Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education An Introduction for the Teaching Profession

I am the youngest of nine children and was born when my parents were in their mid-forties. As a consequence, all but the sister closest in age to me had long left home. For five years I had seen my sister Rosemary heading off to school each day and couldn’t wait to get there myself. However, by little lunch on the first day I had decided that was enough and taken myself home. Eventually I came to love the primary school experience, probably because I was fairly good at most of what happened there. We enjoyed reading, spelling and comprehension, mental arithmetic, geography, nature studies, art, physical training and history. Each week on Friday morning, we had a spelling, dictation and mental arithmetic test. I learned to add, subtract, divide and multiply. I learned my times tables and have never forgotten them. I so much enjoyed tracing countries of the world from my atlas and transferring them to my geography book, colouring in the countries and pencilling in a lovely blue fringe around the islands, naming and placing the capital cities in appropriate spots and marking in significant features of the landscape (never dreaming I would drive down and up the exotic sounding ‘Great Dividing Range’ at least once a week as an adult); copying down text from the board onto my lined page and in “science” drawing the parts of flowers (so helpful these days with crosswords) on the facing blank page; learning how to draw a stick figure; completing physical jerks and playing rounders; and learning an inaccurate history of Australia.