Fragile flame

Report: Tim Winkler
Photography: Dr Glen Auld

Families in a remote community gather on bare red earth around a computer screen, fascinated. Thanks to the work of a Monash education academic, they are reading stories in their own language on computers for the first time.

Living far from any city, they are the keepers of a fragile flame - just 200 people remaining in the world who speak an Indigenous Australian language called Ndjebbana.

The Kunibidgi community is one of several Indigenous groups who live in the small town of Maningrida 500 kilometres east of Darwin in northern Australia.

After almost a decade teaching at the Maningrida school, Dr Glen Auld decided he could help students more by moving away, travelling thousands of kilometres south to work at the Faculty of Education at Monash University, where he has pioneered new forms of language capture and interaction using the multimedia capacity of computers.

"Children would come to school with a limited sense of what a book was for. You can't buy a Ndjébbana book - they are only produced at the school in Maningrida. Although there was a very strong oral tradition, children had limited opportunity to read stories in their own language at home," said Dr Auld.

Because of the scarcity of Ndjébbana books in the community and the difficulties for nonreaders to access the stories in these books, Dr Auld collaborated with the community to develop 96 Ndjébbana Talking Books.

He recorded stories in the mother tongue of the Kunibídji community, placing the first interactive digitised recordings of stories in their Ndjébbana language onto computer.

"Working with the community, we digitised stories, compiled them onto disks, and offered computers with touch screens to families so they could read stories in their own language on computers in their homes for the first time," said Dr Auld.

"I went away for the Christmas holidays not knowing whether they would be interested or not - but when I came back, our software indicated they had touched the screen 112,000 times. There was absolutely no doubt then that they wanted to read."

Dr Auld's doctoral thesis was compiled in three versions - one for academic review, one in plain English and one as a report back to the community that he has grown so close to. It was his way of decolonising the research process and putting Indigenous voices in academic text.

He has since established teaching placements for students from the education faculty at Maningrida, and travels with close to a dozen Monash students for an unforgettable three week placement.

Blending academia with pragmatism, Dr Auld's next goal is to raise funds to send second hand computers to Maningrida so families have a choice to buy them for their homes.

"We use second hand iMac computers in Melbourne . The aim is secure funding to cover the transport costs of these computers to Maningrida and overcome the issue of remoteness - making the computers available in the local shop for the same price people can buy them in a capital city.

"Importantly, these computers will display texts in the children's first language. This program is giving the Kunibídji community that choice for the first time, as English is the third or fourth language for most of the people in the town.

"In the long run, this project will offer Kunibídji people the choice to share knowledge about literacy that will be used when children go to school. The concept of leaving your family and going to school to learn with a whole lot of children the same age does not normally happen at home - and there is no reason why they should have to conform their learning methods to match those of other cultures."

For more information, visit the Maningrida project website.