a m .

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Another inadequacy of domain theory is that it treats code-switching as being responsible for language shift; on the contrary, there is some evidence that in some social and political settings code-switching may be a positive force maintaining multilingualism (see Scotton 1982).I know of no evidence that in the remote Aboriginal context code-switching is proving to be a positive force for maintaining multilingualism. There is some evidence, however, that bilingual education following a domain separation approach is helping maintenance to some extent. (See Murtagh 1979; Baarda 1979; Cataldi 1990. See also Devlin 1990, for a discussion of some maintenance issues in this context.) Domain theory also assumes that code-mixing is random. From informal observation which would not qualify as conclusive evidence, I suspect that code-mixing by Aboriginal teachers is random or at least unconscious. As will be explained below, the domain theory is helpful in the bilingual school setting because it provides more practical guidance than the other theories on how to organise a bilingual program. Two linguists have said to me (Amery, personal communication 1987; Goddard, personal communication 1989) that domain theory becomes more acceptable if the topic dimension is left flexible because there are so many important topics that Aboriginal people need to discuss in both languages. Another linguist (Black 1990) has suggested that the person dimension receive the major emphasis. The second theory of language shift is the variationist theory. The main contribution of this theory is to show that much of the variation, or code-switching, in language is not random but systematic and a vehicle of social meaning. A speaker changes code not on the basis of person, topic or place but because he or she wants to express a feeling or point of view or a them-versus-us message. Gumpen and Hernandez-Chavez (1972) state that code-switching in an EnglishISpanish conversation between two bilinguals can carry the following social meaning functions: Chicano identity is emphasised; non-Chicanos are excluded as unacceptable social partners on occasion; confidentiality is signalled; embarrassment is admitted; personal involvement as opposed to clinical detachment is asserted; and a particular point is emphasised. McConvell(1985) has demonstrated this social meaning role of code-switching between dialects of Gurindji and Kriol in an analysis of the interactions of a group of Aboriginal men at Daguragu during the skinning of a cow. What has not been demonstrated yet is that the social meaning role of code-switching is helping to maintain the traditional language among younger people in very small cultures. In fact McConvell (1985, 119) observes that in the very Aboriginal language group where the social meaning role of code-switching is demonstrated 'the shift from Gurindji to Kriol over the last thirty years is unmistakable'.

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The other major contribution of the variationist theory is that it shows more than domain theory does how the language shift process moves from one group, defined perhaps by age and social class, to another and how these groups vary in the proportion of old language, mixed language and new language they use. Like domain theory, however, it cannot predict how far or fast the shift is going, or whether it merely represents a cyclical phenomenon related to the age of individuals. For example, in the case of some Aboriginal languages, this could mean that the adoption of Kriol among the younger generation indicates that the traditional 'baby talk' variety had been replaced by Kriol, but that these young people would speak the traditional language when they were older. McConvell is not claiming that this is necessarily going to happen. Obviously not every Kriol learning community will have the same language-use pattern. But as far as I know, in places where Kriol was spoken by people when they were young, Kriol is still spoken by those people when they are old, for example, at Barunga and Ngukurr. One of the inadequacies of the variationist model is that it does not consider the role of passive knowledge of a language which occurs often in Aboriginal society, for example, where a young person is spoken to and understands a traditional Aboriginal language but responds in a different language or Kriol. Nor does the variationist theory examine the role of language acquisition in language shift. In other words a language must be learned, understood and spoken, and spoken appropriately according to sociolinguistic rules, to be maintained. Presumably unless two languages are first learned independently, they cannot survive so as to be functionally mixed for social meaning purposes. I assume that applied domain theory increases the opportunity for each language to be learned in contextually supportive settings. I think it could be argued that the variationist theory is a sophistication of the d o m a theory, especially if we dissect further the person dimension. If this is so it reinforces the view that conscious and deliberate code-switchingcan be positive and compatible with the principle that domain separation promotes language maintenance. The corollary is still that unconscious code-mixing remains a serious danger. The third language shift theory is the adaptation theory, a variant of the domain theory with a special emphasis on topics, or semantic issues. In the case of Aboriginal languages this theory suggests that language-use is shifting towards English because the Aboriginal language is increasingly inadequate for talking about all the new things and ideas being introduced from the modern world (see Poulson et al 1986; Christie and Eastwell 1984). This theory is inadequate because, while it explains some reasons for choosing to speak English or Kriol, these account for less than half the choices made by bilingual Aboriginal people.

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For example, why does a Yolngu person at Milingimbi decide to tell off the people at a picture show in English when he could do so perfectly well in his own language? McConvell (forthcoming) seeks to integrate the three theories into something with more explanatory power. He calls this the functional choice theory of language maintenance and language shift. According to McConvell, bilingualism (dr multilingualism or bidialectalism) has three main functions:

1. the communication function, or conveying the basic message, for example when one speaker knows only one of the languages, or when one of the languages does not have the vocabulary to deal with the topic; 2. the social function which is the choice of language made by bilinguals in order to carry a them-versus-us or a social solidarity message; and

3. the cultural function, which has to do with choices made between bilinguals in order to better express contrasting world views and systems of knowledge associated with a particular language. If this theory is accepted as having useful explanatory power about language shift, it requires us to move our focus away from the loss of a language to the loss of the functions or advantages of bilingualism. Language maintenance can be seen as the retention of all the functions of bilingualism such as basic communication, social meaning and cultural meaning and the choices it makes available. So, we should perhaps talk about maintenance of bilingualism rather than maintenance of a language.

TH4TNEEDFOR SPECIAL SUPPORT FOR S M D R LANGUAGE GROUPS Most linguists

would agree that when two language groups are coexisting and one of them is much smaller than the other, then priority and conscious effort need to be given to the more vulnerable language if that coexistence is to be maintained over time. McConvell's analysis summarised above is helpful, but I would add that the maintenance of bilingualism in a context where one language group is small and vulnerable requires conscious, purposeful and dynamic motivation to use the minority language. In her analysis of the maintenance and loss of two languages in Europe, Paulston (1987) suggests that a key ingredient might be ethnic nationalism-a strong and active social mobilisation in support of the vulnerable language. This ethnic nationalism might be manifested in many actions such as Aboriginal people always writing personal letters to each other in their own language, or those who are Christians and have scriptures, hymns or prayers translated in their languages insisting on their use in preference to English. I have no

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substantial research information on these matters across Australia, but I do know that such insistence is not yet consistently the case in northeast Arnhem Land. In efforts to place emphasis on the vulnerable language, social institutions such as the home and school can help. Lambert (1979, 13) stresses that both linguistic groups in bilingual communities need to focus attention on the development of skills in the more vulnerable language. He further says (1979, 14) that: ethnolinguistic minorities need strong educational and social experiences in their own languages and traditions before they can cope in an All-American [or All-Australian] society or before they will want to cope in such a society. Furthermore, Cummins (1986, 24 and 30) points out that educators from the majority culture need to be advocates of the vulnerable smaller language group. By that he means being respectful towards it and defenders and supporters of it, rather than being teachers of it. The dominant language is likely to be learned by immersion, often unconsciously, from many sources such as the media, trade contact, higher formal education and so on. The smaller language will need conscious and disciplined nurture. A special contribution of bilingual schools to language maintenance is the prestige they add to Aboriginal languages. One of the causes of minority language loss is the status of the larger and dominant language. The prestige of Aboriginal languages must be raised by all possible means, for example by producing a written literature in quality format and finish. Another avenue is changing the attitudes of non-Aborigines working in the local community and Aboriginal staff and parents, who sometimes have internalised a racist stereotype against the longterm value and viability of their own language. Attempts by non-Aborigines to learn the Aboriginal language, provided they are serious, could have extremely positive effects on Aboriginal attitudes. Aborigines who have done well in the Western world and are successful models of bicultural living should be encouraged to be good models of Aboriginal language use. Some of these will be school teachers, and it may come as a surprise to them that they should be making an effort to be good speakers of their own first language, so much do we tend to take our own culture for granted. Finally, if too many of the most highly-trained Aboriginal teachers show a strong preference for teaching in English, this will deal a blow to the presitge of the Aboriginal language. The Aboriginal language learning context in two-way schools needs some of the most gifted, prestigious Aboriginal teachers as models, hopefully working with older Aboriginal people who have an established identity as strong bearers of the Aboriginal Way or as gifted users of the local Aboriginal language.

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THE DANGER OF NA.RROWING THE ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE DOMAIN One of the surest signs of language death is the narrowing of the domain of usage of the minority language. For example, when a home language reaches the point where only members of the older generation use it between themselves, and younger people can understand it but don't speak it, the domain of usage is narrow and language death is possibly only one generation away. Also, as younger people progressively acquire modern knowledge and skills they could just as progressively be shut out of Aboriginal language usage, and come to regard it as old-fashioned, out of touch with reality and unsophisticated. Obviously deciding where to draw the line in domain separation is neither easy nor particularly natural, but if any planning about who teaches what in which language is to be possible in a bilingual school, such decisions have to be made. Apart from the issue of whether or not domain separation promotes language maintenance, on a purely practical level I doubt whether it would be possible to organise a bilingual school without language domain separation-there simply can't be enough hours in the day to teach everything in both languages, even if both languages had the semantic resources to do so. Those who doubt the value of domain separation must accept the fact that any measure other than teaching everything in both languages amounts to some degree of domain separation. We need to focus on creating or providing cultural contexts in which it will be appropriate to use the two languages. Some topics will need to be discussed in both languages, such as land rights, health, and some locally important aspects of Western law and economics. Hopefully the conceptual framework, the particular emphases and the contexts of situation will be so different when the same topic is discussed that functional redundancy in using the two languages is not occurring. In a curriculum development exercise held at Walungum (Kintore), west of Papunya, early in 1987, Keeffe found that Pintupi teachers placed money, cars, houses, cards, work and church in both the Yanawu (Aboriginal) domain and the Walypala (whitefella) domain. In an excellent paper Keeffe (1989, 40) makes the following comments about this:

The set of meanings shared by a group is the culture of the society, and it is dynamic. Aboriginal societies have successfully absorbed many elements that are recognised to be non-Aboriginal in origin. In the process of absorption and incorporation, they have been able to redefine the elements in their own cultural terms. ...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. ...the language of work is now used to describe ritual roles (owners, managers, workers, business etc).

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While the Aboriginal school staff at Walungurru see themselves as living in two domains, Keeffe (1989,41) observes that there is also overlap. In the words of Murphy Roberts, an Aboriginal teacher: 'They are not separate paddocks', and schools must ensure they are complementary, rather than competitive or contradictory. Thus, the domains can be roughly separated on the basis of what Aborigines want to talk about among themselves and what they want to talk about with European Australians, with some overlap. Of course this is all easier said than done, and can only be done by Aboriginal people. In order to draw the line between the two language domains, Aboriginal school council members, parents and Aboriginal teachers, possibly with the support of a linguist, will need to make specific demarcation decisions for their own schools and even settlements or language areas, and back these decisions up by their own usage and establishment of usage traditions in their own homes. It is so difficult to deliberately influence any community's language-use that exceptionally strong motivation will be necessary to achieve it. THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN CODE-MIXLNGAl?D CODESWITCHING At least some

sociolinguists would concur with the controversial view put forward here that any constant and largely unconscious code-mixing is a sign of drift towards 'pidginisation' and the ultimate death of a traditional language. It is recognised that the term code-mixing here is problematic. As touched on earlier, the bilingual education handbook of the Northern Territory Department of Education (1986b) and Graham and Harris (forthcoming) define code-mixing as the unconscious use of two languages within the same phrase or sentence on what appears to be a random basis, that is, recall of the right word comes faster in one language than the other. Another feature of code-mixingis that the proportion of each language can be as high as 50-50. Even if linguists can demonstrate that code mjxing is not a matter of language laziness but of personal stylistic preferences, for the sake of the longterm maintenance of the group's language, individuals might need to sacrifice their short-term personal preferences. An example of this kind of determination in language-use is that of someone deciding successfully to stop swearing. The same process may have operated when Aboriginal teenagers changed from their mother's to their father's language. How much of that switch was governed by determination and how much by a change of context would be hard to know. I believe that purposeful determination has to be accepted as one of the ingredients of maintenance of Aboriginal languages, numerically small as they are. Code-switchingon the other hand involves conscious changing between two languages within a discourse for stylistic, humorous or authority-seeking

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purposes-these purposes are neither random nor of roughly equal proportions. In code-switching speakers are clearly conscious of the language in which they are speaking and the second language is brought in for controlled special effect. It appears that code-switching is positive, desirable in a stylistic sense and can exist for long periods of time without harm to either language. It has been established that one use of code-switchingis to carry social meaning. Another reason for its use is that the right word does not exist in one language so it has to be borrowed from the other. My intuition is that after these two reasons for code-switching are accounted for, there is still a significant proportion of codemixing which is a m d o m selection of the first words that come to mind. Because the difference between code-mixing and code-switching appears to be a crucial one to language modelling and survival, I would advocate that nonAboriginal teachers encourage Aboriginal staff to become conscious of and operate from an understanding of the difference. Although there are examples of small languages in various parts of the world that have coexisted with large languages for many years while enjoying codeswitching without any harmful effects, these are only 'small' on the world scene. Their 100,000, or half a million or two million speakers, probably with a strong literate tradition thrown in, represent huge languages when compared with 300 Djinang or 2,800 Warlpiri in remote Australia. Thus in the Aboriginal context an approach with some desperate aspects cannot be avoided.2

THE PRIMACY OF ORAL LANGUAGE USE Probably everyone would agree that oral

language is primary, and that language must be used in social interchange to stay strong. Literacy may broaden the domain of usage of a language, and will certainly increase its status, but the vital everyday life of a language is in its oral functions. This means that for language maintenance, oral use is more important in school than reading and writing. Related to this, it is important that oral language role models in school be mature language speakers, especially older people with a local reputation for their ability in language. It is also vital that Aboriginal staff strive to become good language models. This is a real problem in some Aboriginal schools because some of the younger Aboriginal teachers either are not mature models of their Aboriginal language, or, because of an Aboriginal ethic of not pushing children around, they often do not stretch the children or urge risk-taking in language learning. In addition, the principle that Aboriginal homes can contribute more to language survival than schools needs to be widely publicised in Aboriginal communities. Some Aboriginal parents are not aware of the degree of danger confronting their language and thus underestimate it; moreover, where there is

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a bilingual program they expect the school to achieve maintenance and abdicate their own responsibilities. The importance of parental influence in language maintenance or revival is illustrated by the determination of a Jewish father to renew the oral use of Hebrew in his home. The Hebrew language, while read daily for religious expression, was not used for everyday social interchange between the Diaspora, or the scattering of Jews out of Palestine around 150 AD, and the late nineteenth century. In 1879 Eleaser Ben Yehuda, living in Palestine, decided to insist that Hebrew be the only language used in his home. He started a movement that spread to many Jewish families which in the long-run, with the help of other powerful forces (such as the desperate need to have a single language for efficient military and admjnistrative communication), made the use of Hebrew as a national language possible in modem Israel. This story about Eleaser Ben Yehuda should be an inspiration to Aboriginal parents but the measures it suggests require careful handling. SPECIFIC LNDZCATORS OF W G U A G E SHLFT

McConvell (forthcoming, 11) suggests that asymmetry, when young people understand the old language but speak a different language to each other or to their parents (in this case Kriol), is one of the key indicators of language shift. McConvell (forthcoming, 18) tells an important story about Turkey Creek teenagers' passive knowledge of the old language, but their embarrassment about using it. Children in Turkey Creek, a small town in the Kimberleys, were watching a film of Pitjantjatjara people at Emabella: They watched the adults speaking the language to each other with some interest, and without strong reaction, but when children came on the screen speaking Pitjantjatjara, they greeted them with gales of almost hysterical laughter. The real challenge in terms of language maintenance then, is not primarily in the basic communication function or the cultural function, but is in the social function, and we might add, the identity-making function. It is here that Aboriginal teachers and parents have to be better psychologists than their children, and to out-think their children into actually using their language. The school may have a special contribution, though still not the major one. The peer group value system is a key factor in language maintenance but when children are younger, say three years of age or less, they relate more to their parents than to their peers. At this age sufficiently determined parents can exert strong direct influence on what their children speak through consistent modelling of the desired language. Admittedly this might be more consciously

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purposeful language behaviour than is usual or easy, but the stakes are high. In 1986, one of the most outspoken campaigners for language maintenance at Yhkala was heard to say: 'I speak L to my kids' (naming a clan language). A few minutes later the kids were misbehaving and she screamed at them not in L but in Dhuwaya, the local koine or common dialect (Gale, personal communication 1987). More than anyone else, it is mothers of younger children who need to take Eleaser Ben Yehuda as their hero. McConvell (forthcoming, 14-16) suggests that the other key indicator of language shift is the local social rule which requires that in the presence of Enghh speakers, Aborigines and their children should speak English or the nearest thing to it. This rule is reinforced by teachers and many other non-Aborigines in areas such as the Kimberleys and probably the Barkley Tableland, where Aborigines do not expect them to attempt to learn an Aboriginal language. Sandefur (1986, 82) notes that Kriol speakers have a similar rule restricting the use of Kriol in the presence of outsiders. In contrast, in Arnhem Land and the Western Desert there seems to be no such rule, and here there is an expectation that outsiders will try to learn the local language. In these areas Aborigines haven't the slightest embarrassment at continuing to use their own language in the presence of Westerners. European Australians working in Aboriginal settlements can act as advocates of the Aboriginal language by opposing the rule of deference to Westerners. It may be good Western manners, but language maintenance is a higher priority. Embarrassed and misplaced parental attitudes about usage are also very dangerous to language maintenance in another way. McConvell (forthcoming, 20) tells the story of Ron Day, a Mer Islander who grew up in the period when language shift to Torres Strait Creole was occurring on the island. Day recalls the process by which his peer group, feeling rejected by their elders and their European Australian teachers for speaking neither Meriam Mer nor English correctly, embraced the Pidgin as their own. McConvell warns that the use of too strict a domain separation strategy, where children are in effect urged to speak pure English and pure home language, could produce negative effects on the social connotations of the old language in the way experienced in the Torres Strait. This is a warning worth treating seriously. If it can be accepted that the organisation of bilingual schools along the lines of domain separation has advantages, then an important principle about how this is done in schools needs to be established- that Aboriginal teachers should impose language domain separation on themselves and not directly onto the children. Another simple way to state this principle is that Aboriginal language speakers speak only the Aboriginal language in classrooms, and English language

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teachers, whether non-Aboriginal or Aboriginal, speak only Enghsh when they are teaching in English. Teachers should be conscious language models, deliberately following somewhat artificial rules so that they can model an ideal in the school. In Western schools, teachers are expected to model an ideal English, for example to avoid swearing and broad slang. This is what parents expect, in spite of various academic beliefs that 'usage is the norm'. Aboriginal teachers and parents, need to love and model children into mature usage of their Aboriginal language. Rather than trying to bully them directly into 'pure' language-use, they should accept what the kids say and keep modelling a more acceptable form in reply. Moreover, these matters need to be discussed at parent-teacher meetings and strategies developed. In any speech community where two or more languages are spoken, there will be a continuum in the mastery and maturity of use of each of these languages. It is the aim of a two-way school to be a haven of mature or good usage in both languages, to be on the quality and depth end of the continuum of each. The relationship of this approach to the inevitable and often positive codeswitching which will take place outside school is summarised by Fishman (personal communication 1987): I wouldn't worry too much about informal code-switching,so long as non-interfered varieties are also mastered and have their own normatively defined and very definite functions, within school and without. One objection to any official policy of language domain separation is that it would constitute unwarranted outside interference. The line between interference and responsible language planning action is a fine one. Perhaps the deciding factor is whether the Aboriginal staff welcome such p o l i c y - m m advice. Non-Aborigines working in Aboriginal education have a responsibility to make concrete suggestions when asked, but these need to be based on the latest theoretical and research knowledge, the practical constraints and strengths of the school setting, and must leave final initiatives with the Aboriginal people concerned. Moreover, this needs to be done before all the facts are in about the causes and remedies of language shift. SUGGESTIONS FOR FUTURE OBSERVHTZONS

In terms of future sociolinguistic observation that would provide useful advice for schools wishing to support language maintenance, the closely connected issues of language status and identity through language might be the most fruitful. The importance of status and identity are inherent in McConvell's indicators of language shift and Sandefur's Kriol speakers' rules of deference discussed above. In a recent paper, Pastor (1989) explores the connection between Aboriginal identity and

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language shift. She uses Sandefur's work in Kriol as the starting point and observes that even in communities where adults lament children's failure to learn their fathers' language on maturity, traditional languages are often not spoken to children because it is 'inappropriate'. She also notes (1989, 12) that: 'it is considered "socially unacceptable" in many communities for children to speak a traditional language even though adults expect them to have a passive knowledge of it'. Pastor suggests that it is not so much pressure of English as the increased social mobility of Aborigines within a wider Aboriginal world that is influencing the direction of Aboriginal language shift. Quite a number of observers (for example Sandefur, Amery, Lee and Devlin, referred to elsewhere in this chapter) have noted how Aboriginal language shift is occurring towards vigorous new languages such as Kriol, Dhuwaya and modern Tiwi and developing languages such as Djambarrpuyngu rather than towards standard English. Pastor argues that this movement represents a new direction of identity formation supplementing, not replacing, the old. This could be a mild form of what Paulston regards as ethnic nationalism. It could be that this move towards new and developing Aboriginal languages, which is also a move towards a wider Aboriginal identity, is caused by the unwanted pressure of Western society. In other words, the power of English is still an important factor in the language change, even when it is resisted instead of adopted. All of this suggests that traditional Aboriginal languages will only survive in use by young people through being modernised. The topic aspect of domain separation will therefore need to be open enough to include all topics meaningful to Aborigines when talking among each other. (See Keeffe 1989,40-42, for an indication of what might be possible in the contemporary remote Aboriginal domain.) This approach emphasises the person criterion of language choice (Black 1990). It also suggests that future researchers of Aboriginal language maintenance will need to apply sociological insights about identity formation. Jordan, in papers referred to elsewhere in this book, explains that individual identity is formed partly by what others 'read back' to the individual. A crucial area for research becomes the question of how non-Aborigines, teachers and schools can read back a perception of Aboriginal identity which helps support Aboriginal language maintenance. There are other suggested answers in this chapter, especially the idea that thinking in domains in schools will help structure behaviour supportive of maintenance; but certainly there is room for more observation and research. CONCLUSION In bringing this discussion of language maintenance in schools to a conclusion I'd like to ask readers to consider how a curriculum planner has to make concrete

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decisions, and make them before all the necessary research is completed. Teachers need very specific guidelines in fields in which they are not well-trained themselves. It appears that bilingual education is more successful when the two languages are given different functional loads; for example in the Rock Point Community School (see Rosier and Holm 1980, 10; Holm 1982) there is quite strict language domain separation between English and Navajo, particularly on the lines of person and place. The person for both domains may be Navajo, but he or she will be either known as a Navajo-language teacher or as an English-language teacher. The place change may be as simple as changing classrooms where a tradition is established that only English is spoken in one room and Navajo in the other. There is also some evidence from Northern Rrritory bilingual schools (see Murtagh 1979; Baarda 1979; Cataldi 1990) that the bilingual program is helping young people to maintain their first language. Since domain separation is one of the basic organising principles of the program it has presumably played a positive role. 'Ib return to the view that school is a somewhat artificial environment, it might be appropriate to distinguish between elite bilingualism and folk bilingualism. Elite bilingualism is the result of individuals, often the powerful and privileged, becoming bilingual by choice, and schools are normally a major resource for this process. Folk bilingualism, on the other hand, is the bilingualism of the powerless and the non-privileged (see Kerr 1981,162).Whether a language program in a bilingual school is primarily aimed at establishing elite bilingualism or in supporting or utilising folk bilingualism, in terms of methodology it will be very close to elite bilingualism by immersion. This is because folk bilingualism is an unconscious reality, not always supported by deliberate teaching programs or literacy. Folk bilingualism is learned informally, while elite bilingualism is both taught and learned formally. Bicultural schools, therefore, need to concentrate on recruiting teachers who are excellent language models and on implementing sound language learning methodology in order to create the appropriate contexts for learning. Because of the deliberate and planned nature of a formal learning setting, rules of behaviour can be imposed which go close to a cultural group's ideals, as opposed to merely reflecting the norms outside the classroom. School programs in Southern Ireland during the last half century demonstrated that the school system can make an enormous impact on the learning of a threatened local language. As a result of these programs more people in Ireland know Gaelic than at any other time in the previous century. That fewer use it is also true, and should make us look at the methodology by which language is taught. Does it create stimulating contexts of situation, foster spontaneous use and remain sensitive to the psychological and

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prestige factors? While language domain separation is a positive and practical school strategy, the parables from Turkey Creek and Torres Strait emphasising that parents and teachers should model language-use for children and from Ben Yehuda emphasising the need for parent determination, need to be deeply pondered by Aboriginal teachers and parents and those who work alongside them. It must be emphasised that it is up to the individual Aboriginal person or community to decide to change or even to participate in the mainstream-it is not for European Australians to decide. The two-way school allows for such options but if Aborigines in remote settlements seriously want to maintain their language and culture, firm measures will need to be taken and the school can only be one of those measures. The following statement by Fishman (1985, 374) places the language maintenance role of schools in perspective: nowhere in the world have major programs of language maintenance, language revival or language revitalisation succeeded if their major 'bet' was on the school rather than on other, more primary social processes. ...the difference in community structure, in community control of its own residential and economic bases, and in community regulation of the domains and degrees of interaction with Anglo America are the crucial factors in the differences that obtain. ...the school will have its role to play in the overall language maintenance design, but it will do so by serving a vibrant and purposeful community-a community with a modicum of economic, political and religious power of its own-rather than being called upon to do the impossible: to save the community from itself. Thus, schools will never control the use of language outside school, but insofar as they influence the language development of children they can influence language maintenance to some extent.

NOTES 1. This chapter is about Aboriginal language maintenance, not revival. Different Aboriginal languages are at different stages of loss and have different needs. Teachers interested in language revival and the types of language programs suitable for different situations are directed to Thieberger (1988a, 1988b),and Kimberley Catholic Education Language %am (1988). The literature reviews of three recent theses on Aboriginal language shift and maintenance are Devlin (1986), Amery (1986) and Thieberger (1988a, 1988b).

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2. School teachers are often members of local churches in Aboriginal communities, and churches (or at least church services) are another formal institution where some rules could be imposed in an attempt to support an ideal pattern of language-use. Over the last two or three years most churches in Arnhem Land have gained ordained Aboriginal ministers. Their natural tendency is to preach and pray in their own language, but because there are nearly always non-Aboriginal Christians in the congregations the Aboriginal ministers try to communicate with them too. The result is extensive code-mixing and switching. Churchgoing teachers should urge that separate English language and Aboriginal language meetings or services be held, open to all. Other formalised institutions should also establish separate English and Aboriginal language sessions with the purpose not of apartheid but of preserving a domain of usage for the Aboriginal language, and a domain in which to practise English.

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TO SUPPORT THE AIMS OF two-way schooling Aboriginal languages and English should have different functions in schools. Two areas in which this principle is important will be discussed in this chapter. These are the semantics of the languages of instruction and the complementary distribution of literacy functions in the two languages. The differences in the ontological bases or world views underlying Aboriginal languages and English are highlighted, and the problems of transferring ideas and concepts from one language to the other are discussed. Examples of the functions of literacy in minority groups are drawn from various parts of the world and the potential role of emerging Aboriginal literacy in maintaining cultural identity is examined.

FUNCTIONAL WPFERENTIATION IN LANGUAGES OF INSTRUCTION The fundamental differences in world view between Aboriginal and Western cultures are embodied in their respective languages. If two cultures have different ontological bases for operating, different explanations of reality, or even some very different sets of priorities for living, then their languages will reflect these differences. There is, therefore, potential for semantic confusion if conventional instructional patterns used in Western schooling are transposed directly to teaching in Aboriginal languages, or if Aboriginal languages are used to teach directly those many English concepts not incorporated into Aboriginal life. In a bicultural school the ways in which each language is used and the purposes for which it is used must be consistent with the world view represented in each culture domain. The need for consistency of language-use within each domain of a bicultural school implies functional differentiation in languages of instruction. This is what lbpsy Chestnut and other Kimberley Aboriginal people (Hudson and McConvell1984,37-38) mean when they give reasons why Aboriginal languages should be kept alive. Furthermore, when they say (Hudson and McConvell 1984, 38): 'The language expresses the culture, and people want to keep a distinct and rich Aboriginal culture' and 'there is a deep and wide vocabulary to do with ceremony, stages of knowledge and such things, which is almost impossible to translate', I believe they are talking on two levels. On one level, what makes some Aboriginal meanings almost impossible to translate is the absence of equivalent English vocabulary; for example, kinship terms and hundreds of plants and animals, many of which do not have English names and some not even Latin names. The areas of meaning might also be different; for example, to a coastal Aborigine a big fish is a wide, thick one, whereas to a European Australian a big fish is a long one. However, on a deeper level, lbpsy

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Chestnut is talking about different ontological bases, or world views. This is what Jordan (1983, 213) reinforces when she says: [the] 'world' into which the Aboriginal child in the Strelley community is born is an Aboriginal world, using Aboriginal language that encompasses meanings, connotations, a 'shared' world not easily translatable into English terms and Western concepts. It is through the language that the 'theorising' of the Aboriginal world is absorbed. If maintaining a culture means maintaining a different ontological system, a different explanation of the nature of living, then the role of language in doing this explaining is crucial. This role of language is recognised in Berger's important statement (1971, 98) about the place of theorising in culture maintenance: Men not only experience themselves, they explain themselves. Every socially constructed world contains a psychological model. Once formed the psychological model can act back upon the psychological reality. The model has realising potency. ABORIGLN" LANGUAGES AND FORMAL INSTRUCTION

Organising a two-way school into clearly separated culture domains should help teachers avoid unwittingly imposing onto one culture a world view which is appropriate to another. For example, one of the concerns of those few nonAboriginal teachers who understand an Aboriginal language, when they listen to an Aboriginal teacher teach maths in that language, is that the words are not specific enough for the particular scientific purpose in hand. This is because Aboriginal languages have developed to reflect Aboriginal preoccupation with the qualities of things rather than their properties or quantities (see Christie 1985a, 20-21). For example, there are words for 'big', 'relatively big' and 'very big' (yindi, maw y i d and mirithirri yindi respectively) in Yolngu language, but not for the more scientific concept of 'bigger' and 'biggest'. Just to show how this difference looks I will provide an example (from Christie 1980,4)of how an English sentence typical of a Western maths lesson would be handled in Gupapuyngu (a Yolngu language) in Arnhem Land: English: 'A is small, B is bigger, C is biggest.' Possible Yolngu: A-nyclja dhuwala marr nyumulcuniny. B-nyclja dhuwala ga marr yindi. C-nyclja dhuwalu y i d , cljulkmumma ngayi ga B-nha.' Literal English back translation: 'A is small, B is relatively big. C is big, it surpasses B.'

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Probable Yolngu: IA-nyaa dhuwala nyumukuniny. B-nydja dhuwala marr yindi. C-nydja ga mirithirri yindi.' Literal Enghsh back translation: 'A is small, B is relatively big. C is very big.' Different technologies and economies need different degrees of specificity. To give just two more examples: the Yolngu word gurrupanmirri, often translated as 'share', means 'to give back and forth' and contains the idea, 'to exchange according to what individuals have rights to' rather than 'divide equally'. The word bulu,often translated as 'more', has the sense of 'extra' ('I want more') rather than the sense of 'relatively greater' ('I've got more than you'). Aboriginal languages are sufficiently specific in areas where specificity is important to Aboriginal people, but if a society does not use language extensively for instructional purposes, and for particular kinds of scientific differentiation, then the language may not have certain aspects of specificity for those purposes. This is not a disparaging thing to say; it is perfectly consistent with the principle that different functional learning systems operate in different cultures. Halliday (1985, 92) states this truth well: all languages have the same potential for expressing human meanings. But in practice each language has evolved in its own culture; and while every language is equally well adapted to serve the needs of (i.e. express the meanings of) the culture within which it itself developed, it is not so well equipped for expressing the meanings of another culture. Aboriginal languages are not, in fact, equipped to express the semiotics of Western societiesnor are European languages suited to the meaning styles of Aborigines. Each would have to adapt itself to meet such different demands. Davidson and Klich (1984, 143) discuss conceptual non-equivalence as a barrier to transferring, for teaching purposes, knowledge mastered in one culture domain to another. One example they use is Rudder's description of Elcho Island Yolngu people's clustering of turtle eggs on the base five (mlu). Yolngu do not perceive these clusters of five as being in serial order, and therefore these clusters would not be a suitable basis for counting beyond relatively small numbers, and are not useful for 'logical addition and subtraction of sets or other more complex operations'. To Yolngu eyes the cluster of five is qualitative more than quantitative. In other words, the use of m l u in Yolngu society springs from an ontological base different from the use of five in Western society. Davidson and Klich (1984, 143) warn that 'equating contexts on the basis of similar content or activity should not be taken to mean that these contexts involve the operationalisation of similar strategies'.

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Aboriginal teachers, and those who advise them, need to be careful not to force Aboriginal languages into performing functions that are inconsistent with the Aboriginal world view. In the Western world, verbal instruction and academically purposeful behaviour are often closely related, but Aboriginal people do not habitually use language extensively for instructional purposes so it is not surprising that their languages may not readily be used to teach in a way that fosters academically purposeful learning. A few examples from Christie's work on purposeful learning involving the Yolngu language will illustrate this. Christie looked at the range of meanings conveyed by Yolngu words referring to, or encoding, purposeful behaviour and specific instructional meanings. He found that there is a general de-emphasison purposefulness. For example, the common word for 'thinking' is guyanga. It is also used for-those unintentional, involuntary, and in a sense non-creative or passive activities such as worrying, wondering, realising, recognising and remembering. As Christie (1985a, 43) phrases it: 'There is no necessary connotation [in the word guyanga] of the internal construction or creation of meaning'. If a teacher uses the imperative guyangi! ('think'), Yolngu students would assume that she was asking them to remember rather than calculate or construct knowledge. Another important example is the Yolngu word most commonly used for 'knowing' (marnggi). This means 'know how' (Christie 1985a, 42-43; Christie and Eastwell 1984). For example Ngarra marnggi yarraman'ku would mean, 'I know how to ride a horse', not 'I know what a horse is' or 'I know about horses'. 'Knowing' for the Yolngu is, apart from conferred knowledge related to status, tied up with action and doing, rather than with generalising and theorising. Knowledge is also given or bestowed rather than constructed. The most common word for 'teach' is marnggi-gurrupan (literally 'give knowledge'), and 'to learn' is marnggi-thirri ('to become knowing'). As Christie (1985a, 42) notes, the word for knowing is an adjective in Yolngu, rather than a verb, as it is in English. It is likely that for older Aboriginal people, thinking and knowing take on a more purposeful, personally creative and intentional role; but at least for younger people, who are trained not to usurp the roles and responsibilitiesof older people, knowing and thinking have to do with context-specific experiences or content given by outside sources. Christie (1986a, 43) concludes: 'It appears that Gupapuyngu [a Yolngu language] has no common verb which means to construct or develop ideas or solutions through cognition.' These issues involve important curriculum planning matters. They also take the brief reference to language engineering in the previous chapter a little further. While it is important that enough language engineering takes place to ensure that the Aboriginal language domain does not get too narrow, it is also

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important that language engineering does not become such extensive mental engineering that the Aboriginal world view is damaged beyond its culturally reproductive capacity. Some non-Aboriginalteachers and linguists often urge that more effort be put into harnessing Aboriginal language potential for teaching, say, mathematics. They show, for example, how Aboriginal languages can be made to count beyond three, five, fifty or 100 and so on. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that teaching Aboriginal children to count in their languages way beyond what they did traditionally will harm Aboriginal world view immediately, but over time it would. The Aboriginal world view is qualitative, with everything interrelated on a spiritual or personal basis, rather than quantitative. That is why Aborigines are interested in whose land it is rather than how much land there is and to whom a person is related rather than in their personal name. In the context of a brief discussion of Aboriginal ontology and attitude to quantity Christie (1985a, 21) clarifies the issue as follows: The significant relationships between entities in the Aboriginal universe are not logical ones in the Western sense. Counting can't be done. Counting would rob things of their spiritual significance. Most Aboriginal languages, therefore, have numbers for one, two, a few, and a mob. It should also be quite clear that teaching Aboriginal children arithmetic involves a lot more than teaching them to count. Counting represents the tip of the iceberg. It is the linguistic manifestation of a way of perceiving the world which is not only quite foreign, but quite contrary to what Aboriginal children are taught at home. The whole semantic fields of Aboriginal languages are structured along essentially non-quantifiable and non-scientific lines. In this chapter examples of potential semantic confusion which can be traced back to differences between the Aboriginal and Western world view have mostly been taken from Christie's observations made at Milingimbi in northeast Arnhem Land. Two other writers who have each worked for more than thirty years in very different parts of remote Aboriginal Australia, Bain in Central Australia and Sayers in Cape York, have separately arrived at similar conclusions to Christie (Bain 1979, 1990; Sayers and Bain 1989; Bain and Sayers 1990). They use examples from Aboriginal languages and social processes to illustrate what they see as differences in types and uses of abstract thought in the two societies. While there is some conceptual overlap between the two societies,these writers see a major contrast between transaction and interaction as a mode of both thinking and social process. Western society has 'transactions' in bureaucratic dealings between people who may never see each other again, and 'interaction'

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within family life. Remote Aboriginal society operates through interaction in all social, economic and ceremonial life. Sayers and Bain (1989,9) define an interaction as a simultaneously bi-directional event, an unquantifiable process similar to communication which requires both transmission and reception, as happens when people from different clans carry out their complementary roles in a ceremony and thus help the ecology to keep operating properly. Bain and Sayers discuss matters such as causation, authority, the connection between experience and learning, the notion of impartiality, indefinite referents, suppositions, hypothetical situations and conditionals which are handled in English-speaking society by 'if, when, as, since, ought, should' and so on. They discuss these matters in the framework of Aboriginal preference for dealing with perceived or concrete reality rather than supposition and hypothesis; for dealing with interaction rather than transaction; and a preference for what Bain and Sayers describe as first degree abstraction (such as the adjectives 'light' and 'heavy') rather than second degree abstractions (such as the abstract nouns 'weight' or 'heaviness'). Both authors observe that Aboriginal people who have worked a lot with Westerners are more comfortable with second order abstractions. This is hardly a satisfactory summary of their detailed work, which deserves more attention, but it is sufficient to indicate that their findings, along with those of Christie, reinforce the conviction that translation of concepts, notions or ideas between Aboriginal languages and English is very difficult because of the degree of difference in world views, and that there is still serious breakdown in communication between the two societies. However, the somewhat newer conviction, also reinforced, is that the widely accepted theory of bilingual education which supposes the transferability of ideas and concepts or learnings from the first language to the national language also needs re-examination in the Aboriginal context. 'Ib avoid the danger of mental engineering (some would call it cognitive imperialism), the most urgent need in terms of Aboriginal schooling is to train Aboriginal teachers so that they are fully aware of these issues and can adequately support Aboriginal school councils in making decisions about what is appropriate in each culture domain in the school. Non-Aboriginal teachers, who still make up the vast majority of qualified teachers in Aboriginal schools, also need to be aware of these issues, not so that they can take a decision-making role, but so that they can be supportive advocates of Aboriginal school councils' aims. In fairness it should be said that not all Westerners knowledgeable about Aboriginal languages and Western mathematics would agree with the view expressed so far in this chapter. For example, Cataldi is working with Warlpiri curriculum workers in the Lajamanu bilingual program to develop a maths syllabus

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in Warlpiri that meets the Northern Territory Department of Education's core curriculum requirements in the early childhood levels. And J Harris (1982) has written very positively about how Anindilyakwa people on Groote Eylandt can count to very high numbers in that language. Also, Watson (1987, 1988) provides an interesting discussion in the Yirrkala context which implies disagreement with a domain approach to teaching mathematics to Aboriginal children. These cases notwithstanding, I suggest that culture domain separation in schools will be the best protection schools can provide against unwitting damage to Aboriginal ways of using Aboriginal languages. Academic purposefulness generally and subjects such as maths, which beyond about Year 2 require lots of new terminology and a different ontological basis for thinking and defining meanings, which are crucial to Western school success, would best be kept in the Western culture domain. It is not that Aboriginal languages should be locked in a time warp or that modernisation and language engineering should be opposed, but rather that schools use Aboriginal languages for those purposes and in those ways which reflect a contemporary world view as expressed by local Aboriginal parents. If the approach being advocated here is sound, then a shift in emphasis in one of the major theoretical underpinnings of bilingual education in the Aboriginal context is implied. In this shift the role of Aboriginal language in a bilingual school is seen more as maintaining and expressing language and culture rather than promoting academic gains which could be transferable to English. This is a fortuitous conclusion because it accords with the desires of Aboriginal peoplemaintenance is the prime purpose that they now see for their languages in schools (see Walton and Eggington 1990). CUMMLNS' HYPOTHESES

AND TWO-WW SCHOOLJNG

The writings of James Cumrnins have probably influenced the thinking of teachers and advisers in Aboriginal bilingual programs more than those of any other writer. Cummins has written about many matters of central relevance to bilingual education, but two of his hypotheses have been seen as fundamental. One of these is the threshold hypothesis (Cummins 1978; 1979; 1981, 38) which states that: there may be threshold levels of linguistic proficiency which bilingual children must attain in order to avoid cognitive deficits, and allow the potentially beneficial aspects of becoming bilingual to influence cognitive growth. In very basic form this hypothesis can be restated to say that in terms of reaching full potential in thinking ability a child who knows two languages less than very well is worse off than a child who knows one language very well. In more applied form it means that Aboriginal bilingual schools are probably ensuring

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the cognitive development, as distinct from academic development, of Aboriginal children by encouraging them to learn their first language to mature levels. Examples of groups of children where sufficient first language development was not achieved can be found in Gudschinsky (1970, 80), Skutnab-Kangas and lbukomaa (1976, 75), and Chesarek (1981). These are discussed in Harris (1980b) and Cummins (1981). Cummins' threshold hypothesis has to do with the danger of semilingualism and remains valid for both bilingual and bicultural Aboriginal schools. The other well-known hypothesis of Cummins is the interdependence hypothesis. It has been worded in several ways (for example in Cummins 1978, 1979, 1981) but the most recent version (1986, 20) proposes that: to the extent that instruction through a minority language is effective in developing academic proficiency in the minority language, transfer of this proficiency to the majority language will occur given adequate exposure and motivation to learn the majority language. Applied directly to Aboriginal bilingual schools (see Harris 1980b) this hypothesis can be restated simply to say that if we want Aboriginal children to develop high levels of academic competence in English, one of the most efficient ways to assist this is to first harness Aboriginal languages to promote the learning of Western academic skills such as hypothetical problem solving, context-reduced use of language, essayist prose style of writing and various other un-Aboriginal ways of using language. The hypothesis suggests that these skills learned in the Aboriginal language and transferred to English will ultimately allow more efficient learning in English than would be the case if English only were used to learn these skills. It should be clear that in its unmodified form the interdependence hypothesis stems from a desire to use bilingual education more for academic gain than for minority culture maintenance. Cummins developed the interdependence hypothesis mostly from research with Spanish, Finnish, French, Ukranian and Navajo children. The only cultural group without a long history of schooling in that list, and with anything like as different a world view as that of European Australians and remote Aborigines, is the Rock Point Navajo School. All I can guess is that the Navajo teachers in this academically very successful bilingual school did use Navajo in ways consistent with the interdependence hypothesis. Or, more likely in my view, the intergroup power relations between Navajos and non-Indiansin the Rock Point School provided the psychological environment where Navajo children could succeed academically.

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In the Northern Territory bilingual program, results in English at the end of primary school in all reasonably well-resourced schools so far objectively assessed:' Yirrkala, St Terese's, Shepherdson College, Barunga and Milingimbi, show significant gains in English skills in comparison with the English-only control group of schools (Northern Territory Department of Education 1984a, 1984b, 1984c, 1985a, 1985b respectively). However, the results were still not as good as informed observers expected. The reasons are probably complex, but one important observation is that Aboriginal staff in the program either would not or could not use Aboriginal languages in those un-Aboriginal ways calculated to promote Westem-type academic development (see Graham 1986). It will be argued later that readjusted power relations and improved pedagogy in the English domain, both facilitated by a two-way school structure, are more likely to produce academic gains in remote Aboriginal schools than an approach to bilingual education which supports an unmodified interdependence hypothesis. In this chapter it is argued that in cultures with such incompatible world views as remote Aboriginal and European Australian groups, the unmodified interdependence hypothesis2 is dangerous to long-term minority culture maintenance. It is suggested further that it is not needed where: the threshold hypothesis is heeded; those non-culturethreatening aspects of the interdependence hypothesis are harnessed; inter-culture power relations are adjusted; and English domain pedagogy is improved. The non-culture-threatening aspects of the interdependence hypothesis (in other words, cognitive skills authentically learned in the Aboriginal domain which are transferred to the English domain and used to advantage there) would be the skill of reading, a contemporary skill initially learned in the vernacular, and the skill of narrative writing argumentative writing, and writing in other styles which prove to be indigenous to both Aboriginal and Western literate culture. (See Cazden and Hymes 1978, for an interesting argument in favour of narrative style being respected in tertiary training institutions along with other forms of discourse currently considered more scholarly.) Of course, which genres or styles are perceived as authentically Aboriginal is often a matter of individual opinion and in any case they are evolving and often vary from group to group. However, the principle remains sound that with two such different cultures in contact the smaller culture can best protect itself by culture domain separation. This means that some of the more obviously Western high school and tertiary level cognitive skills should not be fostered in the Aboriginal domain. Yet, it does not mean that all manifestations of the interdependence hypothesis are inappropriate to the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school. The two main examples given, of initial mastering of the reading process and writing in a narrative style, are very important

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skills which could be learned in the Aboriginal domain and transferred to the Western domain without undermining Aboriginal world view. Thus a two-way school which adopted a model of bilingual education which was more faithful to culture domain separation principles3could maintain all the cognitive advantage of the threshold hypothesis, some of the cognitive/academic advantage of the interdependence hypothesis, and, more importantly, be in a better position to foster the adjustment of intergroup power relations more favourably to the minority group. This could be a powerful model of schooling in terms of academic gain. The academic impact of intergroup power relations is discussed later, but it is important to conclude this discussion with the thought that while two-way schooling seeks to pay as much attention to minority culture maintenance as to academic gain, the latter does not need to suffer while a school pursues the former. COMPLEMENTARY DISTRIBUTION OF LITERACY FUNCTIONS Even in the written use of two languages in contact, or bi-literacy, the principle of complementary distribution of language functions should be consistently applied. This can probably be best achieved by observing very closely the preferred uses Aboriginal people have for written literature-in other words, allowing the functions of literacy in the Aboriginal language to be indigenised. People rarely maintain redundant uses of literacy in two languages for very long. The pragmatic parallel to this is that, as the late Sarah Gudschinsky frequently said, people will read if there is something which, from their cultural perspective, is worth reading. Therefore, curriculum planners in two-way schools, with a view to long-term minority culture maintenance, need to be clear-sighted about the fact that literacy does not have the same functions and uses to all people in all cultures and situations all the time. This is one of a number of false assumptions about literacy that need to be dislodged before we can have appropriate input into the uses of literacy in Aboriginal languages for remote groups (see Heath 1986; Smith 1986). These false assumptions have probably survived for so long because most studies of reading have been in school settings or by questionnaire survey methods, rather than through ethnographic observation of the everyday contexts of a sufficiently large number of families to be able to say what is 'typical' literacy behaviour in a particular society or subculture. FUNCTIONS OF LJTERACY

The assumption that literacy fulfills similar uses and functions in all languages and for all groups is belied by the fact that some groups which have accepted

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writing as part of their culture retain a very limited range of uses for it and/or are satisfied for a very small elite or particular specialists to practise it. Heath (1986, 18) quotes the example of the Tuareg in the Sahara who have a centuriesold writing system in their Berber language: 'many members are literate in the script. However, they use it only rarely-for graffiti on rocks in the desert, for certain kinds of talismans and for brief love notes.' In North America, the Cherokee do not expect all members of their community to become literate, but every household has access to a literate person (see Walker 1981). They do not insist that all children undergo formal literacy instruction and there is no negative attitude towards Cherokee who learn to read later in life or who never do so. People learn to read Cherokee informally by observing others read and by participating in natural routines of home, church and in-group activities. Formal literacy instruction in the home context is regarded as coercive, though skills learned formally at school may be spontaneously reactivated at home later in life. Heath's major ethnographic study (1983) of literacy in an area in the southeast of the United States shows just how wide of the mark this false assumption is. She observed two sub-cultures in her study, but the all-black working class community of semi-skilled textile workers is perhaps the most interesting. Preschool children very often became independent readers and writers without any parental initiative. Parents were involved, but only as the children or situation demanded help. The children learned to read spontaneously through their desire to learn the information they judged necessary for their lives and they achieved some mastery of environmental print without being taught. For them comprehension was the context rather than the outcome of learning to read (see Heath 1986, 20). The reading environment for these children was quite different from the reading home that has been somewhat idealised by experts in the field. It was not academically motivated, nor did the parents have critical, aesthetic, organisational or recreational uses for literacy. Typically they had seven uses of literacy: instrumental (price tags, street signs); social interactional (greeting cards, cartoons); news-related (newspaper items for local news, political flyers); memory supportive (reminder messages); substitutes for oral messages (notes to school teachers); permanent records (loan documents, tax forms) and confirmation of attitudes already held (car stickers, the Bible). On the job these parents rarely had to read as virtually all information was given to employees in spoken as well as written form. Finally, reading at home was hardly ever an individual, private matter. As Heath (1986, 21) concludes: Among these adults, reading was a social activity, involving more than the individual reader. Solitary reading, in fact, was often

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interpreted as an indication that one had not succeeded socially; thus, women who read 'romance' magazines or men who read 'girlie' magazines were charged with having to read to meet social needs they could not handle in real life. Written materials were often used in connection with oral explanation, narratives, and jokes about what the written materials meant or did not mean. The authority of the materials was established through social negotiation by the readers.

MEDIATED AM) UMMEDlATEDIATED LITEMCY

The second false assumption is that literacy should always entail readers' autonomous control of the whole process of gaining meaning from print. In a very interesting analysis of Jewish literacy, Spolsky (1986, 25) draws a distinction between unmediated and mediated literacy. Mediated literacy is any mode of literacy which continues to require extensive supplementary verbal explanation by a teacher long after the initial skill of phonemic decoding of the orthography has been acquired. Unmediated literacy, the type aimed for by Western schools, is where readers are ideally autonomous and in control of gaining meaning from print entirely by themselves. It is a personal and individual activity, while mediated literacy is a social phenomenon, where a reader in a sense has to take part in the social process in order to gain full meaning from print. Aboriginal body painting in Arnhem Land for ceremonies such as male initiation is a kind of mediated literacy; the design is plain to see and any observer would know which clan was represented by each design, but the designs hold other information which is revealed to particular people at the appropriate time. Spolsky (1986,28-29) summarisesthe social functions and mechanisms of mediated Hebrew literacy for Jews: The mode of literacy...withits necessity of learning from a teacher and its insistence on a traditional authority higher than the written text itself, was, I believe, particularly significant and fundamental to the maintenance of Jewish religious thought and life. The Rabbis insisted that the Written Law must always be written down, must be copied from another written text letter by letter, must be read aloud from a written text in public worship and not recited from memory, and must be taught to others from a written text. However, the orthographical system was incomplete in two significant ways. First, it lacked both the vowels and the cantillation marks [guides for chanting] that would permit anyone to read the text aloud correctly without having previously memorised both; and second, the text includes

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written forms (ketiv)that are taken to be mistakes and that must be replaced by others @ere) in the reading. As a result the text could not be approached directly; even someone who had learned how to read the letters still needed to learn how to read every sentence in the Written Law from a teacher. Spolsky (1986, 31) goes on to say that: 'Thus the [written] text is important but never autonomous, never more authoritative than the tradition it serves,' Aboriginal culture has often been referred to as a n oral culture, and certainly it is a culture where some types of knowledge are owned by particular people. Although most Aborigines seem to value their languages being written down, some have resisted the recording of their languages because they feared that the written literature caused them to lose control over the information. This concern is more often directed towards secretlsacred knowledge than public or open knowledge. It is not clear whether the following statement from Papunya (Hansen and Hansen 1978, 238) refers to secret or open knowledge, but it does reveal one Pintupi man's concern about recorded knowledge: No, there is no returning to our own countries (We would die also) because the white man has repeatedly photographed us, because of that. ...Our spirits are short, our bodies appear to be big and strong, but it is not so. ...Having put (our names down) on paper they have broken us and are carrying us around (our names in record books), that is, our spirits which have become small. ...We are weak now, not really what we should be. ...Therefore they should just put a bore out there for us. Some American Indian groups have resisted attempts to write down their languages (see Walker 1981). Philips (1975, 378-79) describes an attitude to literacy among Warm Springs Indians in central Oregon where they rarely use public signs and keep literacy out of their religious activities deliberately to 'keep "outsiders" out of the community and keep them relatively uninformed about the nature of traditional Indian activities'. Yet many Aboriginal and Indian groups greatly value the writing down of their languages while they may have some reservations about what should be written down or how this written literature should be used. The Jewish practice of mediated literacy shows how communicative needs for literacy may be closely related to the social structure of a community. It also shows that mediated literacy is a means of 'safeguarding transmission without fossilizing content' (Spolsky 1986,31).It could also be a means of retaining control or keeping an oral culture oral while safeguardingtransmission and gaining the prestige associated with written languages. There is no evidence that this practice is developing in regard to written Aboriginal language but Aboriginal

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communities, their writers and storytellers, need to be informed of these types of measures as they explore complementary functions for written English and written Aboriginal languages. READMG ABORIGLNAL LANGUAGES AND 'THMKLVG ABORIGMM

The third false assumption is that all types of literacy necessarily change the way people think. In their study of Vai literacy in Liberia, Scribner and Cole (1981) shed considerable light on this. Some uses of literacy do foster different ways of thinking, such as those associated with more successful adaptation to the demands of verbally mediated and decontextualised, academically purposeful learning in upper primary and high schools. However, Scribner and Cole were able to separate the cognitive effects of literacy from the cognitive effects of schooling after finding a society in Liberia in which there were three literacies for three different purposes: English for schooling, Arabic for Muslim religious expression and Vai for private uses. Having three literacies for three different purposes occurs elsewhere; for example in the Maldive Islands, also a Muslim society. In summarising Scribner and Cole's findings Heath (1986, 18) says: Their work suggested that literacy is a culturally organised system of skills and values learned in specific settings. Moreover, generalisationsabout oral and literate modes of thought and their causative links to abilities in hypothetical reasoning, abstract thinking, or logical organisation of ideas have not been borne out in cross cultural studies of literacy. Literacy acquisition is often a function of society specific tasks, which are sometimes far removed from those of formal schooling and are not conceived of as resulting from effort expended by 'teacher' and 'learner'. Scollon and Scollon's (1981) valuable research and analysis arrives at the same conclusions as that of Scribner and Cole, though perhaps with a different emphasis. These authors are not so much interested in how literacy may or may not change the ways people think, but how Western forms of literacy can challenge the world view of ethnic minorities and thus their ethnic identity. Scollon and Scollon demonstrate that analysis of written discourse in different languages is likely to reveal that written discourse is closely related to what they call 'reality set', or what has been called in this book 'world view'. Scollon and Scollon take the phrase 'modern consciousness' from Berger, Berger and Kellner (1973), and, in order to handle their findings from written discourse analysis at Fort Chipewyan in Alberta, coined the contrasting phrase 'bush consciousness'. Modern consciousness is related to bureaucratic and technological society and is highly compatible with what they call the essayist prose style of literacy.

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Two of the main features of the essayist prose style are that the written language becomes enshrined as the natural means for the expression of truth and knowledge and all the information needed to understand the text is located in the text-the writing is decontextualised.4 Other features of essayist prose are that it is explicit; it aims to ,appear to be depersonalised and objective; it often fictionalises both audience and author; it offers a high proportion of new information and has an internally cohesive structure. Luther helped Western society revere the written text because 'salvation' was to be found in it; and prestigious bodies such as the Royal Society of London passed edicts that all texts which were not clear and sufficient in their own right were to be rejected from their proceedings (see Olsen 1977). The result of these developments is that essayist prose style has become both the medium and the ultimate goal of Western schooling. Scollon and Scollon discuss a number of examples of uses of literacy in various parts of the world which vary from the European essayist style which has become so dominant that many Westerners assume that literacy is synonymous with it. Their examples include the Vai already discussed above and Asian literacy. In China there have been two strong and ancient Literacy traditions, one Confucianist and the other Buddhist. Buddhist literacy, which became associated with popular literacy movements, was mediated literacy-a text was not complete in itself, and oral interpretation and elaboration were necessary to understanding. Anyone could write who chose to and so-called accuracy was not paramount. Confucianist literacy on the other hand remained associated with a powerful bureaucratic elite. Scollon and Scollon (1981,45)do not elaborate on the contrasts between these two literacy traditions, but conclude that: both of these traditions were developed throughout Asia, and as far as we know were never strictly in competition. There was probably more like a functional specialisation of these types of literacy than the enshrinement of one type as the only access to knowledge. What is particularly relevant is that the complementary functions of different literacies in the same cultural group also relate to different reality sets. Scollon and Scollon suggest that the Fort Chipewyan Athabascans, or Indians, have great difficulty writing about Athabascan things because they have only been offered the essayist ideal of literacy, and the essayist ideal is in conflict with their world view about how language should be used. Scollon and Scollon's view (1981, 54) is strengthened by their observation that the Kutchin Athabascans in Alaska and northwestern Canada have had a different experience with literacy from that

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of the Fort Chipewyan Indians in Alberta. Among the Kutchin the Anglican mission influence many years ago promoted the use of written Kutchin in ways that would allow it to carry the Kutchin world view. Scollon and Scollon see a parallel between the Kutchin and the Vai. Kutchin literacy combines the same functions that Vai and Arabic literacy have for the Vai. The Kutchin read the Bible in Kutchin-they read it but do not write in the religious context except for copying out the Bible and keeping a record of religious activities. On the other hand, Kutchin became used for other local functions similar to those filled by Vai literacy, such as notes and personal letters. In this way neither the Arabic nor Vai uses of literacy challenge Vai ethnic identity, and the two uses of Kutchii likewise. Scollon and Scollon (1981, 65) conclude tentatively, from what they emphasise is not a large research base, that: 'Kutchin literacy has been successful to the extent it has because it has not been essayist literacy'. Kutchin literacy is highly contextualised and used between people who know each other well and have much shared experience. The readers are happy to read between the lines, as they must because the text does not contain all the meaning. Kutchin and Vai literacy have remained representative of bush consciousness, while the complementary functions of English essayist prose are fostered in school- the arena of modern consciousness. These studies give us some hope that the functional specialisation of literacy in two languages may help allow two forms of consciousness or world view to coexist without encroaching on each other in fundamental ways. Different Aboriginal groups are likely to have different configurations of functional specialisation. For example, many Aboriginal groups may prefer that a written Aboriginal literature be used in school, though as yet without clearly established functions. Other groups will resist the use of Aboriginal languages in schools, as Hermannsburg rejects the use of a written Aboriginal literature in the classroom while highly valuing its use in their Christian church. APPLICATIONS IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALLA

In relation to remote Aboriginal groups becoming literate in both their own language and English, the false assumptions discussed above carry a number of important messages. First, the Jewish, Vai and Kutchin studies are very reassuring in the context of two-way schooling because they demonstrate that there are certain ways of using reading and writing that do not change the way people think, and need not be connected to the cognitive-academic developments associated with success at higher levels of Western schooling. Thus it should be possible for the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school to foster or respond to functions of

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vernacular literacy which allow that literacy to be an effective adaptation to changing remote Aboriginal circumstances. This Aboriginal domain literacy should be able to support the long-term maintenance of Aboriginal culture without undermining Aboriginal world view, in contrast to the ways that advanced and decontextualised literacy in English will tend to do. Second, if the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school can foster or respond to functions of literacy which are spontaneously developing in Aboriginal groups, teaching reading will not be hard-Aboriginal students will learn to read in Aboriginal languages naturally as part of living. The American studies of black factory workers and Cherokee Indians discussed above are reassuring here but teachers can also be reassured by knowing that these processes have taken many decades and more in other cultures. Heath (1986, 24) suggests a reorientation in attitudes towards literacy and literacy instruction that is appropriate for those who may wish to work in literacy-related activities in a two-way school: The challenge posed to a uniform definition of functional literacy, and to universal patterns of functions and uses, may alter not only methods and goals of reading instruction, but also assessments of the accountability of schools in meeting society's needs. ...The current state of literacy research suggests, therefore, expanding the definitions, measures, methods, and materials behind literacy teaching to incorporate not only school-based skills, uses and functions of literacy, but also the counterparts and modifications of these in out-of-school contexts. Third, if literacy in Aboriginal languages is to receive spontaneous support from Aboriginal people and therefore contribute to the long-term maintenance of Aboriginal culture, it will have to fulfil different functions and uses from those of English literacy (see Martin 1990) and from the rational perspective of Aboriginal people, will have to fulfil functions which enrich their lives. This rational assessment will need to be part of the 'life context supporting the growth of literacy', as Smith (1986, 263) phrases it. In a two-way Aboriginal school, therefore, it could be a serious mistake to teach literacy in the Aboriginal domain with the same functions and uses for which English literacy is taught. This does not mean that in the early stages the same planned informal teaching methodologies could not be employed for teaching literacy in both languages, or that reading for aesthetic pleasure and love of words could not be a reality in both languages. School staff need to be alert and allow the Aboriginal domain of the school to be in tune with the emerging unique functions of vernacular literacy in Aboriginal settlements. As discussed above, this means that the appropriateness of all aspects of Cummins' interdependence hypothesis to two-way schooling where

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the minority culture maintenance function of the Aboriginal domain is seen as at least as important as academic gains, needs to be questioned. Fourth, all the above implies a task of careful observation of the functions of literacy in Aboriginal languages in remote communities. This needs to take two approaches: ethnographic study to see what really does happen now in relation to literacy in the Aboriginal culture domain; and action research on the part of linguists, curriculum developers, Aboriginal writers and artists to find out what Aboriginal tastes and preferred written styles are, and to stimulate their expression. Linguists and teacher-linguists have a most important role here but there is also a danger that professional stimulation will unwittingly impose Western styles and content onto Aboriginal literature, so these supporters need to approach their role with sensitivity. Such observation is already occuring. Following are a few examples of very useful observations about developments in literacy in Aboriginal languages. Cataldi (1990) has observed that older Warlpiri people at Lajamanu are saying that Warlpiri has the job of recording and preserving Warlpiri cultural knowledge. As she notes (personal communication 1989): 'They are beginning to say "You can get that in a book", when people ask questions such as what kind of shelters were built in the old days.' Marett is currently researching the impact of vernacular literacy on the functions of Aboriginal language, in this case Kriol. She points out (1987, 1) that oral cultures should not be seen as illiterate: 'Just as literate cultures have literacy, so oral ones have orality. Orality is to be distinguished from illiteracy, which implies a lack of literacy, and which is a term reserved to apply to the sections of a literate community who are not literate.' She implies that more observation is necessary to discern what indigenous functions Kriol literacy might have for Kriol-speaking people-language functions not already met by oral Kriol or written English. It is not clear how or to what extent literacy contributes to the vitality of Aboriginal languages. My own view is that literacy in Aboriginal languages indirectly helps to maintain the vitality of those languages, by contributing to their status. The importance of status to language maintenance has been noted in an earlier chapter. The connectionsbetween written Aboriginal languages and status is partially demonstrated by the fact that although two models of bilingual education were offered within the Northern Territory bilingual program, one a bi-literacy model and one an oral vernacular model, communities with existing bilingual programs have invariably asked for the bi-literacy model. To return to Marett's research, she points out that there is no-one involved in the production of Kriol literature who was not first literate in English,

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and that written Kriol is used mainly in the school and church. Also, we do not know what written Kriol looks Like (Marett 1987, 8) in the sense that in English we can distinguish at a glance between poetry, prose, letters, bank accounts and so on. One of Marett's particular interests is how Kriol punctuation or page layout might reflect the importance of the pause in Kriol d i s c o ~ r s e . ~ Christie (1989), writing from lengthy experience in northeast Arnhem Land and now at Yirrkala, also discusses the functions of literacy in Aboriginal languages. He suggests (1989, 27) that in spite of the fact that bilingual programs have produced lots of well-made, interesting books, 'there is very little in the way of literature which Aboriginal people can love or cherish, or call upon to strengthen themselves in their ongoing struggle to maintain their culture and their land'. This implies that Aboriginal people want their written literature to have an identitymaintaining function. Christie (1989,28)makes three main points about the nature of a more Aboriginal-shaped literacy, which reveal how Aborigines insist on 'a crucial tie-up between the medium and the message'. First, Aboriginal children see literacy as a group activity, not as an independent or individualistic one. They refuse to be detached from their peers to cooperate with an individualisticWestern teaching methodology. Second, Western literacy presumes that knowledge and ideas can be recorded as objects and stored. This decontextualising and objectifying of information is not acceptable. Aboriginal children want what we might call a very much socially constructed reality, even in their writing. Christie (1989, 29) says of white educators' guidance of Aboriginal literacy workers in collecting, transcribing and editing vernacular stories in the bilingual program: The editing process involved stripping off all the Aboriginal meaningfulness which connected the information with the storyteller, the place and time and purpose of the telling, who was there, all the intejections and discussions etc., and left a dead piece of classroom material which may have looked smart to white eyes, but which Aboriginal teachers in ensuing years were usually reluctant to use. They would be more likely to take their students and produce their own books, telling of their own group and own experience of collecting yams. The items from the literature centres which have withstood the test of time are old school magazines, and photo books, and excursion and sports reports which show real people we know in real places we know, participating in an event we remember. These books are the exception that prove the rule, i.e., that without links to real people, and real places, real experience and understood events, literature is dead and alien.

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Christie's third point (1989,30) is that Aboriginal society is responsive rather than planned, in the sense that they want to respond to what is ongoing around them rather than to keep strictly to a preset timetable, with Aboriginal teachers being free to use literacy 'to share and explore Aboriginal ways of doing things with pupils' rather than to produce readers and writers. Christie (1989,30) implies that the solution is more Aboriginal staff free to teach in their own way: 'literacy was never wholly embraced as a significant part of Aboriginal life until Aboriginal teachers started taking over'. Of course, without the white educators making the mistakes that they did, there probably wouldn't be any confident Aboriginal teachers who could 'take over', but that is another issue and shouldn't distract from the changes of direction in vernacular literacy which should be taking place now. The final example of recent careful observation in Aboriginal literacy is that of Goddard (1989), writing from his experience as linguist in the Pitjantjatjara bilingual program in South Australia. Goddard (1989, 1)says that: 'the potential of vernacular writing has been largely stifled by the priorities of outside decisionmakers, who focus on children, schooling and religion, rather than on adults, community development and politics'. The mission at Ernabella and later the State Education Department put their resources into promoting passive, individualised uses of reading, rather than into active social uses of writing. Goddard implies that Westerners have misread the sociopoliticalcontext in which the role and genres of Aboriginal writing would prosper. Goddard's paper opens with the irony that while Pitjantjatjara literacy is now fifty years old, few community newspapers have ever flourished for any length of time. He analyses the nature of a community newspaper which did flourish at Amata during 1985-86. The Amatuku gukurpa or Amatu NewsTimes was read with great interest by Pitjantjatjara people. In retrospect it seems that two writing genres were central to the Amatuku ZJukurpa's success-those of reportage and advocacy. The reportage genre is used by Pitjantjatjara writers to stress the emotional impact of an event; to report facts and events; to focus on human involvement (remaining personal with no attempt at objectivity); to present information already known to most readers; to take social action; and to validate or celebrate opinions or to proclaim. The advocacy genre is used to persuade, condemn, praise and complain. An example of an advocacy text was a page written by a Pitjantjatjara Community Council secretary, appealing to people to stop embarrassing her by asking her if they could borrow the Council's car. It was posted up all round the community.

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From this background Goddard (1989, 15) sees that Western promoters of literacy have presumed that Pitjantjatjara literacy would have the same functions for Pitjantjatjara people as literacy does in Western society. Western society has great respect for its huge body of written literature and its reference potential. The major false assumption was to equate becoming literate in Pitjantjatjara with the production of a Western-type Pitjantjatjara literature-that is, bodies of literary, essayist or technical texts. (See Northern Territory Department of Education 19864 68-74, and Russo and Harris 1982, for examples of how this assumption was promoted as a policy.) If such a body of literature is not being produced in Aboriginal languages by literate Aboriginal people, Westerners tend to assume that Aboriginal literacy is not viable. In contrast, Goddard observes that the most useful functions for literacy in the Pitjantjatjara context would be interpersonal and social communication. He suggests (1989, 15) that the moral and aesthetic functions of Western literature are still being carried out in Pitjantjatjara society by traditional oral means. However, the oral public debate and concensus formation which previously took place in small bush camps is no longer possible in large settlements. In his view it is here that written Pitjantjatjara advocacy and reportage genres have a contemporary function. The implication is that perhaps resources should be shifted away from literature-oriented literacy primarily for children, to helping Aboriginal adults take control of writing, and use it for their practical purposes. Goddard concludes with the view that such a re-focus would take a fraction of the current resources, and furthermore, if this does not take place bilingual education could well lose community support. One cannot help noticing that Goddard's observations about emergent functions for written Pitjantjatjara have parallels with the glimpses provided earlier in this chapter of written material from the Tuareg, Cherokee, Vai and Kutchincommunities where writing does have important functions but where developing a large body of written literature is not a priority. However, literacy in Aboriginal languages is extremely recent by comparison to the overseas examples mentioned above. Most of these examples of complementary distribution of the functions of literacy have literacy traditions which are one or more centuries old. Literacy in Aboriginal languages, through either mission or school activities, is barely fifteen years old, except in a few isolated cases. For example, both Ernabella and Hermannsburg have a long history of Aboriginal language literacy (Edwards 1969). It should be added that while Aboriginal bilingual programs do not have these issues sorted out yet, they are gradually building up the number of readers who

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ultimately will take initiatives and make decisions about the functions of their own literacy and literature. Bilingual schools need to respond urgently to these nascent initiatives, otherwise Aboriginal communities may begin to withdraw support for Aboriginal writing in schools, seeing it as being too much guided by an external agenda.

CONCLUSION In Aboriginal bilingual education programs in the past we have sought ways of using two languages in school to best promote cognitive and academic gains. They were worthy aims in terms of our knowledge at the time, but the higher priority of promoting Aboriginal culture maintenance now needs to be worked into educational planning. It was assumed in the past that extensive use of the Aboriginal language for any function in schools would contribute to culture maintenance. Now we must acknowledge that ways and purposes of using Aboriginal languages in schools which are consistent with the functions for which they are used in the Aboriginal world outside school must be taken into account as well. In relation to the functions of literacy, all of the evidence presented above strongly suggests that Aborigines need to be in control of the shape of literacy in their own languages so that indigenous functions for vernacular writing can emerge. It also implies that the emphasis should shift away from children to adults in the vernacular literacy enterprise. However, in my view it does not mean that there is no continuing appropriate role for non-Aboriginal people in supporting Aboriginal literacy activities, as non-Aboriginal adult educator input to the Arnatuku gukurpa demonstrates. There remains an important role for Westernebut they need to be more observant and responsive to tentatively expressed Aboriginal interests and initiatives in vernacular writing, otherwise some of the gains made in bilingual education could be lost and writing in Aboriginal languages not be indigenised.

NOTES 1. In 1987 the approach to accreditation of bilingual programs in the Northern Territory was changed from one of formal assessment through tests and interviews by an external team not involved in the bilingual program, to one of largely structured within-school evaluation. 2. When this chapter was first written Cumrnins was invited to comment on the suggestion that the interdependence hypothesis may need to be modified in the case of a bilingual program with two languages representing two very different world views. He replied

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(personal communication 1987) that he hadn't thought deeply about the influence of different world views on that hypothesis and that it would need to be interpreted carefully in such a context. While he agreed with the analysis of the way world view differences should influence the interpretation and application of the interdependence hypothesis, he pointed out that strictly speaking, the interdependence hypothesis does not itself need to be modified because it includes the statement: 'to the extent that instruction through a minority language is effective in developing academic proficiency'. 3. A paragraph from a letter from Cumrnins (personal communication, 1987) in response to an early draft of this chapter and Chapter One is worth recording: 'the case you make for culture domain separation [in the context you describe] is extremely convincing. It appears not only to provide at least a partial explanation for why previous bilingual and non-bilingual programs for Aboriginal groups have not worked as well as was expected but also a coherent direction for future program planning. I have recently been involved (briefly) with Indian groups in Arizona and also have become more involved with Inuit programs in Canada and intuitively the ideas you are developing appear to have profound implications for those groups in addition to Aboriginal populations. ... I have observed how a good idea like community control can be screwed up both by funding/administrative uncertainties imposed by the mainstream society and by the lack of clear culture domain separation. ...lip service can be paid to the indigenous language and culture and always subsumed to mainstream criteria of what is really important in schools. The structural clarity that your scheme would confer in this type of situation would go quite a long way towards really empowering communities, rather than giving the appearance of empowerment but always with white men pushing the buttons in the background.'

4. The term 'decontextualised', used by Scollon and Scollon and many others in relation to essayist prose style, is strictly speaking not accurate, although what Scollon and Scollon say about the different nature of written language is. What is really meant by 'all the information needed to understand the text is in the text' is that there is enough detail in the text for the reader to understand it without further outside help. According to Macken (personal communication 1987) the readers have to be able to reconstruct the context in their own heads as they read, and bring cultural knowledge to the text in order to understand it. 5. Marett's research was far from complete when this paper was written but even at this stage it provides indications of aspects of vernacular literacy about which everyone involved needs to be sensitive as its functions become indigenised.

CHAPTER

THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CONTEXT OF CURRICULUM PLANNING THE MAIN AIM OF THIS CHAPTER is to begin to remove theoretical ambiguities from curriculum design for remote Aboriginal schools. Of course, these ideas must be tentative because bicultural curriculum development is not only a very new process but it is also a living process which is subject in important ways to differences between Aboriginal communities and to the prevailing attitudes of the majority society. Our understanding of remote Aboriginal children's learning and maintenance of Aboriginal culture is still not highly developed and, hopefully, will continue to grow. Furthermore, many of the decisions can only properly be made by Aboriginal parents, and Aboriginal teachen representing them, as they see situations develop. However, some useful principles behind curriculum design for two-way schools can be suggested. Curriculum matters can be discussed in many ways but some aspects of curriculum, which are taken for granted in majority cultures, assume crucial importance in a minority culture context. Who is h control of the school is one such aspect. The fact that unequal intergroup power relationships between different social classes are frequently reproduced through schools has been impressively argued by researchers such as Bernstein (1972, 1975) and Connell et a1 (1982). The processes of reproduction of working classes and of minority cultures are not the same in every way, because the power of the dominant group tends, partly through schooling, to preserve the former and damage the latter. However, a principle that would seem to be common to the maintenance of social classes and minority cultures is that power is a major force behind social reproduction and that this is reflected in school curriculum matters. For example, Bernstein (1972, 150) says: The power relationships created outside the school penetrate the organisation, distribution, and evaluation of knowledge through the social context of their transmission. The definition of educability is itself at any one time an attenuated consequence of these power relationships. On the same issue, Cummins (1986, 22-26) takes the view that: Minority students will succeed educationally to the extent that the patterns of [inter-ethnic group power] interaction in school reverse those that prevail in the society at large.. . . Students from dominated communities will be empowered in the school context to the extent that the communities themselves are empowered through their interactions with the school.

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One of the stated major aims of maintenance models of bilingual education is the maintenance or reproduction of the minority culture but this has not always worked out in practice. For example, Maseman (1983), writing about Spanish-English maintenance models of bilingual education in parts of the United States, notes that the power relations between languages in a bilingual program often reflect the power relations of the two groups outside school. Maseman also claims that even when two languages in a bilingual program are used for equal teaching times, the material culture of the classroom such as clocks, calendars, American flag, perception of seasons, Western decorations and displays recording Western days of celebration reflect the priorities of the dominant society. The classroom organisation itself, exemplified by children organised to work as individuals, the assessment system, the importance of the separate worth of the work of each child, emphasis on the efficient use of time, Western rules of politeness and discipline, and the administrative structure of the school reinforce the power of the dominant group. Even the use of bilingual education to promote equal educational opportunity for individuals can undermine the preservation of the culture group. It is argued in this book that the separate culture domain design of two-way schooling should help protect children from the 'invisible pedagogy' (Bernstein 1975) of unequal power relations, and from the hidden curriculum of the Western classroom material culture and organisation, by consciously limiting the trappings of Western culture to the Western domain. Furthermore, it is argued that the debilitating effects of unequal power relations on Aboriginal children's ability to benefit from schooling can hopefully be reduced by placing Aboriginal school councils in control. Of course Western authority, in some ways necessarily and legitimately (for example, the State governments have a responsibility to ensure that all children are at least taught the three Rs in English by qualified teachers), will continue to impinge even on two-way schools, but its effects should be balanced by Aboriginal control. Cummins (1981) has had a formative influence on the curriculum design of Aboriginal bilingual education in the Northern Territory, and from there, elsewhere in remote Australia. More recently Cummins has been analysing why education educational interventions such as compensatory education and b-al have not been more widely successful. He suggests (1986,18)that this is because: 'they have not altered significantly the [power] relationships between educators and minority students and between schools and minority communities'. In the following chart (1986, 24) he offers a theoretical framework which summarises what is necessary in terms of school organisation before minority student

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empowerment is possible. All the issues at all levels are in my view curriculum matters. Figure 1 A theoreticalframework for the e m p o w m n t of minority students. Reproduced with kind p m i s s i o n of J a m s Cummins and the Harvard Educational Review, 1986.

SOCIETAL CONTEXT

I Dominant group

l

Dominated group

SCHOOLCONTEXT

Educator role definitions Culturalflinguistic incorporation:

Additive

Subtractive

Community participation:

Collaborative

Exclusive

Pedagogy:

Reciprocal interactionoriented

Transmissionoriented

Assessment:

Advocacyoriented

Legitimisationoriented

4

EMPOWERED STUDENTS

4

DISABLED STUDENTS

On Cummins' chart there are four levels of curriculum design. The top two levels, cultural/linguistic incorporation and community participation, are crucial to school success but are often taken for granted, ignored or accorded only lip service in minority culture contexts. The three topics of this chapter, Aboriginal

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control, culture domain separation and staffing in two-way schools, all fall within these two levels. The subject of the next chapter, curriculum content and process, falls within the lower two levels of Cummins' chart-pedagogy and assessment. During the last decade real advances have been made in teachers' knowledge of appropriate pedagogy and assessment in remote Aboriginal schools, but the effectiveness of that knowledge has probably been limited by insufficient change in the matters discussed in this chapter.

CONTROL IN TWO-WAYSCHOOLS If we are to start with 'first things first' in two-way schooling, we must start with authority structures. Sooner or later they influence everything that happens in a school, both in terms of the overt curriculum and the hidden curriculum. As Paulston (personal communication 1987) states: 'Aboriginal control of the schools is crucial for what they want.' In Aboriginal two-way schools Aboriginal parents must be in control for a number of reasons. Parents 'own' children more than do governments or schools. In the major part of Australia which is largely monocultural and monolingual, parents generally have the same culture as teachers and education department officials and they are thus not highly conscious of the issue of who has prior rights of cultural influence over children. However, for small and very different ethnic minorities the issue is crucial. In a two-culture school demarcation disputes arise where it is not immediately clear to teachers whether what they are teaching in their culture domain could be undermining important aims in the other culture domain. Mature members of the children's own culture are in the best position to judge these matters. Adults in remote communities have had such limited experience in forming opinions on curriculum matters that many educators doubt their interest in doing so. An experience at Lajamanu in the Northern Territory demonstrates that given opportunity and focus, Aboriginal people have many views on curriculum priorities in schools. In 1984 a visiting curriculum consultant gave various groups of Lajamanu Warlpiri, including parents, members of the Lajamanu Council, old women and men, school staff and other residents, an opportunity over a number of days to discuss and write views on four questions. The questions in summary were: What would make the bicultural program strong? What do the children want to learn? What do the children need to learn? How can the local community make the school more accountable to it? The number and range of answers was impressive (see Combe 1984). Recent experience at Yirrkala has demonstrated the same parental interests (see series of Galtha Workshop Reports, Yirrkala Community School Literature Production Centre 1989a-f).

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When parents and teachers of a minority language spoken by very few people do not have clear authority in a major learning institution, their status is undermined and the language they represent loses prestige. This matter of language status is often compounded by social class differences. The importance of the status of the minority group in relation to the dominant group is demonstrated by the fact that Finnish students in Sweden, where they are a lowstatus group, frequently fail academically; whereas in Australia, where they are a high-status group, they do well (Cummins 1986, 22). The same pattern is shown for the Buraku, a low-status,virtually outcast group in Japan, who perform poorly in Japan, but do as well as other Japanese students in the United States (Ogbu 1982,303). In New Zealand children of immigrant Polynesian workers from outside the country do better in school than the native Polynesian minority, the Maoris, (Ogbu 1982, 303; see also Ogbu 1987 and Gibson 1987). Explanations of the causes of such findings range from the lack of a strong cultural identity in low-status contexts to the internalisation of inferior status attributed to them by the dominant group. In the case of New Zealand, it is likely that the newer immigrant Polynesians are less conscious of their low social status than are the Maoris. In broad terms it would be legitimate to call this a socially constructed motivational factor. Increasing the status of minority group leaden by encouraging their control of important contemporary institutions is the surest way we know to raise minority group status in the eyes of minority children. Moreover, this non-academic measure is likely to be a prerequisite to improved academic results. In Keeffe's research at Walungunu (Kintore), the staff drew up a list of words of elements of the Yanangu (Aboriginal) domain and the Walgpalu (Western)domain. Terms like cars, cards, money, church, houses and work appeared in both lists. However, Keeffe (1989, 41) goes on to say: In each of these introduced elements Aboriginal people have gained the power over them necessary to absorb and reform them. This has not been the case with the school. 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 will always be an alien and alienating institution. In the case of small ethnic minorities, the hidden Western curriculum can be more influential in cultural, ontological terms than the overt curriculum. In a simple example, many teachers would unthinkingly assume that The mree Littb Pigs' is a culturally neutral story and harmless in relation to any culture. But it teaches the Western work ethic and carries a Western message of the value

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of future economic planning for personal security. I do not mean to imply that Aboriginal children should not read this story, but rather that they should read it in the Western culture domain. The surest protection against unwanted effects of the hidden curriculum is the promotion of genuine Aboriginal control of a school. Even methods of administration and decision-making will carry a message and indicate cultural priorities. To some extent control, or independence, can be given rather than having to be taken. The responsibility of non-Aboriginal teachers and administraton is to discern where desire for control is developing and, when asked, to support that desire, from behind the scenes in a non-manipulative way. From a sociological perspective Jordan (1987) analyses how Western society has 'managed' Aboriginal society historically. To avoid repeating bad practice, explanations could be made in a non-discouraging way about the fact that greater control will create a lot more work for the Aborigines concerned, that running a school is not easy even for an insider to the tradition; and curriculum development is hard, even for one trained in that tradition. It will take time and a degree of struggle to make Aboriginal control, maintained over the long-term, practicable. In addition, Aboriginal people themselves need to define the situation as one needing their control before their control is feasible-they must pass through a rite of passage. For any people, rites of passage remain a significant lifelong experience because the rites exact a price. For example, the Strelley Mob struck out for a degree of economic independence and control of their own affairs in 1946. They gained their own school in 1976 and the history of their struggle to get it is part of the theorising power that enables them to keep it and to mould their school into something they really want. Also, the unnecessary struggle, from the point of view of reasonable non-Aboriginal educators, through which the Yipirinya group went for six years before winning accreditation for their school in 1983, is probably part of the strength they draw on now to keep it going. Each two-way school will have its own unique history which will explain the origin of the school, and why a desire for something different in schooling came to fruition in that particular place. Ngukun; Yirrkala, Milingimbi, Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island), Walungum (Kintore) and Willowra are other examples of embryonic two-way or both-ways schools which, unlike Strelley and Yipirinya, are still government schools. Also, they have not had the same degree of struggle to achieve a status of greater self-determination over the last three years. At Yirrkala, however, where Aboriginal control is more advanced, there was a real struggle-a two-way school was not handed to the community on a platter, and they built up to it over many years with positive influence from many sources. One influence was the philosophy of community development which the

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Uniting Church has had in place for at least twenty years. Another positive influence was non-Aboriginal teacher support and persistent Aboriginal teacher training. This training began in earnest in 1974 when the bilingual program began, and became more formalised through Batchelor College. Under the influence of Deakin University staff working through the College, the Aboriginal school staff learned to articulate their wishes and assert them through an Aboriginal Staff Action Group. There was some opposition from non-Aboriginal teachers, but that became useful practice for Yolngu assertion. Aboriginal staff in the bilingual program struggled over two years to develop their own Aboriginal Studies curriculum (Ngurruwutthun 1980; Yunupingu and Djuwandayngu 1978; and Graham, personal communication 1979). Yirrkala people also designed a sophisticated form of outstation settlements with embryo two-way schools to serve them. (Their main sophistication was the decision to allow 'no whites and no anthropologists' to stay in the outstations; that is, they established real culture domain separation.) The current principal of Yirrkala, Mandawuy Yunupingu, who now has four years of Western teacher training, as early as 1977 had an independent vision of the necessity to maintain separate culture domains in school if the ontological basis of Aboriginal world view were to be preserved. Graham (personal communication 1979) relates an incident which took place in 1977 when Mandawuy was at a conference in Perth with a non-Aboriginal teaching colleague from the bilingual program at Yirrkala. The non-Aboriginal teacher saw a beautifully illustrated primary school Enghsh history book which had a chapter on how Western scientists think Aborigines originally came from the northwest, from India via South-East Asian islands to Australia. She suggested that this might be an interesting book to translate into Gumatj. Mandawuy said: 'No. The Yirrkala children can read that in English if you like, but for Gumatj we will keep our creator being story where the first Aborigines came from the East.' I am not implying that Aboriginal parents should have to go through a struggle in order to obtain the same degree of control over their children's education that European Australian parents take for granted. What I am saying is that controlling a school is not easy and will involve extra and stressful work for Aboriginal leaders, who understandably will not always be comfortable in the roles which devolve on them. In that light, the period of struggle might be seen as a means of sorting out whether they want to pay the price, or even whether they have a real vision of what they want. I know one community in Arnhem Land with a relatively large pool of concerned people who made serious enquiries in 1982 into establishing an independent school. After much thought they decided it was simply too much extra work over and above their other responsibilities,

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mainly the endless submissions to be written seeking funding. Their school is now moving towards Aboriginal control while remaining a government school. Of course, the Yirrkala model, where Aboriginal leadership was instituted while it remained a government school, should be a normal pattern. However, even there, a lead time for Aboriginal teacher training and local assessment of real desires is preferable, because if the local parent body does not truly want a two-way school it will not be committed to it and it will not work. How can teacher training institutions best prepare Aboriginal teachers to become effective supports to Aboriginal communities seeking a greater degree of control over their local school? Beeby, an experienced Pacific Islands educator, wrote about Islander teachers at a time when many of them were in academic terms only a step or two ahead of their students. He has expressed the view that an indigenous teacher's effectiveness has more to do with his or her own level of academic achievement than with the amount of teacher training undergone (Beeby 1966). Of course beyond a certain point a teacher's academic sophistication and effectiveness are probably not correlated, but a certain level of academic attainment is crucial for 'success' in the Western domain. This is necessary for teachers to understand the implications of Western domain curriculum design, and also relevant to the matter of Aboriginal control. The only guarantee that non-Aboriginal teachers who are supporting an Aboriginal-controlled school will not also manipulate or dominate the situation, is for at least some Aboriginal staff to become as academically sophisticated as the non-Aborigines, and committed to maintaining Aboriginal culture. Another important factor in fostering Aboriginal control of schools is the relative number of non-Aboriginal staff. In the short-term, school authorities face a difficult trade-off situation-if there are not sufficient fully-trained staff an effective academic program cannot be maintained, but if the proportion of nonAboriginal staff to Aboriginal staff is too high, the latter tend to be inhibited and to show less hitiative. Expression of initiative is also limited by interest, experience, training and confidence, but the relative number of non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal staff remains important. As a rule of thumb, Aboriginal schools need fewer better trained non-Aboriginal staff, and more and better trained Aboriginal staff. Aboriginal control would perhaps most readily be administered through an Aboriginal school board or council. The council members would need to be able to discuss all their interests and concerns fully in their own language, and the inhibiting influence of a non-speaker would have to be guarded against. Such a council would also need to have control, at least to a large extent, over the school's policy, staffing and funds, otherwise it would be unlikely to be either committed to, or feel responsible for what happened in the school. A school council could

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only be effective however, if the principal were fully in tune with and committed to carrying out the council's wishes. To help ensure that unproductive situations do not arise in two-way schools, councils would need to have the power to hire and fire school principal^.^ Of course such power would have to be tempered by responsibility-the independence to be gained by having such rights would have to be balanced by the sharing of responsibility for having to find a replacement. While such a process is expensive and time consuming, not to have it would be a false economy. Aboriginal staff action group^,^ usually made up of all the Aborigines employed by the school from teachers to cleaners, are proving to be an essential catalyst for Aboriginal control in those Northern Rrritory schools moving in that direction. Action groups, working virtually as standing committees of school council, need to meet regularly during school time to talk about issues of interest, in their own language and without non-Aboriginal influence. As they are familiar with school matters, they are less open than school councils to manipulation by principals. Action groups can be powerful bodies for change because they have a double power base-both the school and the community. To recapitulate, putting control of schooling into the hands of Aboriginal parents is crucial for two reasons: it will allow the school to contribute more towards Aboriginal culture maintenance and positive adaptation; and it is a necessary precondition to academic gains in English because of its social construction of motivation for learning. One of the most important factors in fostering Aboriginal control of schools is increasing the number of trained Aboriginal staff in schools, and they have an important role to play in determining curriculum priorities.

CURRICULUM P L A N m G AROUND DOMAIN SEPARATION The two very different purposes of two-way Aboriginal schools, that is, to teach the three Rs and appropriate Western roles in English, and to help develop and maintain Aboriginal culture, can probably be achieved with the least ambiguity and confusion by separating the school into two semi-autonomousculture domains, and staffing those domains with their respective specialists. The statement below illustrates the ambiguity that can creep into thinking about bicultural schooling when it is not handled by the two domain approach. In a paper written primarily about bilingual-bicultural curriculum design Folds (1989,45),drawing on Crawford (1984) and Valance and Valance (1988), advocates comparing and contrasting knowledge across domains: The mechanism is on-going intensive school~communitydecision making about bilingual content and process. ...the notion of a

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fixed curriculum is discarded entirely. Instead there is an Aboriginal controlled process of cooperative exchange of knowledge designed to 'maximise the possibility of interaction between the world view expressed by Aboriginal culture and that of Anglo-European culture' (Crawford 1984,6). ...Aboriginal and White teachers and community members negotiate what will be taught, where, how and by whom. ...the knowledge bases of Aboriginal people and whites are brought together side by side. Every new concept taught in the school must have some counterpart in the Aboriginal knowledge base and one side is not allowed to advance faster than the other.. Excavation of a cave by archaeologistsmight lead to a comparison of scientific method with the Aboriginal Dreaming explanation for the creation of the land and all it contains.

..

The daily practicality of such a program could be questioned. However, more importantly, the statements 'maximise the possibility of interaction between the world view expressed by Aboriginal culture and that of Anglo-European culture', and 'comparison of scientific method with the Aboriginal Dreaming', confuse the matter of how such interaction would promote the long-term maintenance of Aboriginal culture. As noted earlier, Pincher Nyunmiyarri wants a two-way school to reflect a spirit of exchange between European Australians and Aborigines in terms of power relations and knowledge, but as far as I can tell, he is asking for interaction in the sense of exchanging whole bits of information intact, not in the sense of integration or mixture. His view is shared by others, and I think this is what Fishman means when he talks of the school needing to 'harmonise' the two cultures but not 'synthesise' them in the following statement (J Fishman, personal communication 1987): A minority-group school under genuinely indigenous control needs to have a curricular space that is fully dedicated to the criteria of each culture, each being fully valid and self-defining in its own domains in accord with the preferences of its parental and professional constituencies. Whereas the school must, to some extent, harmonise the two cultures, this does not mean that it should synthesise them. The function of cultures is to be different. All cultures compromise, minority cultures more than most, but minority cultures lack safe havens for indigenousness and schools must provide at least one of these ...and may, therefore, opt to leave integration to the stronger sociocultural forces that swirl round-about it. Words like combine, build bridges and integrate are problematic in this context because they do not clarify the matter of whether what is meant is the

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need for mutual respect, an exchange of knowledge, doing two important things separately at the same time, or working towards a kind of amalgam culture. The following examples of thinking on this matter avoid the dangers of integration, building bridges, and moves towards an amalgam culture. The first (Henry and Mdhggart 1987, 12) refers to developments at Yirrkala: There is a question about whether both ways education is possible. Is it possible to have any single or unified educational process which contains within itself elements of Aboriginal education and Western education? Probably not. Neither is it sensible to imagine a genuine education in both cultures proceeding as if the other culture did not exist. Perhaps it is more feasible to think in terms of two educational processes in parallel, Aboriginal and Western, and w o r m out ways in which they can be mutually supportive, and working out ways where they are antagonistic... . Another example, this time including Yirrkala men (Mununggun; Yunupingu and Wunungmurra, assisted by Watson and Kemmis 1987, 21), again illustrates thinking on what bicultural curriculum development involves: Curriculum development is a special responsibility of those who work in bicultural schools. Children in our schools must progress along two raki (lines of conceptual development). This is particularly important in the abstract conceptual areas, such as those covered by mathematics in the conventional Balanda [white] school curriculum. Children in our schools must learn to understand and use dual systems of abstract understanding: those of the Yolngu [Aboriginal] world and those of the Balanda world. The phrases 'two raki (lines of conceptual development)' and 'dual systems' imply two separated cultural entities operating in parallel, without planned translation from one culture domain to the other.4 I do not wish to imply by the above two quotations that curriculum choices are always clear-cut. lb illustrate some of the difficulties, a statement made in 1985 by a group of teachers in a curriculum writing workshop in the Northern Territory raise some of the potential practical difficulties for curriculum development in two-way schools: What do we do about Aboriginal ethno-science (such as the Davis example of coastal Aboriginal children learning to record their environmental knowledge in an academic or Western way)? ...Wat do we do about Social and Cultural Education where in Aboriginal Schools for every topic studied in terms of the outside

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world.. .we advocate studying the Aboriginal opposite number and comparing and contrasting the two systems? Our motive was to give Aboriginal culture equal time in Aboriginal schools. ...And what about maths, where we are trying to get Aboriginal children to talk about mathematical concepts in their own language, and where we are reorganising the order of introduction of maths strands to respond to difference in Aboriginal experience.. . . And what about literacy in Aboriginal languages, where we are trying to use Aboriginal learning styles to teach reading in Aboriginal languages and in English? ...We are also trying to expand the range of Aboriginal language written genres and text types to match English types the kids will need in later school. These are contemporary Aborigines you know. Where's the room for adaptation? All those questions deserve an answer, and probably a more detailed answer than this chapter will provide. Briefly, though, my response to the first question is that schools should bring Aboriginal environmental knowledge into the school only if Aboriginal teachers and students take the initiative. If they are interested the school should write down that knowledge in Aboriginal languages as a part of Aboriginal adaptation to becoming a literate culture. We should not record that knowledge in English for local Aboriginal consumption, nor should we record it using un-Aboriginal ways of classifying and organising. For example, such knowledge might be written up in Aboriginal narrative styles if that seemed appropriate to those involved. Studying a social and cultural education curriculum by comparing and contrasting institutions that occur in both Western and Aboriginal cultures does give Aboriginal culture equal time, but still on Western terms, because comparing and contrasting is a Western learning strategy. It may be a step forward to study all these topics separately in each culture domain, but the dangers of artificialising the Aboriginal domain would have to be avoided and the question of whether it is better to study Aboriginal family life than to live it would have to be answered. There are a number of valid reasons for studying local Aboriginal history in school: it is often not being learned informally at home, the new theorising about identity is strengthened by such study, and it can be taught in Aboriginal storytelling styles (preferably at sites where the history took place). The question about maths and literacy in Aboriginal languages has been discussed in earlier chapters. (See also Graham 1987, for a discussion of some maths issues in detail.) I am deliberately avoiding dogmatic suggestions about exactly how and where the line should be drawn to maintain functional cultural and language domain separation in two-way schools. This is very much a matter for Aboriginal

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decision-making. Judgement about the cut-off point between what Aboriginal content can be taught in school and what should be left for ceremony and home life will vary from place to place. Even the closely-related Arnhem Land communities do not all agree on these matters. In 1989 mala (clanlgroup) leaders from Yirrkala, Gapuwiyak, Ramingining and Milingimbi met at Milingimbi to discuss djalkirri (foot/foundationsflaw)because the people were concerned about varying interpretations about cut-off points. (Jarvis, personal communication 1989). Also there will inevitably be influence from one domain to the other, but it is not the school's responsibility to promote it on the grounds that enough is already occurring. Fishman's statement recorded earlier about schools leaving integration to the stronger sociocultural forces that swirl round about them, is worth reinforcing here. STAFFING EN A TWO-WM SCHOOL Since the ways things are done, and the contexts in which they are done, are such important components of culture, and because there are hidden curricula and subtleties of cultural expression which normally only members of those cultures recognise, and which must be learned by students if they are to know when to behave appropriately, a large degree of teacher autonomy in a two-way school will be necessary, However, autonomy can only be trusted to the 'right' teachers in each culture domain. What would those teachers be like in broad idealistic terms? STAFF IN THE ABORIGINAL CULTURE D O M m

The prophet Ezekiel said: 'Where there is no vision the people perish'. Ideally a teacher in the Aboriginal culture domain of a two-way school should be an Aboriginal person who is clear-sighted about the threat of Aboriginal language and culture loss; who shares a strong vision of his or her culture being maintained into the future; and who is prepared to commit him or herself to the work and the learning necessary to maintain or rebuild that culture. The Aboriginal domdn of a two-way school would benefit from the presence of a range of Aboriginal people, from the most highly-trained and sophisticated in the Western education sense to the most tradition-oriented in an Aboriginal sense. These people can each bring an important part of their vision to the school and can sense the dangers of trivialisation, from different perspectives. From different personal resources they can each bring confidence and leadership and prestige to the Aboriginal part of the school. The highly-trained Aboriginal teacher is necessary here because there is a contemporary educational theory to be developed, talked about, and

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formalised. Working in the Aboriginal domain should not prevent an Aboriginal teacher from continuing to the very highest graduate levels of Western training in education, sociohguktics and other related disciplines. Hopefully some of their study will be specifically in biculturalism and the theory of two-way schooling-a theory they will need to both learn and develop. Contemporary Aboriginal culture maintenance will need to be supported by powerful contemporary sociological, sociolinguistic and educational theory. Children in this domain should also be exposed to those people who are the richest carriers of Aboriginal language, stories, songs and philosophy of living; those who know the land best and who have recognised Aboriginal skills of many kinds. These people are well-known in all communities and many of them need to be incorporated into the school program on a part-time basis and be free to relate to the children in what they see as an appropriate context for that knowledge. Old and young teachen should also be willing to travel to those places which are the appropriate settings for passing on the knowledge that they believe their children need.. There is no reason why a trained Aboriginal teacher could not work in one domain for a time and then in the other domain later on, but I would urge that they not work in two culture domains at the same time and not exchange domains frequently. The Aboriginal domain would normally be staffed only by Aboriginal people, and certainly all face to face contact should be with Aboriginal people only. However, in the short-term services of one or two trained non-Aboriginal specialists could be an advantage because quite sophisticated curriculum development tasks could be involved, especially in the area of Aboriginal written literature or oral language development. I am thinking of roles similar to those filled by the non-Aboriginal linguist or teacher-linguist in the Northern Territory bilingual program. Such Western specialist input would only be necessary until Aboriginal people are trained for such roles. This domain is neither culturally static nor purely traditional, but a contemporary expression of what is valuable to those who hold to an Aboriginal world view. In order to adapt along with the society it represents, the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school has an ongoing curriculum development task. If that task includes written literature, or the development of oral language learning lessons, it will help greatly if expertise is available to facilitate it. Ideally this expertise should be in the hands of an Aboriginal person. Aboriginal control of expertise, at least in the short-term, is a more empowering policy than total Aboriginalisation as an end in itself, whatever the preferred long-term goal. Experience in bilingual education has taught us that curriculum development is by far the most difficult aspect of any cross-cultural

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educational endeavour. Specialist expertise will be needed in this area, but of course it must be expertise submitted to Aboriginal goals and leadership. The ways things are done, the contexts in which they are done and even, in the light of Aboriginal views of how knowledge is owned, who does them, are just as central to culture maintenance as the content of the domain. Thus, while curriculum development expertise will need to be available in the Aboriginal part of the school, if this has to be in the form of a non-Aboriginal specialist, this person must take a behind-the-scenes role and avoid any leadership role or face to face teaching. I have tried to point out some of the resources necessary to make the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school feasible in any community. This means, I believe, that many remote Aboriginal settlements do not currently have the resources to sustain a two-way school even if given the opportunity. The first requirement is a history of interest in something different from the conventional school, the expression of some kind of vision of what is wanted, and evidence of previous attempts at taking steps towards some self-determination in schooling. The second is a number of confident and quite highly-trained local Aboriginal teachers. With any less human resources I don't believe a two-way school to be feasible. If a community already has a bilingual program functioning reasonably well, the re-organisation into a two-way school should not be too difficult-if the people really want it. The crucial relationship between Aboriginal aspirations and improving any educational programs in Aboriginal communities is well established by McClay (1988). Bilingual education is probably the closest we can get to bicultural schooling if Aboriginal people are not seeking something more. Of course bilingual education is not a precondition of two-way schooling, but it does constitute the best of 'where we are', and it is where Aboriginal groups and both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal teachers are in the forefront of learning about education across cultures in remote Australia. So it would be natural for two-way schooling to grow out of bilingual education. In the first chapter of this book it was suggested that there are three categories of remote Aborigines: those unconsciously confident of the strength of their culture; those who know they are losing some of their culture and want to fight back; and those who are losing their culture and don't know how to fight back. While all three categories could benefit from two-way schooling, it is only a current workable possibility for the second category because only they would both see the need and have the personal resources to do something about it. For the first and third categories, advanced Aboriginal teacher training would seem to be the most likely source of the confidence and consciousness-raisingnecessary

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before initiatives in the direction of two-way schooling are likely to be taken. In most remote school situations, therefore, Aboriginal teacher training is the priority above all others, and in my view of greater urgency than the schooling of children. STMF IN TEiE WESTERN CULTURE DOMAIN

Early in this chapter the necessity of Aboriginal control in two-way schools was emphasised. However, non-Aboriginal educators-both teachers and curriculum developers-may have a legitimate and important role in such schools, especially in the short-term. While I have heard Aboriginal teachers at, for example, Ngukurr, say that they want to have an all-Aboriginal staff as soon as they are qualified, those remote groups which do control their own schools such as Strelley, Yipirinya and now Yirrkala, appear to have no urgent plans to totally Aboriginalise their staff, although their long-term aim may be to do so. When a group of Strelley men were questioned in 1987 about this, their attitude seemed to be that it was a very long-term ideal to have an all-Aboriginal school staff, but that they had much more urgent priorities such as how to get some of their young people through trades training without their 'losing themselves'. The impression given was that while non-Aboriginal staff were doing what they were contracted to do there was no hurry. The current Strelley philosophy is that 'whites teach the white stuff and Aborigines teach the Aboriginal language'. Milingimbi, an evolving two-way school, began a purposeful Aboriginal staff action group in 1988 which now makes about half the decisions previously made by the principal (Jarvis, personal communication 1989). In 1990 it will begin the mentor training program with an Aboriginal Principal in Training. Milingimbi was one of the first and leading bilingual schools whose principal strongly supported Aboriginal teacher training with the result that if all those Aboriginal staff eligible to complete their third year at Batchelor College had done so, all the teaching positions in the school could have been filled by Yolngu very early in the 1980s. However, that did not happen for reasons such as family obligations, and probably also the lack of urgency to replace all the non-Aboriginal teachers. It is my opinion that most Aboriginal parents want Western culture empowerment for their children more than they want complete Aboriginalisation of school staff, at least in the short-term. Bain (1979, 118)6discusses an Aborigine who was a 'very influential and sophisticated' member of the Hermannsburg School Council who said: We want them to learn English. Not the kind of English you teach them in class, but your secret English. We don't understand that English, but you do. To us you seem to say one thing and then do another. That's the English we want our children to learn.

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This Hermannsburg man is saying that teachers try to teach English language without teaching the cultural knowledge that provides the meaning context for the language, and which makes the language usable. If both nonAboriginal and Aboriginal educators are going to treat seriously this kind of plea for the secret English, we should try to work out objectively how Aboriginal parents' aims can be achieved. The secret English is really a great amount of Western culture general knowledge, which Aborigines must know before they can understand what is behind the English language they hear. Teachers in the Western culture domain, whether they be Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people, should be appointed on the basis of expertise in terms of teaching the Western 'secrets'. This expertise involves both cultural knowledge and a control of English language teaching methodology. Bain (1979, 113) continues with Seagrim and Lendon's discussion: he was making a penetrating and insightful remark: We do have a secret English, secret in the sense that to understand the thought that lies behind apparently straightforward utterances you need to think like an English-speaking person. ...What he may not realise...is what he is letting himself in for, because, of course, you cannot 'have' that English without also having the attitudes that go with it: the Western materialism, the 'property' mentality, the restricted-extent territoriality, the estimation of monetary as opposed to spiritual wealth. These are incompatible with the maintenance of the aboriginality which he may also like to preserve. These secrets of English language have a social interaction dimension interrelated with the general Western cultural knowledge requirements. John Pettit (personal communication 1989), who has related closely to Aboriginal people in the Alice Springs region, especially Eastern Arrernte, for many years, says: 'Aborigines want acceptance with the broader community' and 'You can survive in this world without academic skills, but you can't without social skills. If you can't socially interact you're done for in this society.' One of the main theoretical positions of this book is that in order to be able to understand and appropriately use the secret English, Aborigines will not need to do more than learn roles, and the broad general knowledge that is necessary in order to know when to adopt them appropriately. They will not need to identify with Western culture in order to operate within it. (Thisunderstanding of how general cultural knowledge makes up a context is much of what Berger, Berger and Kellner 1973; Halliday and Hasan 1985; and Gray 1983, are writing about, which will be discussed further in the next chapter.) It is hoped that Aborigines can stop short of adopting the Western value system in order to understand or teach Western secrets.

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The same could be true of teaching purposeful learning. Christie (1984a) has shown that to learn the processes of purposeful learning (that is, to have conscious and specific goals, to believe you have control over your own learning and to react to feedback and correction impersonally and positively) involves learning some very unAborigina1behaviours. Another major theoretical position of this book is that Aboriginal children can learn to learn purposefully without adopting the inherent values of academic purposefulness, through the strategy of learning to adopt the roles. The experience of many non-Aboriginal teachers is that Aboriginal children strongly resist learning to learn purposefully and, instead, socialise the teachers, into allowing much cognitively undemanding busy work in class. If most non-Aboriginal teachers, for whom there is no cultural identity and values system in the balance, cannot withstand the pressure of children resisting academic purposefulness, how much more awkward would it be for Aboriginal staff to train children in purposeful learning? My own intuition is that it may be preferable for some Aborigines, once they understand what is involved, to employ non-Aboriginalteachers to do this 'dirty work' for them, but I emphasise that all this remains speculation until more Aboriginal teachers become fully-trained and elect to teach in the Western domain. I believe that bicultural people are extremely rare in both remote Aboriginal and Western societies. There are members of both groups who speak the other's language fluently, but who still have great difficulty being able to anticipate appropriate behaviour and to know why it is appropriate. This requires extensive background knowledge and control of the world view of the other group. They may know what to say or do but not why and exactly when it is appropriate to say or do it, and this eventually leads to embarrassment or stress. This is all a function of the two cultures being so very different. My point is that two-way schools can make the possibility of becoming bicultural more obtainable, but in order for that to happen the teachers need not themselves be highly bicultural people, provided they are highly competent in their own teaching domain. Teachen in the Western culture domain of a two-way school may need to be willing, if Aboriginal parents wish it, to teach a limited cumculum of three Rs in English, leaving social studies alone. However, to teach English well would necessarily involve teaching many of the roles, and much of the general knowledge on which appropriate use of the roles depends. This general knowledge is often contained in a social studies curriculum. However, an important difference would be one of orientation-this Western knowledge is being learned, not because it is better or even inherently interesting or valuable, but because it is necessary for empowerment in the Western world, and because the secrets of English cannot be learned without it.

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Teachers in the Western culture domain, even though their job is to teach English culture and language, need to be well-oriented to the cultural backgrounds of Aboriginal students. Without such background most non-Aboriginal teachers would find it difficult to build the kind of rapport with students they need. However, once in the job it would be the task of Western domain teachers to uninhibitedly teach appropriate roles in Western culture, and be demanding towards success in Western schools. Caring non-Aboriginal teachers inhibited in their teaching because of concern about undermining the Aboriginal world view of their students, could in a two-way school trust that that was being taken care of elsewhere. They could 'pull all stops out' in terms of Western teaching content and process, with the only modification being that they are teaching alien roles, not belief in alien values. These teachers need to have an attitude of stubborn goodwill, and be very determined in order to overcome student resistance against the cognitive work involved in academically purposeful learning behaviour. They need to be pre-armed by the knowledge that their students will attempt to socialise them into accepting Aboriginal non-purposeful ways of going about school learning. So far in the history of remote Aboriginal education many teachers have not been strong enough, or have been too concerned about Aboriginal culture loss, to do this. Hopefully, strong parental support for the school's aims will also help lower student resistance to working with academic purposefulness in the Western part of the school. Much more focused training is needed for the few non-Aboriginal teachers in two-way schools. At the present time the majority of non-Aboriginal teachers in Aboriginal schools are really qualified only to teach non-Aboriginal children. They are not qualified in terms of understanding Aboriginal culture, in teaching English as a second language or in the nature and processes of academically purposeful learning. I think the role of a few properly trained nonAboriginal teachers will be crucial to the success of two-way schools for some time to come, but I would emphasise that only relatively few should be needed in each school. The proportion of ~boriginalstaff in such a school should be much higher than non-Aboriginal staff, otherwise, in spite of the goodwill of the non-Aborigines, the Aboriginal people will find it difficult to put their own stamp on the school. It is also important that the Western domain of a two-way school be perceived as 'a proper school', as Strelley people would say, otherwise the community support necessary for it to operate well would not be there. It is instructive that several years ago some parents at Yirrkala began sending their children by bus to Nhulunbuy Primary School, the nearby English school serving the mining town, and one other parent who could afford it sent his sons to Scotch College in Melbourne. Both of these initiatives were presumably attempts to learn

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the 'secrets' of Western culture. In 1979 I accompanied a trained Aboriginal teacher from one of the more self-determining Aboriginal schools in Arnhem Land on a visit to Strelley, which many Western educators saw as an inspiring development. After observing the children working on ground sheets under bough shelters out in the elements, this man said: 'This is not a proper school-they ought to get classrooms and do it properly.' Of course, he may not have the same perception today, but my point is that non-Aboriginalteachers involved in the Western domain of a two-way school should submit to Aboriginal judgement of what constitutes 'a proper school'.

ADOPTING ROLES A fundamental aspect of two-way schooling advocated in this book and not conclusively established is the potential of role play to empower a person in terms of being able to adopt appropriate behaviours without personally believing in the values behind the behaviour. As far as the resourcefulness of role play is concerned, I don't believe we can be sure how far it will facilitate learning without believing in the Western domain. However, the idea provides great hope and in the absence of a better solution to the maor dilemma of Aboriginal schooling deserves serious consideration. Some evidence that it is very difficult to stop people learning and problem solving within separate culture or thought domains, which is encouraging in the context of two-way schooling, comes from research in the field of Western science education (Power, personal communication 1987): Several contemporary theories of cognition development and much of the research on transfer of learning suggest that learning, be it formal or informal, is not just a process of knowledge accumulation, but rather one of building up richly organised conceptional networks or domains... . What is striking in the cognitive literature is the degree to which behaviour and thinking processes depend on knowledge structures of the relevant domains, and the degree to which domain separation is maintained. . .one clear set of examples comes from the growing literature on children's science and alternative frameworks, and the parallel literature on resistance of scientific paradigms to change, in spite of contradictory evidence. Work in this area suggests that, for example, in science classes children often hold two models-they may learn and even understand the 'correct' scientific model taught in class [school knowledge] and use it to answer school science examinations, yet retain and use alternative models dervied from life experiences [referred to as action knowledge] in accounting for natural phenomena. ...The literature on cognitive change indicates just how resistant to

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change and how pervasive the separation between 'school knowledge' and 'action knowledge' can be. It suggests that the last thing people (even 'expert' scientists) will do is to make a fundamental change in the structures by which they make sense of the world. Some evidence that members of very different ethnic minorities can live in two worlds comes from the work of Scollon and Scollon (1981) on discourse structures of the Fort Chipewyans, an Athabascan group from Alberta. Their experiences with the Chipewyans led them to the following conclusion (1981,51): In spite of the mutually contradictory nature of the modern consciousness and the bush consciousness, many contexts in modern northern life appear to require a shift from one orientation to the other. We know of individuals who are in fact quite successful in negotiating this exchange of reality sets to at least the extent that they can and do become functional in either context. On the whole, though, it appears to be rare that any individual feels completely at home in both reality sets and we know of none who feel very comfortable in situations requiring something like simultaneous management of both points of view. It is views like this which confirm the intuition that separation of the two culture domains is a workable advantage. This is not a recent observation among American Indians. As early as 1957 some researchers noticed that Indian children coped with living in two worlds by adopting different sets of rules for each cultural activity, thus keeping the two worlds apart. The following passage from Cazden and John (1971, 265) records such an observation: One could conclude from this study that presewing indigenous religion and learning modern science are incompatible. But Havighurst's (1957) findings in the domain of game rules suggest an alternative. Twenty-four children in an isolated Navajo community were familiar with both traditional Navajo games and white games like baseball or marbles. When asked who made the rules and whether they could be changed, the children gave two separate answers. 'Concerning the "white" games, they generally said that the rules were made by the coach, or the teacher, or some person in authority, and that these rules would be changed by agreement among the people playing the game. This kind of answer is given [also] by white children. But when asked about rules of traditional Navajo games, the Navajo mountain youth said

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unanimously that the rules were first made by the "holy people", or by the "ancient ones", or by the "animals'Lwho in ancient days possessed human characteristics-and that no human could change the rules (Havighurst, 1957, 108). We can call this kind of compartmentalization a "coordinate belief system". One solution to some of the problems in Indian education may be to encourage the development of such coordinate systems in many areas of belief and behaviour.'

This example, and the others discussed above, provide encouraging evidence that role play can facilitate the maintenance of two separate domains.

CONCLUSION There are a number of clear advantages in separating culture domains in two-way schools and this seems to be both administratively and pedagogically necessary. Domain separation clarifies and therefore hopefully energises a number of aspects of Aboriginal education: it clarifies the teacher training necessary for both domains and the responsibilities of teachers in each domain; it should promote language learning in both domains and Aboriginal language maintenance with less codemixing; and it should clarify the goals of curriculum development. However, several experienced teachers of Aboriginal children, while supportive of the thrust of two-way schooling, have warned that under such a school structure it would be very easy for the Aboriginal domain to become the poor relation in terms of the support, energy and expertise devoted to its causes. There is also the danger that those involved in establishing two-way schools, both Aborigines and non-Aborigines, could have a greater commitment to the political value of gaining self-managementthrough the school, than to the pedagogical or culture maintenance purposes of such a curriculum design. There is of course no reason why the political, social and educational purposes cannot be mutually supportive and all achievable given sufficient commitment. A Pintupi man in 1987 said to a linguist at Papunya about moving between the Western world and the P,intupi world (Heffernan, personal communication 1987): 'It's like walking through a door.' Two-way schooling and its emphasis on learning various roles rather than identifying with them, seeks to cultivate that facility at levels probably much higher in the Western domain than the Pintupi man has so far experienced. Walking through doors in their mind-that is what two-way schooling seeks to help Aborigines to do. Margaret Bain (personal communication 1989) recalls an experience with Yarni Lester, a wellknown Pitjantjatjara leader in Central Australia:

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One day I said to Yami, 'You've been a lot with the whitefellas and you can do things like a white man and talk to them and understand them. And of course you operate easily in the Aboriginal world too.' And Yami said, 'Yes.' Then I asked, 'Can you do both a t once?' and Yami said, 'No.' WEH Stanner knew Durmugam on the Daly River in the northwestern part of the Northern Territory between 1932 and 1958. Stanner (1979,91-93) refers to the bitterness in Durmugam's later life, which was caused by the incompatibility of Aboriginal law and the white man's law. In a particularly humiliating way it prevented Durmugam from correcting the unfaithfulness of the youngest of his four wives and his married daughter, causing a 'torment of powerlessness'. Is Durmugam representative only of Aborigines of that basically prewar era? I believe that there are many more Aboriginal people than most Australians realise in remote communities, even among the younger generation, who still think and cope like him. The Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara examples recorded above are recent. Durmugam's experience is relevant to two-way schooling for two reasons-it shows how living in two worlds is a possible and necessary coping strategy when two such different cultures come in contact, and it shows how Durmugam suffered partly because he wasn't well enough trained in the Western world to defend himself in it. Two-way schooling and teacher training, while by no means a panacea, should increase Aboriginal capacity to deliberately step from one world to the other and should demystify the Western world and increase empowerment in it. The necessity for these is clear in what Stanner (1979, 101-2) writes about Durmugam: He came to good terms with Europeanism, but found it saltless all his days and, at the end, bitter too. It had some few goodsmundane things...which he took and used. .. . But it never attracted him emotionally, it did not interest him intellectually, and it aroused only his material desires. ...At the conscious level he had found a way of living with duality, an oafish Europeanism and an Aboriginal idealism. ...It was not that one [world] was conscious and the other para-conscious:they were CO-conscious. Yet paradoxical and contradictory as it may seem, he could dissociate and not merely separate the two. ...The reality Durmugam saw was defined by a tradition which he believed. ...Vexing, rather inexplicable things came from outside the tradition. He utilised what he could, endured what he had to, and for the rest did his best to follow up The Dreaming.

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This chapter concludes with examples of the necessity and advantages of Aborigines learning to live in two social worlds. Schools should be functional in that context but they have academic functions too. So to restate the main argument, any academic success is probably dependent on first correcting the sociopolitical context of schools. In other words, the status and power of Aboriginal parents must be changed. If that is seen as a prerequisite for successful learning in schools, we can now discuss some details of the possible content of each culture domain of such a school.

NOTES 1. I am not taking the view that no Engiish stories should ever be translated into an Aboriginal language. Many of these are now considered international, and some do not have a Western origin, but if they are translated into an Aboriginal language the narrative should be modified and presented in such a way that it does not undermine parents' values. Ultimately this is an Aboriginal school council decision. 2. In some of the Northern Territory bilingual programs one of the most damaging experiences was the appointment of principals who were philosophically opposed to bilingual education. Of course they spoke glibly of 'carrying out departmental policy', but their effect-in sometimes as many as a third of the programs at any one time-was heartbreaking. Admittedly the Department of Education was often limited by the candidates who applied for the jobs, but that does not lessen the damage done.

3. In 1989 out of the twenty Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory with more than 100 students, there were ten school councils and fifteen action groups. 4. In later papers some of these writers (for example, Mdhggart 1988, Watson 1988) no longer advocate domain separation.

5. This paper draws on an unpublished manuscript by Seagrim and Lendon.

CURRICULUM DESIGN

THE MAJOR DILEMMA OF SCHOOLING in remote Aboriginal societies is profound. Aboriginal parents have a short answer to the dilemma: their children need to learn the three Rs and to grow up Aboriginal. But they do not say how this can be done, and it is perhaps not their job to know how. That is a curriculum design task for trained Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators. So far I have argued that the solution to the dilemma lies in not bringing its 'horns' together, but treating them as two separate issues-constructing two separate culture domains in each school, and letting whatever integration that is beneficial or unavoidable take place outside school. As Kleinfeld (1984, 183) notes in relation to North American Indian groups there should not be: ' "eitherlor" choices between a minority culture and Western culture, rather than a "bothland" approach that encourages children to achieve competency both in a local and a national culture'. BASIC COMPONEhTS OF A TWO-WM CURRICULUM

Practical curriculum measures in both culture domains are discussed under the same basic curriculum headings for each domain. A curriculum can be defined in many ways. A simple definition for the purposes of this chapter is that a curriculum includes all the learning experiences a student is exposed to by a school. It includes what is to be taught, how it is taught, by whom it is taught, where it is taught, why it is taught and when teachers, parents and students can know that learning has been accomplished. The 'what' of a curriculum includes the content or facts and the control of those processes which may be an integral part of the knowledge (where the medium is the message), or those procedures which must be controlled in order for the knowledge to be applied in real life outside school. The 'how' of a curriculum includes all the teaching methodologies and contexts which must be employed to allow students to learn most effectively. The 'who', 'where' and 'why' influence the curriculum in both overt and covert ways and are especially powerful in terms of the hidden curriculum. Finally, evaluation and assessment are necessary, but their purposes should be to provide learners and teachers and parents with a sense of accomplishment, and to help teachers plan effectively. Evaluation should locate the learning difficulties in the school context and teaching methodology rather than in the students. THE ABORIGINAL CUUURE DOMAIN CURRICULUM

The Aboriginal domain of the school has a credibility and tradition to establish. Because Western schooling is such a highly-developed machine the danger is that

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the Aboriginal domain could come to be seen as a soft option by contrast to the Western domain. Christie (1984a)found in his research at Milingirnbi that Aboriginal students liked and expected hard work; repetitive and cognitively undemanding work perhaps, but hard work nevertheless. They did not respect those teachers who screened too many videos or organised other entertaining activities. To establish norms for the Aboriginal domain, teachen and others need to theorise strongly (or indoctrinate if you will), about the value and status of the Aboriginal domain of the school. Furthermore, the curriculum needs to have substance to substantiate and 'read back' the theorising. The substance of the Aboriginal domain will mostly depend upon on-site curriculum development and tapping existing human resources. WHAT SHOULD THE ABORIGINAL CURRICULUM INCLUDE? The Aboriginal curriculum might include: local traditional and contact history; storytelling (both as content and as a cultural identity process); music or song poetry and song history and geography where appropriate to the age and age-grade status of the students (which Ellis 1985, shows is a major educational form in itself); that portion of artistic knowledge legitimate for children to observe or participate in; participation in ceremonies which the Aboriginal school council sees to be significant (for example, children would always attend funeral ceremonies for appropriate relations); visits to traditional land for exposure to all the environmental knowledge, survival skills and history for which the topography would act as a mnemonic device; and of course, oral language development and literacy where the latter is possible and wanted. Both oral language development and literacy could be accomplished through planned informal methodologies in tune with Aboriginal ways of doing things. It would be possible to have the Aboriginal domain as an entirely oral domain, that is, reject literacy as an un-Aboriginal thing; but to me that is a less adaptive approach and would make the Aboriginal domain harder to sustain. However, for some groups a completely oral approach may be the only option for a number of practical reasons, mainly connected with language group size. The dangers of trivialisation or 'thingification' will be lessened if Aboriginal adults authenticate the activities by choosing the time and place for them, and by their own attitudes towards those activities. The Aboriginal tendency not to draw a distinction between practice and the real thing (see Harris 1980a, 88-95) but rather to make practice sessions satisfying ends in themselves should help the learners. However, adults will still need to guard against activities which are so decontextualised that they amount to something quite unnatural to Aboriginal culture.

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Aspects of the Aboriginal domain will be adaptive and part of the social change process, such as planned oral language learning or language enrichment in school, and reading and writing. Developing writing in Aboriginal languages which is faithful to Aboriginal preferred styles and purposes is a current priority. These should involve unique functions which are in complementary distribution with the functions of English written literature. Because of the shortage of time available to Aboriginal groups to develop such writing styles and functions, compared with the more than a hundred years such groups as the Vai and Kutchin took to achieve that end, the assistance of outside expertise might be necessary. HOW SHOULD THE ABORIGLliAL CURRICULUM B E TAUGHT? If informal learning is

central to most remote Aboriginal learning, and planning is central to making schools work efficiently, then the logical approach to the Aboriginal domain of a two-way school would be a planned informal approach (see Graham 1984). However, that is from a non-Aboriginaloutsider's point of view, using Western logic, and if Aborigines are to do it their way it may turn out to be something quite unexpected. It could be appropriate in a planned informal approach to allow informal Aboriginal ways and contexts of learning to be maintained but with behind-the-scenes organisation. Learning primarily would be through the informal means of observation, imitation, listening, personal trial and error, participation, repetition of real 'wholes' (such as being exposed to entire stories rather than to parts of them), successive approximations to the efficient end product, and responding to significant relationships (see Harris 1980a). The planned aspect of these learnings would not alter their style, but ensure that the experiences happened and happened often enough to allow effective learning. Unplanned informal learning can be effective but very hit-andmiss in the modern context. In more traditional times the subsistence economy and ceremonial activities governed the frequency of informal learning experiences. 'Ib the extent that social life is still governed by kinship and hunting trips and ceremonies still take place, informal learning is still effective, especially in outstations. However, in larger settlements where children can spend up to twentyfive hours per week in Western culture classrooms, and where Western work patterns, television, movies and card playing can reduce time for learning Aboriginal matters, conscious planning for and creation of Aboriginal learning situations by Aboriginal staff and other adults is a necessary adaptation to contemporary life. All those traditional activities which regularly took place for informal enjoyment, such as string figure games, singing camp songs, storytelling and elaborate ways of cooking can still be continued today without any danger of

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trivialisation, provided of course that both adults and children are interested in them and provided they are in the right relationship to each other. Perhaps there lie the biggest dangers to the viability of Aboriginal domain learning activities, and the biggest challenges to the ingenuity and leadership of those interested in using the school as one of the means of culture maintenance? WHO SHOULD TEACH THE ABORIGINAL CURRICULUM? A wide range of local Aboriginal adults of two categories should teach in the Aboriginal culture domain. One category will be trained Aboriginal teachers, some of whom hopefully are very highly-trained in terms of contemporary education theory and method, and theory relating to biculturalism, and who are doing their own theorising about these issues. The other category would be local adults who are recognised experts in various aspects of Aboriginal knowledge and skill who will also theorise about their young people's learning. Both of these categories of teachers would need to be teaching groups of children in appropriate relationship to them for such an exercise, but they can quickly work that out. To legitimise their place on the school staff, and help give the Aboriginal domain equal status with the Western domain, an appropriate pay structure would need to be worked out for the key people. WHERE SHOULD THE ABORIGINAL CURRICULUM B E TAUGHT? The Aboriginal

curriculum should be taught in appropriate contexts in terms of content and the authority of the teacher, and where that person is comfortable. Reading, writing and oral language development can take place in a classroom in a manner very similar to conventional schools. Then there would be two types of activity outside the clas~roorn.~ One would be unplanned participation at various community activities and ceremonies, such as mortuary ceremonies for those children in appropriate relationships. Aboriginal children often attend these ceremonies now, so making them part of the school curriculum would not lose more time to other forms of education. The other type of activity would be planned excursions, such as visiting old people for storytelling in the camp or visiting traditional land to absorb historical, religious and environmental knowledge and attitudes. These excursions would vary from something like two hours to a week or more. WHEN SHOULD THE ABORIGLNAL CURRICULUM BE TAUGHT7 Learning in the

Aboriginal culture domain would take place partly according to set timetabling in a manner very similar to conventional schools, and partly at unforseeable times such as mortuary and initiation ceremonies. However, it must be emphasised that if Aborigines are to run this domain of the school their way, what happens in terms of use of time and attitudes to time might be quite surprising to Western observers.

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This is to be expected if non-Aborigines are to pay more than lip service to the notion of Aboriginal control. In any case, shortage of school time is as much a qualitative matter as a quantitative matter. W H Y SHOULD THE ABORIGINAL CURRICULUM B E TAUGHT AT SCHOOL? There are a number of reasons why this part of the curriculum should be taught under the auspices of the school: to reproduce desired aspects of cultural life not being sufficiently reproduced by day-to-day living; to allow the school to perform those cuiture adaptation roles desired by parents, and to aid in the identity and status building and indoctrination in the first culture that is necessary for culture survival and for the confidence to deal with the dominant culture and its schooling requirements.

WHATASSESSMENT PROCEDURES SHOULD B E FOLLOWED? Assessment procedures would be of two kinds until Aboriginal adults have developed further ones. The out of school activities would be assessed simply in terms of the degree of parent approval of what was happening, and this would be ascertained by the school council. Activities inside the classroom could be assessed in the same way as they would be in the Western culture domain; that is, mainly by keeping folders containing dated samples of children's work and teachers' evaluation comments. However, non-Aboriginal observers must accept that what happens in this culture domain will very often be group work, and/or not subject to Western criteria of what is important in schools. THE YIRRKALA EXAMPLE OF ABORIGINAL CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Yirrkala provides a good example of what can happen in terms of curriculum development in the early years in an Aboriginal-controlled school. Local Yolngu people do not talk about this work as being in the Aboriginal domain, but it looks like that to an outsider. Recent Aboriginal domain curriculum development at Yirrkala began with Helen Watson (then from Deakin University) in joint research with Yolngu people on the Ganma maths project (see Watson 1987, 1988).3 The Ganma workshops became Garma workshops, the term g a m a referring to ceremonies that can be publicly seen as opposed to Madayin or ceremonies which are held in secret. The Yolngu curriculum development workshops then developed from Garma in to Galtha workshops (1989a-e). Galtha is a term referring to the first act of a ceremony, the piercing of the ground to start it off. Part of the galtha process, with the singing already started, is the negotiations which decide who will fill all the roles in the ceremony. The significance of this term to Yolngu curriculum development is the idea that

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curriculum cannot be obtained from a book but through negotiation with the older people. During 1989 there were five or six Galtha workshops, two of which were held in homeland centres. The Biranybirany workshop concentrated on the symbols of cycad palm food. The Yothu Yindi Yolngu rock band of recent international fame performed contemporary Aboriginal rock music at this workshop, including songs which contained cycad symbols. At the Wandawuy homeland workshop, the focus was on clan connections with land and how other clans are interconnected by having what have been likened to small 'embassies' of land within other clan boundaries. At the Wandawuy Galtha workshop a graduation ceremony for remote area teachers was held in Yolngu style. No Balanda (white people) were allowed at either homeland centre workshop, but they were informed later about them. The Primary Galtha Rom (Law) workshop focused on the meanings of the names of children and elders, learning totemic names, the special connections between names, land and water, and the study of family trees (Christie, personal communication 1989; see also Yirrkala Community School Literature Production Centre 1989f). Some examples of other important Yolngu terms which were the focus of Yolngu curriculum workshops, and which reveal the study priorities of the people, have been djalkirri, yirralka and yalu. Qjalkirri literally means 'foot' or 'footprint'; it symbolises the connection between people and land and is translated as 'foundation'. Some of the main djalkirri foundations of Yolngu curriculum are that learning and knowledge come through w a n g a t h u m , or knowing our land; dhawukurru, or knowing our history and stories; dhulanggurru, or understanding our totemic designs; g u r r u t u k u m , or knowing our people, our clans and ancestors; and manikaykurru, or knowing our clan songs. Yirralka refers to the homeland and yalu which literally means 'nest', refers to the kinship system (Christie, personal communication 1989; see Marika, Ngurruwutthun and White 1989, 16-18). THE WESTERN CULTURE DOMAIN CURRICULUM

Most Aboriginal parents and teachers, and non-Aboriginal teachers, would agree with Kleinfeld's statement (1984, 184) that it is important to teach minority children the national culture, as thoroughly as it is taught to white children, but in practice many non-Aboriginal teachers have been inhibited in the task because of concern that they were undermining Aboriginal culture. It is one of the strengths of the two-way school design that, provided the Aboriginal domain operates properly and provided Western skills are taught as roles which can be adopted and not as ends in themselves, teachers in the Western culture domain should be able to teach

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to their full ability without inhibition. The substance of the Western domain of a two-way school will be discussed under the same basic headings as the Aboriginal domain. WHAT SHOULD THE UrESTERN CURRICULUM INCLUDE? Primarily the Western

curriculum would include the three Rs, which in practice means reading, writing and Western maths. It is possible that Aboriginal parents would prefer that social studies, or social and cultural education as it is variously known, and science not be taught. That is their prerogative, but it should be explained to them that to teach English language and culture sufficiently well for language to be used in socially appropriate ways at socially appropriate times, a good deal of the content of a social studies curriculum will need to be learned as an inseparable part of the language learning process. The question of science or environmental science might need to be discussed with Aboriginal parents on a number of levels. On one level the scientific method is likely to be seen as especially dangerous to Aboriginal world view. On another level pragmatic strategy might suggest that Aboriginal students, at least in the short-term, are unlikely to seek careers in science, so in view of the fact that the available school time can be well used in learning the three Rs and in building up sophistication in English through them, science is not a priority. However, while it may not be a priority as a school subject, as an example of Western thinking it might well be. Also, the urgent need of greater knowledge about disease and preventative health among Aborigines living in remote settlements, as well as their expressed interest in technical trade skills (for example, Strelley wants to train its own electricians and motor mechanics) makes the avoidance of all Western science almost impossible. In contrast to the necessarily school-based or local-based curriculum development of the Aboriginal domain, the Western domain could take much more advantage of system-based sources of curriculum guidance. Of course all good teachers develop a lot of their own curriculum guides as they prepare their daily lessons, but there is no special virtue, and in fact much time to be wasted, in rejecting the curriculum guides available from State Departments of Education. If it is felt that local curriculum development is necessary, at least some time can be saved by modifying a centrally available curriculum document rather than rediscovering the entire wheel. Good curriculum development is much more difficult than most people realise (see Skilbeck 1984, for an analysis of principles of school-based curriculum development). HOW SHOULD THE WESTERN CURRICULUM BE TAUGHT? So much can be written

about teaching methodology, and in my experience so much that has been written

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has not been helpful to teachers in Aboriginal schools, that I have decided to limit the discussion to what has proven to be useful in bilingual schools in the Northern Territory, Queensland,South Australia and Western Australia. There has been much interchange between teachers in the Northern Territory and those in other States, and some modification of each other's cuniculurn materials. It is natural, of course, that two-way school curriculum development should build on the experience of bilingual schools. So, following this admittedly parochial but useful experience of teaching method, I will list seven key ingredients of an effective teaching methodology for English language, culture and content in the remote Aboriginal context: 1. Make use of the teaching triangle. This is shorthand for the view that for new concepts or ideas to be learned in a way that provides a contextual basis for understanding, a good standard procedure is for teachers and students to adopt a three-stage cycle: share an experience, that is, do something together; talk about it; then record it in some way. This is a practical way of moving from the known to the unknown (see Graham 1984).

2. Know the strengths and weaknesses of Aboriginal learning styles for the Western domain classroom. The informal learning strategies of learning by doing, looking, repetition, participation, trial and error, by successive approximationsof the end product, and learning in appropriate relationship to particular people, predominate in remote Aboriginal society (see Harris 1980a). These learning strategies do have important applications to school learning tasks, such as learning to read and write, but care must be taken both to help Aboriginal children become more comfortable with learning through verbal means and hypothetical problem solving, and to avoid the trap of using strategies such as Aboriginal tolerance of repetition merely as child minding devices (see Hanis 1984). 3. Know the importance of establishing a context of situation and context of culture for learning in a second language. For too long teachers have tried to teach English to Aboriginal children without realising fully enough that language is representative of a culture and that language can neither be learned well, nor used appropriately, without an extensive knowledge of the culture in which it is imbedded. Thus for Aboriginal children, learning English must be an exercise in learning English culture (see Halliday and Hasan 1985; Gray 1983, 1986). 4. Adopt a sound theory and practice of second language learning. The model I recommend is that of concentrated language encounters, designed by Brian Gray at the Traeger Park Primary School in Alice Springs and recorded in curriculum guide form by Beth Graham and others. This approach tries to formalise and

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concentrate for school use the features of the first language learning situation between mother and child at home. It involves children taking many of the initiatives for their learning and learning the cultural content of situations in which language is used, and teachers m o d e m language for children. All this is integrated through small group dramas where the parts are learned by rote and where there is scope for creativity, and through activities such as detailed group discussion and negotiation of written stories. The approach draws on and integrates other well-tried teaching activities such as storytelling, theme development, role playing, language experience, process writing, shared book experience and group 'cloze' exercises (see Gray 1983,1986;Northern Territory Department of Education 1986~).

5. Encourage academically purposeful learning. It has been discussed several times earlier in this book that many Aboriginal children see school learning as a ritual, where mere presence in school over time gains the learner a new status as a schooled person. Christie (1984a) has shown that teachers need to develop a three-stage cycle of academically purposeful learning if Aboriginal children are to be successful school learners in the Western domain. The three aspects of the cycle are that learners must have a consciously clear goal of what is to be learned; they must believe that they have individual control over the learning task in the sense that they are responsible for their own learning and believe they can do it; and they must be able to accept and use teacher feedback positively. 6. Develop curriculum genres or teacher-pupil interaction patterns which promote student cognitive work. It has been observed by a number of researchers such as Malcolm (1980), Young (1983) and F Christie (1985) that much teacher-pupil interaction in classrooms involves either regulatory talk or at least involves teachers doing most of the talking and most of the cognitive work. Teachers need to become more conscious of this and to learn strategies for fostering more productive dialogue strategies (see Graham 1986). Some of these strategies are implied in points 1, 4 and 5 above.

7. Control the hidden curriculum (see Coombs, Brand1 and Snowdon 1983). The hidden values curriculum has been discussed in several places earlier in this book. The main point to remember here is that teachers need to make it clear over time that what the children are learning about Western culture they are learning because it is needed for surviving in the Western domain, not because it is intrinsically better or more valuable. The 'how' of the Western domain involves what could be called a giant role play of that domain, and the points above suggest ways Aboriginal students might become skilled players in it. Apart from the encouragement that two-way schooling offers in terms of the possibility of students learning successfully to high

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levels in both culture domains without one body of knowledge undermining the other, two warnings come to mind. As Paulston's discussion in Chapter 3 suggested, there will be some deeply held Aboriginal values which are in conflict with important values in the Western culture and which Aboriginal people will not be able even to temporarily adopt in a role play sense. That just has to be accepted, and does not negate the general viability of living and learning in two separate culture domains. The second warning, as stated earlier, is an intuition that it is not advisable for even highly bicultural teachers to try to teach in both culture domains of a school at the same time (same day, week or year) because the teaching methodologies of each domain are so very different and might take some time to tune into. WHO SHOULD TEACH THE WESTERN CURRICULUM? Fully-qualified teachers, preferably with proven experience in teaching, should teach the Western curriculum. If they are non-Aboriginalteachers they should have special training in Aboriginal culture awareness and in teaching in Aboriginal classrooms. Fullytrained Aboriginal teachers increasingly will become the main teachers in this domain and could contribute a great deal to it, but for Western culture teaching it is preferable in the short-term that not all staff in the Western domain be Aboriginal people. WHEIRESHOULD TEE WESTERN CURRICULUMB E TAUGHT? The Western cumculum should be taught mainly in classrooms, and classrooms which are decorated and organised along Western lines and where Western manners and rules of punctuality prevail. Every aid should be used to create a culture context to promote learning of Western roles. Excursions to towns and cities should also form part of this curriculum. WTIENSHOULD THE WESTERN CURRICULUMBE TAUGHT? One view of the 'when'

is attendance and I believe that a school council should require parents to 'contract' that they will send their children to school at least 80 per cent of the time allocated to the Western domain. This is important for three reasons. Firstly, irregular

attendance is one of the main causes of teacher discouragement and low expectations. Secondly, even the most able Aboriginal students put themselves at a disadvantage in comparison with urban and majority culture children simply by not attendmg school regularly-much of the time European Australian children do better simply because they attend more often. Of course useful time in school is a qualitative matter as much as a quantitative one, but the latter is necessary before the former can be a reality, Finally, regular attendance at school is a cultural

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matter-part of the Western culture context is to attend school and this is part of role learning. It should be said here that improving attendance should not be just a matter of coercion; if teachers are effective, children are likely to attend more often. However, a school needs to try to establish norms of behaviour. Also, when a school is Aboriginal-controlled, it is logical that attendance will increase. Obviously two-way schooling is an enormous timetabling challenge. However, many timetabling problems in schools arise when teachers are not sufficiently ruthless about priorities-they agonise about how to add important activities without being bold enough to scrap the less useful ones. Admittedly timetabling will not be at all easy, and great flexibility will be necessary to respond to the need, sometimes unpredictably, for students to go on lengthy Aboriginal excursions or to attend funerals. A units-of-work system might be useful, where teachers can keep track of the amount of time spent in particular topics in each class. Or, when one class or group or clan is away on a week-long Aboriginal domain excursion, another class may spend its entire time for that week in the Western domain. WHY SHOULD THE WESTERN CURRICULUM BE TAUGHT? There are a number of

reasons why Aboriginal students living in an Aboriginal settlement should attend a section of a school which is deliberately structured as a microcosm of Western culture. These are: to prepare for high school and further Western education if that is what the parents wish; and to learn how to adopt roles appropriate to Western culture so that Aboriginal people living in remote settlements may enjoy their times in the Western world more-or at least find those times less stressful and confusing and more effective. An additional reason is to reduce dependency on non-Aboriginal brokers and mediators. WHATASSESSMENT PROCEDURESSHOULD BE FOLLOWED? Assessment procedures

in the Western culture domain should be of three types. Firstly, older students who appear to be destined for urban high schools should be taught how to handle the kinds of tests they are likely to face there (see Harris and Harris 1988). Teachers should pragmatically provide training in becoming 'test-wise' whether or not they approve of all the kinds of tests involved. This is a Western cultural matter. Not all aspects of Western culture are reasonable or rational and Aboriginal students need to learn the good with the bad if they are to be saved later embarrassment. Secondly, the school needs to make time to explain to parents how their children are performing and to try to explain what further steps are necessary for the children to achieve better results. Thirdly, assessment procedures are needed which are designed to improve the schooling of children and let new teachers know what

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they can do. Student shyness or unwillingness to display their skills often means that new teachers may underestimate their abilities. As Cummins (1986) reminds us, assessment should be 'advocacy-oriented', demonstrating what students can do rather than what they cannot; and if there is a problem, locating that problem somewhere other than in the child's capacity for learning. Two very basic suggestions for a positive approach to assessment that are both respectable and reasonably simple to implement are offered here. One is a filing cabinet organised with folders for each student, marked with their name and age. Then tests (which preferably are also good teaching devices), need to be collected about every half year. After a year or two an evaluator or visiting adviser in conjunction with teachers can order the pages in each folder consecutively and easily assess the progress each student is making. Teacher comments are also very useful. The main kinds of tests and teaching activities that can be stored in this way would include very simple devices such as a page of sums for the number strand of maths, and assessments of other aspects of maths; 'cloze' tests to gauge English reading comprehension; and student attempts to rewrite an English story read to them orally. These are merely an indication of the types of measures that need to be taken. The second suggestion is to periodically keep dated samples of each student's work, such as artwork and writing. It is important in the context of assessment for teachers not to try to build in variety, or do too much. Some testing programs founder on too much initial enthusiasm. The procedures need to be streamlined so that administering the tests doesn't become too big a job. Also, none of these tests should be dumped on the students. Most Aboriginal students are not 'test-wise', and the procedures beat them as much as the content. For this reason and because most of these procedures can be made into good teaching experiences, students need to be given several experiences of the procedure before a sample of their performance goes into their assessment file. CONCLUSION The aim of this chapter has been to give a concrete idea of the content and processes which could make up each culture domain in a two-way Aboriginal school. These are largely presented from a non-Aboriginal point of view. As Aboriginal people gain more control of their children's schoolin& they will structure these schools in unique ways. Aboriginal teachen in particular will become more involved in curriculum development in both domains. The purposes of each domain are quite specialised. The main purposes of the Western domain are to teach English language and culture, school-type learning and survival skills, and sufficient orthodox school subjects to allow entry

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to high schools for those who desire it. Hopefully this teaching can be implemented in a way that makes it clear to students that their learning is directed towards survival and even prosperity and eqjoyment in the Western domain, and that the Western domain is not better-just inescapable and even useful. To that end the Western domain might be thought of as a giant role-play and not a source of primary identity. The Aboriginal domain has different priorities-to strengthen Aboriginal identity and to maintain distinctively Aboriginal ways of doing, feeling, learning and believing, and to 'hold' Aboriginal knowledge. This domain does not represent an attempt to freeze Aboriginal culture in the past. All live cultures are changing and adapting, but it is crucial that those undergoing such change have a large part in directing that change. While Aboriginal education has existed for 40,000 years, the Aboriginal domain of a school is a great challenge because no-one has done well at this yet-it is new and uncharted ground. In that sense we are only now at the beginnings of Aboriginal education through schooling. The Aboriginal domain will need time to develop and latitude to make mistakes and false starts. Many of the activities in this domain might, or will preferably, take place away from school but they will need to be under the auspices of the school as one avenue of Aboriginal control over the formation of their children's lives and as a statement to European Australians that Aborigines want to exercise the right to do things in alternative ways, even through major contemporary institutions such as schools. The Aboriginal domain harbours dangers as well as challenges: dangers of trivialising Aboriginal culture; of not providing enough substantial and interesting things to do for young people; of government administrators seeing it as a soft option; or as an opportunity to save funds under the guise of leaving all Aboriginal matters entirely to the private expression of Aboriginal people. Ultimately, if the Aboriginal domain truly has an independent Aboriginal stamp on it, it will be unpredictable to non-Aboriginal observers and very different from what anyone might now imagine. Since 1987 the mood expressed by Aboriginal people about schooling at various conferences and meetings around the country is that they want to keep their languages and they want control of their schools. European Australian society needs to cooperate in making these things possible without trying to push the buttons from behind the scenes. Ultimately Aboriginal initiatives, creative energy and sheer determination will be the decisive factors in achieving Aboriginal goals for schooling. In the following chapter some of the guiding principles which I personally see as both helpful and fundamental for Westerners in forming professional working relationships with Aboriginal people involved in both schooling and tertiary training are discussed.

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1. It is worth remembering here that schools in any culture are adaptive mechanisms for survival. This is very often economic survival-in order to be truly self-determining,minority culture groups need to be economically self-reliant. There is no reason why the Aboriginal domain of the school could not become involved in economic enterprises such as bark and sand painting and batik and silk screen fabric designs, derived from traditional Aboriginal art forms. The apprenticeship of young people in traditional crafts should be considered a legitimate activity for the Aboriginal domain of a twoway school. 2. We should not be surprised if Aboriginal people wish to have some influence over the design of buildings they occupy; for example in planning them with structural features which facilitate the maintenance of avoidance relationships, an example being no narrow hallways in which people in avoidance relationship must pass. 3. Ganma was a metaphor about salt and fresh water mixing together when they meet at a river mouth, which relates to the nature of Yolngu bicultural curriculum development. The metaphor itself does not appear to endorse domain separation.

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THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TWO-WAY SCHOOLING may result in some untidy situations during the first few years, causing establishment educators to query the educational soundness of the new endeavour. Western educators should then ask themselves how long it took Europeans to develop the Western school system, and put into perspective recent moves in Aboriginal education. The very first achievement of Aboriginal control of education in remote Australia was at Strelley in 1976, followed by Ngukurr in 1979, Yipirinya in 1983 and Yirrkala in 1987. In this context of social change through formal educational institutions, some guiding principles should help define for non-Aboriginal people that fine line between support and interference, encouragement and manipulation, expertise and preconceived thinking. Voluntary separation for personal and social purposes is surely one of the cornerstone principles of freedom and equality. There are subtle pressures in mainstream Australian society which imply that separation into exclusive groupings is in some way undemocratic or undesirable or even dangerous to the unity of the wider society. Yet voluntary culture domain separation, like individual privacy, increases freedoms rather than diminishes them, and as such should be accepted as one possible result of Aboriginal self-determination. Kenneth Pike, lecturing at the University of Oklahoma in 1971 defined another principle of positive culture contact: 'Caring people can be saved a lot of unproductive heartache when they recognise that decisions in the untidy arena of culture contact are often reduced to choosing the lesser evil.' Pike's statement is an acknowledgement of the complexity of many cross-culturalsituations. In the absence of greater resources, greater knowledge or sounder theory, one sometimes has to settle for a lesser evil. For example, teaching Aboriginal children is important, but if the children have to suffer to some extent in order for Aboriginal teacher training to get proper attention, then that should be done. Making a decision about what is the lesser evil in a very complex social situation, where someone's feelings are likely to be hurt whichever way one decides, is often helped by taking a long-term view. An example of short-sightedness is the debate about academic standards for Aboriginal graduates of teacher training institutions. Admittedly the decisions are extremely difficult. For example, how does a training college assess a highly intelligent person who is an obvious asset to their own society and yet fails on some major written assignmentspartly because of family commitments, but also because expressing oneself in writing in a language one doesn't use a great deal is very difficult? There are often sound reasons for

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not taking too hard a position. However, who in the long-run should we be most concerned about-the group, whose self-determination will surely be influenced by the quality of teaching its children receive; or the individual teacher trainees who have overcome enormous odds to get where they are and deserve due recognition? Of course both, but I would say, not to an equal extent. Another example of the importance of taking the long-term view is the discussion over two-way schools. One European Australian teacher with a long and strong commitment to improving Aboriginal education said: 'Some local Aborigines are going to use this two-way schooling idea just to get power. They're not really interested in schooling at all.' That may or may not be true, but with the priority of Aboriginal culture maintenance and of Aboriginal leadership in schooling, surely a long-term perspective would produce support for the two-way approach even if the transition were obviously not going to be tidy. POWER AND POLITICS IN ABORIGINAL EDUCATION Periodically we hear the saying: 'Power cannot be given, it can only be taken.'

This attitude is unnecessarily confrontationist in the current Aboriginal schooling context. What matters is not whether power is given or taken but whether it can or will be taken back. For example, the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress within the Uniting Church, an Aboriginal management group which controls all of the Uniting Church's pastoral and business activities in Aboriginal communities in the north, was 'given' the power it has and it cannot be taken back. It could be argued that Strelley and Yipirinya had to take power in order to become independent schools, more than did Ngukurr or Yirrkala in order to achieve their current level of Aboriginal control within a State education system. However, I would say that the hold of Ngukurr and Yirrkala on their power is as secure as that of the independent schools, if not more so because of funding and staff recruitment resources. The sociopolitical nature of Aboriginal education will probably be a major area of future research and of crucial importance to Aboriginal success in schools. A teacher with long experience in two bilingual programs in the Northern Territory and one of the very few European Australians fluent in an Aboriginal language, said recently: 'The mistake we made in the bilingual program was to think it was more an educational matter than a political one.' While this statement is not an entirely fair view because the goal of training Aboriginal staff towards the ultimate takeover of their schools was itself a political act, it contains an important truth. Aboriginal education is a highly political activity, not because some non-Aboriginal teachers are frustrated revolutionaries but because the Aboriginal world view refuses to separate knowledge from people-from their

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status and the interactions between them (see Bain 1990). Knowledge is not an objective reality so much as it is owned and valued because of the person who generates it. Thus, personal relationships and the status and power they embody are crucial in the giving and taking of knowledge by Aborigines. In Aboriginal learning activities, harmony and strengthened relationships between the right people and groups is as important as the 'educational' content of the learning. This has many ramifications for schooling, such as non-Aboriginal teachers being regarded as good teachers if they are nice people according to Aboriginal criteria and if they uphold Aboriginal priorities, rather than if they are good teachers. Western educators should accept these political attitudes to the teaching process. Because Aboriginal parents do want their children to succeed in the three Rs in English, the establishment of two separated domains of school will help them to clarify what they want in the Western domain and how political they can afford to be in terms of which learning processes they allow in that domain. Strelley is an example-right or wrong, they have their own vision of what schooling is for (Bucknall 1982, 82-89): their school is to be viewed as a vehicle for social cohesion and economic independence and not as a vehicle for outward social mobility. ...[Also] one thing is clear and that is the term 'school' is simply a convenient term used to describe a process whereby the total community is supported in its attempt to create a socially and economically viable Aboriginal community within a largely indifferent and often hostile larger Australian community. Another useful principle in a politically sensitive area of Aboriginal education is that judgements about learning or qualifications or even competence should be made in terms of the culture domain in which they apply. Being competent is a matter of cultural context and the application of culture domain theory in schools and colleges should help clarify this matter. In deciding whether or not an Aboriginal student should pass a course at a tertiary institution, the lecturer and the institution should clearly know for which culture domain the course is preparing the student. There is a certain kind of hard-headed goodwill involved in taking the philosophy of the lesser evil, a long-term view, and having the same standards and expectations for Aborigines in the Western domain that we would have for non-Aboriginal people in that domain, although they might get there by different routes. Furthermore, those working in Aboriginal education need to operate on the belief that Aboriginal control will, given sufficient time and support, produce the necessary contemporary management skills. Control is not a

'

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straightforward matter, as two moves in this direction in health services in Aboriginal settlements in Central Australia have shown (Myers 1986). Of course, control includes taking responsibility for the consequences but surely commitment to any program requires some real say in what that program is about. As Kath Walker says (Sykes 1986, xx): If Black Australians are to become masters of their destiny, white Australians must recognise them as capable of formulating their own policy of advancement and then they can determine where white Australians can be of assistance.

This recognition can come by an act of faith, an act of principle, or by a study of the history of Aboriginal schooling. People as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Julius Nyrere and Paulo Friere have espoused the principle that the only real solutions societies achieve are those they develop for themselves. The saying, attributed to Aristotle: 'What comes first, development or participation?' implies the same philosophy. In the context of Aboriginal schooling several principles flow on from this. First, Aboriginal teacher training is the single highest priority and must be set in the context of Aboriginal community development. Second, while there is currently an increase in the number of Aboriginal teachers, the majority of Aboriginal schools will be staffed mostly by non-Aboriginal teachers for a considerable time to come, and thus it is not too late for those teachers to learn a supportive role which will promote Aboriginal leadership. Finally, each Aboriginal community's solution will be different because the people are different and their history is different. For example, while Strelley began an Aboriginal-controlled school in 1976, the seeds of that school were sown in the 1946 strike by the Strelley Mob and others against working conditions on Pilbara pastoral properties. In the case of Yirrkala, Milingirnbi and Galiwin'ku their recent steps towards Aboriginal control had their origins in the community development philosophy of the Uniting Church in those communities over the last twenty years, and in the strong emphasis on Aboriginal teacher training since the bilingual program began fifteen years ago. TaEORY AND PRACTICE IN ABORIGEVAL EDUCATION

New theoretical insights relevant to a unique or changing situation can sometimes only be gained after a practical application has commenced. The potential development of two-way schooling out of bilingual education is an example. Theory and practice should always be influencing each other or developing out of each other, but Aboriginal theorising will be more responsive to practice and arise more out of practical realities than Western theorising normally does. Westerners have more confidence in hypotheses, suppositions, predictions and in theory as a problem-solving path-finding means to improving practice, for example in the case

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of two-way schooling (Harris 1988a, 1988b, 1989). They also feel a responsibility to develop and act on theory to improve the world, while Aborigines probably don't in the same way. Nevertheless, Aboriginal theorising out of experience will, in today's changing environment, be crucial to Aboriginal cultural survival-as Strelley 'Law men' were perhaps the first to demonstrate. So we should watch for what Aborigines say or write about two-way schooling and try to heed it. Harvey Feit, an anthropologist who has not only conducted extensive field research with James Bay Cree in northern Quebec but also has served as an adviser to the Cree Indians in their court fight against a hydro-electric project which affected Cree land use, has this to say about anthropological theory and practice (1982, 374): Anthropologists [and we could say educators] are being called upon in [social change] situations, to play new roles, roles that often require them not only to criticise the societies in which their own professional work is embedded, but to go beyond such critiques to evaluate/discover/create means by which other societies can achieve their own futures in the face of world political and economic interventions.. . It is a situation in which anthropological understanding and theory must be both applied and developed in the same process.

.

Developing a number of alternative models of bicultural schooling involves calling on relevant educational, anthropological and sociolinguistic theory; listening to the intuitions and experiences of people with in-depth experience or commitments in relevant areas; seeking ways to reduce economic dependence if at all possible; and moving ahead in projects which parents want for their children. During all this, theories and approaches are modified in the light of Aboriginal responses and observable results. An emphasis on Aboriginal control of their own affairs and a decrease in dependence on external support must be the larger context which motivates many smaller decisions. It should be emphasised here that Aboriginal groups will need time to learn how to organise what they really want from schools, and there needs to be flexibility in terms of the sorts of school structures which governments will support while Aboriginal groups are discovering what is workable and what they really want. We are still at the beginning of Aboriginal control of contemporary schooling. It is only a little over a decade since alternative approaches such as Aboriginal teacher training or bilingual education have been seriously begun; innovations such as Strelley, Ngukurr or Yipirinya initiated; or for that matter really useful research conducted into Aboriginal education. Aboriginal groups need freedom to try various approaches in searching for a schooling structure which

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meets both their academic and cultural needs. This includes the freedom not to be assessed too quickly. The solutions are not easy. Readers are directed to two very different approaches to academic matters at two Navajo-controlled schools, Rock Point and Rough Rock, a few kilometres apart on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona, both of which could be called two-way schools, and which have had very different results (see Rozier and Holm 1980; Holm 1982; Holm and Holm 1990; McCarty 1987; Collier 1988. See also Souaid 1988 in relation to a comparable non-Navajo situation.) In relation to Aboriginal two-way schools one suggestion is that a very high quality of Aboriginal teacher training will in the long run be the best way to develop the necessary new theories. This training should include the theory and practice of two-way schooling.

TBE S U R V . OF ABORIGllVAL CULTURE One belief underlying this book is the importance to all Australians of the maintenance of Aboriginal culture. As Hudson and McConvell (1984, 40) say: It would be a tragic loss to the Aboriginal people, to all Australians, and to the world if the languages were allowed to die in this generation. It would not be a cause for celebration if 200 years of White Rule in Australia meant the destruction of over 200 linguistically and culturally unique languages. We can probably all see how losing an Aboriginal language can be a tragic loss to Aboriginal people, as it is to any people. But do we really see how it would be a loss to all Australians? One of the aspects of schooling that seems to irritate Aboriginal people is the wholesale assumption that all the teaching and learning flows in one direction-non-Aboriginal teachers arrive to teach and whether or not they learn anything when in an Aboriginal context is entirely optional. One of the clearest signs of a normalising of relationships and true equality of status will be when European Australians really try to learn from Aboriginal people. Part of Pincher Nyurrmiyarri's vision for two-way schooling was that it would involve exchange of information and respect between the two groups. Willingness to learn from Aboriginal people will in the future be one of the sociopolitical pre-requisites of being an effective non-Aboriginal teacher in the Western domain of an Aboriginal school. One of the realities for non-Aboriginal teachers in this new relationship will be sometimes feeling uncomfortable in their role. Part of this discomfort will be the result of a shift in power-when Aborigines are in control, matters are less in non-Aboriginal control, and therefore less predictable. One of the reasons non-

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Aboriginal teachers have not suffered culture shock more seriously in Aboriginal communities is that they have been in control. This shift in power, this increase in feelings of culture shock will be healthy-it will show that the shift in power is real, and it may be that it will be a pre-requisite to learning how to listen to Aboriginal people. Listening to Aboriginal voices, apart from seeing how they vote with their feet would be the most effective ways of learning what they want, but it is hard because their views are not spelled out in the Western discourse patterns familiar to European Australians! As an aside, my own view is that heavy editing of Aboriginal statements in English, supposedly to make the message clearer, is a danger and probably 'whitens' the message. Perhaps the 'non-clarity' of Aboriginal discourse is what European Australians have to struggle with to get any truly Aboriginal message. For the same reasons I am also uneasy with joint EuropeadAboriginal authored academic articles-I think a lot of clarification takes place that makes the Aboriginal message 'clearer' than it is. Making the message clear might kill it. In any case, there is still a role for non-Aboriginalteachers in Aboriginal schools. For example, in the Northern Territory in 1989 there were 390 teaching positions in Aboriginal schools, thirty of them filled by qualified Aboriginal people. With a dozen or so Aborigines graduating with Diplomas of Teaching from Batchelor College each year and even as this rate increases it will be some time before there will be sufficient Aboriginal teachers to fill all the positions, even if Aboriginalisation is defined in that narrow way. Non-Aboriginal teachers who are willing to accept a redefined role as excellent Western domain classroom teachers will be more comfortable under two-way schooling and Aboriginal leadership than they were prior to Aboriginal control. They will be working hard but responsible for less and they should be able to be less concerned about the assimilationist influence of schooling, assured in the knowledge that the Aboriginal domain is being taken care of by Aboriginal people. They should have a more clearly defined task-to teach the three Rs in the context of a giant role play and the Western cultural knowledge which makes those three Rs usable in the Western world. They should do what the Aboriginal leadership asks. They should thus be free to relate personally to Aboriginal people and learn about Aboriginal ways.

While trying to understand the changing face of Aboriginal schooling and helping to develop a practical theory of sustainable biculturalism is important, the most significant contribution non-Aboriginal teachers will make is to promote the training of Aboriginal teachers. At the beginning of this book an indication of the number of remote Aboriginal schools was given to provide a context to the

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theorising, but exciting developments in terms of two-way schooling and Aboriginal control are taking place in relatively few of those schools. There is a long way to go. I would not want to end on what Aborigines need, for ultimately this theory is about what we all need in this country. In the words of Fishman (1983, 136): 'Who needs all those [different] little people and languages out there? We all do.' I believe that it is possible for schools to assist Aboriginal people to become bicultural, and that the most effective strategy for Aboriginal cultural survival is to construct two separate culture domains in each school. The vision with which this book opened was that becoming a bicultural person did not require depletion of one identity in order to add competence in another culture. It ends with the conviction that the one hundred and fifty per cent Aboriginal person is a possible reality. More importantly, I do not think that European Australians or Aborigines have any positive choice other than biculturalism for more harmonious culture contact without loss of Aboriginal identity in the long-term.

NOTE 1. If Aboriginal voices are to be heard it is important that the few independent Aboriginal schools prosper. In their own interests, then, one of the most direct ways State education departments can support independent Aboriginal schools without interfering in their operation is to allow teachers employed by them to be seconded to those independent schools for periods of three years or so. Recruiting good teachers is one of the biggest problems for independent schools, not because teachers aren't keen to work in them, many are; but because those teachers are reluctant to lose their accrued conditions and rewards and the security of service within State systems.

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