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	The Current state of Australia's Indigenous children

By Dashika Ranasinghe, (UN Chronicle)

Australia, a highly developed country renowned for its rich resources and superior quality of life, is hardly a place where one would expect to find over a third of fifteen-year-old Indigenous students lacking essential literacy skills, according to the Indigenous Literary Project (ILP)¹ . However, the hapless predicament of illiteracy involving Indigenous children in this developed country can be considered a national crisis. These figures intensify for children living in isolated areas. In the Northern Territory of Australia, only one in five children living in remote Indigenous communities can read at the acceptable minimum state standard.

The discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians surfaces as early as grade three, where the former group far outperforms the latter in benchmark tests for reading, writing, and numeracy. According to ILP, by grade seven the gap magnifies for numeracy, such that only 15 per cent of Indigenous children living in remote communities reach the acceptable standard, which is 47 per cent lower than their urban counterparts and 74 per cent lower than non-Indigenous students.

Dr. Anita Heiss, an indigenous literacy day ambassador² , has dedicated much of her career to drawing attention to the critical condition of illiteracy among Indigenous children, while championing the significance of Aboriginal literature in supporting and educating them. As an award-winning Indigenous non-fiction writer, she belongs to an ever-expanding group of talented and passionate Aboriginal artists, writers, and storytellers who are playing a fundamental role in shifting their culture from the margins of Australian society to its core. They are cracking the glass ceiling and channelling through inspirational works that encapsulate the diverse and vibrant essence of Aboriginal society in the twenty-first century.

Such is the driving inspiration behind the theme of this year’s National Aboriginal and Indigenous commemoration, “Unsung Heroes: Closing the Gap by Leading Their Way,” which recognizes the quiet achievers in Indigenous communities, and exemplifies how they have taken ownership of bridging educational and cultural divisions. In doing so, they are not only narrowing the gap of ignorance and misrepresentation surrounding the culture, but are also narrowing the deficiency in literacy of the Indigenous peoples who comprise of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. This is achieved by their poignant stories which serve to record the truths of Australian history, act as a tool of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, challenge the predominantly negative media stereotypes, and foster self-representation in Australian and world literature.

However, if one delves deeply, there is an explanation for the staggering statistics mentioned above. To be sure, these figures can be seen as the scars left behind from a painful, complex, and turbulent history that echoes from Australia’s darkest periods of evolution. The Aborigines were the first people of Australia, having occupied the continent some fifty-thousand years ago. In 1788, when the European settlers arrived, up to one million Aboriginals lived peacefully in Australia and were composed of some 300 clans speaking 250 languages and dialects. Displaced by European settlement, the Aborigines suffered dispossession of land and illness and death from diseases carried by the new inhabitants, which disrupted their primitive traditional lifestyles and practices. This led to mass depopulation and the extinction of some tribes.

After World War II, the Australian Government became preoccupied with assimilation and essentially “Europeanizing” Aboriginals, taking away all of their rights in the process. Between 1869 and the 1970s, under a government policy, approximately twenty- to twenty-five-thousand Aboriginal children were removed from their families, sometimes by force, in an effort to integrate them into white Australian society. Those displaced children were later referred to as the “Stolen Generation.”

Although the Australian Government passed legislation in the 1960s to grant Aboriginals citizen status, it was not until 1972 that they were given back limited rights to their land. Since then, given their setbacks, the Indigenous Australians have made remarkable strides in overcoming historical hardships, repression and identity loss . However, they continue to grapple with their challenging circumstances and face a long road ahead. Yet, literature offers them freedom; it acts as a mouthpiece to those who have largely remained voiceless in Australia’s political sphere.

“Literacy, and the ability to engage in literature, therefore to learn, is the key to self-determination for us as individuals, and when we are self-determined as individuals, only then will we be self-determined as an Aboriginal nation of peoples in Australia,” Dr. Heiss affirms.

In the past ten years alone, Indigenous Australians have authored over 100 novels, 180 children’s books and over 400 autobiographies. In fact, their popularity has spread to the international stage with translations in Indonesian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese, German and Japanese, and they have garnered prestigious mainstream awards including the Miles Franklin Award.

According to Dr. Heiss, children’s books are one of the most powerful genres, fuelling Australian history through titles such as Papunya School Bank of History and Country, and complex stories of the Stolen Generation depicting the harsh realities of children hiding from the feared state people as in Down the Hole. Other children’s books, mirroring their adult counterparts, focus on the key issue of understanding Aboriginal identity in the twenty-first century as shown in Sarah Jackson’s story, Tell Me Why, written by a nine-year-old Sarah who struggled with distinguishing her fair skin from her Aboriginal identity.

Aboriginal autobiographies are equally potent, providing a platform for the author to share his or her history—contributing his or her respective story to a past that may not be recorded in full or accurately—while educating and entertaining a broader audience. “Autobiography is a key place for particularly older Aboriginal people to start writing to empower us and for them to use the English language, a language that was once used against us, describing us as barbaric and savage,” says Dr. Heiss.

Dr. Heiss is also responsible for launching the first national literature project that culminates anthologies of Australian Aboriginal writing from the late eighteenth century to the present. She calls it a “panoramic perspective of the Aboriginal experience [that]…sheds light on our history and our contemporary realities, ideas, dreams and memories.” The Macquarie Pen Anthology ³ chronicles selected literature, poetry, drama, letters, autobiography, radio broadcasts and political statements, starting with a 1796 letter by Bennelong, (the first known text in the English language authored by an Aboriginal) right up to present day texts such as Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch.

The key focus of the Macquarie Pen Anthology is to usher Aboriginal study of literature in schools by exposing Indigenous children to their own literary heritage while educating non-Indigenous children, in addition to providing paramount texts to which teachers and parents can refer. This is regarded as crucial to the progression of Australia’s future generations by specifically teaching them, through early education, to have an open mind and using it to breed tolerance and collaboration.

Thus, those personal pieces of creative literature form the rich tapestry of not only Indigenous culture, but also Australian culture as a whole—rounding out Australian history and enabling Australian society to be a vibrant and multi-dimensional one—one that will be able to thrive in the twenty-first century.

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