that munanga linguist

Somehow I dug myself out of a mini PhD-writing slump this week and finally tabulated the last results of some research I did at Ngukurr a couple of months ago where I interviewed 14 young Kriol speakers about bush medicine and also a bit about lizards. The people I interviewed taught me lots of interesting stuff, but analysing what they told me is doing my head in. I've basically been writing about the same stuff for six months and I'm sick of it. I'm sick of my thesis in general. I mean, I'm still *kind of* interested in what I'm doing and learning but I'm at the stage where I've flogged the topics I'm focusing on to death so much so that I barely care anymore and I just can't see how anyone else might care. (Yes, I'm at *that* stage. It's known as the Valley Of Shit ). What I will look like if I have to write about lizards for much longer But here's your chance to restore some faith that what I'm devoting all my time to mig...

I recently wrote a detailed post that was critical of the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation 's use of a statistic that falsely claimed that 80% of Indigenous kids in remote communities can't read. It was a post that had been festering in my mind for six months and I was so relieved to finally get my gripes off my chest. But writing that blogpost was just the start. Initially, I wasn't confident about publishing it on Fully (sic) but after running it by a few people I decided to publish a version there too, knowing it would get a lot more readers and attention. So it went up on Crikey and I immediately noticed it getting read, Facebooked and tweeted, including by reasonably well-known people like Helen Razer and economist Rory Robertson . I got some good feedback - in particular I was totally chuffed to get a personal email from one of the country's top Indigenous academics thanking me for the piece(!) - but I got a few negative comments too. The attention...

I'm not too far away from finishing my PhD (I hope!) and my plan for afterwards is to come back to Katherine and see what comes my way. I'm pretty confident that I'll find interesting work that utilises my skills and experience like the other day when I was asked to help Djilpin Arts with a Kriol translation of a picture book they're creating. It was only a little job, but very interesting for me because I had to translate it into Beswick Kriol, rather than Roper Kriol which I'm much more familiar with. There was a surprising number of little adjustments I had to make to ensure the translation sounded okay to a Beswick audience and Evangeline at Djilpin Arts was invaluable in providing assistance. There were a few things I already knew to avoid - for instance, Beswick mob say idim  instead of dagat for 'eat', they say deya  instead of ja  for 'there' and my favourite - they say eberrijing  instead of enijing  for 'things/belongings ...