Radio

Being bilingual vital for education success, says expert
A linguistics expert says educators and policy makers need to embrace a second or third language for students, if they want to improve outcomes.

Wistful wax: the songs of Fanny Cochrane Smith
The oldest voice recordings ever made of an Aboriginal person - 120 years ago - have been inscribed on the world register of public memory.By her own reckoning, Fanny Cochrane Smith was 70 years old when she sang into the brass trumpet of an Edison phonograph in Hobart in 1903.She sang about flowers and birds in her Pakana language, of which she was the last fluent speaker.Her voice was engraved in wax by phonograph enthusiast Horace Watson, and now those recordings have been added to the Australian Memory of the World Register.The register was established by UNESCO to safeguard against collective amnesia.

Is there such a thing as indigenous architecture?
We meet three architects who speculate on the ways architecture and design can embed Indigenous cultures - from residential homes to public buildings.

Getting kids back on track
The Federal Government's latest report on closing the gap on indigenous disadvantage shows there is still a long way to go when it comes to employment and school attendance.Meanwhile, for the past twelve years the BackTrack program has been giving at risk kids, 75% of whom are indigenous, support through initiatives like Paws Up, with working dogs, and Ag Lads where young people learn to work on farms in the Armidale region of New South Wales.The holistic approach now includes a residential program for those who can't stay at home.

Mining the archive
From Yirrkala bark paintings and mission drawings to Bard incised pearl shells and the pandanus sail of a Yolngu canoe, the University of Sydney holds hundreds of objects of Aboriginal material culture.The academic records of Australia's oldest anthropology department have been inscribed on the Australian Memory of the World Register.The objects, as well as thousands of photographs and documents, form part of the University's Anthropological Field Research and Teaching Records.The collection includes a wealth of field notes, genealogies and photographs as well as reams of correspondence collected during the tenure of the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown and his successor A.P.

Aboriginal group calls for guarantee NT gas pipeline won't lead to fracking
The contracts for a gas pipeline connecting the Northern Territory to the eastern states have been drawn up, but some Aboriginal people say they're not ready to sign-off on the deal.

Audit into Aurukun School finds enrolments overstated
Indigenous leader Noel Pearson says he has been vindicated by an investigation into the troubled school at Aurukun in far-north Queensland.