Remember the fuss about the ‘stolen generation’ – mainly mixed-race, aborigine children being taken away from their mothers to be raised in Australian families?
Thinking at the time saw this as a denial of the child’s aborigine culture, not to mention the feelings of the mother.
But a recent article in the magazine Inside Story forces something of a re-think.
Entitled ‘Opening doors in Central Australia’, by Glenn Nicholls, it is sub-titled as ‘A Lutheran pastor F.W. Albrecht introduced to remote communities a different way of thinking about schooling for Aboriginal children.’
Coming mainly from east Europe, Albrecht and other Lutheran missionaries in the area knew something about multi-lingualism. His first move was to become fluent in the language of the local Aranda tribe.
But education for the local Aborigines was a mix of English and Aranda, ending with primary school in the Alice Springs area. He was concerned that such education just left students in limbo.
(Things seem not to have improved much since. A recent TV documentary pointed to problems of crime, aimlessness and unemployment for Aborigine youth in Alice Springs.)
So at around age twelve, Lorna, the focus of the story, was ‘stolen’ – sent to stay for two years with a host family near Adelaide, then coming back, and at age 16 moving to Albury to stay at a boarding school and then to be trained as a nurse.
She made a career for herself as an interpreter of several tribal languages Her son became deputy vice-chancellor (Indigenous) at the University of Melbourne. The article continues:
‘Rather than expunging their Indigenous culture, Albrecht’s scheme encouraged students to keep connected to their homes, language and culture and provided ways and means to achieve that. It enabled students to withdraw at any time and to return home for the long summer holidays, and encouraged communication among the students themselves and with home base in Central Australia.
This was a great advance on what had earlier troubled Albrecht about schooling for Aboriginal students: “They have lost their past, but not gained the future.”
Needless to say, Canberra, with its policies of ’Social Darwinism’ which have reduced Alice Springs to the mess it seems to be today, did not approve:
By mid 1959 his (Albrecht’s) work was considered to have veered so far from the government line that the territories minister Paul Hasluck referred in correspondence the “concern that is felt in Canberra,” Nicholls writes.
Turning to my own problems in trying to raise a bi-lingual family in Japan, I think I know something of the importance of having children ‘stolen’ —in my case by an English boarding school for a year when they were around eleven years old after primary education mainly in Japanese with some English.
At that age I could be safe that the one-year immersion would make the English stick, and through continued family contact the Japanese would stay.
Sadly, many of the people employed to teach Asian languages in Australia seem to think they should be teaching grammar from a textbook.
To learn a difficult language to fluency is to push a vast amount of material into the brain, and only the sub-conscious memory can handle that. If that involves being ’stolen’ then so be it. Children’s minds are tougher than we realise.