She's known around the world for those famous words "You're terrible Muriel" but these days Gabby Millgate is more focused on language at least 20,000 years older than what was current in Porpoise Spit in the mid-1990s.
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Gabby, who starred as Joanie Heslop in the 1994 classic movie Muriel's Wedding, is now an early childcare educator in Canberra, the nature pedagogy leader at the Woden Valley Early Learning Centre.
With NAIDOC Week starting on Sunday, Gabby was inspired to start teaching Ngunnawal words to the children at the centre, making them part of their everyday play.
"I started putting the Ngunnawal words in the corridor so it would become a conversation between parents," Gabby said.
Further inspiration came from a Ngambri Ngunnawal Dharawhal family with the service, who also gave their children Indigenous names.
Daisy Franks is otherwise known as Winguraminya, which means whirlwind. And, soon, the other children at the centre wanted a Ngunnawal name.
Their choices ranged from Djirri for frog to Malang for fish to Mununja for butterfly.
The Ngunnawal words are now displayed around the centre, made part of everything from craft to music to storytelling and colouring in.
And there was one word that kind of harked back to Muriel's Wedding when the kids were gathered around the centre's firepit.
"I saw 'muril' meant smoke so if the smoke got in my eyes, I'd say, 'You're terrible muril!' just to amuse myself and my fellow educators, not to make the children say it, but then they started saying it," Gabby said.
It was just one way of incorporating Indigenous culture into everyday life.
"You can't just open people's heads and pour in information. Children naturally learn through play and through song and through story," Gabby said.
"If you try to just explain something to them, it doesn't engage them."
Making the Ngunnawal language a natural part of play and conversations only added to the children understanding a perspective of life that may be different from their own.
"This is the early childhood teaching framework in action," she said.
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Megan Doherty
I like telling local stories and celebrating Canberra. Email: megan.doherty@canberratimes.com.au
I like telling local stories and celebrating Canberra. Email: megan.doherty@canberratimes.com.au
