The 1998 Wentworth Lecture
Raymattja Marika

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to
dedicate the 1998 Wentworth Lecture to the late
HC Coombs, and I will begin with my story.

Yäkum ngaya Raymattja. Likan yäkum ngaya
Marika. Waripum ngaya yäku likan djinawam'
Gunutjpirr Gunuwanga.

Djinawam'yum likandhu nhänha yaka
mam'thuman nyäkuru ngayili, ngalanguru ngaya ga
nhä nyäku dhäruk. Djinaku mathawu ga romgu
ngaya marnggiyin dhäwu'wu, ngaya ngarrungan
marnggiyin nhänharayu, kjinaku romgu yolnguwu
ngaya marnggiyin, bili ngaya yakan nhängal
nyäkuway bapa'miguny. Ga bulu waripuny
gulku'warrany ngalapalminy banha dhanal gungan
yakan rom yolnguwu warrawu, ga nhalpiyan
ngalma ngarru nyena djinal yutunga romnga.

Banha ngalmaliny ngarrung dhä-munygum
mulkuruyu romdhu, banha yaka ngalmalingu.
Yolnguwum rom yakan dhäyan bewakthuwan, nuku
yolgnuwu, djalkiri rom yakan marnggiyin
yolnguwarra be ngätjil baman, ga dhangu wapthun.
Dilakthu rom yaka mayan ga gungan ngunha bala
galinga ngärra'nga dhanalinggum dirramumuwum
ga bulu warrangul rom.

Banhayam rom dhanal yakan marnggiyin,
ngätjilingu rom ga dhäruk dhanal yaka bäki,
ngätjilingu dharukmurru, manikaymurru,
ga ganurumurru, miny'tjimurru, ga ngayimurru.

My name is Raymattja. My surname is Marika. My
other name, my deep name, is Gunutjpitt
Gunuwanga. This name links me to my land, to my
religious aspect of the land. It defines where I come
from, who I am, and with this language, the rom that
the elders taught over many years and centuries, this
is continuing in our community.

Yolngu people have learnt this rom for years,
through dilak, the elders, teaching them, and we have
been learning this through our fathers and through
our elders. Those rules and the language that they
have been teaching us are our own language,
teaching through songs, manikay, through wänga,
land, and through singing, or songs that women use
for crying.

Even though we live in a new world in which
foreign law engulfs us, a law that is not ours, Yolngu
law has existed from long before and our Yolngu
foundation has sustained us—our sacred law and our
secular law.

My first real learning was about the land, wänga,
the environment, and my relationship to my
community. My grandmothers and my mothers were
influential in helping me identify different foods and
vegetables from the bush. Hunting and gathering for
borum, bush fruits, and food and bush honey, guku,
shellfish. I also learnt the value of work, djäma, as
everybody was expected to do something—to carry
wood for cooking, to cut wood for carving, to polish
the wood until it was smooth for painting and for
sale to keep food in our bellies.

I looked forward to the oral histories that my
grandmother, my märi, my mother’s mother, told us
around the campfire. I loved the hunting trips to
Wirrwawuy Lagoon, where we would hunt for water
chestnuts, räkay, the bulbs and turtle, long-necked
tortoise. On other hunting trips that I loved we went
in the boat with my father. This was the only boat
that our family had and the children used to go with
their fathers after school.

I did my schooling at the Yirrkala mission school.
The mission had established a kindergarten and a
primary school. All I remember about the kindergarten
is that we had a Balanda school teacher and
we had Balanda stories read to us and did Balanda
activities—European activities. Much of it did not
mean much to me but riding the tricycle did. All
through my early years of school I read a lot of
English literature.

After school we went out in the bush for the fruits
we loved to pick, that was my favourite activity,
picking fruits and going to Yamuna for the bush
apples and figs and other fruits. Weekends were used
to go honey hunting, learning to use our eyes to look
for the tiny bees as they went in and out of the tree.
We also learnt how to hunt for yams, gan.guri and
yukuwa. We learnt how to get different fruits, wäyin,
animals and shellfish throughout the seasons. We
learnt what we would get during the midawarr season
and what was available through the rarranhdharr.

As I got older I learnt to read and write at school
in English. Books became my favourite items at
school. As a young adult I started to read and write
in Yolngu matha. We were writing stories in Gumatj
for the younger children, primers for the new bilingual
program.

In 1976 I went to work at the school, typing stories
that the old people had made and translating them. I
was exposed to a high level of Yolngu knowledge but
I didn’t know it at that time. My language was
Dhuwaya, a new language that had been developed
by children at the mission as their lingua franca. I
was a woman with a child but I was still immature.
In fact, there are many young Balanda who go
through quality education, through high school then
university, but still remain immature. I was like that.
I was ignorant of the fact that here was my own
knowledge tradition, so rich, though I did not realise
it was so powerful until the 1980s. It was not until I
spoke in my own language, Rirratjingu, that my view
of the Yolngu world would become more meaningful.
It was formal Yolngu education. I was learning to
understand the hard language, the esoteric language
I was working on at the school. This level of
language is similar to the use of old Latin in English.

The most significant book I worked on at this time
was called Balngana Mawurrku, with one of my bäapa,
my father, Dhunggala Marika. This book gave me a
new understanding about my place, my wänga. It
gave me a fresh new understanding of the world
from a Yolngu perspective. It was more like a formal
Yolngu education through attending ceremonies,
manikay. Attending these ceremonies and listening to
the language of manikay, to songlines, helped me to
grow in my own thinking about the complexities of
the content and the context of the Yolngu world view.
I found that this can happen through demonstrating
yourself in public, in front of a critical audience. I see
it all the time with my brothers and my family. These
events are part of continuing learning stages that
Yolngu go through. Yolngu have to demonstrate that
we have continued to hold on to our values, otherwise
we lose ourselves in this ever-changing world
and are accused of being a Balanda.

I will now talk about some of the histories that
have occurred round Yirrkala. Some of the stories I
have heard came from my märi, Wandjuk Marika. He
told me the Macassan traders called our land
Australia Buthamarrigi. We call them Manggatharra
or Batharripa. They had established gundirr or
marngarr trepang processing ovens. We use these
places, which are known as marngarr. The Macassans
came each year during the wet season to collect
dharripa or trepang or bêche-de-mer. People from
many Yolngu clans around the East Arnhem coast
collected trepang with the Macassans and established
an extensive network of trade with them for a period
of more than 300 years. Rice, songs, tobacco, calico,
metal, knives were some of the items of trade.

Although there were some disputes it was
generally a good working relationship, until it was
terminated by the South Australian government in
1907. Some Yolngu went for trips to Macassar and
back, and some Macassans stayed between seasons.
Children from both cultures were born, raised and
educated together. Yolngu learnt Macassan words,
songs and cultural traditions. The Macassans joined
with us in our ceremonial life and Yolngu shared
their language. There are many Macassan loan-words
in our language, such as rrupiya, money; lipalipa,
canoe; and berratha, rice. Tamarind trees, rock
designs, pottery remains and old trepang processing
sites provide testimony to the rich cultural exchange
which occurred. Yolngu possess a wealth of songs
and stories about these events, of which only a few
have been written down.

An important ceremonial leader, Dula
Ngurruwutthun, told me there were Macassans
south of Yirrkala at Gän.gan and at Biranybirany and
Gurka'wuy, another community. At Gän.gan,
Gawarrin’s homeland, white men killed almost an
entire clan. Then they rode on horseback to
Biranybirany, where they nearly wiped out my
husband’s clan, the Yarrwidi clan, the saltwater
people of the Gumatj Nation or language group.
Then they rode to Gurkawuy, further to the south,
where they nearly wiped out the Marrakulu clan, the
mother clan of the Yarrwidi clan, which included the
family of the famous artist Old Man Wanambi. We
have many stories that have been passed on to us
about expeditions like these in southern and northeast
Arnhem Land, specifically to wipe out Yolngu
and to gather their skulls, which we believe were
then sent on to museums overseas. As a result of
these atrocities, our Yolngu elders resolved to
organise themselves to defend their estates and to
protect their families in the face of unwanted
intrusion into their land.

The Japanese came into our area to harvest
trepang, bêche-de-mer, after the Macassans were
stopped at Caledon Bay, Garrthalala. At Caledon Bay
they insulted a Yolngu man of the area by throwing
trepang guts into his face. The Yolngu retaliated.
Five Japanese were killed and one escaped. While
investigating these killings, Police Constable McColl
held some Yolngu women, one of whom was married
to Dhakiyarr, of the Dhudi-Djapu clan, which is my
father’s grandmother’s clan. For this he was killed by
Dhakiyarr. Fred Grey, a trepanger who had made
friends with my mother’s father, escorted Dhakiyarr
in his boat into Darwin. Dhakiyarr was tried in court
and sentenced to death. His conviction was later
overturned in a subsequent trial, but following his
release from gaol he was never seen again.

Donald Thomson, an anthropologist, was
appointed by the Commonwealth government to
investigate the circumstances surrounding the cause
of these killings. During these investigations, in
the mid-1930s, he learnt about Yolngu culture and
subsequently wrote a series of reports and other
documents which constituted the first serious studies
of our culture after Lloyd Warner, who had been at
Milingimbi in the 1920s. Thomson talked about the
rom, the beliefs and the laws of the Yolngu, and about
the social structure and other features of our society.
He was a friend and adviser of the Djapu elder
Wonggu, who was the grandfather of Gatjil
Djerrkura, the current Chairperson of ATSIC
(Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission).

Donald Thomson later established a reconnaissance
unit which provided a defence of the northern
coastline during World War II against the Japanese.
He was stationed at Bayapula, near Caledon Bay,
near the site of the earlier Japanese killings. He
taught the Yolngu about machine-guns and defence
tactics, and also how to write their names. Some of
our elders were justifiably confused about all this
change of heart about killing Japanese. Some
concluded the Balanda were quite mad.

I will now talk about the mission. The Methodist
missionaries came to Yirrkala in 1935, intending to
create a buffer zone between Yolngu and Balanda, to
stop the tribal warfare and to bring the good news of
Christianity. The missionaries set up a school in 1939.
They used a bark shelter made from traditional
materials by Yolngu men. The shelter was located
near where the women’s resource centre is now
located. Some early missionaries prevented our
people from performing Yolngu ceremonies on
Sundays and were responsible for the loss of some
ceremonies. They also banned the use of our
languages in the mission school. The church included
a pre-school, which I attended. I remember the building.
Its roof was thatched with palm leaves and the
floor was made of antbed, which we had to collect in
an old tractor from the peanut farm. I was just a little
girl, a yothu. I learnt to read and write by going to
church and Sunday schools; I read the hymnbooks in
one of the Yolngu languages, Gumatj.

The Rev. Wells was the minister at that time. He is
the author of the book Reward and Punishment in
Arnhem Land. He was sent away by the Methodist
Church for helping the Yolngu with the Bark Petition
in 1963. Some missionaries were helpful to the
Yolngu; some were not. They built the existing
church in the 1960s in front of the present offices of
the Dhanbul Association, which from the 1970s took
on the responsibilities of local government. The
church is still being used for Sunday services. The
missionaries and some Yolngu built the old mission
school, near where the museum is now located.
In 1969 the school was transferred to the
Commonwealth and was called the Welfare School. It
became a government school when the Northern
Territory obtained self-government in 1978.

In 1963 leases for mining bauxite on the Gove
Peninsula were issued by the Commonwealth
government on land which came right to the
doorstep of the mission settlement. The Yolngu clan
leaders ngalapal prepared a bark petition in protest,
which they sent to Canberra. It was a picture of their
traditional clan estates and told the story of our law,
our language and our identity. They sent a second
bark petition two weeks later. They are still on
display in the new Parliament House.

The elders feared they would become like the
Larakia people, whose land was taken from them to
build the city of Darwin. They feared that they would
become landless and lose their language and their
culture. They would be wängamirriw, without
language, dhärukmirriw, a dominated and marginalised
people.

Our elders made history by taking out a writ
against Nabalco and the Commonwealth
government in 1968, over the establishment of the
bauxite mine at Gove, and in doing so challenged the
domination and legitimacy of the Balanda legal
system. In 1968 they got together to have a
galtha ceremony for the Supreme Court case. There
are galtha areas situated all over northeast Arnhem
Land, where people have come together over many
hundreds of years for hunting, trading, peacemaking,
politics, marriage exchange and ceremonies.

Galtha in this sense is the place where people
assemble, arriving from their different territories to
sit for some time with related groups of people, but
galtha is more than this. It is a place at which
important negotiations are carried out, agreements
made and plans formulated. More importantly, it
refers to the whole process of meeting, discussion,
negotiation, planning, agreement and action. Galtha
marks the nexus between plan and action, between
theory and practice.

Thus, the Supreme Court process started with a
galtha, and a second petition to protest against the
desecration of Nhulun, Mt Saunders, where Nabalco
had constructed a water tank. The elders performed a
bunggul, a ceremony to try to explain to the Balanda
that the site was sacred. They also sent a petition to
parliament to make sure the name Nhulunbuy was
kept. Years later we developed a curriculum called
galtha.

In his judgment in Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty Ltd, in
1971, Mr Justice Blackburn found evidence that
Aborigines belong to the land but the land does not
belong to the Aborigines. This finding was the
beginning of the land rights struggle in Arnhem
Land and led eventually to the Aboriginal Land Rights
(Northern Territory) Act 1976. When our elders
returned to Yirrkala from the court hearings in
Darwin and Canberra, they realised that the younger
generations needed to be competent to a very high
level within their own language to be able to
translate the principles of Yolngu world views
and Yolngu law to the Australian institutions
founded on the foreign, British system of law. They
realised that the younger generations would be
required to mount complicated and difficult
arguments concerning the rights of Yolngu people on
the land, sea and resources of their traditional estate.
They would need to be able to explain clearly the
principles of all aspects of Yolngu society in order to
change Balanda views about the legitimacy of the
Yolngu way of life.

The administration of Aboriginal affairs in the
Northern Territory was a Commonwealth matter
from 1911 to 1978. During that time various
Commonwealth administrative agencies were
responsible for Commonwealth policies dealing with
the Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory.
Our elders were subject to the assimilation policies of
that time. They lived under colonial regimes which
were first referred to as Native Affairs and then later
as Welfare, and were administered by the mission. I
too lived under that policy until I was 14 years old.
My elders resisted these policies through the Bark
Petition that they presented to the Federal Parliament
in 1963 to express their opposition to the mining
which led to the litigation by the clan elders to
prevent the mine in the Milirrpum case.

In the early 1960s a report was commissioned by
the ministers of the states and territories to investigate
the curriculum and teaching methods used in
the Northern Territory. In her thesis, Dhangum
Djorra'wuy Dhäwu, Marian Gale explains:

	The report incorporated an official acknowledgment of
the diversity of Aboriginal languages represented in the
NT schools. As well as the large cultural differences
that existed between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
pupils, it isolated a number of factors contributing to
the lack of academic achievement by Aboriginal
children in the current school system and made many
comprehensive recommendations for its subsequent
improvement. Obviously influenced by the 1953
UNESCO statement, the report acknowledged
the advantages to be gained through the use of the
vernacular in Aboriginal schools, but it fell short of
recommending the implementation of vernacular
programs. It wasn’t until December 1972 that the newly
elected Labor government, under Gough Whitlam,
introduced a program involving teaching in Aboriginal
languages.

Bilingual education started in 1974, when the
Northern Territory was still a territory administered
from Canberra. It was in 1978 that the
Commonwealth granted self-government to the
Northern Territory. After that, a Northern Territory
education department was established. During
Gough Whitlam’s time as Prime Minister, from 1974
to 1975, the Commonwealth Department of
Education established and supported the bilingual
education needs of Aboriginal communities in the
Northern Territory. In a report prepared by the
Minister for Education, Kim Beazley Snr, a working
definition was prepared and adopted by the
Northern Territory Government. It read:

"Bilingual education is the use of two languages, one of
which is English, as the medium of instruction for the
same pupil population in a well-organised program
which encompasses part or all of the curriculum and
includes the study of history and culture associated
with the mother tongue. A complete program develops
and maintains the children’s self-esteem and a
legitimate pride in both cultures."

The Commonwealth continued its control over
Aboriginal education until 1978–79 when selfgovernment
was achieved.

Mandawuy, in a speech he gave last year at the
Language Learning and Culture: Unsettling
Certainties conference, outlined some of the major
processes we had to go through to gain control of
curriculum development in the mid to late 1980s. The
control of curriculum, teaching, learning and literacy
is all about power. We wanted the school to be a
place which put together Balanda and Yolngu
learning to strengthen our culture. To do this at
Yirrkala school we had to invent a governance
structure that would allow us to explore alternative
visions of what it means to be educated and literate.
We needed to create the space for us to express
ourselves. We had to overcome the structural
organisational barriers which had been up until then
a feature of western education. This became a
collaborative project between community and clans.

We have developed a vision and a five-year plan
called an Aboriginalisation plan, which was accepted
by the Northern Territory government in 1986. We
worked with the elders, writing down their ideas,
then we negotiated the elders’ ideas into a form that
the western education system could understand. To
negotiate what we wanted, we had to be able to put
our ideas in their way. The basis of the plan is the
Nambarra School Council which is the school’s
governing body and an action group. The action
group is made up of all the Yolngu matha speaking
members of staff. Managing the day-to-day running
of the school, this group, of which the principal is a
member, makes decisions in consultation with and
on behalf of the school council. In this way the
community becomes more directly involved in the
running of the school. This same model still operates
today.

A system of mentor training was introduced, with
Aboriginal teachers working side by side with
Balanda, with equal pay. The relationship is one of
partnership. This mentor system continues today as
well. The curriculum became more Aboriginal. Our
language became a valued part of teaching and
learning. Classroom practice and management
became more Aboriginal and an Aboriginal-oriented
curriculum was introduced. For example, students
spent a lot of time out of the classroom on visits to
important cultural sites.

Out of this work came what we called our Yolngu
curriculum. I want to share with you some of
the important esoteric Yolngu words which
have informed our curriculum development at
Yirrkala.

What is garma? In the 1980s the Yirrkala school
introduced a program of Aboriginalisation. Yolngu
community elders were asked to come to the school
to help develop a ‘both ways’ curriculum for
Nambarra School in maths. The community elders
came to meetings to tell the Yolngu teachers what
their school curriculum should be like. These elders
gave us several words to guide the developmental
maths curriculum. These words or metaphors reflect
the knowledge of the Yolngu elders about how maths
in the Yolngu world and maths in the Balanda world
can be taught side by side, so that one does not
devalue the other. Several Yolngu metaphors were
used to understand Yolngu mathematical ideas.
Some of these words are ganma, milngurr, garma and
galtha.

Some of the ideas for our practice come from
theory related to the Ganma Lagoon. Ganma is firstly
a place; it is an area within the mangroves where the
salt water coming in from the sea meets the stream of
fresh water coming down from the land. Ganma is a
still lagoon. The water circulates silently underneath,
and there are lines of foam circulating across the surface.
The swelling and retreating of the tides and the
wet season floods can be seen in the two bodies of
the water. Water is often taken to represent knowledge
in Yolngu philosophy. What we see happening
in the school is a process of knowledge production
where we have two different cultures, Balanda and
Yolngu, working together. Both cultures need to be
presented in a way where each one is preserved and
respected. This theory is Yirritja.

I will now talk about milngurr, which is Dhuwa,
the opposite theory. Milngurr is a name of sacred
spring water. It is created by the mawalan, the
walking sticks of the Djangkawu ancestral being—
my ancestor. This is a metaphor that my father used
to help me to understand about teaching and
learning. Milngurr represents the ebb and flow of
water. We use this to represent the way we learn.
When the tide is high, we are full of new knowledge,
new ideas, new thinking. When it ebbs, we are
looking for new things. We hope to produce a
dynamic like this at Yirrkala, a continuous striving
for a balanced environment.

Garma is also a place. It is an open ceremonial area
that everyone can participate in and enjoy. If a
ceremony is negotiated and produced in full view of
everybody, it will be performed in the garma
ceremonial area. Yolngu can sit and watch a garma
ceremony and read from it the network of
connections between people, places, songs and
totems that make up these particular ceremonies at a
certain time. Garma also means an open forum where
people can share ideas and everyone can work hard
to reach agreement. The old people told us the school
should be like a garma setting.

Galtha is also a place. We talked about it earlier:
the galtha ceremony which started the Supreme Court
case. In a school context, a galtha curriculum relates
to how children are related to the land and to their
djalkiri, to their foundations.

We used these ideas as a driving force to help
inform our direction and future. In the late 1980s we
began a process of incorporating garma into the
school program, side by side with the Northern
Territory maths curriculum and documents. While
the notion of garma began to be implemented in the
1980s, we are now ready to create a working
document which enables all staff, regardless of their
experience and cultural backgrounds, to work with
the school-based ‘both ways’ maths curriculum
document which is informed by garma.

There are four strands to the garma maths
curriculum. There is gurrutu, which is Yolngu, and
number, which is English; and djalkiri, which is
Yolngu, and location, which is English. But they
relate to one another. Number relates to gurrutu and
djalkiri relates to location. In gurrutu we
have pattern, in the same way as numbers have
patterns and names. In gurrutu we have individual
relationships, as in numbers there are numeration,
measurement and money, time, length. And in djalkiri
the kids learn about area—the area where they come
from and their homelands—as in location there is
space, mapping. In the same way there is mapping in
djalkiri too: mapping in the Yolngu way, tracking,
dhin'thun.

Part of our garma curriculum are workshops
driven by galtha. These workshops can run over one
week or a few days. In them students look at Yolngu
world views, including land tenure systems,
kinships, gurrutu systems, social structures—like in
djalkiri, such as clans, land ownerships, place names,
mappings of the country. Yolngu art, traditions,
djalkiri, dhulang and mint'tji are taught by elders.
Dhäruk languages and clan languages are taught.
Songs, dances and manikay, traditional dance, are also
taught in the galtha curriculum workshops.

[Editor’s note: at this point in the lecture, there
were several brief audiovisual presentations,
illustrating students’ work and the descriptions of
Yolngu and Balanda understandings in this work,
which have not been transcribed.]

Working parties have been established at the
school which are developing outcomes for the
different maths strands, linking the garma strands of
gurrutu, number, djalkiri, quantifying, location, with
departmental curriculum strands of working
mathematically: number, space, measurement and
algebra. In so doing we have established a new galtha
area for maths. The process of developing our garma
maths policy has begun and will continue producing
knowledge in the Yirrkala language curriculum.

Another exciting example of bringing the two
knowledge systems together is the development and
recent revision of the Yirrkala school-based language
curriculum. What is important with the school-based
working documents is that staff are using the
curriculum side by side with other departmental
curriculum documents to inform their collaborative
planning, teaching and learning practice, assessment,
profiling and benchmarking: whose knowledge,
whose language, whose priorities?

The Northern Territory Department of Education
assesses all territory schools in English only. Every
year children from all Northern Territory schools
take part in the multi-level assessment program at
Level 5 in primary school. This includes all bilingual
schools, which actually are set up to teach literacy in
Aboriginal languages in the first years of school, with
an emphasis on oral English development. I believe
that bilingual schools should have curriculum
support, including funding, to develop their own
way of assessing children which is appropriate to
those schools. Bilingual schools undergo bilingual
appraisals every three years and there should be
funding allocated to support bilingual schools,
particularly in the area of curriculum development,
assessment procedures and evaluation of programs.
Research is needed in the area of Indigenous
languages, as we are still in relatively uncharted
waters as far as Indigenous curriculum development
goes.

Profiling is a relatively new assessment tool in the
Northern Territory. The development of English profiles
and other curriculum areas has been an extensive
process. We were disappointed to realise that the
process was very much geared to mainstream curriculum
areas. Language profiling entails teachers
preparing a profile on each child and assessing each
child’s reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.
Unfortunately, these profiles have been developed
for children who speak English as a first language.
For English we can use the English-as-a-secondlanguage
profile, but the bicultural nature of our
school program is not acknowledged. The national
benchmarking process also wants to know the
answer to the question: do Yirrkala children achieve
the same learning outcomes at the same time as any
other child in Australia? There is no consideration
given to the fact that our children are learning in and
through two languages, and learning about two
knowledge systems or traditions.

The premise from the Northern Territory’s view of
profiling and the national benchmark is that only the
Balanda knowledge system, transmitted in English, is
important. They are making a value judgment which
is assimilationist and unfair to our children, because
our children are learning in and through two
languages and knowledge systems. At a school level
we do assess the level of competency among the
children for the Yolngu garma curriculum. As the
teacher-linguist I collaborated with the teachers to
plan the overview of learning outcomes for each
term. At the end of each term we use the learning
outcomes as a checklist against the performance of
each child. A report card and a checklist on the learning
outcome is sent to the family of each child. We
used the language curriculum documents to plan the
outcome for the topics that the children are taught at
each level. This assessment is starting to work well,
but we are new on this path. We need assistance to
develop our assessment procedures, to write our own
Yolngu maths profiles as well as using the ESL
profiles to map our children’s progress in their
second language.

In conclusion I would like to ask this question.
Is the government fair dinkum about bilingual
education? We believe that our children have a right
to know and understand their own cultural beliefs
within the model bilingual program. Learning
literacy in the children’s first language takes
precedence in the first primary schooling years from
Transition to Level 3. The focus of the English
learning during this period is very much an oral one,
helping the children to become a confident speaker of
English before they have to grapple with English
literacy and concepts. Once children have mastered
literacy skills in their first language they can then
transfer them to English literacy.

The task ahead is to convince the Department of
Education and the Commonwealth government that
Yolngu assessment and evaluation methods can and
should be developed. These methods will have to
involve our elders and our languages and our
knowledge systems. Bilingual schools in the
Northern Territory are not adequately resourced,
when you consider the enormous task ahead of us.
We are not opposed to profiling or to the national
benchmarking process. It is just that the current
evaluation systems do not take into account Yolngu
curriculum which is taught in our schools and other
Indigenous systems. The current system does not
take into account our Yolngu garma curriculum or
Yolngu ‘both ways’ pedagogy and curriculum.

Our job as educators is to convince the people
who control mainstream education that we wish to
be included. Until this happens, reconciliation is an
empty word and an intellectual terra nullius. Thank
you very much.

Raymattja Marika, Wentworth Lecture 1998
AIATSIS Library, S06.1/AIAS/10 1999 no1, p.3-9

“The 1998 Wentworth Lecture” 
paper presented at the Wentworth Lecture. 
(a318678_a.rtf)

To cite this file use : 
http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/lbry/dig_prgm/wentworth/a318678_a.rtf 
 Raymattja Marika-Munungiritj