Lynette Riley and Diane Riley-McNaboe wrote a series of Wiradjuri workbooks

Associate Professor Lynette Riley and her sister, Diane Riley-McNaboe, are proud Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi women. Ms Riley said the idea for the workbooks came about after she discovered people were beginning to lose touch with their culture.

"It was realised in the COVID pandemic this became really difficult, because a lot of the birth parents could not maintain any connections," she said.

"A lot of the parents didn't have computers so they couldn't zoom in and some often didn't have reliable phone plans.

"So how can you maintain family connections and bonds let alone cultural teachers.

"I remember being at one meeting where the case workers were raising this and I felt a bit useless."

Ms Riley believes the new series of books are vital to helping children learn the Wiradjuri language and the diverse history of the culture.

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"They are actually really vital because I've been doing some work through the research centre for children and families," she said.

"I'm a chief investigator for one of their projects which is about lifelong connections, specifically with Aboriginal children in out of home care. So we're working with four groups of case workers across NSW and Dubbo is one of those groups. The case workers in Dubbo identified that one of the key issues they were looking at was maintaining cultural connections for children."

Ms Riley said it was a rewarding experience to be able to work with her sister, even after she disagreed with her initial idea for the project.

"I came up with the idea to produce one booklet and I volunteered my sister Diane to help, because she is a Wiradjuri language teacher," she said.

"I took it to her and she said 'you want to put the whole language in one book, it's not going to work'.

"So over a series of weeks, we decided that we needed to have themes for each book and we came up with six themes plus the seventh book would be symbols and tracks.

"Because that's another part of language, because when we were kids under government policy it was against the law to transmit your culture.

"So Aboriginal people could be locked up or have their kids taken away from them."

The first part of each book focused on the Wiradjuri language before the rest focuses on signs and symbols, designed to provide young Indigenous people with the tools to learn with help from others.

The first two workbooks are available to be downloaded from the SBS website with the next five books still on the way.

There will also be an opportunity for the public to purchase all seven of the books together once they are released over the coming months.

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