A Proposal for Wadeye

Patrick McCauley

About two months into my short six-month contract to teach at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic School at Wadeye, I sent a despairing e-mail to Gary Johns at the Bennelong Society. Fortunately, he rang me and after a long, patient phone call, he put me in touch with Steve Etherington in Darwin.

I met up with Steve at the Casuarina shopping centre and we spent an hour or so together. He reassured me that what I was seeing in Wadeye was not unusual throughout the Northern Territory in many of the isolated Aboriginal communities. Appalling literacy and numeracy levels, school attendance rates often below 50 per cent or even as low as about 20 per cent. He advised me to cool down before writing anything---advice I was unable to live up to. My essay in the December/January edition of Quadrant attempted to describe the forces and narratives at work to firstly, create and then continue to exacerbate, the failure of education in Wadeye. This short article attempts to imagine some possible pathways through the various difficulties to ensure that basic literacy in English and basic numeracy are provided for the next generation of children in Wadeye.

At present, there are 500 to 600 school-aged children in the community of Wadeye who do not go to school. Most of them have never been to school. These children do not speak, read or write in English. They have no prospects of work and will spend the rest of their lives on welfare (as their parents did) many in various stages of addiction, most involved in petty crime and vandalism, many in serious violent crime. Many will live out their short lives in addiction recovery units (if there are any), jails and mental institutions. The young women will be forced to have babies as soon as possible to collect the baby bonus, and the young men will be amongst the most 'at risk' on earth. This is largely the legacy of a failed education.

It is now not unreasonable to admit that we need to suspend anti-discrimination and 'human rights' laws in order to educate Aboriginal children. We need to trade human rights and racial discrimination (as they have been defined) in order to achieve 'equal opportunity'. The most important human right to the next generation of children at Wadeye is the ability to read and write in English (a ticket to ride on the Australian merry-go-round). This must happen before anything else. If the children do not go to school, however, they cannot be taught. So the children must go to school. If the Catholic school at Wadeye cannot get the children to go to school, then the NT Government and/or the Federal Government must. A team of truancy officers and a system of on-the-spot fines issued to parents of children who do not go to school would solve this problem immediately, definitely and clearly. This is a much more honest and productive means to achieve attendance than the present regime of handing out bribes in the form of lollies, etc. It requires the Catholic Church or the Government, however, to recognise the seriousness of the problem in Wadeye and then have the intestinal fortitude to act decisively.

Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic School has been responsible for Education in Wadeye since its inception, and it, the Catholic Education Office and the Catholic Church of the Northern Territory are responsible for these outcomes. Of course there are others who are also responsible, such as Mick Dodson and Pat Dodson and their acolytes---but there is, now, no doubting that the policies of 'self determination' and of the 'homelands' are failures. Those who are committed to the indigenous rights movement, which at its core remains a revolutionary movement seeking a separate state, do not care about the children of Wadeye. The Catholic Church, The Catholic Education Office and OLSH Catholic School, however, must.

There are no children at Wadeye school who were able to pass the national benchmarks in literacy or numeracy---not one. There are significant absences from school by both students and teachers at Wadeye. The two Co-principals of the school attended conferences all over Australia all year, the school went to the Gama festival, and there were cadet camps, excursions and funerals to such a large extent that the teaching programme was disrupted on a weekly basis. No child will learn to read and write under these conditions.

Teachers need to be able to have confidence in their secular Australian culture and in their Christian culture. There has not been enough said about the courage, the successes and the insights of Christian missionaries working with 'The Stolen Generations'. Much has been made of this and the terrible accusation of Genocide through various UN bodies by Aboriginal representatives and public intellectuals. These conditions confine white Christian teachers to be the invaders teaching the invaded. Aboriginal communities such as Wadeye are fuelled by this type of ideology, which is only bolstered by the Catholic Church which has not shown the backbone to contest the blanket acceptance of 'the Stolen Generation' even when it is clear that almost all mixed race children were taken for welfare purposes rather than for political or racial ones. Shame.

The door of the principal's office at the very front of the school at Wadeye displayed a large 'Sorry' poster, as I'm sure many indigenous and non-indigenous schools do. What exactly are we 'Sorry' for---'the stolen generation'---the children of white men who were taken into care by the state and the church when they were perceived to be in danger, neglected or abused? Some were taken wrongly, most were well brought up and educated. There are many children in Wadeye who should be taken out of harm's way right now, but who won't be because of that word 'Sorry' on the principal's door. I have seen children walk in through my classroom door over the last six months who have not been fed since their last meal at school yesterday, who have minimal dirty clothes and have not washed all week, who had neither a blanket nor a mattress to sleep on last night, who may not have been to bed all night, who look as if they are on drugs, who suffer from alcohol foetal syndrome and who live with grandparents or aunties because their parents are in jail, or who watch happily through the window as their father is taken off to jail in the big police helicopter. Is this what the Catholic Church means by human rights? That which we are being required to be 'sorry' for is the very attempt to provide children with the fundamentals of 'human rights'.

I don't think it would be inappropriate to use the army in situations such as Wadeye. If we can use the army to save Timor Leste, why can't we use it to save our own people at Wadeye? The Australian Army has an excellent reputation and capacity for rebuilding devastated communities from the ground up as they did in Dili. Why could there not be an army education unit with the operational charter of taking the 500--600 school-aged children at Wadeye to provide literacy, numeracy and to put their energies to a creative use? In Australia we do not consider it a human right to allow impressionable children to degenerate into crime and addiction through ignorance. If the likes of Mick and Pat Dodson were involved, they and we might be forced to actually, really, find a way to integrate Aboriginal culture with numeracy and English literacy. I don't believe that this task is nearly as difficult as it has been made out to be---there are dozens of cultures which have managed to continue with their cultural imperatives and become literate and numerate in Australian society. We are a good and fair society in Australia and the Left undervalues its nest egg. It may be a good time for some serious compromise in the spirit of real reconciliation.

There has already been talk by the previous government of a strike force of excellent teachers who could be used to 'fast track' numeracy and English literacy in isolated Aboriginal communities. This seems to have disintegrated into more 'fly-in, fly-out consultants' mainly in 'Accelerated Literacy'. This may work well in some communities after a period of time. However, places such as Wadeye have fallen behind so far over the last 30 years (now in a second generation of illiteracy and welfare dependency) that they require a focused and lasting stimulus. Wadeye requires a significant intervention into the whole culture surrounding the school, including the aspects of tribal/traditional Aboriginal culture that in any way interfere with the process of children becoming numerate and literate in English. Teachers need to be sufficiently 'deprogrammed' from invasion, genocide, the stolen generation and the politics of apology enough to develop a 'teachers without borders' neutrality, from which they can command the respect of the students. Changes to traditional culture may be required unless the basic discipline of children, including adequate toilet training, can be maintained.

Get rid of all the cages around all the classrooms in the school. If the school has to be caged to keep it from destruction by the very children it is trying to teach, then it does not have the conditions which are needed to conduct education. The community must first be educated about the benefits of education and must be brought to the realization that it is the way forward. The community must want and value and own the school.

There must be a programme to overcome the 'don't speak English, you're Aboriginal' mindset of many, if not most, Aboriginal people in Wadeye. This may include some serious discussions with whitefella linguistic philosophers who believe all languages must be saved no matter what the cost.

The curriculum should focus on numeracy and English literacy only and perhaps only operate for half a day, due to the level of concentration needed to learn English as a second language. Aboriginal children are unused to concentrating in a structured environment and the second half of the day might be taken up with cultural activities that may benefit both the children and local adults involved in training to become teachers. Many, if not most, local Teacher Assistants (TAs) are unable to teach, and are used as translators and disciplinarians. This is counter-productive on a number of levels and actually hinders the students' progress in English. TAs should not be paid when they do not come to work. If they do not come to work, they should be sacked. TAs should not be employed along skin group/totem group/extended Aboriginal family lines. We have enough trouble with this sort of nepotism in our own society and it should not be encouraged in indigenous culture.

A strong and decisive discipline policy needs to be instituted at OLSH Wadeye. Perhaps even a measured corporal punishment administered by family and supervised by police or teachers.

There needs to be a programme to promote to each family of each schoolchild, the need to feed the child breakfast and dinner and to make sure the child has a mattress and a blanket and that they go to sleep by 10 pm.

There also needs to be a drug programme that can deal with asphyxiation butane, petrol, gunga and alcohol addictions and their consequences. And there needs to be a programme for young mothers on toilet training.

There are few whitefella teachers who are able to stay in Wadeye for more than a few years. So there is no long-term contact between the community and its teachers. The place needs a community of teachers without politics who can stay together for about five years. There may be benefits in a large hostel type community lifestyle---a large hotel/motel type of accommodation in which 20 or 30 teachers could live together well. Everything in these days of secular individualism points toward an army unit or a teaching order of priests and nuns.

The Catholic Education Office and OLSH Thamarrurr Catholic school presently provide a second-hand amateur education for the children at Wadeye. Sons, daughters, husbands and wives of teachers are employed by the school and put into various support positions because of the difficulty in getting professional qualified staff for the school. Human rights lawyers and High Court Judges will tell you that the Catholic Church could be held legally accountable for the failure of education in Wadeye. This is a serious problem for the Catholic Education Office and the Diocese of Darwin. These are important issues of great public concern, particularly since Australia's name has been so sullied on the international stage with regard to its previous treatment of indigenous peoples. We have apologised for far more than we have done and we are now caught in a catch-22 as the tragedy of the alternative progressive policy reveals itself.

Unfortunately, there is no real way forward with regard to education in Wadeye other than that which requires interventionist thinking. Accelerated literacy is a good example of creative, successful interventionist thinking. Even in a short six months in Wadeye it became clear to me that in every Aboriginal child there is an Australian trying to get out.

Patrick McCauley spent six months teaching at Wadeye, returning to the Territory after a break of 32 years when, in 1975, he was developing adult education programmes on Melville and Bathurst Islands.

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