Name
Rhonda Balzan
Birthplace
Sydney, Australia
Lives
Sydney, Australia
Your organisation/community Maltese Language School of NSW
Profile
The Federal Government’s Multicultural Policy and the New South Wales Government’s Diversity policy raised the stakes for second and third generation Maltese Australians like me to allow us to claim our ethnicity and honour our right to cultural and linguistic diversity.
The Maltese Language School of New South Wales was a dream of mine that started when I attended an Adult Education Conference in Nov-Dec 1995 in Malta. One of the conference convenors, Peter Mayo, and Adult Education Lecturer in the University of Malta presented the findings of a research Masters he had recently completed regarding a (fictitious) community education program he and two other student colleagues had written for the Maltese community in the city of Toronto, Canada.
Reading the paper about the Maltese in Toronto (migration patterns out of the city centre to develop farming businesses, ideas about assimilation, language loss among second and third generations, grief and loss regarding cultural identity and tokenistic references to culture such as pastizzi), I was overwhelmed by the similarities between Toronto and Sydney. It was as though one could easily ‘liquid paper’ out Toronto for Sydney. The story was exactly the same.
I came back and immediately formed, ‘Friends of the Maltese Language Interest Group’ with two other women in Sydney (one was younger, the other older) in 1996. Together we started to raise awareness of the need and interest for a Maltese Language School that would be effective in both teaching pedagogy and community development (eg professionally community run and owned).
After three years of creating constructive dialogue within the Maltese-Australian community in Sydney (community elders were convinced there was, ‘no interest from the youth’ to learn or maintain Maltese and that the language would just ‘die out’), The Maltese Language School of New South Wales, formed as a division of the Maltese Community Council of NSW Inc at a meeting held by the Minister for Education and Training, John Aquilina in his office in December 1998. The MLS of NSW opened for class at three locations at the beginning of Term One 1999 with more than eighty students, when many believed we would be lucky to get a class of twenty!!
Today the MLS of NSW has over one hundred and forty students attending classes in five locations across Western Sydney, with a request for a further campus in Penrith. Ten teachers all qualified to teach communicative Maltese Language and Culture and the ten Management Committee members have changed the course of a language in a Diaspora of a Small Island State in the Mediterranean.
Don’t believe what you hear. Maltese is spoken in many places around the world such as Morocco, England, United States, New Zealand, Egypt, Turkey, Canada and Australia-definitely in New South Wales!
