My primary school library has, I believe, most of the texts listed in threads about this topic: Baby Business, Young Dark Emu, Jandamarra, Sorry Day, Wilam etc. But what we lack, and what I am finding quite hard to find, is literature exploring the everyday lived experiences of students like mine. We have only one Aboriginal student in our school at the moment and her experience is very different to what we see reflected in a lot of the indigenous literature available. It was very interesting to hear Anita Heiss talking about this in the modules this week.

I think our collection offers a good range for supporting the cross-curricular priority and for including Aboriginal perspectives in the curriculum more broadly, but I notice they tend only to come out during NAIDOC week and that’s about all. This week, as I was sharing Jandamarra with year 5, an very valuable discussion occured because many of the students could not connect “warrior” with the Aboriginal people. They asked, “What were they fighting for?” It was not meant in a derogatory way, many of these students are recent immigrants and have no real concept of Aboriginal history or culture, but it pointed out to all of us in the room that we need to do much better in terms of helping the students to really understand the issues at play.

In my role as TL, I need to promote more of these resources around planning time and help our teachers to include Aboriginal perspectives more effectively. I don’t think it is too much to do with not having the resources available, more that they don’t know what to do with them.