RUBY:

Hey there, it’s Ruby Jones, host of 7am. We are taking a break from our daily show over the summer, but we will be releasing some of our favourite episodes as highlights over the next few weeks. We will be back with all new content on January 25. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out. And if you haven't already heard our special series ‘Climate Change Will Kill You’, you can find it in the 7am feed on your podcast app. Thanks for listening.

[Theme music starts]

RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

For decades, students in Footscray in Melbourne’s West have been taught in Vietnamese alongside English, in line with the suburb’s long-standing heritage.

But now, the program, one of the country’s longest running bilingual education systems, is under threat.

Today, Andre Dao on why we value some languages more than others, and what it says about where Australia sees its place in the world.

[Theme music ends]

RUBY:

Andre, what drew you to this story?

ANDRE:

So Vietnamese was my first language. It's the language my parents spoke to me as a kid, as a baby. And my parents, although they spoke to me at home, I think they took on board a message pretty early on that it was something that was for home and that at school and elsewhere I should be focusing on English. So really, these days, my Vietnamese is really quite poor.

RUBY:

Andre Dao wrote about language and bilingual education in the latest edition of The Monthly.

ANDRE:

So when we moved into Footscray and someone told me that the local primary school did that bilingual program, we'd really been really excited about the idea that our kids would be able to learn Vietnamese bilingually, it seemed to be a really special thing to us.

And so hearing the news that it was going to be axed, you know, I was just upset at first. And then the more I thought about it, the more I thought that there was something more going on there than just my disappointment.

RUBY:

Can you tell me about the history of that bilingual program? When did it start?

ANDRE:

So the bilingual program at Footscray Primary started in 1997.

Archival Tape -- [Moon lantern festival performance tape]

ANDRE:

But it actually has roots in an older program that started in the 80s that was, at that time, a mother tongue maintenance program for Vietnamese refugees and their children.

Archival Tape -- [Children speaking Vietnamese]

ANDRE:

In writing the article, I spoke to a teacher who had been at the school since '97, first as a teacher's aide, and then she came back to head up the bilingual program.

Archival Tape -- Chau Cong:

“My name is Chau Cong, and I have been a Vietnamese teacher for a long time.”

ANDRE:

Speaking to her, she was so proud of the program that she had developed.

Archival Tape -- Chau Cong:

“Language is alive. That's what I used to think, and that we need to keep it up so it'll become natural for our children.”

ANDRE:

Vietnamese is still by far the most commonly spoken language at home in Footscray, apart from English, and one of the things that Chau also really emphasised was the fact that the kids took what they learned in the classroom out into Footscray.

Archival Tape -- [Students have conversation with one another in Vietnamese]

ANDRE:

So you leave the school and you walk down the road and there’s all the shops and Footscray market.

Archival Tape -- [Sounds of people selling in Footscray market]

ANDRE:

Going down to a banh mi shop and ordering lunch, it’s nice thing to be able to practically, but it actually gave them a sense of pride and a bit of ownership over learning the language as well.

Archival Tape -- Chau Cong:

“The nicest way is to see how students can communicate. So when they are confident enough to stand up and use a language, especially when they use a language with some Vietnamese people, it's really heartening. I feel that, oh it worked [laughs].”

Archival Tape -- [Crowd claps Vietnamese performance]

RUBY:

Ok, so how does a program like this go from being seemingly so successful, to having its very existence come under threat?

ANDRE:

So back in 2016, towards the end of term two, parents found a newsletter in their kid's bags that announced sort of unilaterally without any consultation that the program was gonna be axed.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“This is a significant decision which will change the identity of the school in important ways.”

ANDRE:

Coming out of the blue like that, it caused a really strong community grassroots response...

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“It was made without notice or consultation with parents and guardians...”

ANDRE:

...that actually led to the department kind of stepping in and overturning the Principal’s decision.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Man #1:

“...to intervene in this particular situation, to overturn the decision and ensure that the bilingual immersion program at Footscray Primary School is retained.”

ANDRE:

And so you had a situation where you had a leadership that didn't particularly understand the purpose of the bilingual education or the history of it at Footscray Primary, who didn't really want the program to be there. And so the program started to run into problems.

Archival Tape -- Chau Cong:

“The saddest part of all the issues was that I couldn't support young Vietnamese teachers in the school, being looked down on that way, and that is not good.”

RUBY:

And so what is happening at Footscray Primary now? Where has this push, which I guess started back in 2016, where has it landed?

ANDRE:

Towards the beginning of this year, a new principal said that they'd look into the bilingual program and they ended up committing to keeping the bilingual program. But then the language of instruction was then going to put up for consultation.

And then at the end of July, the school board decided that Vietnamese would no longer be taught at Footscray and that the new language would be Italian.

And there was an immediate reaction from local parents, and one of those, Tony Bui, started a petition and that pretty quickly garnered a lot of signatures. At least at the time that I wrote the article, it was up to 14 thousand.

And if you look through the comments on that petition, there's people from all sorts of links to the school that teachers, parents, parents from from other schools as well. People who really were angered by the decision.

This program that had been around for 23 years and had been such a success was still so vulnerable. And that made me reflect on how much care and attention minority languages and minority cultures require in Australia.

And I thought about the way that Vietnamese had been taught at this school for that long. And then it didn't stick. And it seemed as if other European histories of Footscray could stick or could come back

And you could say, oh, well, there was this Italian history in Footscray. But that didn't really seem to me like a satisfactory answer to why we were losing this kind of immediate link to Vietnamese.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Andre, the Victorian education department is planning to shut down Vietnamese bilingual education at Footscray Primary, which is in Melbourne’s west. It's a program that had a lot of support from parents and students, so what is the department saying about the rationale behind this decision?

ANDRE:

So the main reason given by the school and by the Department of Education, they've put it down to a lack of suitably qualified Vietnamese teachers.

They rely on a report that was commissioned by the department and produced by a couple of academics from the University of Melbourne. And in that report, they kind of paint a picture of Vietnamese being this marginal language that's in decline, at least in terms of the numbers of people studying and the teachers available. So their rationale, at least, is that it's sort of inevitable that this language isn't sustainable and that they had to switch to a more common language.

But the fact that I think it was 8 Vietnamese teachers had left the school relatively recently, and many of them have gone on to teach at other bilingual schools around Victoria kind of points to the fact that availability of quality teachers wasn't the real issue.

RUBY:

So what is the real issue then, that led to Vietnamese being scrapped in favour of Italian?

ANDRE:

It seems that the other factor is this idea that Italian is a more global or worldly language than Vietnamese, that idea of the global language crops up in the Melbourne Uni report, and it comes up again in the school website when they talk about preferences for language.

So I guess there's this idea that Vietnamese is this community language, which means it's this language that's only really relevant to people from the Vietnamese community. And so the bilingual program at Footscray really served its purpose. It maintained the mother tongue of a generation of Vietnamese refugees and their children. And now that the suburb is allegedly becoming whiter and more gentrified, a more global language is needed.

And so it seems to come down more to this very nebulous concept of prestige.

RUBY:

And what do you think people mean when they are using the word prestige when they’re referring to a language.

ANDRE:

So there's a professor from the University of Sydney, Ken Crookshank.

Archival Tape -- Ken Crookshank:

“Languages are not a part of the core curriculum in practically every state.”

ANDRE:

He talks about this idea that some languages are seen as having prestige and others not having prestige. And his main examples are European languages, so French being prestigious and Indonesian, for example, being not prestigious.

Archival Tape -- Unidentified Woman #1:

“In some ways having fluency in French is prestige. Having fluency in Chinese and Japanese is seen as competition. Don't ask me why”

ANDRE:

Prestige seems to be tied with the power and wealth of the country that the language is from. So, again, we have this idea that Vietnamese is not prestigious because Vietnam is not seen as kind of a world power.

But the other interesting example here, i think, is that in all these conversations about global languages or world languages, at least in the materials that I was looking at, no one mentions Arabic. And clearly Arabic ticks a lot of boxes in terms of mobility, but also if you're thinking about community in Australia and so on. But it doesn't come up and I think there's obviously cultural reasons for that that we're not talking about openly.

RUBY:

And what do you think it is that education authorities and also perhaps sections of the community are missing here about language and schooling and the importance of the Vietnamese bilingual program?

ANDRE:

Yeah, in writing this article, I really was struck by how the language around either axing the program or defending it so often revolved around this idea of education as being this individual accumulation of skills to make our children into future employable, globally mobile consumers and workers.

And that's one way of thinking of education. But what it misses, I think, is the link between learning language and community and place and history.

RUBY:

There's a line towards the end of your essay that I wanted to ask you about, and that was this idea that, I guess you raised it as a question, whether Australians need further education in speaking and seeing the world in a dominant language. And I wondered if you could just sort of explain that a little to me.

ANDRE:

I think as English speakers, and not only as English speakers but as a former British colony, Australian culture and language has always tied itself to the dominant. And in part, that's because of the way Australians have imagined themselves as this European outpost in Asia and needing that kind of big country protection, basically. So there’s kind of that history, I think, swirling around these questions of bilingual education.

But in terms of what we get from thinking in a minority language or from a minority culture viewpoint, when you are an English speaker in the 21st century, you kind of expect that you can take your English to most places around the world. When you speak Vietnamese or Khmer or Indonesian, you don't have that expectation. And that is a really fundamentally different way of viewing the world and the way in which it's available to you.

It gives you a different sense of the importance of protecting culture and community and maintaining it if you fundamentally understand that it's this vulnerable thing that's precious rather than it just being a given, which is what I think Anglo cultures tend to do, because you look out at the world and it's already there for you.

RUBY:

Andre, thank you so much for talking to me.

ANDRE:

Thank you, Ruby.

RUBY:

Elle Marsh produced this story with support from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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