Indigenous Literacy Day Celebrated at PLHS

On Wednesday, we celebrated Indigenous Literacy Day, a day founded by the Indigenous Literacy Foundation to raise awareness about the importance of literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and to celebrate culture, storytelling, and language as powerful tools for learning and identity. This day helps people learn languages and share traditional stories.

A group of my Year 7 peers and I hosted three Year 6 classes from Port Lincoln Primary School to share the stories we wrote using traditional Indigenous Australian language - specifically Barngarla as it is local to our area - and other traditional languages that are significant to families or language groups.

We wrote these books last term as a part of our Reconciliation Learning Journey where we learned about Australia's history and Indigenous people's connection to language and learning from Country. Through lessons with our ASETO's CJ and Shantelle, we discovered that lots of languages are being lost and writing stories to encourage people learning and using them is a way to conserve them.

Getting to write and share our stories was fun. I really enjoyed the experience as it made me proud to be sharing the language and Indigenous knowledge we have learnt across the term with next year’s Year 7s.

We also passed on our knowledge as experts of Port Lincoln High School, explaining how we felt coming to high school, how we really like it and some of our favourite lessons are Tech and Dance. We also shared that something that makes Port Lincoln High School special is the teachers. We gave them tips about transition, like the Year 12s are not scary when you get to know them and that once you get to know your way around the school it doesn't feel as big as it seems.

The day was really fun to share culture and our school with the Year 6s.

~ Charlee Frick (Year 7)