Past Programs
Indigenous - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander - 2008
Call for a national Indigenous languages policy
08/11/2008
Despite Australian Indigenous languages being among the most endangered in the world, their use in education facilities is becoming evermore restricted, with the focus instead on schools providing better English-language skills to Indigenous students.
But there is also a groundswell calling for a national Indigenous languages policy, as well as for the promotion of bilingual or 'two-way' education in schools, using Indigenous languages as well as English.
Indigenous Literacy Day
30/08/2008
On Indigenous Literacy Day, 3 September this year, Australian booksellers and publishers, writers, libraries and schools will join together to raise awareness and resources to promote literacy in English in remote Indigenous communities.
Aboriginal loanwords in Australian English: Lost and found
09/08/2008
Borrowings from Aboriginal languages into Australian English have not been so numerous. Those on record total around 400, most of which relate to the bush environment.
Aboriginal names for flora and fauna were also sometimes paraphrased away by English substitutes, so that the echidna became the 'native hedgehog' and the quoll the 'native cat'. The Aboriginal loanword was consigned to a kind of linguistic twilight, only to be reclaimed when the animal was close to extinction.
Another loanword with a shadowy existence is 'bogan', early enshrined in proper names and rural idioms but which is now part of contemporary Australian vernacular.
Saying 'sorry' and being sorry
19/07/2008
The word, 'sorry', has different meanings in Australian English and Aboriginal English. So what did Prime Minister Rudd's historic apology, made earlier this year, actually signify for the Indigenous Australians to whom it was offered?
Learning Adnyamathanha language
12/07/2008
There are only some twenty people still fluent in the Adnyamathanya language of the Indigenous people of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. But they are teaching many others, passing on their cultural heritage to all who are willing to learn.
(This year's NAIDOC Week is being celebrated 6-13 July. NAIDOC celebrates the survival of Indigenous culture and the Indigenous contribution to modern Australia.)
