Bunuba-Walmajarri: land, language and culture. [A report of collaborative curriculum design and delivery for non-Indigenous primary school children in Australia about Indigenous Australia.] (2009)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Wesley College is a large, coeducational, independent school in Melbourne, Australia. It has 3000 students on three campuses and has students from kindergarten to Year 12. It is an open entry school and has embraced the International Baccalaureate in the Primary Years (Early Childhood to Year 6) and Diploma Years (Year 11-12). In July 2003, Dr Helen Drennen was appointed Principal of Wesley College. In her opening address to staff, Helen acknowledged the many good programmes on offer at the College, but highlighted a gap in our curriculum offering. It was a part of her mission and goal to work with the educators at the College to investigate ways to create authentic links in our programmes to develop understandings in the school and wider society around Indigenous Australia. Like Helen Drennen, many educators in Australian schools are becoming aware of the need to address the imbalance in the content of humanities or integrated studies curriculum in relation to indigenous perspectives within our primary and secondary schools. Over the past few years, attempts have been made by various state and national educational bodies to create programmes and curriculum documentation to focus on this area. The challenge for everyone was to make sure that we were authentic in our delivery and more importantly that indigenous and non-indigenous educators worked together in partnership to create a programme that gave our children a true picture of Indigenous Australia. The following is an account of the journey Wesley College has taken to address this imbalance in the curriculum through collaboration with Australia's indigenous people from the Bunuba and Walmajarri tribes of the Kimberley region. The Kimberley is a vast landscape of rugged terrain, boab trees and spinifex grass in far northern Western Australia, about 6000 km from Melbourne. The Bunuba and Walmajarri are two of four tribes who live throughout the Fitzroy Valley region of the Kimberley. The population of the Valley is about 4000 and fewer than 200 of them are native speakers of Bunuba, while about 600 still use Walmajarri as their mother tongue. To build authentic units of work with an indigenous perspective could only be achieved if we could firstly build and sustain a relationship with a community. We could then embark on working collaboratively with them to incorporate an authentic indigenous perspective in the development of units for our non-indigenous children. In 2003, with the assistance of a family within the College community who had spent time in the region, Dr Drennen went to the Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, seeking to begin discussion with various indigenous organizations on how to engage with indigenous people who had been able to maintain their mother-tongue, their connection to land, and their ability to live out their culture and traditions. Gradually, Wesley College formed a partnership with such an indigenous community. The partnership was detailed in a Memorandum of Understanding which was created and co-signed by senior members from Wesley College and the Fitzroy Valley Community. The Partnership Agreement provides the overarching framework under which ideas, activities and projects can be developed and progressed. Several projects and activities are now operating between the two communities, of which the collaboration in curriculum design and delivery is reported here. The curriculum project arose following a discussion between Dr Drennen and June Oscar, who was then Chairperson of the Kimberley Languages Resource Centre. Both recognised the importance of preserving indigenous languages in an area where there are 33 different languages, many of which are quickly disappearing. Two staff from Wesley had already worked in the Kimberley Languages Resource Centre with staff there looking at pathways or models to teach mother tongue indigenous languages in the local primary school today. …