Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Wanda Miller, an Indigenous Australian woman, talking about developing materials to assist with teaching and learning the Wirangu language as part of a program of language revival. Wombat hunting, which is an important activity for the Wirangu people, is the subject chosen for one resource. Still pictures from the finished resource show members of the Miller family hunting and cooking a wombat. A young Indigenous woman is shown using the materials on a computer to help her learn the language.

Educational value points

• The narrator, Wanda Miller, grew up at Koonibba, 40 km north-west of Ceduna, South Australia. In the clip she describes the efforts being made to maintain the Wirangu language – Wirangu traditional country includes the eastern end of the Nullarbor Plain along the Eyre Peninsula, the dune fields of the Great Victoria Desert and the arid Gawler Ranges in South Australia.

• Wanda Miller says that her sister Gladys Miller is one of the few remaining speakers of Wirangu, and the clip focuses on efforts to keep the Wirangu language alive. Since the 1970s there have been efforts to reclaim and sustain Indigenous languages. It is estimated that in 1788, when British colonisation began, there were about 250 Indigenous languages and about the same number of distinct variants. Today, there are 18 Indigenous languages that have more than 1,000 speakers. Those speakers mainly live in central and northern Australia.

• One of the women featured in the clip says, 'half the town lives off wombat meat’, indicating how central the chosen topic is to the life of the community. The language resource thus has a dual function of keeping the language alive and maintaining cultural knowledge.

• Language is a strong marker and determinant of cultural identity for all peoples, and the clip indicates the special place of language for Indigenous peoples. In traditional lore, language is a gift from the Ancestral Beings who helped to describe and connect the land and the people.

• Gladys Miller is a Wirangu Elder and an authoritative source of knowledge of the Wirangu language. The absence of written resources is one of the major impediments to supporting language learning, and rendering oral languages into an agreed written form is a significant challenge. The habit of naming languages, for example, is not part of Indigenous Australian cultures, and there are at least eight alternative names or spellings for 'Wirangu’.

• The process of creating the book about hunting wombats, which is described in this clip, illustrates a common process by which language learning is developed. Storybooks can help young people learn to read, especially when the books reflect the life experiences of the readers, as well as presenting aspects of local culture, both contemporary and traditional.