ORIGINALLY from Walgett, Aunty Beth Lane clearly relishes her role in helping to revive the Indigenous languages and culture of communities around western NSW.
Aunty Beth is employed through TAFE Western’s Yarradamurra Centre and has been back in Coonamble running another intensive course for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to learn Gamilaroi (Kamilaroi, Gamilaaray … Aunty Beth tells us that the spelling doesn’t matter.)
According to Aunty Beth the group of around a dozen adults have “gone back to kindergarten” to be introduced to the intricacies of local language and culture.
The students attend classes over five nights and spend additional time on homework and logged on to a Moodle site.
“You can’t teach the language without the culture,” Aunty Beth said.
So apart from first finding out that the Gamilaroi had only 14 sounds in their ‘alphabet’, learning words and grasping the language structure [Sentences in Gamilaroi are composed using Subject – object – verb rather than subject – verb – object in English.], the students are also invited to understand cultural aspects of local traditional Indigenous life.
“We tell them about the different messages animals bring and we share some traditional bush foods and medicines,” Aunty Beth said.
Growing up in Walgett Beth Wright first learned Gamilaroi from her mother, although she says that at that time they only used words in isolation.
“If you were found speaking the language you could be taken away,” she said. “So people only spoke bits of the language for a long time.”
After twenty years in Walgett, Beth moved to Goodooga where she spent a further twenty years and started teaching language at the local Central School.
During that time she met and married John Lane and had three daughters.
They eventually moved to Dubbo and in 2010 she was offered the role as the first Aboriginal language teacher in NSW employed through TAFE.
She now teaches seven Indigenous languages across 15 communities in north west NSW.
“People are realising the value of language,” Aunty Beth said.
Coonamble is home to both the Weilwan and Gamilaraay nations so it can get complicated.
“There are issues in some communities like Coonamble about which language to teach.”
“It is up to the local Indigenous community to decide which language as well as who can learn and who can teach. In some areas, only Aboriginal people can learn the language. “It’s the community’s decision,” she said.
“We got permission from the community through the AECG,” she said. “We’re about connecting people with their culture. We find they’re losing their identities and learning the culture and language can help.”
This is the fourth course offered in Coonamble. “The first group were all Aboriginal people, and the second included a lot of teachers,” Aunty beth said.
“We also spent six months with a group from Castlereagh Industries,” she said
“This group is a mix of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.”
“It’s like preschool,” she said. “We just give them a platform to work from.”
