When literacy can mean life
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jeff McMullen
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“Let's play hangman," says my eleven year-old daughter, Claire. Heavy rain is falling and so we settle at the kitchen table and with pencil and paper play the word game that has been around longer than anyone can remember.
I look at this flaxen-haired child and her brother, Will, aged ten. Both are such avid readers that I have not the slightest doubt they will find all the answers they choose to seek. They have always loved books. On their birthdays I write stories for them in which they are the main characters, in charge of their destinies as they explore the Galapagos Islands, cross Antarctica or make their way up the Amazon. Before they could write they dictated their stories to their mother and me. We wrote them out and they drew the pictures. When we travel now they fill notebooks with accounts of the adventures we share and their discoveries.
As our game goes on, my thoughts drift to the Aboriginal kids who play a different version of hangman. Full of sad bravado, some kids in remote communities climb to the top of electricity poles to make a gruesome exit from life calculated to outdo their laughing mates, to scoff at death and perhaps at all of us for ignoring their sadness, anger and alienation.
Let me suggest that literacy can change the lives of these children; that literacy is life. But first we need to understand the link between literacy and health.
"THE RIGHTS OF OUR CHILDREN CAN ONLY BE ACHIEVED IN PRACTICE if they can sleep peacefully with a full stomach at night," said Cape York leader Noel Pearson, summing up the plight of indigenous children when he addressed Reconciliation Australia's National Reconciliation Planning Workshop in Canberra in May 2005.
What I see constantly in my work in remote Aboriginal communities is chronically malnourished children living under stresses that my own children would find unbearable. In a nation that exports food to the world we allow some of our children to go hungry. The truth is that the children of the first sunrise are usually thought of last.
American scholar Paul E. Barton argues in his book, Parsing the Achievement Gap: Baselines for Tracking Progress (Educational Testing Service, 2003), that, of fourteen major factors contributing to a racial gap in learning in the United States, eight of them occur before children of disadvantaged minorities reach school. Many of these children are way behind even before they begin kindergarten. Of great importance is Barton's finding that hunger, poor nutrition and dangerously low birth weight are important contributors to what can be lifelong under-achievement.
Indigenous Australian children are born with dangerously low birth weights at two and a half times the rate of the rest of Australian children. This is one of the underlying reasons for their disastrous state of education, which is intrinsically connected to the health emergency in the heartland of Australia.
A plague of chronic illnesses known as "Syndrome X" is scything through a whole Aboriginal generation and lining up the next. Like a new Black Death, this cluster of so-called lifestyle illnesses, including diabetes, end-state renal disease, strokes, hypertension and heart disease, is growing at a rapid rate.
At 58, I am usually the oldest man in the street of the red-dirt communities in Arnhem Land. For indigenous men, the median age at death is just 56 and for women 60, about 20 years less than for other Australians. Across the Northern Territory and in many other isolated parts of the country, however, Aboriginal men are dying in their mid-forties. Families experience an almost constant sense of loss. The children endure an endless procession of funerals and grieving, adding more stress and depression to their already troubled lives.
For years some have explained Syndrome X as the consequence of a "weak gene". I heard this same racist excuse for inaction 30 years ago as I filmed for the ABC's Four Corners among Native Americans. But this myth has finally been shattered.
Monash University, the Menzies School of Health Research in the Northern Territory and the University of Mississippi examined autopsies of various racial groups and found a fascinating constant among those who had died of kidney disease. It was not a "weak gene". The common factor, Monash's Professor John Bertram told me, was being born a dangerously low-birth-weight baby with fewer nephrons in the kidneys, creating a high risk of chronic illness. These children, even in utero, are being programmed for early-onset illnesses because of their mothers' poor health, malnutrition and lack of education. Surely here is the key to the mystery of Syndrome X and a pointer as to how education can help ease this genuine health crisis in our heartland.
In their landmark study of indigenous health in Western Australia, former Australian of the Year Dr Fiona Stanley and Professor Ted Wilkes describe the disturbing pattern of hunger, poor nutrition, sexually transmitted diseases and the high incidence of smoking and alcohol abuse in young pregnant Aboriginal women. They estimate that 49 per cent of indigenous women smoke during pregnancy and 23 per cent continue to drink alcohol. These are two of the major causes of those dangerously low-birth-weight babies. But what distresses the researchers the most is that apparently the health education message has never reached these young Australians or has been ignored. We need to make a far more vigorous and creative educational effort, with messages shaped by indigenous people, to help young pregnant teenagers understand that it is not only their health that is threatened but their unborn children's health, intellect and ability to learn as well.
Doctors have told me that every extra year of education for a young woman may add up to four years to the life expectancy of her child. It's a different take on literacy, isn't it?
Ken Wyatt, Director Aboriginal Health, NSW Department of Health, has said that educating a young woman for an extra year can also reduce the danger of infant mortality when she gives birth by between 7 and 10 per cent. What a staggering thought. Isn't this the most powerful invitation to concentrate on early, life-empowering education for indigenous children? This is what I think of when I say "literacy can mean life."