Visiting Uluru

Last week Ben Pham and I had the opportunity to visit Uluru and Kata Tjuta in central Australia. It is such a special place cared for by Indigenous people for millennia.

Learning from Aboriginal people at Charles Sturt University

Over the past week I have had some fantastic opportunities to learn from Aboriginal people. I live and work on Wiradjuri land, and Charles Sturt University is working closely with the Wiradjuri people, as well as Indigenous people across our country.

• I have been reading Talking to My Country, a book by Stan Grant who is Chair of Indigenous Affairs at CSU
• I have attended the premier screening of The Front Line: the Indigenous university student experience. The CSU news release is here.
• I have listened to a lecture given to CSU education students by Dave Lardner from the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (NSW AECG)
• I have learned about the Teacher Education in Community (TEC) Program that supports Aboriginal students from rural and remote areas of NSW to become fully accredited, high quality teachers

According to Dave Lardner, Aboriginal learning is based around the 3Ls: look, listen, learn. I have acquired some additional knowledge this week by looking, listening and learning.

NADOC week

This week is NADOC week in Australia. NADOC originally stood for National Aborigines Day Observance Committee. This year’s poster is titled “Songlines Tie All Aboriginal People Together” and was painted by Lani Balzan

 

Marra Marra Badhang exhibition

Today we attended the opening of the Marra Marra Badhang exhibition at Charles Sturt University. The exhibition was launched with a smoking ceremony by Wiradyuri Elders and opened by the Bathurst Mayor and Charles Sturt University Vice-Chancellor. The exhibition includes the Bathurst Wiradyuri and Aboriginal community possum skin cloaks, alongside Indigenous artwork from the CSU art collection.  The exhibition is part of the 2015 NADIOC celebrations and the Bathurst Bicentenary. 

Sarah Verdon and Ben Pham with the Wiradyuri possum cloak

Smoking ceremony

Wiradyuri elders presenting the Vice Chancellor with the new flag

Footprints in time: Wave 5 report

Sarah Verdon and I were invited to write an article for the Australian Government's report on wave 5 data from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. It has just been published, and here is the reference and summary:

McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2015). Longitudinal patterns of language use, diversity, support, and competence. In Department of Social Services (Ed.), Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children.  Report from Wave 5 (pp. 66-70). Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth of Australia.

Indigenous Australian children in Footprints in Time included in the current article were culturally and linguistically diverse. Many were multilingual with some speaking up to seven languages. Most of the children spoke English (with all of the children speaking English by Wave 4). One-fifth of children spoke an Indigenous language, and the percentage slightly increased over the four waves of data. Indigenous Australian children have rich cultural and linguistic traditions and their speech and language competence is promoted through family and community experiences, including book reading and telling stories. Almost all primary carers wanted their children to learn an Indigenous language at school in some capacity. Primary carers were concerned about children’s speech and language competence at similar rates as reported for all Australian children. While some children were receiving speech pathology services, others were unable to, or did not plan to access services. Encouraging Indigenous children’s speech and language competence is an important endeavour for families, communities and society to support children to grow up strong.

The full report is here

Early childhood development for Indigenous children

While in Sydney I attended a Closing the Gap Clearinghouse event titled: Early childhood development: Understanding the evidence to inform parenting, early learning programs, and access to services for Indigenous children. The Closing the Gap Clearinghouse is a clearinghouse for evidence-based research on overcoming disadvantage for Indigenous Australians. The event was chaired by Associate Professor Karen Martin from Griffith University.   

The papers that were presented were:

• Early learning programs that promote children’s developmental and educational outcome by Professor Linda Harrison (Charles Sturt University) and Associate Professor Sharon Goldfield (Centre for Community Child Health, Royal Children's Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute) 
• Parenting in the early years: Effectiveness of parenting support programs for Indigenous families by Dr Robyn Mildon (Parenting Research Centre)
• Improving access to urban and regional early childhood services by Dr Daryl Higgins (Australian Institute of Family Services)

Afterwards, members of the Collaborative Research Network in Early Years Education had lunch with Associate Professor Karen Martin from Griffith University who is the Deputy Chair of the steering committee for the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. We had a rich conversation about the importance of Indigenous knowledge to understanding our world.

Front: Felicity McArdle (QUT), Karen Martin (Griffith U), Lysa Dealtry (CSU)
Back: Sarah Verdon, Linda Harrison, Sharynne McLeod (CSU)

Indigenous Australian children's speech and language competence

Footprints in Time: Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) is a national study of approximately 1600 children. Over the past few weeks Sarah Verdon and I have been working with members of the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs: Laura Bennetts-Kneebone, Fiona Skelton, and Jason Brandrup. We have been analysing data from approximately 600 children in waves 1 and 3 of the child cohort (when the children were aged 3-5 and 5-7 years). These children spoke up to eight languages each including: English (wave 1: 91.2%, wave 3: 99.6%), Indigenous languages (wave 1: 24.4%, wave 3: 26.8%), and foreign languages (wave 1: 2.5%, wave 3: 5.4%). The children’s language environments were rich, with many family members and friends telling oral stories, reading books, and listening to the children read. We hope to submit a journal article about Indigenous children’s speech and language competence next year.

Wiradjuri: An extinct or endangered language?

To my surprise, when I looked into the Ethnologue, I found that my local Australian Aboriginal language - Wiradjuri - was listed as extinct.

I then looked at the following website that is dedicated to Endangered Languages
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
It is described as "the world through 3054 lenses: an online collaborative effort to protect global linguistic diversity". I noticed that Wiradjuri is listed as "critically endangered, with 3 native speakers worldwide in 1981." They provide a document defining endangerment and extinction.

I am not sure that Wiradjuri is extinct or critically endangered:

In 2009 I learned Wiradjuri for a year and received a Certificate 1 in Wiradjuri from the NSW Technical and Further Education Commission of Australia. During this course I met and learned from Wiradjuri speakers.

Last week, I asked the authors of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children if they knew of children on their project that spoke Wiradjuri. They said that there were.

UPDATE 20th August 2012

Laura Bennetts-Kneebone, the linguist on LSIC has just told me about AUSTLANG: The Australian Indigenous Languages Database. It shows that in the 2006 Australian census there were reported to be 102 speakers of Wiradjuri.

I look forward to working further to find out more about the actual status of Wiradjuri

Wiradjuri: Australian Aboriginal language

Wiradjuri is an Aboriginal language spoken by the Wiradjuri people.

The Wiradjuri land extends from Gilgandra and Dubbo (north), Lithgow (east), Albury/Wodonga (south) to Hillston and Griffith (west). Wiradjuri children speak Australian Aboriginal English, standard Australian English, and know some Wiradjuri.

I have been learning Wiradjuri from Diane McNaboe at Charles Sturt University (Dubbo campus) throughout 2009. During a weekend class we were invited by the Wiradjuri elders to visit them on the Talbragar reserve to talk about their language and culture. We also learned to throw boomerangs.

CSU media release

The Daily Liberal wrote about the weekend on the reserve:
http://www.dailyliberal.com.au/news/local/news/general/great-memories-shared-at-reserve-reunion/1664825.aspx
http://www.dailyliberal.com.au/news/local/news/general/elders-invite-all-to-talbragar-reserve-for-historical-campout/1663167.aspx