In the European sense she works for the Catholic Church whose missionaries set up St Teresa’s school on the island in 1911. In reality, she works for the Tiwi (Aboriginal) people. She will retire in the next few years, and in due course she will be replaced as principal.
The miracle, not in any sense recognised by the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints, is that Sister Anne will be replaced by a Tiwi.
It will be the culmination of her mission and many years of training Tiwi teachers at the school through the teachers’ college at Batchelor. Indeed, the name of the school was changed three years ago from St Teresa’s to Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic School in honour of Murrupurtiyanuwu, the first Tiwi to qualify as a teacher, who since died of a brain tumour. Her name means the wave that pushed against a boat.
Murrupurtiyanuwu school has about 250 students, including boys up to Year 5. Adjacent St Xavier’s, with which it shares some facilities, has boys from Year 6 and an adult program, which goes into the evening. St Xavier’s has about 190 students, about half adult.
Bathurst and adjacent Melville Island are Aboriginal land granted under the Land Rights Act. They have their own land council and so have avoided the centralised control of the large Northern and Central Land Councils which control the vast majority of Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory.
The Tiwis are fortunate because their islands define their nation and give them a great sense of pride and identity.
“”Bathurst Island is the cheapest place in Australia to die,” says adult educator John Naden. “”It’s 160 bucks for the coffin, the cross, the lot.”
And he points to some coffins made in his workshop at St Xavier’s. They make furniture and sell it to other Aboriginal communities, and craft to sell to tourists across the strait in Darwin.
Adults are also taught literacy, numeracy and office skills.
But this is no ordinary school. For a start, it’s 36 degrees and the humidity makes it like standing in a jet engine’s exhaust. Murrupurtiyanuwu is a school without corridors. Each classroom is in a simple long fibro or besser-brick building and opens directly on to the veranda. Outside primary kids do an art class under a mango tree. Several mums with babies look on.
Inside one room, utterly misplaced, is a battery of 20 Apple Macs. Here students do the correspondence part of their teacher training.
English is the second language. Tiwi is spoken at home. Since 1977 the school has been bilingual. More than 200 Tiwi books have been published at the school and a dictionary is to come out next year. Tiwi literacy is taught first. English is taught only orally till Year 4. After that English literacy is taught.
The bilingual program will ensure the survival of the language, which with the land is an essential part of retaining culture. Bathurst Island has 1600 Tiwi speakers and Melville has perhaps a similar number.
But there are other dangers. Like many Aboriginal communities, Bathurst has its share of grog problems. Though there are more non-drinkers among Aborigines than whites, those that hit it more often hit it hard. Sister Anne helps the children cope with the guilt, shame and anger. Indeed, this is what she will devote herself to when she retires as principal.
Then there is deafness. Up to 80% of Tiwi children have hearing problems. Sister Francis Caine heads program for students with impaired hearing using headphones.
None the less, the Tiwis are slowly taking over. The church, which once ran the whole show now runs just the two virtually combined schools and a clinic.
On Tuesday afternoons people come from the community to teach story-telling, dances, carving pukumani poles and basket-weaving. The community has not taken the course of some other communities which insist that the school restrict itself to reading, writing and arithmetic and that culture is the preserve of elders in the community away from the school.
Sister Anne: “”Why am I here? I am a religious person. Also, it’s the trust you build up. The Tiwi-trained are in effect running the school. A Tiwi does the financial books and runs the cheque account.”
She mixes Tiwi traditional culture with Bible stories _ heaven alone knows with what theological results. The important thing, however, is results. Tiwis are being trained and given jobs. When trained and with jobs they will be in a better position to determine their own destiny.
Bathurst Island is what the Minister for Education, Shane Stone, calls the good story to be told about Aboriginal education.
“”On literacy, numeracy and retention rates there are some excellent aboriginal communities who have done really well,” he said.
The schools on Bathurst were among them with attendance rates at 90 per cent, which would rival any urban school.
“”The whole notion of schooling is still relatively new among tribal people,” he said. “”People down south when the think Aboriginal think of Aboriginal people they have seen in Redfern or Fitzroy who live in flats and houses who drive a car and have a Bankcard and live fairly much like they live. We are dealing here with traditional Aboriginal people who are driven by a different set of imperatives, some of them actually quite sensible. I don’t think they suffer any of the stress we get ourselves into. The whole notion of living an idyllic lifestyle close to a beautiful sandy beach living off barramundi and mudcrab actually appeals to me. It would be absolutely marvellous.”
Tiwi islands had done really well. “”Traditional people who still maintain a traditional lifestyle, the quality of life and in the same breath run productive industry such as the pine plantations the printing of batik shirts and materials.”
“”But you get other communities, and it is just a disaster,” he said.
What is difference?
“”I keep coming back to the parents and the community. If the parents don’t lead by example, that is they are not off the grog they are not taking any interest in their kids going to school, they don’t make their kids go to school, then the kids obviously are not going to go to school. You find a community that has been decimated by alcohol, kava or petrol-sniffing then on all fronts things are way down: lifestyle, health, education etc.
“”Some of these communities are closed. They ban alcohol or they impose a limit. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. There are communities where you can still buy a drink but because of the strong leadership of a number of Aboriginal elders there who literally rule the place with an iron fist, it works. It has to come form within those communities. It’s not much good white fellas going over there saying you’ll do this or you won’t do that. Where these communities succeed is where there are strong people (men or women) _ traditionally strong who are able to guide persuade and rule their people in a traditional sense.”
They want to graft on to that a western education system because “”they say we want our kids to work.”
“”The Aboriginal people are among the most trained people in Australia if you take account of all the disabilities. They’ve had the training; they now want the jobs. Unless training articulates into the labour markets, then you are wasting your time. And that’s been the great panacea in the past of successive Governments federally. They say we’ll commit X million dollars and we’ll train them all, but there was never any jobs.
“”And you talk to the women in particular. They are very strong on this issue. They say if the men were working they would not be drinking, they wouldn’t be on the petrol-sniffing etc. And Aboriginals don’t like being on a hand-out. Aboriginal people have a great sense of pride and commitment to what they are trying to do.”
A group of people on Bathurst were coming up for their long-service leave. “”If you walked around Melbourne and Sydney and try and tell ordinary Australians that traditional Aboriginal people had been in the workforce long enough to qualify for long-service leave, they wouldn’t believe you. They have been turning up for 10 or 15 years every day, without fail nine to five.
“”Quite a few communities have success stories under their belt. What I find really frustrating is I can’t media to report these things. If there is a brawl going on out a Port Keats the electronic media will be out there with helicopters and television cameras blazing. If you want to take them out and say come and have a look at this, they say Nope.”
The media needed to help breakdown stereotypes of Aborigines as “”layabout drunks.” It was just not the case.
“”The majority of Aboriginal people do not drink,” he said. “”I can prove that to you on the stats. However, the blackfella who drinks really drinks; its seems to be one extreme or the other.
“”You’ve really got to admire when a bloke whose been a real boozer out on the communities and he’s stopped. Incredible. No comfort of AA or detoxification centres in a nice white-washed hospital. No-one to hold your hand while you went through the DTs out in the scrub.”
What about Aboriginal employment in the public sector?
“”I employ over 25 per cent of Aboriginal people in Education,” he said. “”In Treasury would be struggling to find anyone for the very obvious reason that you would need an honours economics degree to be sitting at one of the desks. And Aboriginal people have not seen that as a priority to carve a career out in the financial management of the state. But where they have seen an area where they can become involved as a teacher or a health-care worker they’ve grabbed it with both hands.
“”There’s some good news to be told up here about Aboriginal self-determination.”