Professor Mick Dodson is spot on (Dodson leads education drive, February 18, p3). Twelve months ago we had the hollow symbolism of the apology. Now we've cooled off, what's happened? Nothing. So let's back Dodson up by doing something immediately practical, as spelt out below.
I was working on an isolated Northern Territory cattle station in early 1961 when enlightened owners decided to build a school and supply a teacher, uniforms and hot showers for the 30 or so school-aged children of their Aboriginal workers. Come November, the end of mustering and time for the annual month-long walkabout, the children jacked up and refused to go they preferred school.
In May 1940, in Britain's darkest hour, Winston Churchill, alarmed at sluggish aircraft production, broke up the Air Ministry and created a new Ministry of Aircraft Production under the control of media magnate Lord Beaverbrook. Recruiting his own people, using non-Public Service methods, keeping few records, conducting business largely over the phone, leaving many jobs undefined, favouring crisis management, personal intervention and willpower, he doubled fighter production in four months.
Learn two things from these examples. First, Aboriginal children, given the appropriate learning environment, will respond with enthusiasm, even if it means separation from their parents. Second, an imaginative, vigorous and radical approach can often achieve results unobtainable through normal, stultifying public service due process.
So let's immediately exploit these examples in the Northern Territory. Forget scoping studies, conferences, reviews, inquiries, consultation and other bureaucratic impedimenta.
Just find a large area of bush just outside Darwin, preferably on a river dump a pile of demountables or tents, or both, and set up a boarding school for boys. Give the children school uniforms, hot showers, three meals a day, stacks of sports, regular trips to the nearest swimming hole the sort of activities boarding schools usually have. Attendance will be with parents' permission, pupils will complete a school year before returning to their communities, the government will pay travel expenses for the children plus one trip mid-year for parents, who will stay at the school for two days as observers.
Each group of 30 or so children will have an elderly Aboriginal woman as a ''house mother''. Teachers needn't arrive dripping with academic or other education qualifications, just display enthusiasm and imagination leavened with commonsense. First priority would be literacy, with reading taught phonetically. Once children have learnt the basics and realise they can teach themselves, they will be empowered and other subjects will be easier.
If teachers or teachers' aides are hard to come by there are enough grey nomads, experienced and wanting to keep their neurones oiled, who probably wouldn't mind doing a few weeks' voluntary work for board and lodging in an interesting, usefully progressive environment.
Staff should be a mix of Aboriginal and whatever. To kick the whole thing off, Dodson could use his influence to be a roving ambassador for the project among Aboriginal communities, explaining its aims and encouraging parents to send their children.
Meanwhile, a mover-shaker administrator with pull and experience in handling unusually difficult situations where rules have to be improvised, minds flexible and dullard obstructionist bureaucrats overcome, is needed. An ex-serviceman/woman say, someone along the lines of an Alan Stretton or Peter Cosgrove.
The principal should be a maverick Noel Pearson-type. Ignore innovation-phobic, hand-wringing so-called Aboriginal leaders and white luvvies whose skills are best confined to attending conferences, writing strategic papers and demanding money. And keep consulting with locals to a bare minimum 40 years of consultations have produced practically bugger all, a shining exception being Fred Hollows.
Funding? Rob less worthy indigenous programs, get mining industry sponsorship for some courses, raid the ridiculous travel perks given to serving and retired MPs call it a practical apology. Ask for public donations for a truly public school, with children safe from abuse and in a protective learning environment. Call it practical reconciliation.
Further details I leave to the go-getters. Just get it started. Now. Our indigenous brethren deserve it, Dodson and many others want it, Kevin Rudd needs it to demonstrate he isn't all talk.
Bill Deane is a regular Canberra Times book reviewer and an occasional feature writer.
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