that munanga linguist

Today is Territory Day and while I am a proud Territorian in many ways, it's a challenging place and there is lots going on here that I don't particular like or value. Any long-term readers of my blog will probably notice that I've become increasingly jaded over the years and am now thoroughly disillusioned with many things that happen in the NT, like the Government's poor record of  education delivery in remote communities and the increasing push for mining development that undermines environmental concerns and Aboriginal relationships to country. My list of gripes is pretty endless. A constant on that list is the neglectful treatment of Aboriginal languages and failure of so many to value the amazing linguistic diversity found in the Northern Territory, which has been diminishing unabated for decades now. Official language policy in the NT fits nicely within what gets described as a 'Laissez-faire policy' where Aboriginal languages aren't explicitly d...

Last week, an NT-wide review into Indigenous Education took a big step forward when a draft report was released. Accompanying its release were a few media stories relaying that its author, Bruce Wilson, was recommending shutting down secondary schools in remote communities and sending everyone to boarding school. My reaction was 'what?!' and 'who is this Bruce Wilson?'. A bio of Bruce Wilson on a Victorian education website, it turns out, has this remarkable line written about him: He often uses humour in his presentations to disguise the fact that he hasn't done any research. I'll write more on Mr. Wilson in Part 2. In this post, I'd like to discuss a few aspects of the draft review. When I actually started to read to the report rather than react to newspaper headlines, I remained distinctly unimpressed. If I was marking it as a university assignment, it might just pass. Maybe. Key references have been overlooked, vague conclusions drawn without stro...

I'm reading about so many foul and disgusting things that white people did to Aboriginal people when they first arrived in the Northern Territory. It's kinda unbearable and makes it starkly clear that white Australia has blood on their hands. And the names that come up in the history books! The one I'm most surprised at is former Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer 's grandfather, Sir John Downer , who was premier of South Australia and a lawyer (and has a suburb in Canberra named after him). John Downer "played an active role" when "successive South Australian governments masterminded, condoned, or concealed the violent dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory to 1910" ( Roberts 2009 : 22). And don't be fooled - the violence and atrocities that white people carried out on the frontier is not something buried. It's in government reports, newspapers, memoirs and diaries, letters of officials, the r...

I’m reasonably familiar with Urapunga, though not many Australians – nor even Territorians - are. It’s a little community of 80 or so people about half an hour’s drive from Ngukurr. It’s nestled between the two big river crossings – the Wilton and the Roper. I used to go there once or twice a week in 2006 and 2007 to help Hannah and Hazel run Ngalakgan classes at the local school. It’s a great little tight-knit community, built, as many remote communities are, on the site of a former pastoral station.  Opening of Urapunga store in 2010 (Source: Fred Hollows Foundation) A few years ago, I was wasting time on Google Maps, looking at Ngukurr and surrounds, curious to see how well they’ve mapped probably one of the most isolated-but-populated areas on the globe. And I found something rather weird when I scanned over the map of Roper Bar crossing. There were these faint gridlines superimposed on the map that made it look like a neat little town was about to be build on the b...

As Tony Abbott moves into the top job, I've had a look over what happened in the NT for the 2013 Federal election. There haven't been any major changes - (Natasha Griggs looks to have held her seat in Solomon as has Warren Snowdon in Lingiari. Nigel Scullion is again our CLP senator and Labor still won the other senate seat) - but looking a bit more closely at the results shows a few interesting things: Solomon Natasha Griggs has apparently been returned, after a very tight battle with Labor's Luke Gosling. She survived about a 1% swing against her and currently leads by only 800 or so votes. (ABC still has the seat in the "in doubt" category though). Looking at how individual booths voted, the northern suburbs of Darwin generally swung towards Luke and he won quite a few booths there with a clear margin. Down in Palmerston, most or all of the booths there swung towards Natasha. So while the final result is much the same, underlying this is a widening gap betw...