The name is absent

277

examined ’’the aspirations, motives, behaviour of all participating
groups”, of the Aborigines and of the mission staff, as well as
station owners. He argued that the lack of communication between
the Aborigines and mission staff was a powerful support for each
group in its theorizing about its activities and its maintenance
of separate identities.

In the case of Strelley, the staff are employed by the marrngu,
The former know clearly that it is the marrngu who formulate
policy. White staff are employed for a specific purpose, to exercise
their teaching function. The role of social worker, or of the
socializing agent so often confused with the role of the teacher
in mainstream society, is not their role.

In order to be part of this situation, the staff must enter
into a view of reality that attempts to adopt, for that situation,
the ethnocentrism of the marrngu themselves, a reversal of the
situation where the dominant group is Anglo-Saxon and expects other
groups to become assimilated into their particular ^ethnocentric
view.’

However, concepts such as self-determination and independence
are abstractions given different meanings, in theory and practice, by
■■
government agencies, new type secular ’missionaries’ from among white
people and the Aboriginal people themselves. It is likely, perhaps
inescapable, that the Strelley ’world' will be influenced by the
interaction of white staff, just as, undeniably, the interaction with
the Aboriginal people subtly changes the ’world’ of theorizing with
which individual white staff interact to form their identity.

The continuation of the school, with its role of strengthening
self-determination, is dependent upon the selection of committed,
sensitive, stable staff able not only to survive, but to grow personally
through the pressures inherent in the situation they have undertaken.

It has been posited aboveɪ that education in contemporary society
must be viewed as located within the conceptualisation of Australia
as a multi-cultural country.

See p.145.

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