My mother, my daughter and I are all Ngarigu women. We are matrilineal, tracing our family through the women for as long as we have been a people. Our country is in south-east Australia and is now known widely as the Snowy Mountains, the High Country of south-eastern New South Wales and northern Victoria. We know our country and stories of our family in that country for countless generations. However, when we talk about business to do with our family it is always in English because, for most of the people who identify as Ngarigu, with the exception of a few old people, our language is sleeping – it is not the language in which we still communicate. We talk about our languages as being ‘asleep’, waiting for us to wake them up again, because while ever the people who belong to a language still exist, that language continues to have a life. We need the teachers of Australia to work with us to help us wake up our languages.

Teaching an Australian language to your students helps develop their self esteem, engagement with education and their overall well being. There are no better reasons for teaching a subject. As Jeanie Bell so powerfully put it, our languages are a key to maintaining and preserving ourselves as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Schools have an important role in working with us to maintain and revitalise our languages.