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.
[Guest post from Bob Gosford, who has written on NT topics for Crikey]
Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough and Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey yesterday announced the imminent demise of the Commonwealth’s Community Development Employment Programme (CDEP) in the Northern Territory.
As of 30 September this year, CDEP in the NT will be dead.
According to Brough, it’s all about the cash and the kids.
I was going to take a break from whinging, but then today the changes to Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) in the Northern Territory were revealed – further Q&As at FACSIA [.pdf]. I can’t say I’ve fully taken in the changes. But it looks like no one is spared; people in all Northern Territory remote communities will go off CDEP.
The changes to CDEP in the Northern Territory are a key part of the broader emergency response to protect children, make communities safer and normalise services for Indigenous communities.
The only link to protecting children seems to be that if everyone’s on welfare and not CDEP, this will make it easier to introduce food stamps and welfare deductions as a way of making parents send their kids to school and making people clean up their yards.
While it’s good to see that the Government is at last thinking about transitions from CDEP (unlike the poor people in communities such as Jigalong which lost CDEP on July 1), it also presumably means the loss of the extra Federal funding that has been put into CDEP businesses and community operations.
Guest post from Inge Kral The recent closure of the Indigenous Community TV network (ICTV), (see Frank Rijavec’s letter) is a move of profound short-sightedness by individuals who do not understand how significant this media broadcasting outlet has been for thousands of Indigenous Australians living in remote Australia. At a time when we need to … Read more
“So I think there may be a misconception that we’re here to fix things. We’re not. We’re here to examine as many kids as we can in two weeks and to send the figures back to Canberra, and also to give the figures to the local health service.”
[volunteer doctor, stationed in Titjikala, south of Alice Springs for two weeks as part of the Government’s response.]
It’s now a month since the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, stood together to announce that There is A National Emergency of sexual abuse on Aboriginal communities, And the Government Will Send Out The Gunships.
We have a right to expect that if the Government sends out the gunships, there is good reason to. There is. We also have a right to expect that when the problems are longstanding there should be a good plan with longterm solutions. The last month has shown that there isn’t.
The gunships were sent off with only a mud-map, under the command of a taskforce which has no member professionally trained to work with sexual abuse victims. Without advice from Indigenous doctors or people who know about Indigenous health interventions, sex abuse or Indigenous children. Without paying attention to the advice of Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, the authors of the report that triggered the announcement. (‘Gunships’ and ‘swarms of locusts’ are Wild’s metaphors). And with no idea of how much the operation would cost.
It’s bright shiny lip-gloss to call the present disastrous state of many Indigenous communities a National Emergency – because emergencies are things you don’t expect, and you can be forgiven for not foreseeing them. The problems in Australian Indigenous communities have been laid out in report after report after report over the last 10 years. Many people have shown the need for long-term solutions, and many communities have trialled solutions, some successful, some not.
A nice reversal: Mount Nameless has got its name back. The Western Australian Government has adopted dual naming guidelines. (The good people of the Geographic Names Boards. Hurrah hurrah!) The Shire of Ashburton agreed to the mountain being called both Mount Nameless (apparently this name was bestowed by a Hamersley Iron survey team in the early 1960s), and Jarndunmunha, the name used by the Eastern Guruma people. (The people are also known as Kurrama*).
[Further update, you can see a picture of Jarndunmunha/Mount Nameless and more discussion at
Filipiniana & Cunning Linguistics.]
[ further to further update, Piers Kelly has sent a photo of the long long view from the top [.jpg]]
The Western Australian Lands Minister, Michelle Roberts, is quoted as saying:
“There are probably hundreds of traditional Aboriginal names, virtually unknown by the general community, for features such as mountains, lakes and rivers that currently have a well-known European name.”
‘Hundreds’? Wrong ball-park.
If you have an outstanding track record of publications, and you got your PhD between 1 January 2002 and 31 December 2006, and you’d like to work in the Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney, or PARADISEC, then, consider applying for a University of Sydney postdoctoral fellowship. They’re open to all disciplines, so they’re highly competitive. But on top of your salary they give you a once-off research support grant of $25,000, which is pretty useful for doing fieldwork.
If you want to work on endangered languages, especially in the Australia-Pacific area, then e-mail me (jhs AT mail.usyd.edu.au) for help with an application, and copy it to the chair of department, Professor James Martin (jmartin AT mail.usyd.edu.au). If you want to work on music or digital archiving, then e-mail Linda Barwick (lbarwick AT usyd.edu.au). Deadline to get to us: 9 August.
In 2001 and 2002 St John Skilton carried out a survey of Scottish Gaelic in Australia and New Zealand using different means- participating in Scottish Gaelic community activities, carrying out interviews, forming focus groups, and sending out a questionnaire to which he received 178 responses. His description of the situation and his analysis were part of his doctoral work at the University of Sydney, which he finished at the University of Fribourg: The Survey of Scottish Gaelic in Australia and New Zealand PhD 2004.
Skilton examines from many angles the position in Australia of Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken by few, but the heritage language of many. He discusses the demography of the speakers and learners; he shows how opportunities to use and learn the language are shaped by the language practices in Australia – such as the language policies and the teaching of language at schools. He also discusses how the speakers and learners felt about the language. The situation of Scottish Gaelic as a minority language in Australia is both interestingly similar to, and interestingly different from, the situation of minority Indigenous languages in Australia. I quote here one of his concluding summaries.
Last month (on 14th June) I gave a talk at the Tokyo University Linguistics Colloquium entitled “Current Trends in Language Documentation”; some of the ideas I discussed there can be found in a paper under the same name that I co-authored with Lenore Grenoble in the recently published Language Documentation and Description, Volume 4. In my talk I referred to and quoted a recent blog post that is an excellent discussion of what some language communities judge linguists to be useful for. The bottom line is: “Linguists are good for trust and love” – establishing and maintaining good human relationships over an extended period of time. Other things, like linguistic research, follow from that.
Call for Papers
Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory: 75 years of Linguistics at SOAS, 5 years of the Endangered Languages Project
7-8th December 2007
School of Oriental and African Studies, London
In 2007 the Department of Linguistics at School of Oriental and African Studies celebrates its 75th anniversary. Founded in 1932 as the first department of general linguistics in Britain, the research carried out by linguistics within the department has made a significant and lasting impact on the fields of language documentation and description and linguistic theory.
This conference commemorates both the 75 year tradition of linguistics within the School and the 5th anniversary of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, comprising the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP), the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), and the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP).
The conference aims to bring together researchers working on linguistic theory and language documentation and description, with a particular focus on innovative work on underdescribed or endangered languages, especially those of Asia and Africa. Our goal is to provide a forum to discuss the ways that linguists and others, especially community members, can respond to the current challenges to linguistic diversity and build on experiences of the past.
Themes:
1. implications of language documentation and description for linguistic theory
2. implications of linguistic theory for language documentation and description
3. experiences of language documentation and description and linguistic theory at SOAS
4. new techniques and opportunities for documenting and describing languages
5. community-oriented outcomes of endangered languages research
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