In the 2011 census (ABS, 2011) there were 89 Aboriginal people recorded as residing in Ipmangker (and 6 non-Indigenous, who were likely the station operators). Like the Aboriginal population all over Australia, it is a young demographic, with 80% of people under the age of 30. As of my fieldwork period (2009-2011) most of the residents are Alyawarr people. There is also one senior Kaytetye man, and a family with Warlpiri ties. Close family relationships extend to nearby Ali Curung (a mixed Warlpiri,
Warumungu, Alyawarr and Kaytetye community 30kms to the west), Canteen Creek and Epenarra, as well as across the Alyawarr heartland including Ampilatwatja (a mainly Alyawarr community of 350 people, 110 kms to the south-east) and Arlparra (also known as the Utopia homelands, 120 kms to the south) and as far afield as Alpurrurulam (300 kms to the west, close to the Queensland border). Travel to and from these other locals is reasonably frequent: including for the purposes of sports weekends, heritage and land council work (e.g. mapping sites, governance meetings), clinic visits and personal visits. Two women who have married in to the community are from the Kimberley, WA, and their families have spent some several extended periods
75 visiting back there. Ipmangker is therefore a community within a larger network of communities with a great deal of shared cultural and linguistic practices.
As of 2011, there were 12 separate inhabited dwellings at Ipmangker, and a few sheds. Each household is the main residence of one extended family unit. According to the 2011 Census (ABS, 2011) 79% of these dwellings were in need of a least 1 extra
bedroom. Each house has a veranda and yard, and several have bough shelters. Most of the home recordings took place in the bough shelter of one particular house (occupied by the great-grandmother of some of the focus children), although other shady spots around the community were also utilised. During one field trip there were considerable renovations being undertaken on several of the homes, during which time the occupants would shift around into other premises. As of 2011, 9 of the houses have broadband internet as part of a trial run by Swinburne University investigating internet use in remote locations (Rennie et al 2016).
Today the station runs with fewer hands than it did in the early days when the
Aboriginal population provided the main workforce in the burgeoning pastoral industry across the Territory. The men of Ipmangker community take on seasonal labouring and stockman work at the station, although there is not full-time work available. Ipmangker Community residents still interact on a daily basis with the station owners and
managers via the small store run by the station. The store is a for-profit business (as opposed to community-run stores that operate at other locations such as Ali Curung) and provides basic groceries, fuel, as well as a range of homewares, appliances, clothing and other goods requested by community residents. Since the Federal Government Intervention in the Northern Territory these retail transactions have taken on a greater level of administration, which requires the station manager to be more intimately involved in the financial affairs of community residents. The station store also caters to the occasional passers-by, and the station also provides short-term donga-style
accommodation to visitors to the community (such as school support personnel). It also maintains a landing strip, which is sometimes used by government visitors.
The small government primary school is set off from the community, just a short walk through the scrub. It caters to children from ages 4 to 12, with two multi-aged classes: lower primary (5-8 years old) and upper primary years 8-11 years). It is a ‘two-teacher
76 school’ (with additional teaching assistant positions, see below), although over the period of my field trips staffing allocation varied somewhat (see below). There were around 30 children officially enrolled and attendance levels vary mainly depending on residence in the community. Most children who are residing in the community attend school on a daily basis, sometimes with the encouragement of the teacher-principal and the teaching assistant (TA) bringing the school ‘Troopie’ (a type of 4WD people carrier) to collect them. The school also hosts a Mobile Preschool, which operates sporadically and relies on centralised support delivered out of Tennant Creek.
Students must live away from the community to attend secondary school. The closest secondary school is Tennant Creek, but many of the young people opt to board in Darwin. In the 2011 census, 13 Indigenous adults then residing in the community reported having completed year 12 (ABS 2011).
English is the main language of instruction at the school. There is not currently an Alyawarr language or culture program of any variety. According to community members there have at times been such programs, and the elders have participated by coming to the school, telling stories in Alyawarr, and going on bush trips with the children. The school has also reportedly had Alyawarr literacy materials, such as readers, although the staff during my visits were unaware if they were still held by the school. I occasionally supported some one-off cultural/language lessons during my visits, and provided the schools with some Alyawarr resources.
During my field trips there were different staff each time:
Preliminary trip, Sept 2009: One teaching principal was residing on site in the department house, and a second teacher was travelling in daily from Ali Curung. Field trip 1, May 2010: One acting-teaching principal was living on site, teaching upper years. The other non-permanent teacher was living in Ali Curung and commuting daily as the lower primary teacher. The teachers holding permanent placements at Murray
Downs were working in Tennant Creek9. Prior to their departure they had been at
Murray Downs school for approximately 12 months. In the immediate wake of their
9 The NT Education Department has a system that allows permanent positions to be held for extended periods while a teacher takes leave or is seconded to other roles.
77 secondment to Tennant Creek, the school was staffed with a series of casual teachers out of Ali Curung and Tennant Creek. It is quite common in the Northern Territory for teachers to stay at schools for relatively short periods of time.
Field trip 2, Oct-Nov 2010: One acting principal was living in Ali Curung and
commuting in most days. A married couple were residing in the newly built teachers’ house on site. One was the upper primary teacher and the other was the lower primary. The non-permanent teacher from May’s trip was now acting in an adjunct position, giving release time and supporting extra literacy classes. She was residing on site, but frequently commuted to Ali Curung to teach there.
Field trip 3, May 2011: New permanent teachers had been in place since the beginning of the year. They were residing on site, and one was the Teaching Principal in charge of the upper years class, and the other teaches lower primary. Another teacher was residing in the other house and providing release support at Murray Downs school and at Ali Curung. This arrangement lasted for the whole year, and new staff arrived in 2012. In the context of such as small school, this brief description of the comings and goings of school personnel already indicates that the students of Murray Downs primary school experience educational delivery of a fairly inconstant variety. The students must
constantly become accustomed to new faces at the front of the room, both in day-to-day teaching and specific support personnel. The main source of continuity in the classroom is therefore the presence of teaching assistants (TAs). The teaching assistants in Murray Downs school are all Indigenous residents of the community who have achieved or are in the process of achieving formal qualification through in-service training provided by the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE) office in Tennant Creek. A support person from BIITE visited the TAs and worked with them on a regular basis, to enable them to complete assignments and gain certificate-level qualification. At the time of the field trips there were three community members working as TAs, at different levels of qualification, and these remained consistent over all my visits. In the recent past this number has been much higher.
78 4.3 Language Use
Language use in Ipmangker is highly dynamic. The language spoken on a daily basis by most people under the age of 30 (80% of the population) is Alyawarr English. The main traditional Australian language spoken is Alyawarr, but it is also possible to hear
Kaytetye and Warlpiri being spoken by older people. Other Arandic languages and even Warumungu may also be brought in by visitors at special events. Work crews from Ali Curung may have the odd younger Warlpiri speaker.
Alyawarr English, the first language of the children in this study, is spoken by people under the age of around 30 years. While I have above described Ipmangker as well- networked into a larger set of communities (many of which have Alyawarr as the traditional language), there is anecdotal evidence that Alyawarr English is a language that has germinated locally in Ipmangker. One research assistant described a couple of funny incidents where family telephoning in from Utopia (another Alyawarr-speaking area) would attempt to speak in a more Ipmangker “style”, much to the bemusement of the call recipient. She was also fairly adamant that people did not speak Alyawarr English in neighbouring Ali Curung (a large community with several languages) or Ampilatwatja (a community where Alyawarr is still strong). However, there has been little investigation of the extent to which non-traditional languages are spoken in these communities, or in the more distant traditional Alyawarr communities where young people have been said to have switched to a contact language, such as Lake Nash, Epenarra (Moses & Wigglesworth 2008) and Canteen Creek. Nor has the possible relatedness of such varieties to Alyawarr English been formally evaluated. It may well be that across these sites, and indeed possibly extending out of Alyawarr country into Tennant Creek (per ‘Wumpurrarni English’ described by Disbray 2008a,b), the use of English-lexified varieties constitutes something of a continuum.
The 2011 census figures (ABS 2011) reveal an interesting pattern of language identification: all Ipmangker residents were reported as speaking an “Australian
Indigenous Language” at home, and none reported speaking “English only”. “Australian Indigenous Language” might refer to Alyawarr, in which case the receptive proficiency of the children is thought sufficient to qualify them as language ‘speakers’ (I have not observed anyone under the age of 15 able to have a conversation in straight Alyawarr,
79 though the receptive capacity appears to be high). Alternatively, residents are
identifying their variety of English as a ‘modern Australian Indigenous Language’, which, although matching the perspective I take, seems unlikely to me since it was always placed in the realm of ‘English’ rather than ‘Alyawarr’. I infer this from
discussions in which I asked about whether the children in Ipmangker speak Alyawarr: the response from adults would universally state ‘no, they just speak English’ (referring to the variety I’m calling Alyawarr English). This should not be understood as speakers not recognising the difference between SAE and AlyE: when this was the focus of discussion SAE could be referred to as ‘whitefella English’ to draw the comparison. 17 people reported speaking English “not well or not at all”. It would be interesting to know if this clustered around young children or older people, or some demographic feature unrelated to age. Most people (73) reported speaking English “well or very well”. Several varieties of Standard Australian English are spoken by non-Indigenous health workers, teachers, station managers and other community visitors, as well as
community members themselves. Several of the teachers over my visits have also spoken either English as a second language, or other national Englishes (such as South African English) as a first language. In addition, there are two sisters from Halls Creek who have married in to the community whose first language is Kimberley Kriol.