The use of Indigenous languages has been declining over the period of non-Aboriginal settlement in Australia as a result of repressive policies, both explicit and implicit. The National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco, 1987) was the high point of language policy in Australia, given its national scope and status and its attempt to encompass all aspects of language use. Indigenous languages received significant recognition as an important social and cultural resource in this policy, but subsequent national policy developments moved via a focus on economic utility to an almost exclusive emphasis on English, exacerbated by a focus on national literacy standards. This is exemplified in the Northern Territory’s treatment of Indigenous bilingual education programs. Over recent years there have been hopeful signs in various states of policy developments supportive of Indigenous languages and in 2009 the Commonwealth Government introduced a new National Indigenous Languages Policy and a plan for a national curriculum in languages. Support for Indigenous languages remains fragmentary, however, and very much subservient to the dominant rhetoric about the need for English skills, while at the same time ignoring research that shows the importance of Indigenous and minority languages for social well-being and for developing English language skills

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This report on the September 1985 earthquakes in Mexico describes the earthquakes themselves, their effects and the resulting damage in considerably more detail than did the preliminary report of the reconnaissance team.

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This paper reports on language variation research carried out in Western Australian primary schools. It addresses differences in the acquisition of vocabulary, in particular the acquisition of colloquial Australian English vocabulary by students from English-speaking backgrounds (ESB) and from a range of non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB). The data show differences which are attributable to a lack of familiarity with terms and the objects that they represent, which promoted strategies such as generic terms of circumlocution and which may have resulted from partial word knowledge. Other differences were attributable to cultural influences and were evident in varied patterns of word usage among the different non-English-speaking background groups. The findings of this paper suggest the importance of knowing a word not only in its semantic sense but also in its pragmatic and sociolinguistic sense.