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Colonisation: The Australian Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander People

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(Colonisation) The Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have lived on the Australian continent and Torres Strat Islands for thousands of years, they have ancestral roots dating back between fifty-two and sixty-one thousand years ago (Monroe, 2017), these peoples have such a strong bound with the lands they live on. The Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been living within the boundaries of the land they live on and have adjusted themselves to be better suited to the environment around them with no real foreign interference for thousands of years, no other cultures have done so well as Indigenous Australians (Denham, 1978). Since the colonisation of Europeans, many Australian Aboriginal and Torres …show more content…

Of the 250 original languages that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples used 160 of these languages are extinct, 70 of these are endanger of going extinct and there are 20 likely to survive for a short period of time (Walsh and Yallop, 2005). The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages were considered of less value in early colonisation era than that of their English counterparts, the government of that time period also enforced policies that discouraged the use of the original Australian languages through the education and employment policies (Walsh and Yallop, 2005). The Indigenous population of Australia was positively discouraged from speaking their traditional languages in public, they were made to feel ashamed for use of their languages, subsequently, some of the original Australian languages were phased out (Walsh and Yallop, 2005). The study by Footprints in Time: The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) of Indigenous Language Learning and Maintenance Among Young Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children suggest that there is a major loss of traditional language once a child moves from early childhood care in to a English base education system, proposing that there might be more …show more content…

The education section of the Closing the Gap policy focusing on the Numeracy and Literacy section, found that with the statistics from the NAPLAN showed most Indigenous Australian students were not on track to meet the requirements set in place by the policy, only year 9 numeracy is on track for all states and territories except the Northern Territory and that the Australian Capital Territory is the only one out of all the states or territories that has achieved the standards for literacy and numeracy for the 2016 NAPLAN scores (Closing the Gap, 2017). The Australian Governments policy also has put a focus on school attendance, however, there has been no significant change from 2014 to 2016 it has dropped from 83.5 per cent to 83.4 per cent, Australia wide for Indigenous students between Year 1 and Year 10 (Closing the Gap, 2017). There is significant difference between major cities and very remote areas with a difference of 86.3 per cent to 66.4 per cent for Indigenous Australian student attendance rates (Closing the Gap, 2017). In the report it was stated that regular school attendance leads to greater results

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