Awabakal language revitalisation project

Awabakal language revitalisation project begins at Gateshead High School. Percy Haslam is instrumental in and a driving force behind it. The University of Newcastle supports the project. It seeks to restore the Awabakal mother tongue to persons of Aboriginal descent residing in the Hunter region. John Heath recalls how the Awabakal Co-Op in conjunction with Percy Haslam sows the seeds of the Awabakal cultural revival: “We set the seeds of an Awabakal language program. Because Perc[y] was white and an older person he wasn’t a good teacher in the sense for the young kids so I became a teacher alongside him. My involvement was to learn the lesson the week before the kids. So together we started an elementary language program. We often had fifteen or twenty people mainly kids but we had older people as well” (Maynard, Awabakal voices, 89).