A year ago I joined the board of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. In May, I went with the Foundation on a field trip to Melville Island, the largest of the Tiwi Islands. Melville has two primary schools and a secondary boarding school, Tiwi College, on the island. The main purpose of the trip was to run programs for both primary schools and the College. We were accompanied by singer and ILF ambassador Josh Pyke, and authors and illustrators Alison Lester, Gregg Dreise, Marc McBride and Karen Wyld.

Josh led song-writing classes and Alison helped kids create beautiful illustrations; at earlier ILF workshops, Alison had helped produce the delightful picture book, No Way Yirrikipay. Gregg ran workshops about Indigenous culture and introduced the Tiwi kids to boomerang painting – boomerangs weren’t ever used on Tiwi – and Marc, whose work draws heavily on mythology, taught nifty airbrush techniques to create impressive dragons. Karen’s creative writing workshops elicited some great ideas. Some of the students will travel to Melbourne in September to work with Penguin Random House to refine their ideas, and hopefully turn them into a publication. The fruits of a similar trip last year, to Sydney-based children’s publisher, Scholastic, will be published as Shallow in the Deep End this month. We set up ‘bookshops’ at each school and every student could choose two books to take home. It was lovely to see the excitement and pleasure on their faces as they chose.

The ILF’s support for literacy has three strands. The first, is to gift culturally and age appropriate books free of charge to over 250 remote communities around Australia – since the program began, over 200,000 books have been distributed. The second is Book Buzz, an early childhood literacy program. And the third is community publishing of books written and conceived by local communities, either in language or English.

I spoke to Ian Smith, the outgoing principal of Tiwi College, about the ILF and whether he thought its work was helping. ‘Indigenous education is a slow process; we have to deal with many complex cultural and social issues that don’t arise in an urban setting. Often kids growing up in remote communities don’t see the relevance of a traditional Western curriculum, especially boys. We have to learn how to engage them. We’ve loved having the ILF come in and run their programs.’ Ian spoke very passionately about the community publishing. ‘The community is so proud of the books that have come out of the program – it affects everyone.’ It was inspiring to meet vice principal Ailsa MacFie: Tiwi College have an arrangement with Melbourne’s Scotch whereby a group of Tiwi boys spend a week at Scotch and a group of Scotch boys spend a week at Tiwi. Ailsa was a Scotch teacher who brought up a group of boys; she was so inspired that she left Scotch and joined the Tiwi teaching staff. Ailsa, too, was very positive about the ILF. ‘We get a number of organisations wanting to come up here; there aren’t many that we value as much as the ILF.’ And it was good to meet Gladys Puruntatameri and Jessica Stass, two recent Tiwi graduates and former participants in the ILF’s community publishing program, who had returned to the college as staff members.

With the end of the financial year coming up, the Indigenous Literacy Foundation is a wonderful cause. You can donate here.

Mark Rubbo