Qld: Technology of the future is preserving indigenous past

AAP General News (Australia)
12-09-2003
Qld: Technology of the future is preserving indigenous past

By Jordan Baker

CAIRNS, Dec 9 AAP - High-tech wizardry is replacing billy can and damper-style oral
cultural transmission for a Cape York indigenous community.

The Noel Pearson-driven Computer Culture project at Coen trains students to record
their elders' stories and culture onto websites, CDs and digital video.

Mr Pearson said the pioneering project, one of many he is rolling out across the cape,
aims to make children's education the town's number one priority.

The project would also ensure the preservation of culture, both through its documentation
and in the minds of the young people who document it.

"Education is absolutely critical to cultural survival in the long term," Mr Pearson said.

"We're not going to survive as a culture without education in the long term.

"We have to make a decisive connection between education and cultural survival.

"The people who will speak Aboriginal languages in 50 years time will be literate in
English, they'll be literate in their own language, they'll be highly educated.

"Our focus here in the Computer Culture project is education, it's using culture as
a hook to bring the elders and families in to support their kids in education."

Mr Pearson said indigenous people needed to decisively move to literate transmission
of culture because oral transmission was not enough in the modern world.

"We're moving away from the billy can and damper cultural transmission of the bush
tucker trips in the bush to one that stresses even your culture has got to involve literacy,"

he said.

Also launching the Coen Education Strategy, which focuses on encouraging inquiring
minds and high-quality schooling, Mr Pearson warned of the danger of surrounding children
with low expectations.

"One of the real dangers I'm waking up to in terms of secondary school education is
too many schools have got a kind of two-stream program," he said.

"One for the kids they have expectations of and the other for the kids they have no
expectations of.

"My alarm is at the fact that schools are already pre-determining the two streams these
kids enter into ... I don't like the fact it's all the black kids who are going down the
B-grade stream."

AAP jb/sc/apm/de

KEYWORD: COMPUTER

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