The NT is a hotmess

You couldn't make this stuff up.

Calling the police in the NT now goes to a centralised call centre in Darwin where the people who answer the calls have zero local knowledge. Elders in Lajamanu want to contact local community police but instead get a nitwit in Darwin asking ridiculous questions. (And would the police have Aboriginal language-speaking interpreters on stand-by? Don’t think so!). Nobody outside of Darwin wants this new centralised police call centre.

School starts today. Thousands of kids who speak Aboriginal languages are denied receiving an education in their own language. Attendance in remote schools is worse than ever and the Federal Government is rolling out the “No School, No Food” policy which has been shown to *not* work. The Ed. Dept is now recruiting teachers with no teaching qualifications, bringing in more outsiders who are clueless about working in remote Aboriginal Australia, even if their heart is in the right place.

The Australian Human Rights commission says the Super Shires might be worse than the intervention. From Mick Gooda:

I have not heard one person say anything positive about what has happened. People feel totally disempowered by it and if we don't do something about getting ... governance structures back into the communities, the outcome of this amalgamation will be probably worse than the Northern Territory Intervention.

Barack and Julia think it's all a bit of a laugh.
Darwin, 2011.

Phase two of the Intervention, labelled “Stronger Futures”, is being put through parliament. A senate inquiry has begun and many in the NT just want to see the Intervention and its remnants gone for good. Take a look at the submission from Ramingining elders to see how those subjected to these policies feel:

The intervention has been here for 5 years and what did it do? We got fences on our houses, but no new houses. Not for Yolŋu, only Balanda. No extra jobs.

We want our right to self-determination. We don’t want to be controlled from the outside.

We want our community councils back, and our assets returned. We want to be able to have a say in the foundation of any laws that effect Yolŋu in our communities.

We want bilingual education brought back. Every study shows that it is better for our people. We want elders to have a say in curriculums so it is relevant to our lives.

…we need our laws to be recognised along with Balanda laws.Our law is the basis of our society. We want our law recognised. We want our law holders to be recognised.

We are the land holders in our communities.
It is our land, it is our community and it is subject to our law.
We will not be assimilated by these policies.
WE CHOOSE SELF DETERMINATION.

Meanwhile, our politicians are more worried about some bratty kids who burned a bit of fabric with some stars on it…

 … 3000kms away.

Ah, the magic of the NT. You’ll never never know, if you never never go.

Mums and aunties (if only it were that simple)

Hi everyone!

So I'm in Canberra at the moment trying to be a studious linguist and get this PhD done. I have my mid-term review coming up where I'll be giving a seminar about words you use in Marra and Kriol to talk about family (kinterms).

Can I just say, unequivocally, that Marra people have an amazingly complex way of talking about their family. I mean, I'm not surprised by this as Marra people, like all Aboriginal people, place so much importance on family and maintaining family relationships. But still, I'm slightly blown away by the kin terminology Marra people use. To demonstrate this, I'll try and explain how Marra people would talk about people who in English, we'd call mum or aunty:

So, if I was speaking Marra and wanted to call out to my mum or talk about my mum, I'd use the word gajirri. I'd also use this word if I was calling out to or talking about any of my mum's younger sisters. If I was calling out to or talking about my mum's big sisters, I'd need a different word: ngajamu. In English,  ngajamu would be my aunty. But, my father's sisters - who I'd also call aunty in English - are not my ngajamu or gajirri, but I'd call them barnarna.

So we have three words here:

gajirri (mother, mum's little sisters)
ngajamu (mum's big sisters)
barnarna (dad's sisters)

However, if I wanted to talk about the people that are *your* mother, mother's little and big sisters or your dad's sisters, I need different words:

bibi (your mother and her little sisters)
jamulmarr (your mother's big sisters)
marrimarr (your dad's sisters)

Then, if we're talking about someone else's mother, mother's sisters or dad's sisters, we need different words again:

garrnya (someone else's mother and her little sisters)
jamulnganja (someone else's mum's big sisters)
marringanja (someone else's dad's sisters)

Phew! And these are just nine of the 100 or so different kinterms used in the Marra language. Crazy and awesome.

P.S. Hi mum! :-)

Conferenced out but what fun! (Langfest recap Pt. 1)

After sweating it out in Katherine and Ngukurr over the past few months and doing lotsa really enjoyable and good work with the Ngukurr mob (which I haven't shared nearly enough of on this blog), I've now landed back in cold country (Canberra) just as the rain starts in the north and makes travel difficult again for a few months.

I timed my return to Canberra for Langfest - a series of linguistics conferences held by various national language and linguistics associations - and I'm sitting here tired and fatigued from five long days of stimulating linguistics presentations and the endless socialising that happens throughout these events. Despite my fatigue, it's all been really great and I'm going to attempt a bit of a recap here. I could write a minor thesis on all the talks I went to and the ideas they threw up, but I'm just going to start writing and see how I go. Maybe a reader or two will stay with me!

The first two days were for the Applied Linguistics conference (joint annual conferences of ALAA and ALANZ - the applied linguistics associations of Australia and New Zealand). It started on a great note with an excellent plenary by Andy Kirkpatrick from Griffith Uni who talked about English as a lingua franca in SE Asia. This was a topic I'd never thought about before but Andy's material was very engaging. Two tidbits from the talk stuck with me:

He talked about education in the Philippines and questioned the value of teaching in English and Filipino when most students spoke neither language, but often spoke a local language (e.g. Bohol) plus a regional language (e.g. Cebuano). Apparently the rate of students dropping out of school around year 5 is horrific which is probably a result of such an linguistically alienating education system. This resonated very strongly with me, thinking about the NT where Aboriginal languages are restricted from being the language of instruction and attendance rates are also horrific. This was comforting in a weird way - comforting to know that the crap we are dealing with in the NT isn't  unique but just what happens when Mother Tongue Education is ignored.

Andy also talked about Chinese education in SE Asia and commented on Kevin Rudd and his Putonghua ("standard" Chinese, cf. Guangdonghua and other varieties) skills. In Australia, his bilingualism was not widely respected. Andy condemned Australian attitudes towards Rudd's Chinese speaking and attitudes towards bilingualism in general, saying that many Aussies feel that "when you speak another language, then you're siding with the enemy". I was aware of this attitude, but what I, like most Australians, wasn't aware of was the Rudd's Chinese-speaking talents caused a huge ruckus in Singapore who apparently freaked out at "an Anglo speaking better Mandarin than anyone in Singapore cabinet!". Maybe if more Aussies realised that K-Rudd's Chinese gave us international cred like this example shows than fewer would have disparaged it.

I spent a lot of the Applied Linguistics conference listening to talks about Aboriginal English and work going on in education with Aboriginal and Islander kids who don't speak English the same way most of their Anglo teachers do. There are some really interesting projects going on. I particularly liked the research that Ian Malcolm discussed by Sharifian which compared the ways Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal kids retold a story. The research demonstrated that each group brings their own 'cultural schema' to the task. For example, Aboriginal kids would pay attention to details in the story like that the woman in the story was a widow but the Anglo kids would focus on other aspects. I like research on Aboriginal English that goes beyond listing grammatical and phonological features and this was a nice example.

On the other hand, I do sort of cringe at quite a bit of research on Aboriginal English. In my experience, it's not a label that many Aboriginal people feel comfortable in applying to themselves and the way they speak. There's a real danger in pigeon-holing Aboriginal people with the label, as Aboriginal English is nowhere near as prestigious as Anglo English and also many or most Aboriginal people are sophisticated code-switchers who are very competent users of more standard forms of English and are rarely if ever monodialectal. But still, it's an interesting field and sensitively-done research can be really revealing and exciting.

Okay, well I'll have to call this Part One of my conference recap as it's now 1am and I have be up and ready for Uni in a few hours!  Goodnight all. Hopefully I get around to telling you more about langfest tomorrow.

Starring on ABC

I forgot to mention on here that I was interviewed by the ABC a few weeks ago, along with BR who has been so so great in helping my with my Marra work at Ngukurr over the past 18 months.

We were interviewed for ABC Radio's Northern Territory rural report, but they also did up a really nice online article where you can hear the interview and even hear a little bit of BR and FR speaking Marra at start.

Here's the link.

Ai sabi tok Frentj na!

I wrote a post a while back about a little boy thinking I was speaking French when I was actually speaking Kriol. Well, I'm pleased to say, I speak French now!

Haha. Not quite.

I recorded old MT telling a story about one of her paintings the other day:

 
The painting is actually a gift for a French volunteer who has been working at the Art Centre here at Ngukurr for a few months.  So, after working with the recording in the usual way by transcribing MT's Marra and adding a Kriol translation (thanks to FR), I also added an English translation which was then translated into French!

So, for the first time, I now have a Marra recording translated into French. Maybe it's a world first!

Here's an extract of what MT told us (and yes, the French sounds clumsy sometimes because it's a fairly literal translation):

Nana ninya, warr-iwiganji "rambaramba". Nyingaya-wajurlu gunyan, ya-girriya-ni, gana ngarr-abama. Gana ngarr-abama mingi gana... warlindu mingi bigana, nana gunyan gana ngarr-uyinga.

Celui la, on l'appelle "rambaramba". Il aime le lait, des femmes, quand il le sent. Quand il le sent, apres... il y va apres, parce qu'il... sent le lait.

Yumarr! (Bien!)

Oh, and it's a good story too. It's about a type of snake called rambaramba that likes milk and as such is known to be attracted to breast milk.  Unfortunately, it's also a prime example of what can be lost when you translate from a language like Marra into English or French. In Marra, the word for milk (including breast milk) and the word for breast is one and the same: gunyan. So when you say in Marra that 'the snake likes gunyan', you're simultaneously saying 'the snake likes milk', 'the snake likes breastmilk' and 'the snake like breasts'. And you can have a giggle about it. When you put it into English you have to choose one. I went with 'milk'. Much less fun. And then you have to do a bit more cognitive work to figure out that rambaramba likes chasing after breasts.

(This is an example why being able to express yourself in your mother tongue is convenient, valuable and important! *cough cough*... NT Department of Education... )

Lovely photo - Marra mob join in the Song Peoples Sessions project

I just wanted to share this lovely photo that Ant from the Ngukurr Arts took of me working with the Ngukurr Marra gang today. We were going through some Marra songs that were recorded a couple of months ago as part of the Song Peoples Sessions project run by Winanjjikari Music Centre and Barkly Regional Arts.

It was a good session and the translations and transcriptions will be published soon, along with a collection of songs from a range of endangered languages throughout the region. One of the old ladies here had already done a great job transcribing and translating the songs a couple of months back. We're just doing a bit of a clean up. Good work team!

Lovely photo, I reckon.

And here's a blogpost about the Marra part of the Song Peoples Session project. Keep an eye for the CD when it's released!

Gani n-marranguru gana ngarl-umindini

Here's a photo of my "office" for the afternoon:

I sat down here with BR, FR and JJ to transcribe a story in Marra old MT had recorded with me last week. It's a great story about two men who encountered a submarine in the Gulf of Carpentaria while hunting for dugong but had no idea what it was. Initially, they thought it was a rainbow serpent. 

Kudos to the language mob here for their wonderful work and contributions: MTs story was great and well told and this arvo BR and FR helped me plough through the 7-minute recording in just two hours, completing a nice transcription and Kriol translation.

I have to share the bit that I loved the most, from when the army guys encountered the two Marra hunters:

"Ngarl-urrumanji Ingglish?"
Gani n-marranguru gana ngarl-umindini.

Translation:
"Do you two speak English?"
Only heads were speaking. 

Inferring that they just stood there and shook their heads.  How lovely is that! :-)