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White Australia talking the talk, if not walking the walk |
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Saturday, 16 June 2007 |
Larry Schwartz visits the Trades Hall Learning Group in the week leading up to the opening of Ngapartji Ngapartji in Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Larry Schwartz
October 13, 2006
IT'S a fair way from Lygon Street, Carlton, to Ernabella. But an evening class in the indigenous language spoken in the community in the eastern Mulgrave Ranges of north-western South Australia, was treated to an unexpected visit from some residents.
"It's very good to see white Australians talking, or trying to talk, our language," said Lorna Wilson, who was among the visitors at Trades Hall one night earlier this week. "They were getting it right. I was amazed."
Wilson, a Pitjantjatjara teacher, had arrived with the small group from Ernabella and Alice Springs to take part in the Melbourne International Arts Festival. They unintentionally put on the spot a weekly class of about 12 people learning Pitjantjatjara, which is spoken by about 2500 people across the north-western parts of South Australia and areas of Western Australian and the Northern Territory.
"I'm struggling," Karina Noontil, an English-as-a-second-language and weekend Italian teacher determined to learn an Aboriginal language, had earlier conceded. She was wary of the 26-lesson online course with which the Pitjantjatjara community has been teaching through stories, songs, animation and short films.
Manrico Moro, who teaches computer skills, speaks Italian and once knew Arabic from childhood in Libya but hadn't "done enough homework" in Pitjantjatjara. "But I have learned so much about the culture that I am still happy I enrolled," he said.
They are among about 180 people taking part in the online project to help understand a Festival performance piece in English and Pitjantjatjara called Ngapartji Ngapartji. It takes its name from a concept of reciprocity, means "I give you something, you give me something", and is based on experiences of the "spinifex mob" of performer Trevor Jamieson, including the nuclear tests at Maralinga.
Linnet Hunter, a vocational trainer, said she had been "trumpeting and posturing and loudmouthing that everyone should learn an Aboriginal language and I thought, well, maybe … I should (too)."
Convener Rosemary Kelly had days earlier taken some visitors shopping at a Big W store and found she could converse with them. "They've got mobile phones," she said. "They bought DVD players and clothes for their kids … ."
Her daughter, Alex, the show's creative director, remarked on the "shyness in the room". She regards the course as a way of encouraging reconciliation. "It's just the seed," she said, "but the beginning of something bigger, I hope."
Ngapartji Ngapartji is on until Tuesday, October 17, at 7.45pm (Sunday at 4pm) at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre. |
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2010 Ngapartji Ngapartji