The snowclone title I owe to Mark Liberman’s LanguageLog post.
I’ve continued to track which communities are being targetted by the “Howard/Brough plan” (last update on 22 July). Last Tuesday we learnt which communities will get a 5-year lease to the Commonwealth. These are set out in the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and its Schedules, wherein s.2(1) specifies commencement dates of the leases.
The wind dropped in Canberra this morning – just as well for the small demonstration following the La Perouse community’s Aboriginal flag up the hill to Parliament House. A mixture of the Green Left, the young, and many grey and white-haired people with long experience in Indigenous communities. The main message was – tell Australians that the NT National Emergency Response legislation won’t stop child abuse, that it may make matters worse, not better. Far too many Australians believe that the proposed legislation is Doing Something About Child Abuse. They don’t know that it may well be Doing Something Bad About Child Abuse.
When I got back, I found an e-mail from GetUp! who are running a campaign for signatures to delay or modify or vote against the bills – before this Tuesday (14th August) when the Senate votes on it.
Did you know that receiving an e-mail publicising a demonstration could be illegal on public computers in most Aboriginal communities in the NT once the legislation is passed? (And as for porn – if their spam filter doesn’t work, they’re stuffed). Sloppy drafting.
For a clear account of problems with the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Legislation, a list of possible unintended bad consequences, and some solutions to some of the problems, go to the Submission of the Human Rights And Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) to today’s public hearing on the legislation by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee.
Here are just a few of the possible bad consequences they note:
I don’t want to think about the legislation the Government rammed through yesterday– Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007, No. 2007(Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) A Bill for an Act to respond to the Northern Territory’s national emergency, and for related purposes. I don’t want to think about the Opposition supporting this bill. … Read more
A small glimmer of good news amidst the increasing storm clouds of concern about how the loss of the Community Development Employment Program will make some Indigenous Australian communities unliveable and unviable. For the first time, an Aboriginal person who was removed from his family as a child has successfully sued a state government for … Read more
Excellent news! The Economic and Social Science Research Council of the UK has just awarded a £1 million grant to Adam Schembri for what sounds like important work, The British Sign Language (BSL) Corpus Project: Sociolinguistic variation, language change, language contact and lexical frequency in BSL (2007-2010), which builds on the work he and Trevor Johnston and Louise de Beuzeville and others have been doing on the sign language of the deaf community of Australia, Auslan (e.g. the Auslan corpus project and Adam and Trevor’s recent book. Adam got his PhD in 2002 from the University of Sydney, for a thesis Issues in the analysis of polycomponential verbs in Australian Sign Language (Auslan)).
Adam’s the Principal Investigator – based at University College, London, and other investigators include Bencie Woll, Kearsy Cormier, Frances Elton, Rachel Sutton-Spence (University of Bristol), Graham Turner (Heriot Watt University), Margaret Deuchar (University of Wales Bangor) and Donall O’Baoill (Queens University Belfast). Here’s the project summary.
Several contributors to this blog, including yours truly, and no doubt a number of our readers too, have recently been bitten by the Facebook bug. Facebook bills itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”, and its kind of fun too. In addition to being able to track what your friends are up to, it is also possible to join groups of like-minded individuals to share ideas, and socialise (reminds me of those sessions in the bar at the end of a hard day’s work at a linguistics conference). Along with the predictable groups centered around Noam Chomsky, there is also “You’re a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?”, “Typologists United”, and my particular favourite “Thomas Payne is My Hero” whose members are:
“dedicated to the source of all linguistics knowledge, Thomas Payne. His manuals are so good that they can apply to any discipline at any time. Physics problems? Open the textbook and realize that you should really be a linguistics major. Life? Look up grammatical relations and discover meaning in existence. Linguistics? You better just read the whole thing. Oh Thomas Payne, what would we do without you?”
Facebook is part of what has been termed “Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly.
So reads the headline of a three page article in the Friday 27th July 2007 Il Venerdi supplement of La Repubblica, the most widely distributed national daily newspaper in Italy (La Repubblica has an excellent website [fixed broken link, JHS]; however the supplements are print only and not available on the internet). The headline and subhead read:
“L’Australia dichara guerra agli aborigeni. Sulla base di accuse che sembrano costruite (violenza sui bambini, alcolismo) il governo manda militari << ispettori >> nei territori sacri dei nativi. Dietro ci sono le promissime elezioni, E le miniere di uranio.”
which I translate as:
“Australia declares war on the Aborigines. Based on accusations that seem made up (violence against children, alcoholism) the government sent troops ‘inspectors’ into the sacred lands of the natives. Behind this are the next elections. And the mining of uranium.”
Australia recently lost another of its national treasures. Paddy Bedford was one of the prodigeously talented Gija artists of the East Kimberley. He was doubtlessly one one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. You can read obituaries here and here (WARNING: Photo) and see for yourself the wonderful legacy he has left … Read more
Noel Pearson sets up a deliberately provocative contrast between ‘we‘ (Indigenous Australians and good guys) and ‘they‘ (‘middle-class culture producer’s and bad guys) in The Australian (21/7/07).
* They say we should respect Aboriginal English as a real language.
* We say we should speak our traditional languages and the Queen’s English fluently.
False contrast.
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