Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and

cultures:fears, fallacies and futures

27/9/2013Dr Kathy Butler

Bert Groves addressing the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board 1953

• We know what it is for men to live without government and, living without government to live without rights; ...We see it among many savage nations, or rather races of mankind;

• for instance among the savages of New South Wales... no habit of obedience, and thence no government; no government and thence no laws; no laws, and thence nor any such thing as rights, no security, no property” (Bentham 1973: 268-9).

I agreed with them because it was propaganda… If you talk about a hole in the street up there that’s politics. And this old clichéd business of saying we are non-political. If you’re non-political, man, you’re dead, you’re not even thinking (Noonuccal, 1988, 19).

• For me, critical pedagogy poses the challenge:

• This is a great discovery, education is politics! After that, when a teacher discovers that he or she is a politician, too, the teacher has to ask, What kind of politics am I doing in the classroom? That is, in favor of whom am I educating? By asking in favor of whom am I educating, the teacher must also ask against whom am I educating… After that moment the educator has to make his or her choice (Freire in Shor & Freire, 1987, 46).

Examples of English that are current,

and exemplify the lived

experience and

language conventions

of Australian children today

• Attempts to discover an Indigenous Mathematics are undoubtedly well-intentioned, but ultimately ill-directed. It is neither useful nor beneficent to bestow on aspects of Aboriginal and Islander cultures a significance that they do not, in fact, possess. (Deakin 2010)

• “Our mainstream culture, the culture that all Australians will inherit, needs the precision of modern science. Earlier cultures did indeed develop accounts of such matters, and these served them well through many millennia; however, they are nowadays superseded” (Deakin 2010)…therefore

Living KnowledgesIndigenous knowledge in science education

• “The Garma Maths curriculum, for example, finds correspondences between aspects of the Yolŋu kinship system, (Gurrutu), and aspects of numeracy; and between people’s connections with place, (Djalkiri), and concepts of pattern and space in western maths”. (http://livingknowledge.anu.edu.au/index.htm)

• OI.2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities maintain a special connection to and responsibility for Country/Place throughout all of Australia.

• OI.5 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ ways of life are uniquely expressed through ways of being, knowing, thinking and doing.

• OI.7 The broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies encompass a diversity of nations across Australia.

• OI.8 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have sophisticated family and kinship structures.