Cafe Society: Inspiring sky-high hopes for our state

A bold goal has evolved from speech pathologist Rosalie Martin’s passion.

2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year Rosalie Martin. Picture: FIONA HARDING

SOME people have a gift for bringing others together to flourish in new relationships. Rosalie Martin is one such individual.

She is not a matchmaker of the romantic kind, but the 2017 Tasmanian Australian of the Year is romantic in the best possible way, being an idealist by nature.

The speech pathologist and criminologist regularly donates her time to teach Risdon Prison inmates to read and write. It tends to keeps the pragmatic dreamer firmly grounded in reality as well as continually inspired to do more to help her community thrive.

A year or so ago, after she had completed her official year in the spotlight, Martin hatched a plan to entice a group of people into one room to think and converse about literacy.

Her symposium, called Communicating: The Heart of Literacy, finally happened in a grand and gracious meeting room at Government House on Monday, having been postponed by the floods in May.

Martin’s intention in gathering 55 diverse guests, many of whom were meeting for the first time, was to open a dialogue rather than come up with specific strategies for addressing Tasmania’s low literacy level.

She already knew she had a champion for the cause in Her Excellency the Governor Kate Warner, who was a delegate as well as the host. Martin’s biggest hope for the day was to seed a movement towards giving more Tasmanians the chance to flourish through better reading and writing skills.

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But even she had no idea of the ambition of the goal that would burst forth among delegates at day’s end: 100 per cent literacy in the state.

It is a bold vision that departs from the modest targets the state has previously nominated, which have mostly aligned with a figure that would bring us in line with the levels of most other states.

Meeting the 100 per cent target would shoot us to the top not only of the country but the world. Coming anywhere near it would do more to increase prosperity and wellbeing in the state than almost any other available activator.

The rallying call reverberated with hope around the vice-regal parlour, where I represented this newspaper as a delegate.

Before we arrived, many of us would not have dared to dream so boldly, especially with the state’s oft-quoted 48 per cent functional illiteracy rate at the back of our minds.

But when Martin told us she believed everyone had the ability to read and write, something in the room shifted. You could feel it. Her next message was that a huge amount of early learning hinges on the warmth of the relationships supporting it. That thought informed the rest of the day’s expansive, open-ended conversations.

When we meet the next day at Etties in Elizabeth St, a few doors down from Martin’s speech therapy practice, she expands on why she believes empathy is at the heart of literacy.

She has seen the results of this approach in action over more than three decades working with children as a speech therapist and in her more recent charity work teaching adults, including prisoners, to read and write.

If a child’s relationships with caregivers are impoverished in the early years, they are far less likely to develop the rich language that underpins our literacy and connection with books and reading. This paucity tends to perpetuate various kinds of poverty that can play out for the rest of their lives.

“Without connected warmth, relationship opportunity and security and all the language that goes around those things in early childhood, the same neurobiological potential in an individual’s life can go in a completely different direction,” she says.

Then there are the children born with a predetermined processing system that means learning to read and write in a typical classroom situation is difficult for them.

“But they can learn,” she says, “and there is so much evidence showing that if we deliver instruction individually nuanced to the child, we can teach them to read and write.”

They just need the right somebody with the right skills to hold their hand.

“With trust in somebody else, we might be willing to take a risk we might not take on our own.

“But without that trusting other, I can’t. I am going to shut down and feel ashamed, I am going to repel that work because I am being asked to do something I can’t get a foothold in and nobody is helping me get a foothold.”

Martin has many initiatives in mind, but for now her focus is on firming up the fledgling affiliation that formed on Monday to see just what we might do in the service of that soaring 100 per cent goal.

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Rosalie Martin is speaking at the Rally for Kindness hosted by Equal Opportunity Tasmania at Parliament Lawns at lunchtime on December 7