Submission – Education in Rural and Complex Environments

What questions does the history of a tri-border school raise?

Max Angus

4 March 2020

Introduction This submission presents a brief history of a particular school located in the tri-border region of Central Australia. The account is confined to the years 1934 – 1990 and addresses most of the Committee’s terms of refence. It is drawn from a larger work in progress. The submission does not document the school’s more recent history; however, the argument can be made that the die was cast during the earlier years, and what happened during those years is an important factor shaping how schooling is provided today.

In addition, arising from the history I make a number of observations about issues that are germane to the Committee’s term of reference. The views expressed are my own.

The particular school to which most of the remarks refer Is today known as the Lands School, a composite of eight campuses, though until 1978 there was only a single institution - Warburton Range Primary School.

Obviously, any generalisations to other schools should made with caution. The sub-category of schools to which generalisations about Warburton best fit are those with the following characteristics:

• They are located within an Aboriginal-governed community in the tri-border region; • The vernacular speech is a Western Desert dialect; • There is no local industry in or near the community offering employment opportunities; • Entry to the community has always required a permit, isolating it from European society; and • There continues to be a strong attachment to the Tjukurrpa and the Law; this attachment overrides the usual civic obligations that apply in predominantly European settlements.

There are not many such schools, yet they are distinctive institutions and from a policy perspective should be considered separately from the more inclusive Australian Standard Geographic Classification categories of ‘remote’ or ‘very remote’.

Chronology of Warburton Ranges School

1933 Fewer than 90 years ago there was no schooling in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands. The people were hunter gatherers and travelled about their country in small bands of 10 to 15 people. Children learned by observing adults and older siblings, practising essential skills, and participating in the spiritual and ceremonial life. The documentary Desert People filmed in 1967 shows Warburton people living a traditional life. Some of the people in that film are still alive today.

1 1934 When missionaries arrived in 1934, they established a school to facilitate their evangelical work. For the next twenty years schooling was provided for children cared for in dormitories. For practical reasons instruction was limited to one, or two hours per day. The teachers had no professional training and the instruction focused on developing English language competence, bible stories and singing hymns. The Mission actively sought to eradicate the children’s Aboriginal spiritual beliefs, many of which they thought had satanic overtones.

1954 When the Education Department took over responsibility for operating the Mission’s school, it employed the teachers and adopted an ‘Aboriginal curriculum’, a simplified version of the standard curriculum. The children who were enrolled continued to live in Mission dormitories. Attendance was therefore nearly 100 per cent. Students achievement clustered around the middle -primary years though a few were able to perform at the upper-primary level.

1956 The Commissioner for Native Welfare recognised that there was no work in Warburton for students who completed schooling and decided to relocate students to Cosmo Newbery Mission and eventually to close Warburton Mission. This plan was shelved as a result of the intercession of Member of Parliament, Bill Grayden.

1960 The Mission decided to end the dormitory system and the children returned to live with their families in the nearby camps.

1966 Teenagers, some of whom had spent time in special ‘project’ classes in , Norseman or Esperance, found there was no benefit from having attended secondary school. Nor was there anything constructive for them to do in Warburton. They began marauding around the Mission site and the incidence of vandalism, and petty theft spiked. This anti-social behaviour became an ongoing problem with no end in sight. At the same time, attendance in the primary classes was declining.

1970 Hopes for commercially viable copper and nickel mining industries (with job opportunities for Warburton people) were dashed as the companies involved packed up and left. There were no major employers with whom Warburton school leavers could look for a job.

1970 In a review of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands (or Warburton and Central Reserves as the lands were than known) by a management consultant team, the report drew attention to the low levels of literacy and numeracy achieved by the school. There was a suggestion that Warburton School should become an ‘experimental school’. The implied criticism was repudiated by the Education Department authorities who maintained that the Ngaanyatjarra people should make a greater effort to fit in with the school’s requirements. The report indicated that future economic development would be reliant on various craft and cottage industries. It pinned the greatest hope on the development of a tourism industry. There were no secondary facilities in Warburton, and no one knew what vocational preparation would be appropriate under the circumstances described in the report.

1973 The Mission closed, and the Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority began to hand over the responsibility for managing the ‘new Warburton’ to the Warburton Community Inc. whose members lived on the Warburton and Central Reserves. There was growing uncertainty and unrest in the Warburton community. The inexperienced Council found it difficult to address the many concerns that were now referred to it. The school was not involved in this process.

1974 At the instigation of United Aborigines’ Mission linguists, the Education Department reluctantly agreed to implement a bilingual education program in the early primary years at Warburton school.

2 Children in the early years were taught to read and write in the vernacular Ngaanyatjarra dialect. The innovation had the backing of the Commonwealth Government. The program ran successfully for two years before fading and concluding a few years later. It was found to be too hard to staff with teachers who had acquired sufficient competence in the dialect, and it imposed additional complexity on the administration of the school.

1974 In this year most Warburton adults became beneficiaries of unemployment benefits; these payments removed the incentive to look for work. There seemed little point in the school advocating for vocational training.

1975 Frustrations of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Warburton came to a head. Nurses were withdrawn from the settlement as a result of concerns about their safety. Teachers followed a fortnight later. Finally, contractors working on the new hospital packed up and left. One teacher elected to remain and keep the school open with the assistance of four local Aboriginal teacher aides. Attendance reached 80. A new principal, a volunteer, arrived later in the year and continued to employ the aides. Later, barbed wire fences were erected around buildings, including the school. The residents continued to live in brush shelters and life in the camp sites were described by officials as being of Third World standard.

1976 From 1973, with Commonwealth government backing, Ngaanyatjarra people whose homelands were to the east of Warburton began to migrate to them and set up camp. Basically, they required bores for drinking water, access to medical support, and food supplies delivered by truck. The provision of a school was high on their list of priorities. In 1976 the Education Department appointed an itinerant teacher to supervise teacher aides at four sites - Wingellina, Jameson, Warrakurna (Giles) and Blackstone. A second itinerant teacher arrived the following year. In later years, a teacher was appointed and provided with a caravan and a prefabricated one-room school building. The demography of the Lands was changing. In 1974 the peak school enrolment at Warburton was 123, but owing to the outmigration to each of the sites, dropped to 49 in 1979. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Warburton enrolled between one-half to one-fifth of the total number of enrolled students in the Lands. The remainder were distributed among the growing number of outstation schools. This period was characterised by a very high level of inter-school mobility, severely hampering the work of teachers.

1977 In 1977 the Commonwealth introduced the Community Development Employment Project (CDEP). It enabled the agency officials in charge of Warburton to consolidate all the unemployment benefit to which people in the Lands were entitled and transfer them to the Warburton Community where they could be reissued in the form of wages for those residents in the Community who volunteered to work on community development projects. CDEP transformed Warburton as it enabled for the first time the Community to assume responsibility for needed improvements that had hitherto been perceived as ‘whitefella’ business. There was no vocational education.

1984 After a decade of pleading for a high school in the Lands, secondary education facilities finally arrived. Though the decision raised hopes, it soon became evident that a viable secondary education program required much more than demountable buildings. There were now schools in the outstations, some with relatively low numbers. It was difficult to staff the program and the optimistic forecasts of enrolments vastly exceeded the numbers attending on a day-to-day basis. Even were the program to have met with success, there was no clear thinking about where graduates might find a job.

1988 The Tri-State Project was initiated by the South Australian Education Department to enhance collaboration among education authorities in the three jurisdictions with schools in the central

3 desert region. The schools at Pipalyatjara, in South Australia, and Wingellina in , were only 30 kms apart and had a history of helping each other. There had been sharing of support among teachers and several of the principals on the Western Australian side of the border had sought grants from the Commonwealth to enhance collaboration. In 1991 a committee of officials called for a Tri-State Board of Education to govern education provision. After a number of years of discussion, the Education Department of Western Australia signalled it would not support the recommendation as it did not want to delegate any authority to another jurisdiction. The Tri-State plan collapsed.

Key generalisations

1. Central control Throughout the 20th Century, the Education Department administered a highly centralised school system confident that the benefits of the central control of schools considerably outweighed the disadvantages. When establishing a new school, it used as a model a well-functioning school in suburban .

When the Education Department took over the Mission school in Warburton in 1954, there was no thought given to designing from scratch a form of schooling that would be suitable for a place as remote as the Warburton Ranges, servicing a community whose members had lived nomadic lives and were now living in bush camps on the outskirts of the Mission station.

The Department expected that when a new school was located in an unconventional setting, such as Warburton, it would function effectively with minor fine-tuning. This thinking applied not only to the design of school buildings but also to school organisation, staffing, curriculum and so on. The Department permitted a degree of adaptation by local principals and their staff members to suit the school’s circumstances provided the changes did not contravene Parliamentary Regulations and Departmental policy.

2. Generic frameworks During the 1960s the Department established a large curriculum branch to produce new curriculum materials and employ advisory teachers to share the latest thinking about effective teaching. Any new program addressing topics that were not an integral part of the official curriculum were layered on top of other core programs and school activities. There was a competition for blocks of time in the school’s timetable and pressure to devote more and more time to literacy and numeracy, especially if performances were sub-standard, as was the case in Warburton. Such an arrangement might be sufficient to enable minor adjustments to school practices to allow new kinds of activities but be far too weak to mitigate problems of a fundamental nature that were deeply embedded in a school. As a result, schools lacked sufficient power to cut through and permanently improve the situation.

There was almost no fundamental restructuring or innovation applied to Warburton during the period under review. Probably the most radical innovation was the initiative begun in 1974 to teach Warburton children to read and write in the Ngaayatjarra dialect. It was strongly opposed by the Departmental officials on various grounds but eventually approved on a trial basis. It fell into decline two years later following the departure of key staff members who could not be satisfactorily replaced. To work efficiently, the school system required generic models of curriculum, staffing and provision of basic infrastructure. It was unkind towards exceptions and irregularities.

4 3. Extra-curricular activities Schoolteachers were aware of the need to provide students with learning experiences outside the confines of the school grounds. This work included excursions to regional towns and cities, sporting carnivals, and bush trip with elders. These are good ways for school staff to bond with the community members, but they were time-consuming and difficult to arrange. Most of the school day was spent in classrooms with children seated at desks.

For practical reasons these excursions required relatively small groups of students to be provided with plenty of adult supervision. They tended to be a rare or minor ‘add on’ to the regular curriculum; instruction relied on traditional pedagogical approaches in classrooms.

4. Quarantining the school The community, with its episodic turbulence, apparently permissive parenting, and distancing behaviours reached an accommodation with the school where once their children entered it, they were under the control of teachers. Like the Mission, the school sought to immerse the children in an environment where they could acquire rudimentary language and computational skills, as well as social skills and European manners – politeness, patience and so on. However, the missionaries exercised more control over parents and their children that the schoolteachers and the Mission closure in 1973 contributed to the growing unrest in the community

The Education Department discouraged its teachers from becoming actively involved in community development. Though some principals recognised that they needed the Community’s support if they were to address the challenges they faced, it was difficult to acquire since there was little history of involvement and collaboration on matters deemed important by them.

Individual principals and teachers sought to break down that isolation and there are many stories of how they went about it, but they had to fight against the institutional norms that communicated such work was not their core business. At various times the employment of Aboriginal teacher aides provided constructive links with the community but building this service into the instructional mainstay, as it had been during the crisis in 1975, and the itinerant teacher years, was not sustained.

5. Impediments to learning Throughout most of the Education Department’s stewardship of the Warburton school it operated in a milieu of community unrest. The anarchic behaviour of the Warburton youth not only scuttled the prospect of a useful secondary education but also produced ripples that reached into the primary school years. The community was not engaged by the restructuring that followed the closure of the Mission and there was lingering resentment at the broken promises and investment in premises for the non-Aboriginal staff and their access to government-funded vehicles. Though students were absent from school for legitimate reasons, such as attendance at funerals, ceremonies and family reunions, teachers found it galling to observe large numbers playing around the settlement during school hours. School buildings and teacher housing were sub-standard and communicated the low status of schooling. Finally, the growing commitment to schooling at the outstations created enrolment turbulence and added to the organisational complexity.

6. Attachment to country Time and again agency officials found that solutions to problems that required people to leave their country to get a job or attend a high school, whether on a permanent basis or for extended periods of time, were bound to be resisted. Solutions to the problems facing the schools would have to be found within the Lands, considerably constraining the range of possible solutions. As a result, only a handful of students have completed Year 12. Most students resisted staying in hostels or boarding schools for longer than a few weeks. In 1970 it was calculated that about 10 per cent of students had

5 an experience of this kind. As for adults, some travelled to regional centres and stayed for a while but the idea that people would seek regular employment with a company and accept a posting anywhere in Australia was fanciful. The homelands had an irresistible pull.

7. Standards of academic achievement During the period under review, Warburton Primary School had been a government primary school for over 40 years. During that time the main instructional goal of the school had been to enable students to achieve the standard of literacy and numeracy equivalent to state-wide age and year level norms. Records showed that in the early 1970s the achievement level plateaued at about the mid-primary standard. This ceiling has seemed fixed in spite of the efforts of dedicated and skilful teachers, and a steady stream of curriculum packages and professional development. Nothing so for seems to have made much of a difference. The annual reports of the national strategy, Closing the Gap, indicates that this trend has persisted. Without any solid evidence of what has produced this flatlining, it is hard to design an intervention that strikes at the heart of the problem.

The thesis of this submission

What is the purpose of schooling in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands? In Mission days it was clear that schooling was a tool to help Ngaanyatjarra children form a Christian identity. The development of literacy competencies, in English and later in the Ngaanyatjarra dialect, was an exceedingly purposeful activity intended to enable Christian converts to read the Bible.

When the Education Department took over schooling at Warburton in the 1950s, its purpose was to enable the assimilation of Ngaanyatjarra people into mainstream Australian society, recognising that it might take decades to accomplish. This purpose may have made sense to teachers and Departmental officials, but it was not embraced by Ngaanyatjarra people who did not want to assimilate even though they may have wanted commodities that were produced in the wider Australian society.

Assimilation was not a controversial purpose at the time though it began to be questioned in the 1970s. In pursuit of its reform of Aboriginal affairs the Whitlam government vigorously pursued a policy of self-determination for Aboriginal communities. Each community could decide for itself the pace and nature of its future development within the legal, social and economic restraints of Australian society. Schools were expected to do their bit.

The Commonwealth wanted state school systems to devolve their central powers to schools so that they would share their decision making with their community. However, such devolution was opposed by the Education Department and it retained control. To circumvent this opposition, the Commonwealth in 1974 funded the creation of independent Aboriginal community schools, several in remote communities in Western Australia. The Education Department’s remote Aboriginal schools did not change course.

Today, the School’s aims are stated on its website: ‘Our school aims to ensure that our students become constructive and informed members of Ngaanyatjarra society. Equally, we aim to ensure that they are able to transition successfully into the wider Australian society when they choose to do so.’ (https://www.nglandschool.wa.edu.au/our-school/our-schools-purpose/) Its purpose is a hybrid, combining what is essentially the long-standing aim of ‘assimilation’ with the newer, more ‘radical’ aim of ‘preparing students to lead a good life on the Lands’, as stated on the website. This appears to me to be an entirely appropriate formulation providing there is a proper balance between each aim.

6 The questions arise, however: How do you achieve both aims and do justice to each? Educating students to make a transition to wider Australian society could mean doing what the school has practised for decades; we know that few students have chosen to follow that path; most have opted to stay in the Lands. The aim to enable students to lead a good life on the Lands is more problematic since its meaning is not self-evident and is more challenging.

Because most Australians are familiar with a single model of schooling, the same one that was transplanted to Warburton in the 1950s, we find it hard to imagine major variations of it. One such attempt to imagine how schooling could more usefully serve Ngaanyatjarra people was undertaken a few years ago by anthropologist David Brooks who has worked for three decades in the Lands. His paper is titled ‘What does an education for ‘a good life on the Lands’ mean and what does the school need to do to support students along such a path? In my view this title incorporates key questions that should be displayed front and centre during the Committee’s inquiry.

This submission began with a summary of important milestones in the history of the Warburton Ranges Primary School. Teachers and officials struggled to establish conditions that would enable them to narrow the gap in literacy and numeracy competence between Ngaanyatjarra students and their counterparts in mainstream schools. For various reasons the school isolated itself and there was little bonding between the community and the school. Though teachers were aware that children and teenagers, with few exceptions, were reluctant to spend time away from the lands to attend hostels and secondary schools, the curriculum was developed as though eventually the majority would make a more permanent break with the Lands. This never happened and seems unlikely to happen over the foreseeable future.

Widening the school’s purpose to equip students to ‘lead a good life on the Lands’ may require additional help to turn these words into a reality. For example, substantial changes to the standard operating procedures may be required, and the Education Department may need to sanction restructuring of the school’s organisation and curriculum. The school’s community leaders will need to be convinced about what needs to be changed and enjoined so that they can acquire ownership for what emerges, otherwise history will repeat itself. Rather than allowing the changes to unfold in an ad hoc way, the development would require a plan and budget allocation to ensure that the whole exercise is not washed away by unexpected events and competing agendas for school improvement. There may be some advantage in considering like-schools with similar ambitions collaborating on some basis. It will require a persistent effort over an extended period of time and an openness to outside critique or the re-purposing may lapse into window dressing. Such a project could invigorate the school and the community. Were the school to succeed in giving full expression to this purpose it would constitute a monumental step forward in the provision of schooling in the tri-border region.

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