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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.

Wanda Miller is being interviewed.
Wanda Miller Wirangu language, and with Gladys and supporting here, I found that I was learning more as well. And I thought that was important, because my grandchildren are Wirangu through my husband. So I feel that I’ll be able to pass, you know, that language that I know on to them.

Close-up of book A Wirangu storybook by Gladys Miller with a wombat on the cover.
Wanda (voice-over) We were asked to do a simple story for children to understand at school, and the simplest thing that we could think of – because it’s just what we normally do – is write down what we do when we go for wombat.

Still photographs of a wombat hunt. Two local women are interviewed sitting outside.
Woman 1 Very important. Half the town, they live off the wombat meat. They always hunted wombats.
Woman 2 And always will.

Still photographs of Miller family and resources for language revival.
Wanda I became involved with the Wirangu language through Gladys, because she’s about, you know, one of the few Wirangu speakers that are left. Mainly with supporting her, and became involved because I, um, you know – when I was growing up at Koonibba, that was the main language being spoken there. So I understood quite a bit of it already, and just by supporting Gladys with recording and putting it down in a dictionary, because Gladys wanted to keep the language alive. It was nearly gone.

A young Indigenous woman is shown using the materials on a computer to help her learn the language.
Wanda (voice-over) Primary focus is to put it into schools so the children learn about the language in the schools. And hopefully more people will be talking the Wirangu language. And it can be learnt like any other second language anyone else would learn. You know, if you’re learning German or any other language like that. Most definitely they will know what to do when they’re older.

More stills showing wombat hunts.
Wanda (voice-over) My husband was working away a lot, and I used to go out wombating. I used to do everything, shoot it and pull it out of the hole and gut it and cook it. They are only four and six at the moment, but already the six-year-old is getting a lot of knowledge about bush, and, you know, she lives in Ceduna but she always wants to come out here and she always like to go out bush. Even when we ask her, you know, ‘Do you want to go to the beach, shall we go camping at the beach?’ ‘No, the bush.’