that munanga linguist

I don't often blog about what I get up to anymore. Too busy ranting about what other people are doing it seems! I never even blogged about finishing my thesis or getting a new job at the University of Queensland (as a Postdoc with the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language ). That was all last year though and I'm not going to go into that now. Instead, why not just pick up from where I am today, which is in Beswick community, listening to a raging wet season storm going on outside. It's night-time now but here's the view from my awesome accommodation  this afternoon: Today was the first day in which I started my new research project proper (that is, actually getting out and about and making recordings, rather than doing preliminary office-based stuff). My current project (which I'm just calling Kriol Proujek for now, for simplicity's sake) is an attempt to find out how Kriol is different in all the communities it is spoken in, east of Katherine...

The Walking With Spirits festival has been running for about as long as I've been in the Katherine Region. It makes no sense that I'd never been before. I know the guys who run it and occasionally do bits of work for their organisation , I know dozens of people who've gone and plenty who've performed and worked on it too. This year, I stopped being a lazy bum and checked it out for myself and fortunately enough got to do so for free as a volunteer. It was a pretty awesome event. Unfortunately with my volunteering duties I didn't get to the venue, Melkjulumbu (aka Beswick Falls) until dusk. It's an absolutely breathtaking place and it would've been nice to be a regular patron and spend the afternoon soaking up the location. The festival location at dusk. Photo: ABC The festival consists mainly of one massive show, featuring a range of performers who vary pretty wildly in levels of experience, who they are, what they do and where they're from. Ins...

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 ...