There is no more promising way of increasing the closeness of subcultural groups to their own roots and culture “than by cherishing and nourishing the speech of the home and the neighbourhood and by helping it to find the kind of expression in story, poem, play, which can communicate the spirit of the subculture to a multicultural audience.”

In 1985 there was a Combined Associations Conference held in Darwin. As part of that conference Ann Harrison (a TESL lecturer at Darwin Institute of Technology) and I prepared a workshop to explore some issues concerned with Aboriginal children learning to write in English when it is not their mother tongue. In that workshop we looked at samples of Northern Territory Aboriginal children’s writing in English to consider:

Amongst all populations there is a normal distribution of physical and mental characteristics. It follows then that in the Aboriginal population there will be the same proportion of children who vary from the intellectual norm as in any other surveyed group. For educators one such cohort which is often ignored is that which we might like to call the intellectually gifted or, individually, the gifted child.

This article is addressed to issues that cause stress in children, but are not outward and obvious such as illness or lack of food and shelter.

From the point of view of a child psychiatrist, separation from important members of the family (or threat of separation) is one of the major stresses of childhood, particularly in the child under three years of age. Unfortunately, cultural influences from Anglo-Saxon sources have been one of the main sources of untoward separation of young children through hospitalisation or assessment at distant places. This was in ignorance of the harmful effects of separating young children from the person they are attached to most.

All children, black or white, learn a lot more outside the classroom than inside it. All normal children, by the time they go to school for the first time, have already learnt to speak their mother tongue, have learnt who they are and where they fit into their family or community, and have learnt a vast range of behaviours which are appropriate (and inappropriate) for members of their culture. They have learnt all these through the informal process of socialization which affects all members of every culture throughout their lives. In traditional Aboriginal society, for example, hunting and food preparation skills, the traditional law, patterns of land ownership and important stories from the past, were all learnt informally in the daily life of the family. Only some sacred knowledge would be transmitted formally in a ceremonial context.