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.
FollowNews from Rome: “Australia declares war on the Aborigines”
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.”
A huge loss
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
Us and them are we
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.
Ploughing salt into the ruins of the NT – Brough’s end game with CDEP and the little children – Bob Gosford
[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.
CDEP changes
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.
The closure of the remote areas Indigenous Community TV network – why?? – Inge Kral
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
Gunboat lip-gloss
“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.
Nameless named
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.
Postdoctoral fellowships – University of Sydney 2007 for 2008
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.