Endangered Languages and Cultures

Are you sick of emotional wallpaper? Complain!

5 February 201122 September 2007 by Jane Simpson

All honour to Frances Killaly who made a complaint to the Australian Press Council about the use of pictures of random Aboriginal children in the Canberra Times and the Sydney Morning Herald to illustrate stories about abuse of children in Indigenous Australian communities. (The story was reported in the rival The Australian).
Dishonour to all the newspapers, (including The Australian) which continue to illustrate stories (mostly negative) with pictures of random Aboriginal kids as ’emotional wallpaper’ (evoking the ‘gag-me-with-a-spoon’ reaction that Will Owen had to the Australian‘s doggerel ad).
And absolutely totally completely all dishonour to their self-regulatory body, the Australian Press Council which found there was no case.

Adjudication No. 1369 (adjudicated September 2007)
“In dismissing complaints over the use of pictures of Aboriginal children in reports on the Prime Minister’s plan to address matters of child abuse in Northern territory communities, the Australian Press Council reaffirms that newspapers and magazines have a duty to inform the public of important issues and have the right to illustrate these issues with photographs. However, they need to take special care when those images deal with children in circumstances where a false inference can be drawn…..While acknowledging Ms Killaly’s genuine concerns the Council does not believe the publication of the pictures indicated the children had been abused.”

So what if the photographs aren’t of children who have anything to do with the problem? In a story about sex abuse??????

FiFo fieldwork

5 February 201120 September 2007 by Jane Simpson

Update: (thanks Peter!) Barista has a long post discussing Harrison’s work in the light of Anggarrgoon‘s post.
Huge media attention has been garnered by K. David Harrison’s National Geographic funded fly-in-fly-out trips to document endangered languages in settings mostly remote and picturesque. See for example the Independent, and the Australian (the article also features Brownie Doolan, perhaps the last speaker of Lower Arrernte, and Gavan Breen, a linguist who has been working with him for years on a dictionary).
I was rung up in a supermarket by Jenny Green who was rung up on the road by a journalist who.. wanted to know more about endangered languages. So much for all our online information.. This started me thinking about two questions:
•How can we build on this media interest to do good things for endangered languages and their speakers?
•How could fly-in-fly-out trips be made useful for endangered languages and their speakers? (For some problems with Harrison’s recent FiFo trip to Australia, see Anggarrgoon today).
Suggestions welcome, my present suggestions below..

Indigenous language work and the 2007 Deadlys

5 February 201119 September 2007 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to Daryn McKenny (and check out the Arwarbukarl Indigenous Language and Information Technology Blog that he’s involved in) for alerting us to the online voting for the Deadlys – national awards for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music, sport, entertainment and community achievement. Voting closes in a couple of days – 21st September. A … Read more

On the nose

5 February 201118 September 2007 by admin

I blogged earlier this year about some differences I have been running into between my native Australian English and that of the locals here in the UK. Well it’s happened again.
I was taking part in a conference abstract selection panel recently with two English and one other Australian academic when one of our English colleagues offered the opinion that a particular abstract was “on the nose”.
“But I thought you liked it when we did a quick run through earlier” said the other Australian.
“I do” responded the Brit, “that’s what I just said, it’s on the nose, exactly on the topic of the conference!”
My interpretation, and that of the other Australian, was that “on the nose” means “it stinks, it’s bad” and should be rejected.

Phenome – one; phoneme – nil

5 February 201117 September 2007 by Jane Simpson

The Australian newspaper has been running a teacher-bashing campaign for years – asserting that kids don’t learn to read and write because their teachers are crap or because they use a crap teaching method. Front page news today was an article by the Education Writer, Justine Ferrari, Teacher failures spell student trouble. Ferrari quotes one Denyse Ritchie, “executive director and co-author of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills),” as saying:

“You can learn to read without knowing phenomics (the sounds that make up words), but when you spell, you have to have a good phenomic understanding to help spell words like said. “Unless you’re taught that ‘ai’ as well as ‘e’ can make an ‘eh’ sound in words like said and again, you will spell said as ‘sed’.
“But many teachers don’t have that inherent knowledge,”
The teachers’ phenomic knowledge was also tested. When asked to break words into the constituent sounds or phenomes – such as how many sounds in ‘cat’ (c-a-t) – the average score was 4.1 out of a possible 10 correct answers.

Back to back and neck and neck

5 February 201115 September 2007 by Jane Simpson

Yesterday was an important day in determining the directions of university work on endangered languages in the Asia-Pacific area – the decision on the appointment of a replacement for Andrew Pawley as the research-only Chair of Linguistics at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. This department fosters much work on endangered languages, through staff research, doctoral student training and its publishing arm, Pacific Linguistics.
There were public talks by the three shortlisted candidates – back to back and neck and neck were Nick (Laos and Vietnam), Nick (Australian and a toe-hold in Papuan) and Nik (Western Austronesian).
Public job talks are a curious ritual – a discreet competition watched by an audience, most of whom are not on the selection panel, but who have a serious interest in the outcome, and only a few, like me, just along to hear an interesting paper. The etiquette is a puzzle for the organisers – should the candidates see each other? should they attend each other’s talks? The puzzle for the paper-givers is what type of paper to give. Go for breadth? Go for depth? Show ‘the vision thing’? Show how you fit in? Show what you’d add to the department? And in the end the quality of the paper may have little to do with the selection committee’s decision. They may just want to know that you don’t habitually spit in the corner.

This week’s langguj bagarap

5 February 201127 August 2007 by Jane Simpson

Bagarap (1) how not to read census numbers

Uncertain future for town’s new arrivals
Simon Kearney, Yuendumu | August 27, 2007
LIFE will be a lottery for the 25 children born this year in the remote Northern Territory Aboriginal community of Yuendumu.
Based on last year’s census, it is likely that only two of these children will finish Year 12 and five of them will grow up without any command of the English language.

What Kearney must have done is take the percentage of all Yuendumu inhabitants who don’t speak English, and base his 5/25 figure on that. Conveniently forgetting that most of the non-English speaking Warlpiri are old people. Kids learn English at school.

Digitally barefoot archivists

5 February 201122 August 2007 by Jane Simpson

Digital archives of photos, films and recordings are springing up in Indigenous communities, and some of them are even Getting Funding, hurrah! The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving a million US dollars to the Northern Territory State Library System:

“a 2007 Access to Learning Award recognizes the Northern Territory Library for providing free computer and Internet access and training to impoverished indigenous communities… The award honours the innovative Libraries and Knowledge Centres (LKC) Program, which provides communities with free access to computers and the Internet, and helps Indigenous Territorians to build digital collections of their culture through the Our Story database.”

They’ve got Knowledge Centres at Milingimbi, Wadeye, Peppimenarti, Umbakumba, Angurugu, Pirlangimpi, Milikapiti, Barunga, Ti Tree, and Ltyentye Apurte.
…..As well, “Microsoft, a Global Libraries initiative partner, will donate US $224,000 in software and technology training curriculum to upgrade the organization’s 300 library computers.” [Weep for us Mac users]
The Our Story database is an adaptation of the classic Filemaker Pro Ara Irititja program developed by the artist and historian John Dallwitz for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara.

Ara Irititja, a project of the Pitjantjatjara Council, commenced in 1994 when it was realised that a large amount of archival material about Anangu was not controlled by or accessible to them. This material was held in museums, libraries and private collections. Items held by private individuals were often at risk of being damaged or irretrievably lost. To date, a major focus of Ara Irititja’s work has been retrieving and securing such records for the benefit of Anangu and the broader Australian community.

The great advantage of Filemaker Pro was that it was basically off-the-shelf and basically fairly easy for people to use. There have been elaborate proposals, but going beyond glamour to making things work in remote communities is a very large step.

Those who do not learn from history…

5 February 201117 August 2007 by Jane Simpson

…doom other people to repeat it. In this case, the other people are Aborigines.
Govt hails passage of NT indigenous laws, August 17, 2007 – 12:39PM, The Age
“A historic day for Aboriginal people”, according to the Government. Indeed, and this is what Bob Brown wants us to remember it for:

Senator BOB BROWN (Tasmania – Leader of the Australian Greens) (7.50 pm) Hansard 16/8/07
…We know from experience right around the world – from the Gaelic experience to the experience of people in the Americas – that the loss of language brings great anguish and depression, which visits people for centuries afterwards. Yet this government seems to have put that aside in the move – which must be very clear about here – to say to Indigenous people, ‘Take up the predominant culture or else.’ […]. I want that on the record, so that no-one reading about this moment in history 10, 50, 100 or 500 years from now can say, “If only they had known what they were doing to Indigenous culture in Australia.” We all know. The government has made its choice. It has the bulldozer; it has the numbers, and we do not. But let nobody in this place say that it did not know what this would do to Indigenous culture, custom, law, language, pride and wellbeing into the future of this nation.

Feast of indigenous song – Darwin

5 February 201116 August 2007 by Linda Barwick

It’s been a rich week for lovers of indigenous music.
On Tuesday (14 August) in Maningrida I attended the launch of the new Wurrurrumi Kun-borrk CD from Sydney University Press (which you can order online). In attendance were the songman Kevin Djimarr and notes-writer Murray Garde.
To quote the blurb on the flyer:
Kevin Djimarr, one of Western Arnhem Land’s pre-eminent composer-performers, presents a complete repertory of traditional kun-borrk songs from the Maningrida area. The album was recorded with the support of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and Maningrida Arts. Murray Garde’s extensive notes, which accompany the audio CD, include authoritative translations and explanations of Djimarr’s song texts. They open up this extraordinary music to a national and international audience, while remaining true to Djimarr’s own particular artistic vision, communicating in a lively and accessible fashion the unique qualities of his work.
The CD is the first in a new series from the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. We are currently seeking funding to enable us to continue the series: please let us know of any thoughts!
On Friday night (17 August), the University of Sydney’s own Professor of Musicology, Allan Marett, is presenting a free public talk as part of the Darwin Festival, “Why should we know about Aboriginal music?” Location: MAGNT Theatrette, Museum and Art Gallery of the NT, Date / Time: 17 August 2007, from 4.30pm.
And as I write we are gearing up for the 6th Symposium on Indigenous Music and Dance, hosted by Charles Darwin University’s School of Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems, to be held on Saturday 18 August at Charles Darwin University’s Casuarina Campus (Building 22 room 01). Registration is free but please do so online.
This will be a fantastic event, with participation by a number of indigenous performers.