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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-03-31 Daily Xml
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Ernabella Anangu School

The Hon. C. BONAROS (15:52): I rise to acknowledge and congratulate the Ernabella Anangu School and community on the recent celebration of 80 years of schooling on the APY lands. As a disclaimer, can I start by indicating that, while I might be bilingual, Pitjantjatjara is definitely not one of those languages, so please forgive me if I struggle with some of the pronunciations in this speech.

I congratulate everyone who was involved in this week's festivities to celebrate the school's 80th anniversary, which had to be held over from 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been touched by watching videos of the old people singing Ernabella choir songs and the kids sharing their first language stories, singing choir and dancing Inma (traditional dance).

Mr President and members of this place, I hope that you have experienced the joy of hearing the Ernabella choir singing in four-part harmony. They have the voices of angels. If you have not, I implore you to do so. They sing at many big events now but were not formally recognised as the Ernabella choir until a group travelled from the APY lands in the back of a truck to Adelaide to sing during The Queen's 1954 visit.

Of course, education was not new to Anangu 80 years ago. However, formal schooling, first held in the creek bed of Ernabella before moving to the school building, was new. Ernabella was the only Anangu school in SA for more than three decades, so a whole generation of students from the region were educated there. It was in that sense the centre of formal schooling in the APY lands.

Dr Charles Duguid, who established a mission at Ernabella, directed that Ernabella was to respect and put at the centre Pitjantjatjara as the first language in education and mission life. This meant the early teachers, such as Nancy Sheppard and Ron Trudinger, had to quickly learn the language well enough to teach in Pitjantjatjara. Many subsequent teachers like Sandra Ken, Paul Eckert, Chris Tapscott, Bob Lines, Bob Capp, Greg Wilson, Maree McColm and others, including Sam Osborne, who conducts the Iwiri choir based in Adelaide, became proficient in the language thanks to the Anangu teachers. Many educational resources as well as hymns and biblical texts were translated right from the beginning of the Ernabella school and are still used to this day.

I particularly want to acknowledge the lifelong contribution of Angkuna Akitiya Tjitayi to schooling at Ernabella, Fregon and across the regions. She went through the Ernabella school as a student in the 1940s and became a teacher with Nancy Sheppard, the only white teacher, from the early 1950s. All of Angkuna's work was in first language, and Nancy Sheppard ran bilingual education for students from year 5 upwards.

Angkuna taught so many of the great emerging leaders who set up communities on the APY lands and championed land rights and the homeland movement in the era following the 1967 referendum, which eventually led to the APY Land Rights Act that is still strong today. Angkuna was one of five women acknowledged as a living treasure in the celebrations this week. The other women included Nganyinytja, Watulya, Tjuwilya and Lucy Lester—all incredible women and educators in their own right.

Of note, in the early 1960s, Angkuna went with Nancy Sheppard to establish a school at Fregon, while Nganyinytja Ilyatjari went across to Amata. When the new teachers arrived to commence schooling at Amata in 1968, they were shocked to discover Nganyitja had been running a school in a repurposed rations shed for many years. Angkuna has two incredible daughters in Katrina and Umatji Tjitayi, who are educators, and a granddaughter, who is also starting out in schools.

Katrina has drawn on Angkuna's wisdom in first language over 20 years of mental health and wellbeing curriculum and resources development. This body of work is taken up and developed in schools across the region and in programs such as the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council's Uti Kulintjaku program. Following the next generation of Anangu educators, including Yanyi Bandicha and Trevor Adamson, the UniSA Anangu tertiary education program was established in the 1980s. I think I have to leave it there.

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