Linguapax
Rebuilding Languages
17 March 2011
Schools in Western NSW are helping rebuild the Yuwalaraay/Gamilaraay language.
Yaama again to the Living Black audience.
As mentioned in my previous blog, I was fortunate enough to be welcomed by the staff and students at St. Joseph's Primary School in Walgett, as part of my Muurdi Paaki trip. The school is just one of a number of schools and TAFE Colleges in the state's North West teaching the Yuwalaraay / Gamilaraay language, the original language of the Kamilaroi people.
Out of all these institutions, St. Joseph's is the most established. It is also a Catholic school, and while driving to the morning shoot, I imagined nuns in habits and men in robes, with sceptres in their hands and crucifixes around their necks, floating through the corridors, a la Sister Mary Stigmata, or "the Penguin", made famous by the Blues Brothers.
With John Lee Hooker and James Brown as the soundtrack in my head, I parked the car in Arthur Street, across the road from the church and headed in to the school.
What I found was completely different, of course: a country school like any other with the colours of the Aboriginal and Australian flags at full-mast out the front. After signing in, I was directed a room full of children, engrossed in the lesson being given by John Brown, or JB, as he prefers to be known. JB has been teaching the language here since 1994, and teaches a total of 21 classes per week from kindergarten to year six.
Past government policies prevented Aboriginal people on missions throughout the state from speaking their language. Along with the passing in recent times of elders who were fluent in Yuwalaraay/Gamilaraay, much was lost.
"Within New South Wales we're revitalising our language. The language not so much died, but has been dormant for a long time and it's only within the last 14 or 15 years ... that they decided to do something ... and revitalise those languages," he said.
Linguist John Giacon has been working in with the communities in the region for almost two decades. "For me the image of revival is someone gets knocked out and they get up again and everything's working ...but also if you want to use the language today that was last spoken maybe 50 or 100 years ago you have to develop a whole lot of new bits for talking about cameras and televisions and cars and videos and all those things," he said.
The teacher of the class that allowed me film her students participating in JB's language lesson, Bonnie Cochrane, told me how non-Indigenous parents had commented on numerous occasions of how proud they are that their children are learning the language.
Let's hope the language continues to grow and rebuild, because bilingual education can only be an asset in an educational armoury the students can take with them through their life.
http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/livingblack/blog/single/ID/122792/-P-Rebuilding-Languages-P