Aboriginal education, again.

Tatz, Colin

Reports and inquiries on Aboriginal issues are usually polite, sometimes plaintive, often euphemistic to avoid sensitivities, and frequently a set of bullet points to show how far Aborigines fall below the Australian norms. Bluntness is uncommon, and so it is both refreshing and grim to have such a brutal analysis from Helen Hughes on the failings of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory (Hughes 2008).

She asks how there can be such appalling educational deprivation 'in a compassionate country with one of the world's most effective democracies' (Hughes 2008:2). Failure is to be found in inequitable school facilities and teacher housing, in substandard teachers and teaching, inappropriate curriculums, massive shortcomings in electricity, ablution blocks and equipment (even down to the absence of pencils and paper), and in a succession of 'pretend' vocational courses. Children who have been at school for ten years cannot read above Year 1 primary level (Hughes 2008:3).

Her remedy? Look at Aboriginal children 'in the open society attending mainstream schools' and see how well they manage in comparison with those in remote and separate Homelands education systems. Invest in real teachers, qualified teachers, she writes; insist on school attendance registers, do something drastic about CDEP (Community Development Employment Projects, or work-for-social-service benefits), teacher aides, get rid of the teacher fly-in and drive-in regimen, abandon the vocational courses that lead no one anywhere and, whatever else, teach children English and mathematics, the very foundations for real work, for artisan or professional careers. Public inquiries into Aboriginal education have been going on for more than 30 years, she states (incorrectly), but her axe falls most heavily on the Northern Territory government, which, she insists, has known for a decade that Aboriginal schools are turning out children with the numeracy and literacy rates of five-year-olds (Hughes 2008:1-12).

Professor Hughes is frank about her opposition to those who insist that Aboriginal culture can only be kept alive by sensitive bi- or monocultural programs; she is a steadfast mainstreamer, a believer in a free-market, individual-achieving society.

There is not much to contest in this vivisection of entrenched and embedded failure of Territory policy and its administration. One could resort to old-fashioned victim-blaming, arguing that parental values and influences are grossly disruptive and therefore the long-held assimilationist and separating theories should come back, with distant boarding schools, yet again and as yet another flavour of the year. Or one could return openly, again, to a Social Darwinian postulate that 'these people' really are beyond the pale and that Governor Macquarie was probably right in setting up the first Native Institution in 1815, the forerunner of many more, in which the boys could be trained 'for agricultural employ' and the girls for domestic service.

There can be no return to that kind of racist philosophy and anthropology, and despite a federal initiative of $20 million in scholarships, thousands of children cannot be transported from Milingimbi, Cape York and Kalumburu to board at St Josephs in Sydney. The (yet again) relocation theme is now a major focus of philanthropists, business corporations and well-intentioned governments. We can no longer push the 'overwhelming primitivism' explanation--given that there are enough successful programs, here and abroad, to show just what can be done. We could also learn to admit that the problems we can't resolve aren't irresolvable.

Herein lies the major weakness of the Hughes report: the absence of history--contextual history and institutional history--as an explanation of much of the above. That lack of context, and memory, is also, of course, what bedevils most of Aboriginal policy making. The Coalition Government's Emergency 'Intervention' in 2007, recently renewed by the Labor Government for at least another year, is possibly the most gauche, visible and noisy replication of past practices that have come unglued, turned messy and then been unabashedly consigned to the amnesia bin. What follows is a brief excursion into Aboriginal education, not in the sense of excuse for the present disaster but as an explanation of it. It also allows some projections into the future.

Education for Territory Aborigines began more than a century after other Australians. Before 1950 there was no provision whatever. Concerns and reports began more than 60, not 30, years ago. In the 1940s there were plans and negotiations, as well as talk, about 'an army-type education' (along the lines of the army units presently teaching carpentry, road making and the like in northern Australia). In 1950 the (then) Commonwealth Office of Education (COE), based in Sydney and specialising in migrant education and teaching English as a foreign language, agreed to begin a program. This was but one of so many (foredoomed) programs that conceived of Aborigines as a subset of the migrant population. COE teachers were to be three-year trained, with one year at a teachers' college and the subsequent years 'heavily laden with anthropology' and the Elkin-doctrine material at Sydney University (Tatz 1964a:162-71). That, of course, was always part of the problem: an anthropology suffused with all manner of 'scientific' curiosity, good intention but, essentially, with much disdain for Aboriginal society. Professor Baldwin Spencer (1913)--whose works became the veritable Old Testament of Aboriginal tribes, lives and times--was to write:

 The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious
 mixture; mentally, about the level of a child
 who has little control over his feelings and is
 liable to give way to violent fits of temper,
 during which he may very likely behave with
 great cruelty. He has no sense of responsibility
 and, except in rare cases, no initiative.

Much of the anthropology that followed, at least until the land rights era of the mid-1970s, was 'reconstructionist', that is, field workers came into government-run settlements and Christian-run missions, totally ignored the geographic and legal fences that cocooned and incarcerated hunter-gatherers, and pretended that they could reconstruct the days in the lives of the tribes, people ostensibly in 'pristine condition'. No one looked at the legal and administrative frameworks, essentially based on protection by means of segregation; no one looked at, let alone recognised, the 'asylum-like' confinement of people in often inaccessible domains. While anthropologists disregarded these legal and geographic constraints, officials were busy pretending that these domains were 'normal', places where the three Rs could be instilled and where children could be taught to eat spaghetti with a knife and fork.

The great self-deception was that COE or any mission agency could transplant essentially urban-constructed programs into a 'normal' environment. Some pathetic concessions to reality were made: 'Bush Books' told the story of Nari and Jangala, who went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, despite the absence of buckets and water in Central Australia; T is for train and S is for sea were other jewels in the primers for those who would most likely never see either. Two supervisory staff members were located at COE headquarters in Darwin.

In 1950 COE established four schools; by 1955 there were 11 on government settlements, with enrolments of 594 children. It came as no surprise that the newly created Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory Administration wanted to take control from COE. The Welfare Ordinance of 1953 replaced the long-standing Aboriginals Ordinance of 1911-18. While the allegedly new laws 'emancipated' the 'half-castes', the statutes made sure that every restriction from 1911 onwards--which banned alcohol, free movement in and out of reserves, trade union membership, intermarriage with non-Aborigines except by official permission, sex across the colour line, a Federal and Territory vote, and social service payments, which prescribed payments well below the basic wage and most often issued rations in lieu of wages--was retained and applied to all 'full-blood' Aborigines. All, irrespective of age, were made wards of the state, subject to the legal guardianship of the Director of Welfare (Tatz 1964a:20-8, 1964b).

The Director, unwittingly perhaps, created a model that had failed so dismally in Britain in the nineteenth century, namely the Board of Guardians for the Administration of the Poor Laws. The Board insisted on an octopus framework whereby all functions and services for the poor, as a specialised clientele, were to be provided by them. Only they understood the poor. The Welfare Branch made it clear it wanted control of Aboriginal education and COE succumbed, with muted whimper, from 1956 (Tatz 1964a:171-91).

The Branch had several subdivisions, including health, hygiene, catering, capital and mission subsidies, and housing, and a staff of three senior educators, a Superintendent of Special Schools (SSS) and two Inspectors, responsible only to the Director. (I know all this because I took six months leave from my doctoral research--on Aboriginal administration in the Territory--to act as SSS while the incumbent was on leave.)

A number of factors made failure inevitable. First, three senior education staff were located in a non-professional administrative unit. Second, they attempted to operate programs across 14 settlements and 13 missions in a domain larger than France and Germany together. Third, they delegated education to missionaries who 'serviced' one-third of the Aboriginal population and they exercised almost no supervision or control over education on cattle stations, which 'administered' the remaining third of the population. Fourth, there was no recourse to an internal network of ideas from fellow professionals (other State Aboriginal administrations were almost as bad in their education programs). Fifth, the teachers who served on settlements and missions did not have their Territory experiences acknowledged or recognised by State authorities. Sixth, there were no in-service courses, workshops or updates of any kind. Seventh, most teachers were one-year primary-certificated, and could (and did) rise to positions within the Branch that they could never hope to reach in a normal authority. Eighth, there was no direct link between teachers and the head office trio, with teachers having to submit to the whims of mostly untrained, undereducated and non-professional superintendents of missions and settlements. Ninth, induction courses for new teachers lasted a day, if they occurred at all. Tenth, living quarters for teachers were abysmal. Eleventh, there was either ambivalence or antipathy to the few mission teachers who spoke a vernacular and wanted to teach in that medium. Twelfth, there was, with one exception, never an attempt to explain to Aboriginal parents what was going on in a fenced-off brick building for up to six hours a day. Nor was any explanation given to teachers as to what the 'assimilation policy' was or was meant to achieve. And so on, and on.

Professor Hughes refers positively to the older generations having been taught literacy by missionaries. This was true--but only of a minority of missions. The school at Roper River Mission produced a cohort of Aboriginal leaders, such as Dexter Daniels and his clan, prominent in trade unions and activist politics. There was strong bilingual literacy in Methodist enclaves in Arnhem Land and at Umbakumba on Groote Eylandt (when it was a private mission run by Fred Gray in the 1940s). Much of mission endeavour, especially at places like Oenpelli, was as bad, if not worse in quality, than settlement programs.

The most abysmal aspects were the 'aide' and the 'vocational' programs. Hygiene and education aides were sent for short courses, usually with a duration of between two weeks and six-months. The presumption, an old colonial one, was that they would work only among their own people--and hence a lowered standard would be acceptable as 'normal'. Usually the same aides were sent back, year after year, for repeats of the same courses, with little or no graduation to higher levels of skill. 'Butchers', 'bricklayers', 'carpenters', and 'bakers' were sent for two-week courses and given certificates of attainment, paper of no possible validity anywhere (Tatz 1964a:58-78).

Wittingly or not, there was a significant element of false pretence in all of this. Expectations were offered that could never be attained; hopes were held for promotions that were never there; job prospects were held out for jobs that could never be there. Professor Hughes uses a good term, 'pretend', about much of this; phoney, and deep down, knowingly phoney, is another. There was simply nothing to assimilate into. Nor, frankly, is there very much available today--unless, to use Professor Jon Altman's comment to me (20 September 2008) about Hughes' philosophy, we empty the Aboriginal estate (terra vacua) and move everyone to the charms and chances offered by Alice, Darwin, Tennant and Katherine.

The Welfare Branch has long gone and wardship has been abolished. But legacies remain, and they constrain both the present and the future. From some of the current Aboriginal leadership, whom I once taught at places like Yuendumu and Papunya, one sees and hears the bitterness of past incarceration, the rigid rules, empty promises, false hopes and general purposelessness. Aboriginal antagonism, from grandparents to parents to today's children, is evident. Resistance to White 'largesse', innovation, 'inputs', constant if not incessant new brooms, is not merely passive but very active. One is always amazed at what many of these children can read while they formally refuse to read, or fail yet another battery of White-inspired (and universally applied) tests.

One can also watch an innovator like Ann Morrice. She has demonstrated the efficacy of her language development technique in more than 300 Australian schools. Speaking, listening, reading and writing are linked in meaningful contexts. The program builds on the positives that exist for the children in their environments. Ernabella in South Australia has shown remarkable results from her quick, inexpensive literacy program, one that Mortice claims can be used to train teachers in half a day. Schools don't have to be the vehicles or venues (Tatz 2001:215-16). There are also, of course, language-acquisition programs of considerable success in South Africa, in parts of Asia and in the Americas. We also have an acute summary from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in Education, Training and Indigenous Futures (CAEPR 2008), albeit one that visits all of the above issues, again.

Several precepts need consideration. The first is that Aborigines are yet to be seen as legitimate participants in any life-improvement activities. They remain recipients of what is deemed in their better interests. Second, we have yet to try a middle path between total separatism and total assimilation, namely, accommodation. The true meaning of assimilation is not that a larger group swallows a smaller one, to the point of the latter's distinctive disappearance. Rather, assimilation has an ideological base: it is a process of generalisation, inwardly and ethnocentrically oriented, one that seeks to incorporate Indigenous or foreign situations into White frameworks of thought and action. It involves generalising the strategies developed in essentially White or Western metropolitan institutions--in London, Madrid, Lisbon, Paris, Sydney, Canberra--and duplicating them in essentially Black rural (colonial) contexts. To be successful, these 'others" need to abandon their traditional behaviour, culture, and manner of thinking and doing, and accommodate 'our' models. Accommodation should be about specification, not generalisation, outwardly oriented towards the 'different ones'. It may often mean adopting strategies that depart, often radically, from pre-existing metropolitan norms and values. That is what Ann Mortice has done. And this, of course, is what bureaucrats of any kind, including educationists, deplore: universality is so much easier than dealing with difference, especially regional difference, let alone local difference. Professor Hughes sees Australia as an effective democracy, but to be so requires that it addresses the needs of the unequals, the different ones, the inept and the unable, and that it doesn't try to 'homogenise' them into middleclass 'aspirationists'.

What Professor Hughes omits is any mention of the 'outcomes' of her mainstream philosophy. Precisely where do these Aboriginal mainstream-educated children go to, or get to? We know where the university-trained people find careers, but what of the majority--those who can't finish, or don't want to finish, or simply don't want to leave what they consider home and Country? It will be interesting to see what happens to all the Joey's boarders over time.

There is one final thought about Professor Hughes' essay. She does the Northern Territory the honour of treating that entity as normal, as having a functioning government supporting the wants and needs of people who aspire to statehood. There are, at present, some 217 000 people living in 1.4 million square kilometres, or 0.16 persons per square kilometres. Just over 30 percent of the population is Aboriginal, the majority living in remote communities, the once-were settlements and missions, places that were not always domains of natural habitat but selected by government or missions as secluded enough to protect Aborigines from predators who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, take their women or sell them opium. In a cruel sense, perhaps, there is something faintly ludicrous about a frontier such as this one trying to run systems and institutions on some kind of par with the much older, vastly more populated States or the ACT. That they don't keep school-attendance registers is one thing. That they don't keep records of chronic malformation births and stillbirths is another. That their school populations are a fair way last in the national literacy and numeracy tests is another. Why? In many fields, they simply don't want to. In others, they simply can't.

A state's motive for investment in education is to produce a return, namely, a regular cohort of labouring, artisan and professional classes. The 'spin" to the public is that 'education is good for you'. Aboriginal education has had different premises, ranging from preparedness for cleanliness, Christianity and civilisation to demonstrating that the state doesn't discriminate, and does provide equal, or separate but equal, facilities, or at least quite good facilities, considering ... In close on 50 years of watching all this, I have yet to see anyone sit down, seriously, for a month, or a fortnight at least, and allow local people, in language or through interpreters, to express what they expect or want from this 'school business'. Until then, we go on gilding our endeavours, and lamenting the results.

REFERENCES

CAEPR (Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research) 2008 Education, Training and Indigenous Futures: CAEPR policy research 1990-2007, CAEPR, The Australian National University, Canberra <www.anu.edu.au/caepr/education.php> accessed 14 November 2008.

Hughes, Helen 2008 Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory, Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards (Policy Monograph 83).

Spencer, Baldwin 1913 Preliminary Report on the Aboriginals of the Northern Territory, Parliamentary papers, vol. 3, Commonwealth of Australia, Melbourne (part of the Report of the Administrator for the Year 1912).

Tatz, Colin 1964a Aboriginal administration in the Northern Territory of Australia, unpublished doctoral thesis, The Australian National University.

--1964b 'Commonwealth Aboriginal Policy', Australian Quarterly 36(4) (December).

--2001 Aboriginal Suicide is Different, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

Colin Tatz

Honorary Visiting Fellow, AIATSIS <colintatz@gmail.com>