ABSTRACT
A traditional feature of Lardil teaching and learning is that children learn by experience and by watching — a sort of look, listen and learn method. Questioning is not encouraged. Asking why is so unusual that my practice of doing so resulted in being nicknamed ‘The man who asks why’. (Strangely enough I have only belatedly realized that I never enquired why questioning was frowned upon.) The look, listen and learn method is fine when people participate and do look and listen but the problem in the late 1960s was that the young people spent very little time with older people and so they lost many an opportunity to look, listen and learn about traditional ways. They were living in a different world from the elders and certainly in a different world to the one the elders had lived in during their childhood. To take a simple example, let us suppose that people are out in the bush and they come across some tracks. The older people would examine them and would likely say something to the effect that they were made two or three days ago and that it must be the Bunbadji family going up to the northern part of the island and that they must have camped at Elizabeth River the night before. They would be able to reach these conclusions by the firmness of the tracks, how much sand or dust had covered them, how windy it had been the last three days, the directions of the tracks, etc. There might be some discussion about whether a particular footprint is X or Y and whether or not the party was in a hurry, which in part can be determined by the length of their strides and the imprint of their tracks. It would not be necessary to point out to the young people how the signs were read. Through frequent experience they would acquire such knowledge. But in the village camp young people were not as frequently exposed to such experiences as the elders had been in their youth and so their tracking abilities were inferior. A complication was that some people wore boots, sandals and flip-flops and it was therefore difficult to determine their track. And so it was with many other aspects of the traditional culture.
