Bilingual Education, Translation and Sovereignty: Stories from the Literature Production Centres of Aboriginal Australia

In The Streets of Papunya: The Re-invention of Papunya Painting (2015), Vivien Johnson writes of a ‘Pintupi Luritja literature’ that grew from bilingual schoolbooks published by the Papunya Literature Production Centre (53). During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, such literature production centres were dotted through the Northern Territory, developed to support bilingual education programs in remote Aboriginal schools. Communities recorded stories in Aboriginal languages on cassettes, transcribed them orthographically, illustrated and published them. They also translated them into English for the benefit of non-Aboriginal language speakers working in the schools. Published on dyeline and other types of printing machines, twenty-eight literature production centres in the Northern Territory each produced from twenty to five hundred bilingual books (Christie et al ).¹ The centres supported a diversity of languages, from the island languages of Tiwi and Anindilyakwa to Gumatj and Dhuwaya on Arnhem Land to the desert languages of Arrernte, Pitjantjatjara and Warlpiri. Most of the literature production centres in the Northern Territory were run by the Northern Territory Education Department. Others were run by the Catholic Education sector and another was an independent school’s initiative at Yipirinya in Alice Springs. There were also a handful of literature production centres in Western Australia under Catholic Education Western Australia, while others developed within community-controlled schools and were supported by Aboriginal Independent Community Schools. Two of these latter literature production centres were developed in the highly politicised communities of Strelley and Nookanbah, where bilingual education was part of a drive for autonomy from the state government’s support for mining and pastoral interests over the claims of Aboriginal peoples. The publications produced by literature production centres include Dreaming stories, historical stories of first contact, hunting, the first sighting of airplanes, working with cattle, and in the Pilbara stories of Aboriginal people prospecting for minerals. These are the only written record of many of these stories that otherwise exist only as part of the oral culture of these communities.

The history of the illustrated literature movement is one of the transfer of stories and knowledge from one generation to another, and the continuity of storytelling as its context changes from oral to written mediums (Barton et al.; Heath; Kral Talk; Street). The concept of illustrated literature brings the concept of literature to this history, as it emerges from the practices of storytellers, orthographers, illustrators and translators who were engaged in developing children’s literacy. These workers were invested in the multilingual and multi-cultural as they processed knowledge from the oral to literate, the aural to visual. Local people became artists, publishers, literacy workers, transcribers, translators and writers (Disbray. ‘Evaluating’ 37). This collaborative dimension of illustrated literature offers an alternative literary history to one in which authors, texts and their reception have been defined by non-Indigenous publishing practices and by non-Aboriginal audiences (Freeman; Jones, ‘Australian’; Jones, Black). The illustrations that were part of these publications are also distinct from the Aboriginal art movement that developed for non-Aboriginal consumption. The books of remote Aboriginal literature centres were instead intended for a local, community-based and language specific readership, rather than for a broader public. The illustrated literature movement is part of a shift to a multi-modal Aboriginal literacy, extending pre-existing verbal arts forms (Kral et al.; Kral Talk; van Toorn). The distinct, creative content of these books addresses ‘the crucial point in defining Indigenous knowledges ... the recognition of their place-based locus of production and use in communities ethnically distinct and socio-historically distant from national centers of political and economic power’ (Menezes de Souza qtd. in O'Neill 3). While the books illuminate the historical and spiritual experiences of particular language communities they also belong to a history of bilingual education in remote Australian schools, broadening definitions of Aboriginal writing by emerging in highly local communities. Below I turn to books published by the Papunya Literature Production Centre and the Strelley Literature Production Centre as case studies of bilingual education, translation and literature. These books illuminate the multi-faceted significance of the illustrated literature movement in their collective production, intergenerational readership and content that is local in both its languages and its storytelling. Their translations into English also emphasise different aspects of their story’s significance according to readerships situated in different historical times.

In 1984, the Papunya Literature Production Centre published Yara Wanampitjarra (A Story about Wanampi the Giant Snake) by Charlotte Philipus Napurrula, with illustrations by Thomas Stevens. The story is written in Pintupi-Luritja and contains a translation into English on its back page. It is about Wanampi the giant snake from the Dreaming. The translation tells us that Wanampi lives ‘in the country to the west and stays in the salt lake country there.’ A man and his son travel a long way hunting, and the snake comes out of the ground and frightens them. They run away and make camp again, but ‘Once again Wanampi scared them in the night.’ When they arrive home, they tell people what they saw, ‘then they all decided to return back to the country they knew because Wanampi was too dangerous. They all moved back to their own country and they stayed there forever.’ Yara Wanampitjarra is one of around three hundred and fifty books published by the Papunya Literature Production Centre between 1978 and 1990, alongside calendars, the community newsletter Tjakulpa, and an archive of drawings and photographs.² Yara Wanampitjarra is not only a story in Pintupi-Luritja. It is also illustrated, with pictures that bring the snake to life as it rises up out of the earth to threaten the man and boy whose figures sit diminutively upon the page. The illustrations can in part be seen as a pedagogical device, as they assist both children and adults at Papunya learning to read in their first language.

At Papunya, the book illustrations are also part of a well-documented art history. The Central and Western Desert dot painting movement began there in 1971, not long before the beginnings of the Literature Production Centre. As the Centre produced books, Papunya Tula Artists was supporting artists in their careers, and there was a relationship between these artists and those working there as storytellers and illustrators. Philipus, the author of Yara Wanampitjarra, is the eldest daughter of Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, one of the first dot painters. A prolific illustrator of Papunya’s books, Dennis Nelson, is the son of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, one of the most innovative of the early Papunya painters. Nelson’s illustrations recently featured in Wangka Walytja, an exhibition about the Papunya Literature Production Centre held at the Papunya Tjupi art centre in Papunya in 2024 and at the Library and Archives of the Northern Territory in Darwin in early 2025 (Haskin). He recalls that:

Yara irrititja, ngaatja yara irrititja Ilipilitjarra, yirupulayini para ankupayi katuwana tjana nyangu. Anangu Tjuta ngurangka nyinanyi. Anangu tjutangku tjana ngurrpa nyanganyi palulangurru tjana ngulurringu. Tjana kulinu mamuku yirupulayni. Tjana kumpira nyananyi anta palulangurru kamalatjarra tjutalpi mayananyi, whitefellas and maru Anangu, waltja tjananya nyangu ngurrangka nyinaningka. Mirrangu alajti tjananya... kaamatuwa, eyyy!.. tjana kulinu wangka walytja.

These old stories, it was good we used to make them at the school, we collected and printed them alongside pictures for people to see. That old one, little book we made they wrote it down this one old story, this one’s an old story about Ilpili and an aeroplane flying around in the sky. This mob saw it, all of these Anangu in their homeland. They didn’t know what it was they were seeing and became frightened. They thought the aeroplane was a monster, they hid from it. It was after that people came on camels. White fellas and black fellas, their family. They saw them all staying in their homeland. They called out and the people heard them, their family speaking their language. (‘Wangka’)

The title of the book Nelson is speaking about is Ngayulu Kulinu Mamu (1988) (translated as I Thought It Was a Devil). The story of the book, about the Anangu’s first sight of an aeroplane, was told by his father, Warangkula, while Nelson illustrated it. These two examples from Papunya, one an ancestral Dreaming story of the Wanampi and the other a contemporary history of the first sight of an aeroplane, are two of many different kinds of stories published by the Papunya Literature Production Centre.

In 2024 a second exhibition drawing upon the illustrated literature movement opened at the John Curtin Gallery in Perth.³ The Strelley Mob drew upon the archives of the Strelley Literature Production Centre and its publications from the 1970s to the 1990s.⁴ It also featured animations made from the illustrations, with new translations of stories by Nyangumarta Elders Barbara Hale and Bruce Thomas. Hale was also commissioned to make new translations for a forthcoming book of children’s stories by Strelley storyteller and illustrator Solomon Cocky (Cocky Stories). ‘Warla Yirrirni Pirirrilu’ (The Man Saw the Lake) was originally published in the 1982 anthology Yarrarna Mangunyrrangu Yimpirni Solomonju (Again Stories Told by Solomon) and tells the story of a man who is travelling beside a lake. The stones by the lake are sacred and should not be touched. In this first, 1982 translation, the man chases a goanna, and upon grabbing it ‘changed into a rock because of the Law and stays on the edge of the lake’ (Yarrarna). This translation of the story into English was done by the Nyangumarta linguist, Elder and Barbara’s father, Monty Hale, who had learned to transcribe Nyangumarta while working on pastoral stations. Supported by linguist Inge Kral, the second 2024 translation was done by Barbara Hale, Monty’s daughter, who is today the leading Nyangumarta linguist. The translation was used for an animated version of the story that is being exhibited as part of The Strelley Mob exhibition.⁵ The circumstances of this new translation are very different, as Barbara was part of a team of people developing animations and translations for a general public. Readers of Monty Hale’s first translation were more limited, largely consisting of teachers who had English as their first language, and who were working in the schools set up at Strelley and in various other stations and outstations. This community of teachers was tight-knit, selected for their commitment not only to teaching but to respecting the traditional and political values of the Strelley community. As such, there was less pressure on the first translation that functioned only to explain the story to a limited readership for non-Nyangumarta teachers.

The second, 2024 translation is destined for a wider readership, one that should not be assumed to share the values of the Strelley community. I want to suggest that Barbara’s new, 2024 translation is conscious of this different audience. While the 1982 translation refers to the ‘Dreamtime (Laws),’ and subsequently to the ‘Law’, the 2024 translation refers instead to the ‘Creation Time’ (Cocky Stories 30-33). The ending of the 2024 version is also different, as the man grabs the goanna but does not turn into a rock. This translation ends by insisting that ‘That lake that was there all the time. All those stones from the Creation Time are still there by the side of the lake to this day. And still no-one can touch them or take them. We believe this to be true’ (Cocky Stories 33). Monty’s 1982 emphasis upon ‘Law’ is for a readership of teachers who have signed a declaration before coming to work in the Strelley School system that they will not become a part of or interfere with the workings of traditional Law. The emphasis in Barbara’s 2024 translation is on the lake and the rocks, rather than the man. The poetic image that concludes the story lies in these features of the land that have persisted since the Creation Time, and the persistence of ‘we’ Aboriginal people who believe in the significance of this land. In the initial translation, the poetic image lies instead in the man who remains on the ‘edge of the lake’, and who has become a part of the country. The emphasis has changed, and this shift signals something of the historical shifts through which Nyangumarta speakers, as well as Aboriginal people more generally, have endured since the 1980s.

It is possible to interpret Barbara’s emphasis on the country and on ‘Creation Time’ as symptomatic of demands on Aboriginal people to prove their association with their Countries since the Native Title Act of 1993. During the following decades, Aboriginal people have been part of long running legal cases for Native Title, while in the Pilbara they are in constant negotiation and renegotiation with mining companies over the use of land. Barbara and other First Nations peoples in the Pilbara are part of Indigenous organisations, and spend time in meetings with lawyers, anthropologists and archaeologists, in which they articulate their connection to Country and their personal, familial and people’s histories. Such cases were not part of the Pilbara’s Aboriginal world until after the Native Title Act of 1993. Rather than mythological Dreaming figures, Barbara now translates the story to emphasise this significance of Country.

The educational context for translating Solomon’s stories has also shifted since the initial 1982 publication of ‘Warla Yirrirni Pirirrilu’. Today, illustrated literature centres are no longer in operation in remote communities, while there has been a concerted effort to include Indigenous content within Australian schools, including in various iterations of the national school curriculum. Collaboration between educational institutions and Aboriginal educators has brought a range of opportunities to foster cultural sovereignty and to share Indigenous knowledge in mainstream cultural and educational settings (Nakata 9). There has also been a campaign to bring Indigenous students into contact with their own culture and history within school settings. Educator Mary Graham emphasises the way that education can facilitate identity by connecting these students to country, including ‘creating stories about and artistic expressions of the relevant sites, protecting them from damage, and maintaining continuity with them throughout the formative years of childhood and on into adulthood.’ This is precisely the context within which illustrated literature centres published their books, and yet today, and in spite of efforts to Indigenise the Australian curriculum, they are no longer being created or used in schools because of the lack of support for bilingual education. Barbara’s emphasis upon identity, language and Country in her new translation of ‘Warla Yirrirni Pirirrilu’ is for readers outside of the Strelley community, rather than for those within it.

In The Translation Zone (2006), Emily Apter warns against the cultural essentialism that studies of Indigenous languages can bring about, and the reification of minor languages in terms of their immanent extinction, rather than as dynamic zones of semantic adaptation and change (4–6). Although the Nyangumarta transcription of Solomon’s ‘Warla Yirrirni Pirirrilu’ remains the same, its translation into English demonstrates something of this dynamism, the intercultural traffic by which a First Nations story reveals the interpretive possibilities that lie within it. These changing possibilities, I want to argue, are defined by the context for these two translations, and more specifically by its translators, Monty and Barbara, anticipating the subject position of the reader. Barbara’s translation reflects a decolonising approach as her emphasis upon Country puts the case for the sovereignty of Aboriginal people in relation to this Country (Corr 177; Phillips and Archer-Lean). In this sense Barbara’s translation reflects the values of Strelley School, where new generations of Nyangumarta speakers were educated, and that set out to host the transmission of sovereign identity through transcription and publication. The School’s purchase of a pastoral lease in 1972 was an effort to reoccupy Country after the 1946 Pilbara Strike led to a group of Aboriginal people achieving autonomy from the state. The Strelley community are descendants of these strikers who walked off pastoral stations in and after 1946, and who adopted Nyangumarta as their lingua franca among various camps that achieved economic independence during the 1950s and 1960s. The strikers made a living from alluvial mining, pastoralism, gathering pearl shells and grass seed. Strelley was a pastoral station purchased by this collective of economically self-sufficient strikers. It was unlike other Aboriginal communities of the 1970s as it was not established on the site of an old mission or government settlement, or purchased with government funding. They established an independent school at Strelley in 1976, but this was not the first time they had set out to formally educate the children of the community. During the 1950s and 1960s they began to educate their children in camp schools, emphasising the importance of training them to carry on their political struggle (Scrimgeour 341–60). The Strelley Literature Production Centre followed the school’s establishment, with books printed for use under the bough shelters that were the first classrooms (McLeod 97-104). In the mid-1980s, just after the publication of ‘Warla Yirrirni Pirirrilu’, Snowy Jittermarra expressed something of the ongoing politics of the strike community by saying that ‘We were on strike all the way – and we’re still in the strike today. We’re on strike now’ (How). From this political point of view, the two translations of the story address two different readerships, but maintain a continuity in their expression of the Strelley community’s sovereignty. As one member of the Strelley school board is quoted as saying, ‘Now we learn all this literacy, we win the country back’ (Liberman 141). Barbara and Monty’s translations are part of an epistemically privileged knowledge specific to their Indigenous community.

Strelley makes an excellent case study for thinking through the cultural interface of literature production centres. In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s remote schools employed settler teachers to put two-way education in place. The earliest recorded description of two-way education comes from Pincher Nyurrmiyarri at Wattie Creek, near Wave Hill in the Northern Territory where The Wave Hill Walk-Off had taken place in 1966. Nyurrmiyarri describes the aims of two-way schooling as a means of fairly representing both Aboriginal and Western culture, of developing a spirit of exchange between these cultures, and to facilitate good relations between older and younger generations (Harris 13). Two-way education is ‘an underlying model of bilingual/bicultural education in which power is shared, the curriculum is balanced, the existence of competing knowledge systems is acknowledged and the program is related to language use and cultural observances in the community’ (Devlin). Local schools are able to choose the content of their education, and in reading books produced in their own language by members of their community, they experience positive stories relevant to their own lifeworld. As Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes, stories about Indigenous people ‘remind us of the greatness of where we came from as well as the greatness of who we’re meant to be’ (qtd. in Stubbs et al). Two-way schooling works for the benefit of Aboriginal communities by recognising that there are many profound differences between remote people and mainstream Australia, and work with this difference rather than to erase it (Disbray ‘Evaluating’; Handbook for Teachers; Handbook for Bilingual Teachers; Harris).

The bilingual language program at Strelley School came about as a result of the collaboration between Monty and two settler teachers working at the school, Gwen Bucknall and her husband John Bucknall. The Bucknalls worked closely with Monty and the artist Jim Wigley in establishing the Strelley Literature Production Centre and its publishing program. The collaborative mode of production within Literature Production Centres and their ongoing ownership by their communities is an example of the ‘cultural credibility’ that Gooreng Gooreng and Waka Waka scholar Sandra Phillips advocates for in the publishing of Indigenous stories for children (149). Literature centres also represent some of the first transpositions of stories into a combination of alphabetic literacy and figurative imagery. This use of Aboriginal languages was preceded by Bible story publishing programs, and by educational programs run in communities that set out to teach Aboriginal people to read and write. Yet these programs were never as substantial or grounded in remote communities as the school-based literature centres, that determined their own subjects for storytelling and involved multiple community members. Elders who now managed their own communities and schools learned to write and teach in their own languages to train future generations of local teachers.

While each literature centre produced books relevant to their own community, history and sense of what stories were important to tell, they also entertained relationships with each other and hosted different language communities. During the 1970s the Strelley community hosted Manyjilyjarra families who later moved back to the Western Desert, where they established the Martu communities of Parnngurr and Punmu. While they lived at Strelley, these families produced books in Manyjilyjarra, that were later used at the Punmu school. Books were also translated between remote languages. The Papunya Literature Production Centre shared publication materials with the literature centre at Yeundumu. The earliest example of these at Papunya was Mayitjarrakamu Kukatjarra Yara (Hunting and Food Gathering in the Old Days), by Masie Napaltjarri Kitson and Glorine Nungarrayi Martin. It was translated by Charlotte Phillipus Napurrula from Pintupi into Warlpiri in 1982 (with an accompanying English translation) and published by the Warlpiri Literature Production Centre. Yulytja Tjuta, written by Jeannie Egan Nungarrayi and illustrated by June Napanangka, was translated from the Warlpiri by Charlotte Phillipus and published by the Papunya Literature Production Centre in September, 1982. Its frontispiece thanks Yuendumu School ‘for letting us use their story and pictures.’ After teachers from Strelley visited the Arnhem Land island of Milingimbi to see how the school there was run, Nyungu Warrarn Ngalypa (This is Good Country, 1977) was published by the Milingimbi Literature Production Centre, and featured stories in both Nyangumarta and Gupapunyngu. During such visits authors, language workers and teachers learned from each other’s schools and literature centers. Such networks and co-operative production illuminate the way that literature centres, while focused on their own language communities, were part of a wider movement of art, education and translation taking place in remote Australia during the final decades of the twentieth century. The independence of these publications, their power to illuminate community histories, is balanced by this sense in which they represented distinctive modes of storytelling. These books emerge from multi-lingual, multimodal and transcultural communities. Warlpiri educator Tess Ross reports that in Yuendumu people listen on the radio to ‘Anmatjerre, Pintupi, Lurija, Pitjantjatjara, whatever languages are spoken in NT, in other communities, out in the desert. For desert people, we can understand each other . . .’ (Disbray ‘Spaces,’ 326). At Strelley many languages apart from Nyangumarta were spoken, especially Manyjilyjarra and Kukatja. The production of bilingual literature across Australia was part of this multilingual context, as people moved between communities and languages as part of their lives. The exchange between community language centres, of linguists, storytellers and staff, is evidence of a wider ecology of literary production, in which people learned from each other. This learning extended from the operation of printing presses to systems of transcription and translation, as linguists in remote schools worked with established orthographies and developed new ones to best capture the stories of Elders.

While literature production centres were once alive with translation and literary production, resources have since been withdrawn from Northern Territory bilingual education programs. Once common in remote communities, literature production was part of ‘two-way’ education that gave community members some control over the education of their children and aimed to keep language and culture strong (Hartman and Henderson; Walton and Eggington). In 1998, the Federal government announced the end of its support for bilingual education. This withdrawal of support was carried out in spite of the Collins Review of Education in the Northern Territory, released the year after the announcement, that recommended continued support for two-way learning in schools (Learning). Though the NT bilingual program survived into the 2000s in many schools, it was undermined by a government that was committed to single language education. Bilingual education programs in the Pintupi-Luritja region had ceased by 2005, as had literature production. Since the 1998 crisis, support for bilingual education in the Northern Territory has largely been in the hands of local principals and teachers, waxing and waning with staff confidence and will to continue dedicated learning programs (Devlin, Disbray and Friedman Devlin, 2017). In 2008, a federal policy decreed that the first four hours of every school in the Northern Territory must be taught in English, delivering a further blow to the few remaining programs (Simpson, Caffery and McConvell, 2010). At the time of writing, the only publicly funded bilingual education program in the Northern Territory, and possibly Australia, is Yirrkala School in Arnhem Land. The more recent 2012 review of Indigenous education acknowledged that education in children's first languages ‘contribute[s] to identity formation, are important elements in student engagement, help children feel at home in the school environment and have educational value including instrumental benefits in learning English’ (Wilson 11). Arguments for bilingual education typically focus upon maintaining the well-being of people in remote communities, especially children (Devlin; Devlin et al.; Disbray, ‘Evaluating’; Disbray, ‘Realising’; Disbray, ‘Spaces’; Harris et al; Simpson et al.)These developments have left archives of illustrated literature languishing in remote community schools, as the support for bi-lingual education deprives them of the context within which they might be used. Without continuing publication, these books are less and less part of living traditions within which they might acquire new relevance to students of first languages.

Bilingual education focuses upon language preservation, typically using elderly speakers who have a broad vocabulary as well as an understanding of the more complex aspects of the way their languages function. They are a way of bringing Elders into education. The illustrated literature movement and the bilingual school program that supported it were, in retrospect, a high point for the preservation of endangered Aboriginal languages. Since then, vernacular languages have become more commonly spoken as the ‘high’ language that was spoken before colonisation becomes more difficult to preserve. Scholars have suggested that this focus upon preserving ‘high’ languages has been at the price of ‘high-level research into the use of vernacular in Indigenous schools’ (Learning 130). Creolisation between Aboriginal languages has not been a site for the production of literature. These newer, living languages of remote communities may well also be part of a reimagined literature production, as such adaptations of language lend themselves to storytelling. Rather than focusing upon preserving and reconstructing the ‘high’ language that was spoken in language communities, such creole languages may lend themselves to the softness of storytelling, its inclusive and relational qualities (Archer-Lean et al, 211–12). A new national curriculum for Aboriginal languages, the draft Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, sets out program options, including first languages teaching programs, but these options remain to be implemented (Disbray ‘Realising’; Disbray ‘Spaces’). Whether teaching high or creole languages, the history of illustrated literature programs in remote schools offers a powerful precedent for the teaching of first languages. Their transformation of literacy programs into literature is a model for aspirations for remote communities to maintain a level of sovereignty and to situate decolonial practices of storytelling within traditions that are their own. The exhibitions Wangka Walytja and The Strelley Mob turn to the archives of illustrated literature from Papunya and Strelley to advocate for a bilingual education that once thrived in remote Australia. They also offer lessons for Australian literary studies, that typically focuses upon Aboriginal literature in English rather than in first languages. The stories of the illustrated literature movement is a rich corpus not only for literary studies, but for historical and linguistic scholars, as they emerge from a distinct historical moment in Australian history and in the translation of Aboriginal languages.