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The Northern Territory's bilingual education programmes, in which local Australian Aboriginal languages and English were used side by side in a minority of Aboriginal primary schools in remote northern Australia, came into being in 1973 under the broader federal government policy imprimatur of ‘self-determination’ for Indigenous Australians. These programmes enjoyed considerable support from Indigenous Australian communities, until 1998 when the Northern Territory Government passed legislation to axe these programmes. This ran counter to the articulated wishes of the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal community members and Aboriginal school staff in affected communities. The authorities' stated reason for the closure of these programmes was that of the putative ‘poor standards in English literacy’ in bilingual schools, in comparison with English-only Aboriginal schools, although no evidence has ever been proffered to support such a claim. Since the official closure of the programmes, some of the schools that were formerly bilingual have been attempting to ‘go it alone’ to keep their bilingual education programmes operational. This is however a difficult task given that the bilingual education programmes are no longer state-sanctioned. Supporters of the former Indigenous Australian bilingual education programmes perceive the current emphasis on a monolingual curriculum in English in Indigenous primary schools in the Northern Territory schools as a denial of the human rights of significant numbers of Aboriginal children. In this paper the reasons why Indigenous communities wish to retain these programmes are outlined and it is explained that the lack of official support for these programmes is a long-term phenomenon, rather than a recent development.
