Only a matter of hours after Jess Mauboy's message of cultural togetherness, a young Aboriginal mum is confronted with this . . .
AN indigenous woman talking to her toddler daughter in her native language in Adelaide on Tuesday was told: "It's Australia Day, we speak English in Australia." Confronted with this just hours after pop star Jessica Mauboy kicked off Australia Day celebrations by singing the national anthem from the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge in both English and an Aboriginal language spoken in NSW, Elizabeth Close told how, in shock, she had replied: "Pardon me?" To that, the young woman in Union Jack leggings who had made the statement at the suburban shopping centre slowed her speech and said again that "it's Australia Day. We speak English". 
Mrs Close is a nurse and artist who retains strong links to the Pitjantjatjara culture - and the language was spoken in Australia for tens of thousands of years before the British settled the continent.
"I couldn't get more Australian," Mrs Close, 29, told The Advertiser. "She stared at me blankly before walking off." Mrs Close said she was almost brought to tears by the incident - not for herself but for the future of her two young children, aged two and five, who she had believed would not be subject to such blatant racism. "I stood there, having witnessed the most overt form of racism that I personally have ever received, and my eyes welled with tears," she said.
"Not for me; I've got thick, paint-splattered skin. I'll move on. No, my eyes welled for the little Anangu girl that I held in my arms, seemingly oblivious to the hate-filled scene that had developed before her.
"Would she and her brother encounter such vile, overt racism when they grow up?" In a message of cultural togetherness on Tuesday, pop star Mauboy showed the survival of indigenous language is close to her heart by singing the national anthem in a medley of local Sydney dialects before repeating it in English.
Both the Australian and Aboriginal flags were raised together as she sang. Indigenous languages and dialects that stretch back over millennia have struggled to survive in the two centuries since the arrival in Sydney of the First Fleet.
Flinders University's dean of the office of indigenous strategy and engagement, Professor Daryle Rigney, said languages spoken in Australia since European settlement had withered from between 700-800 to about 20. "Within the languages there are words, ideas, knowledge, and if you lose these things it can be very difficult to pass on cultural concepts," he said. "Languages are deeply conceptual, they are literacies that connect people to their heritage." He said finding funding to teach and reclaim languages was very difficult and, in reality, needed to be done within indigenous groups or it would not happen at all.
A lot of indigenous languages, Prof Rigney said, were now a hybrid of English."We are making steps to reclaim the languages and create new words for new things like computers and other modern day products," he added.