Wai! Palya!

While bush workshops, ‘memory basket’ production, planning for attendance at another youth learning workshop in Darwin in September, ongoing documentary work and Nyuntu Ngali creative development all tick along here at Ngapartji Ngapartji, the focus of this news posting will be on an issue that sits squarely behind all of these activities – raising public awareness of the status and significance of indigenous languages, of their rapid loss, and of the pressing need to create policy and strategies to promote, preserve, and maintain indigenous languages, as well as ensure they have a respected and valued place in Australian society and life.

As discussed briefly in the previous posting (June), a big part of the ongoing work done here at Ngapartji Ngapartji has been using the high profile created by project arts activity, such as the theatre show, as leverage to push for social change, in this case to lobby for a National Indigenous Language policy. The last month has seen some significant and exciting developments in this area, including Alex taking an incredible collection of over forty letters in support of such a policy to Minister Macklin in Canberra, and consequently receiving word of a commitment to develop an indigenous languages action plan.

Alex recently shared the background of these developments with us at Ngapartji Ngapartji, as well as detailing where all this sits in both the project’s and Big hART’s commitment to social change. It was a fascinating session and worth sharing some of the details…

Indigenous language and social change.

While much of the projects activity on the ground has been concerned with arts or media activity with Pitjantjatjara people of central and south Australia, indigenous language has always been a significant part of these activities, through the website, the theatre production, youth learning and literacy activity, and film, media and music workshops with young people. Underpinning all these activities has been the Big hART commitment to using project arts activity to create public awareness around issues faced by the target communities, and in doing so instigate positive changes in identity and behavior, and in broader community and public attitudes to marginalized communities. This is based on the idea that ‘nations are narrations’ and that through community arts projects, Big hART can facilitate marginalized communities to change or ‘retell’ dominant negative or disempowering narrations, to create stories that truly reflect the values, qualities and experiences of participants. As the Big hART project booklet says ‘It’s harder to hurt someone if you know their story’.

While there are many models and theories advocated for achieving social change, there is no evidence of a single prescribed road to take. From Alex’s description of the Ngapartji Ngapartji project’s multi-faceted language campaign, it is clear that rather than a top down approach (through policy, law or government change) or bottom up approach (from action by the people and communities directly affected), this campaign has employed a ‘kata, alipiri,muti, tjina’ (head, shoulders, knees and toes) style attack which has involved not only top down and bottom up, but nudging, poking, tapping, schmoozing, pestering, informing, questioning, discussing, moving, and entertaining, at multiple levels of the public domain, including media, academic, political, and general public forums in both local and national communities.

Challenging Dominant values…

From Alex’s description, building such a campaign has faced many challenges. This has included employing a difficult mix of tenacity and sensitivity to counter and meet the prevailing values, misconceptions and ignorance around indigenous language issues. While there are of course many exceptions, widespread values this campaign continually encounters through politicians, the media, academics and the general public, suggest that as a nation, Australia doesn’t value languages other than the dominant English; doesn’t understand what is embedded within other languages (culture, history, and meaning that is not simply translatable); views indigenous peoples, language and culture, as ‘simple’ or ‘primitive’; and has a limited understanding of indigenous languages, ie. how many there were, how many have been lost, and how many, and where they are still spoken. (I recently asked my 16 year old niece who attends a private school in Melbourne how many indigenous languages she thought there were in Australia. She answered ‘two’. My own daughter, brought up in Alice Springs, answered ‘twenty-five’. Both fall well short ofthe actual two hundred plus correct answer.)

Other Challenges…

Part of challenging and changing public perceptions has also been the tricky process of identifying who and what sectors of the nebulous ‘public domain’ to target, and how most effectively to do this in each case. Against this background, Ngapartji Ngapartji staff, particularly Sydney-based Melanie Gillbank and Alice Springs-based Alex Kelly, have conducted extensive research around indigenous languages, about both their existing status, and any existing relevant policies, or the lack there-of. The task has also been to link the importance of indigenous languages to service delivery, consultation and effective strategies to address other challenging issues faced by indigenous people, such as health, education, employment and community capacity building, yet without becoming entangled in the complex and controversial issues of each of these separate areas. Intensive research has also been required to understand how things work in Canberra, and how to fit all this groundwork into the complex processes and procedures in operation at the federal political level.

Allies…

As well as targeting ‘the opposition’, Mel and Alex have also attended language conferences and meetings all over Australia, and over the years made at least half a dozen presentations about the project’s links and commitment to language issues in forums also committed to supporting indigenous languages and halting their rapid loss. Over time, this has gained the trust of many others (linguists, academics, activists, teachers, first language speakers, community language teachers, and indigenous community members) who have been working tirelessly, but often individually, to promote, preserve and maintain indigenous languages. This work has contributed to the building up of a strong network and coalition sharing a similar aim – that is to push for a National Indigenous Language policy. The breadth of this support and coalition building was reflected in the incredible amount of letters sent to the project from many different sources, organizations and individuals, both indigenous and non-indigenous, from all over Australia in support of action around indigenous languages.

The Canberra meeting…

Alex copied, collated and bound these letters to form an impressive and powerful document that she was able to present to Minister Macklin, and the advisors to Ministers’ Peter Garret, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, in the meeting in Canberra on June 23^rd. This meeting was also attended by long-term passionate language advocates Kevin Lowe, Eastern States Indigenous Languages Working Group and Inspector for Aboriginal Education at the Board of Studies NSW, and Faith Baisden, who is on the Queensland Indigenous Language Advisory Committee and works for The State Library of Queensland’s Indigenous Languages Project.

According to Alex: ‘it was a very quick meeting – 25 minutes seemed to flash past. It was fantastic to have advisers from four offices, including the PM and Deputy PM there as well as an executive staff member from DEWHA (The Department of Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts) which is Garrett’s dept and where the language program sits…The meeting felt very much as if Macklin was onside and supportive and the conclusion was that she would talk with Garrett and Gillard when they are back in Australia about making a joint statement regarding commitment to developing a policy!!’

Alex Kelly, Kevin Lowe and Faith Baisden outside Parliment House, June 23, 2009.

The outcome..

Only days after this meeting, Alex received word that DEWHA has commenced drafting an Indigenous Languages Action Plan and will coordinate this process through relevant Government agencies before consulting with key indigenous stakeholders. Obviously this is only the start of a long process but it demonstrates a commitment to the issues around indigenous languages being taken seriously at a federal level.

Yeeee-haaaa!

Language campaign Time-line

Feb 2004 – Ngapartji Ngapartji project conceptualised

Sept 2004 – Produced pilot language lesson and website in Coober Pedy

Mid 2005 – Meet with FATSIL to discuss application of project in termsof policy outcomes

July 2005 – Community film production workshops commence in AliceSprings

Oct 2005 – Work in progress season of Ngapartji Ngapartji in Melbourne International Arts Festival

April 2006 – Launch of Ninti site – online Pitjantjatjara language andculture site

Oct 2006 – World Premiere of Ngaparjti Ngaparjti main stage production

June 2007 – Peter Garrett launches tour to Dreaming Festival and news website, Alice Springs

Sept 2007 – Indigenous languages conference, Adelaide

July 2008 – Lingfest Conference, Sydney

July 2008 – Ngapartji Ngaparjti release background paper on indigenous languages

April 2009 – Central Australian Linguistics Circle presentation

June 2009 – Canberra meeting with Macklin et al

And finally..

To sum up, the fight to recognize and support indigenous languages has been a long and complex road, one that started long before the Ngapartji Ngapartji project began, and one that will continue long after. But it is heartening to see some tangible interest and developments around action in this area at a federal level, so thank you to all of you for all the unseen and unacknowledged work in this area (especially Alex and Mel), and to all those who have contributed in big or small ways to this campaign, both recently, and in the long history of those who have fought to have indigenous languages recognized and valued.

PS: If you want to get involved with the campaign or want more info about the meeting in Canberra feel free to contact Alex on alex@ngaparjti.org or at the Ngapartji Ngapartji office on 08 89535463.

Other Relevant Links:

PDF file of letters delivered at the Canberra meeting:

http://www.ngapartji.org/content/view/197/92/

National Indigenous Languages Survey 2005:

http://www.arts.gov.au/indigenous/MILR/publications

AIATSIS paper on bilingual education policy in the NT:

http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research_

program/publications/discussion_papers

More news on other project activity soon..

Jane –

On behalf of the Ngapartji Ngapartji team, Alice Springs.

Art and Upheaval by William Cleveland features a chapter on Big hART and the Ngapartji Ngapartji project with interviews with Scott Rankin, Trevor Jamieson and I.

From New Village Press:

Citizen artists successfully rebuild the social infrastructure in six communities devastated by war, repression and dislocation.

Author William Cleveland tells remarkable stories from Northern Ireland, Cambodia, South Africa, United States (Watts, Los Angeles), aboriginal Australia, and Serbia, about artists who resolve conflict, heal unspeakable trauma, give voice to the forgotten and disappeared, and restitch the cultural fabric of their communities.

Art can be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. The stories in this book have valuable implications for artists, academics, educators, human service providers, philanthropists, and community leaders throughout the world. The artists documented in the book have generated new technologies for advocacy, organizing, peacemaking, healing trauma and the rebuilding of community. Creativity is our most powerful capacity, and it can mitigate and heal our most destructive tendencies.

Beth Sometimes and I had a chapter published in the book Re-awakening languages: theory and practice in the revitalisation of Australia’s Indigenous languages. We wrote about “Ngapartji Ngapartji; Indigenous Languages in the Arts”.

The Indigenous languages of Australia have been undergoing a renaissance over recent decades. Many languages that had long ceased to be heard in public and consequently deemed ‘dead’ or ‘extinct’, have begun to emerge.

Geographically and linguistically isolated, revitalisers of Indigenous Australian languages have often struggled to find guidance for their circumstances, unaware of the others walking a similar path. In this context Re-awakening languages seeks to provide the first comprehensive snapshot of the actions and aspirations of Indigenous people and their supporters for the revitalisation of Australian languages in the twenty-first century.

The contributions to this volume describe the satisfactions and tensions of this ongoing struggle. They also draw attention to the need for effective planning and strong advocacy at the highest political and administrative levels, if language revitalisation in Australia is to be successful and people’s efforts are to have longevity.

The book can be ordered through University of Sydney here and chapter prelims can be viewed here (PDF).

Written by James Waites
Monday, 14 January 2008
Australian Stage Online Wantinyalana! Once in a Life Time!

A few days back on a Festival blog entry I waxed lyrical over the rich treasure of the Kev Carmody tribute concert. There I mentioned how some of us were ready to cast aside our White Supremicist arrogance, sit down at the feet of Aboriginal Elders and listen to whatever it was they saw fit to tell us.

How could I know that the Carmody concert was but a warm up for Big hArt’s enthralling drama –  Ngapartji Ngapartji – about the life of the Central Desert’s Spinifex people and, in particular, the joys and sufferings of lead storyteller, Trevor Jamieson and his immediate family. Do the gods really ever listen? Maybe totems do. For here I was, a few days later, not just in the presence of a truly major work of art – brimming with ideas and emotions, and exquisitely realized – but in the form of the very ‘sit down and listen’ I had asked for.

In a style that bounces joy and sometimes even reckless laughter off the cold walls or wisdom, grief and sadness (found also in the film Ten Canoes to those who saw it), I was among the second-night Festival audience who, first up, learned how to sing the kindergarten song ‘Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes’ in Pitjanjatjara: ‘Kata alpiri muti tjina’. A great ice-breaker. All of us being little kids again. The child in us brought to the surface, we were sat down again and so the lesson began.

Much recent Aboriginal expression deploying western theatre forms has been reminiscent of grief counselling: where the victim initially unleashes the horror of the experiences that is holding their healing back. The story has almost always been personal and, however compelling and sometimes hilarious, we whitefellas cannot help but come away ‘shamed’. I’m thinking of works including the plays of Jack Davis about the 200-year-old ‘White Problem’ in West Australia to the solo shows of Ningali Lawson and Leah Purcell, Seven Stages of Grieving, and many more.

Ngapartji’s writer and director, Scott Rankin, worked with Purcell on her excellent one-person show, Box the Pony, which premiered at the Festival of Dreaming in Sydney in 1997. A decade later he is one among a vast tribe of artists, volunteers, language teachers, activists, web specialists, and others, known as Big hArt – who have brought the elusive dream of ‘community art’ practice to a level artistic sophistication that rivals Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

Big hArt’s Ngapartji Ngapartji project centres on the concern for lost language, the glue that holds any culture together. Australia has already lost half of its 300 indigenous languages; and 110 of the 145 surviving are on the critically endangered list.

You could say the current production at Belvoir Street (where, for a Sydney season, this show belongs) is the above-surface component of the Big hArt Ngapartji Ngapartji iceberg; the bulk of the cultural activity taking place beneath this surface. Perhaps it’s better to imagine Uluru as the tip of a mountain rising bluntly out of its shimmering Central Desert surrounds, with the bulk of its meaning, history and purpose lying beneath the surrounding red-earth surface.

Nearby Alice Springs serves as the centre for Big hArt. As the program notes, this location on Arrente country is along way from  the Jamieson family’s Spinifex nation to the south west. But much of this land is uninhabitable, even unapproachable, due to the poison that lies in the soil since atom-bomb testing which took place, most infamously at Maralinga.

But Big hArt has worked on projects across the length and breadth of Australia, including sites in Tasmania, the troubled Sydney beach community of Cronulla; and even Northcott – the daunting Housing Commission estate that raps its loving and sometimes troubled arms around the Belvoir Street Theatre.

In development is Gold a Murray-Darling basin project which is looking at the effect of water (or lack of it) on communities from the Queensland border and along the course of the river system down into South Australia. It is Big hArt’s first foray into the matter of global warming. And in typical fashion it is coordinating opportunities for those effected to share their stories, and by whatever means appear appropriate, art-making will emerge.

In yet another most fortuitous merging of opportunities, Big hArt’s National Creative Director and Cofounder, Scott Rankin, was invited to give the 2008 Rex Cramphorn Lecture, included for the first time in a Sydney Festival program and delivered yesterday. Rankin offered an extraordinarily insightful commentary – again, like all Big hArt’s work I’ve now seen, swinging artlessly from sombre fact-telling to self-deprecating joke-telling, taking in both big-picture vision and microscopic and respectful observance.

Ngapartji Ngapartji is the perfect example. The production’s central performer, Trevor Jamieson, explains that he began on this project because he wanted to make a film about one of his brothers, Jangala, who – like so many dispossessed – was having trouble holding his life together. There is some stunning footage of this film where family, including Jangala’s own children, gather round after his release from jail to discuss, quite animatedly, where he might go from here.

This story of one young man’s troubles is used to personalize the big version of the Spinifex people who were driven from their land after the Australia agreed to Britain’s request to use nearby country to test atom bombs. We are all aware, to varying degrees, the impact this had on those who were poisoned. While physical illness in terms of cancer is widespread, so was the dispersion of community and consequently language. To quote Cape York elder, Roger Hart, “When I speak language, it makes me feel home”. And Rita Mae Brown: “Language is the roadmap to culture. It tells you where people are coming from and where they are going.” So this is the story of profound loss.

And it helps explain why, if you dip into the Big hArt website, you can find out how to enroll in Pitjanjatjara, the language of the Spinifex people. This company is not just out to point the finger of blame, it is rolling up its sleeves and getting into the business of helping with the healing. On the matter of radiation poisoning, the cast includes Japanese-born Yumi Umiumare, who contributes her own people’s version of this catastrophe; and we are reminded too that Australian scientists stole the bones of hundreds of infants for years, both black and white, to test for the effect of pre-natal radiation poisoning. So white people have also been abused.

Drawing on the malleable language of western theatre practice, this production takes the previous work (above mentioned) of Davis, Lawson and Purcell, et al, a step further. Here we go beyond identifying the crisis and releasing some of the pain, to a new phase of learning and healing – the beginning of. That we start with rehearsing the most simple kindergarten song is fun, but no joke. Most of us really do have to go right ‘back to the very beginning’ to make our start. In a stark reminder touched on during the production: we all know how to go to France and say ‘bonjour’ to the locals. But how many of us can do the same in even one of Australia’s 150 surviving traditional tongues? As Rankin reworked this alarming fact into his lecture: John Howard sent in the army to help but, after jumping off the trucks, not a single soldier knew how to say ‘hi’ in the vernacular of the people they had supposedly turned up to help.

By familiar western theatre standards, Ngapartji Ngapartji is a profound and moving drama, exquisitely told. Trevor Jamieson carries the weight of the production with such a gift for movement and story-telling that you imagine he is carrying around a feather. He share’s the stage with a fine supporting cast including artists and artisans, Australians of other blood-lines, and half-a-dozen women elders. Their presence proffers, in equal share again, both laughter and gravitas.

Already eight years in the making, Njapartji Ngapartji is, at its core, the unfolding of one family’s story. Without giving too much away, now is an amazing time to catch where this family story is at. Let me just say this: I called my response to the Kev Carmody concert: ‘Art Can Save Lives’. Ngapartji Ngapartji is living proof.

To hear the David Byrne/Talking Heads anthem, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ wash over you in Pitjanjatjara is a once-in-a-life-time experience. So is this show: the bold little foal I mentioned last week is now bolting around the paddock. Go take a look. Such beauty can make you weep!

Further Reading www.bighart.org

Company B, Sydney Festival and Big hART in association with Melbourne International Arts Festival, Perth International Arts Festival and Sydney Opera House present
Ngapartji Ngapartji

Venue: Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills
Dates: 12 January – 10 February 2008
Times: Tuesday 6.30pm, Wednesday to Saturday 8pm, Sunday 5pm
Duration: 2hrs, 20mins, including interval
Tickets: Full $54
Seniors (excluding Fri/Sat evenings) & Groups 10+ $45.
Concession $33.
Student Rush $25 for Tuesday 6.30pm, available from 10am on the day (subject to availability)
Bookings: Belvoir St Theatre on (02) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au | www.sydneyfestival.org.au

by Alex Kelly
Arts Hub
Friday, June 15, 2007

What could a young resident of an Alice Springs town camp possibly have to teach a successful white city-dweller? How about one of the oldest languages in the world?

You might have heard about Ngapartji Ngapartji as a huge stage show that has toured to critical and audience acclaim in Melbourne and Perth festivals. The show follows the story of Spinifex man Trevor Jameson and his family, and their encounters with the dark history of nuclear tests at Maralinga.

Ngapartji Ngapartji, which means “I give you something, you give me something” in Pitjantjatjara, is more than just a performance. Making its debut in Adelaide is the other, more interactive version of the show – a theatre performance, language and culture course, and history lesson rolled together, where the opportunity to learn and exchange culture and language is taken to a much deeper level.

The Ngapartji Ngapartji project, which straddles grassroots and mainstream festivals, also attempts to engage with national policy, particularly in the area of Indigenous languages. Working on the project can mean joining in on skill-sharing workshops with young Pitjantjatjara speakers in town camps one minute, and meeting with ministers in Canberra the next. It can mean having a crowbar in one hand, helping elders to look for goanna, and a backstage pass to the Sydney Opera House in the other.

Jumping between these worlds is not easy, but Big hART recognises that these are exactly the kind of stretches that are required if we want to talk about reconciliation, about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians making a future together which works for everyone. First, we have to learn how to talk to each other, find out each other’s stories. The big challenge is to make those connections work at many different levels.

The Ngapartji Ngapartji language show asks audience/participants to step up to that challenge, to take the opportunity to learn more than a few words of Pitjantjatjara, to learn about a complex culture, its kinship networks, its strength in family and incredible history of survival. The show is an invitation to participate in a generous exchange.

It’s a challenge that, for many audience members, has been an incredibly rewarding and emotional experience. Here’s some of the feedback we received from Melbourne audiences of the language show we performed there in 2005:

“Best honest performance I have seen in many years – exactly what is needed to bring worlds together”
“I was ‘transported’ to ‘your’ country and I felt welcomed”
“As a linguist seeing such an innovative way to get people aware of, involved in and keen to learn language it is the most wonderful project I have ever seen”
“It changed my experience of the world”
“I hope I get the chance to give you something”

What is given to the performers/participants in exchange is a powerful sense of pride in their culture, and the confidence to access “mainstream” ways of sharing, through theatre, film, story, and song. The strength of being respected for language and culture feeds back into health, empowers communities, and changes the story of poverty and helplessness in Indigenous communities which is so often told by the media.

These changes are not always immediately obvious to audience members. The audience might leave the show feeling that they have been given an amazing gift of insight into a culture and story. But working with the young people, we have a chance to witness the changes that take place for them, and the transformation is just as dramatic.

The depth of exchange happening at the language shows is rewarding for everyone involved. It’s only through this reciprocal learning that we can make the connections we must make with each other to walk together into the future. Like the Big hART principle says, ‘it’s harder to hurt someone if you know their story.’ And there is already so much hurt in the story of Aboriginal Australia.

It’s a joyful and very overwhelming project to be working on. The stresses of touring a massive show with ever changing team of performers, entire families, etc are also an exchange for us – the emotional demands are great, and the learning curves are steep. But in return we feel we are making the kind of theatre that really can change the world.

Ngapartji Ngapartji toured The Dreaming Festival from 8 to 10 June, and is appearing at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival until 17 June.

It’s a unique and unforgettable experience, and we hope you take up the opportunity to share in the story.

For more information about Ngapartji Ngapartji, visit http://www.ngapartji.org.