The Northern Territory Bilingual Education Program was established in 1974 in remote Australia with ambitious goals (Devlin, Disbray and Devlin, 2017). One was the development of literature and teaching resources in the 27 Indigenous languages represented in the program (Gale and Doube, 1997). This initiative triggered the emergence and proliferation of new and innovative literary traditions, in the novel media of alphabetic literacy and realist illustration. In local Literature Production Centres, such as at Papunya in Central Australia, storytellers, authors and artists harnessed these new media to document their traditional language and knowledge, and in the face of colonial incursion continue its transmission to their children and community (Disbray, 2013:128). Waxing and waning Education Department support has meant the endangerment of these literary collections, traditions and learning opportunities. However new initiatives, leveraged by developments such as the new Australian Curriculum, the UN Decade of Indigenous Languages and new technologies, seek to address this.
This presentation details the motivations and methods of a community-led collaborative project underway to restore access, safe keep, document and repurpose the collection generated in the Pintupi-Luritja Bilingual Collection at Papunya (Russell, 2019). We chart the research partnership and the project's interplays between archival management, art history, education design and advocacy; as the community members and researchers navigate education policy on the ground to see the materials used in schools once more. We present the initiatives to safe-keep and reactivate the collection, and challenges educators, communities and children face in seeing their efforts to return Pintupi-Luritja language, knowledge and literature to classrooms and beyond.
References
Devlin, Brian, Samantha Disbray and Nancy Devlin. (2017). History of Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory. Springer, Singapore.
Disbray, Samantha. (2013). At Benchmark? Evaluating the Northern Territory Bilingual Education Program. In Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan (eds) Selected Papers from the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. University of Melbourne. https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/40960
Gale, Mary-Anne and Leone Doube (1997). Dhanum Djorra'wuy Dhawu : a history of writing in Aboriginal languages. Underdale, South Australia: Aboriginal Research Institute, University of South Australia.
Russell, Roslyn (2018), Papunya Luritja Collection: Significance Assessment Report. National Library of Australia, Community Heritage Grants Program.
This research is funded under the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, DP210103825, The Illustrated Literature of Papunya and Strelley, 1979-1998.
