The educational and social disengagement of Indigenous youth in many remote communities in Northern Australia is well documented. A cursory reading of media reports and opinion pieces uncovers many who can be blamed: schools, parents, teachers, government, socialists, anthropologists, linguists and even film makers.

Writing about literacy in the remote Aboriginal context rarely considers anthropological aspects such as whether literacy has been incorporated into social practice, and how we understand change, transmission and transformation in the evolving social practices and cultural conceptions of reading and writing across the generations in the remote world. In this seminar Jerry Schwab and Inge Kral suggest that, in addition to schooling, everyday social practice is critical to literacy acquisition, maintenance and development in remote contexts.