Abstract

A confluence of factors brought bilingual education to some remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory throughout the 1970s—including the work of missionary linguists in assisting to develop literacy in a small number of Aboriginal languages. However, what remains underexplored is the shape of the transition from this era of missionary use of the ‘vernacular’ to the era of self-determination and bilingual education. This paper, using archival and interview data, critically investigates the changing power structures within one mission-turned-government bilingual school, Galiwin’ku’s Shepherdson College in Australia’s Arnhem Land, from 1973-1983. The paper shows that while many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal staff pursued the goal of Aboriginal-controlled schooling, the promise of the self-determination era remained largely unfulfilled by the early 1980s. Adapting Tsianina Lomawaima and McCarty’s concept of the ‘safety zone’ in Native American education, it suggests that the possibilities of self-determination in bilingual education settings were ultimately constrained by state control. This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the connection between bilingual schooling and self-determination in Australia’s remote Aboriginal communities.

Biography

Amy is an academic in the Adult Learning and Applied Linguistics program at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) where she was also a 2018 Shopfront Community Research Fellow. Her PhD research focuses on the history English in education in northern Australia, and the contest between ideas of self-determination and assimilation in Indigenous bilingual schooling in northern Australia since the 1970s. For an essay on this topic, she was awarded the Northern Territory Literary Award in 2018 in the Essay category. She is currently co-researcher on an historical media analysis project, ‘Representing Indigenous interests in Australian policy discourse’, with Heidi Norman and Andrew Jakubowicz. Her research interests include Indigenous studies, critical studies in education, language planning and policy, and late modern Australian history. She has published in both academic and popular press, including Sexualities, Crikey, Overland Literary Journal, The Lifted Brow and New Matilda.