i bin learn

'This artwork is based on old-school slate chalk boards and comments on the racism that Aboriginal people experience in the Australian education system. The education system in Australia started out being instrumental in excluding Aboriginal people from their own cultural learning and at the same time denying them a mainstream education. RG Craven (Teaching Aboriginal Studies, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999:66) writes: First attempts to educate Aboriginal people were steeped in ethnocentrism– the unassailable conviction of the superiority of western European culture, especially British, linked to this was the twin faith of Christianity as the one true civilised religion and the need to bring God’s word to enlighten and save the heathen. This is why so many early Aboriginal education institutions were missions and why mission schooling was always essentially assimilationist, with no place for Aboriginal cultures. With government-run reserves and church-run missions set up it was clearly forced from the ‘protection’ board that they did not want to educate the Aboriginal population, as stated by Protector AO Neville (Australia’s Coloured Minority, Sydney: rrawong Publishing Co., 1947:13): Their children are not wanted at the State schools … [and] on the part of white parents in country towns [they want] to keep their children away from school if ‘aboriginal’ (usually quadroon and octoroon or lighter) children are allowed to attend the same school. This means that a separate school must be established for the mixed-blood children, sometimes within a mile or two of the public school. The artwork comments on and tells the perspective and reality of my experience of racism within the educational system. The experience is one that many generations of Aboriginal people will be able to relate to.’ - Deann Grant © Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory