Norma Ingram is a Wiradjuri woman who has been prominent in Indigenous affairs in Australia for several decades. She was the first administrator of Murawina, a pre school set up specifically for inner city Aboriginal children in 1973. Murawina was one amongst several Indigenous organisations established by the radical black political movement of the early 1970s.
Norma talks about the political background in 1970s and the general educational philosophy of Murawina, There was no model for Murawina and the example of a Maori playgroup was unsuitable for the long day care and other support that Aboriginal mothers needed. Mothers who ran Murawina were initially untrained but funding for wages was gained from the Whitlam Labor Government, and teacher training and other skills, such as bus driving, encouraged. Murawina was not an offshoot of the Women’s Liberation Movement but rather a function of the equality and distinction between women’s and men’s business in Aboriginal society. Norma reflects on the early ‘70s as exciting, energising times attributable to an emerging generation of young, educated Aboriginal people whose urban life freed them from the intimidation experienced by their elders who lived on missions.
In the excerpt Ms Ingram talks about the pre-school readers that were developed at Murawina as part of a culturally appropriate programme.
That was part of a whole programme of us looking at, again, that cultural aspect and cultural learning, where we wanted to have some resources that reflected Aboriginal Australians, rather than Mary, Jack and Jane, ‘The Cow’s Jumped Over the Moon’ and all of those readers. We wanted to have our own readers, and we wanted to have our own jigsaw puzzles. With the jigsaw puzzles, for example, the prisoners made the jigsaws for us and so it had kangaroos and Aboriginal faces instead of non-Aboriginal faces. And the readers were about our children in the centre. So, we focused on what the children were actually doing at the preschool and also in their home; and so it was about the children themselves, so they can see real people rather than those stories that you get from Europe. So, we wanted to develop our own Aboriginal stories. One of those readers, for example, was about Margaret who was the bus driver – and so it was a picture of the person on the left page and on the right page was print. So, you know, “This is Margaret. Margaret is driving the bus”. And so they look at the picture and then they read the words. We were very proud of those readers.
