that munanga linguist

Ten years of blogging? How did that happen! Well this is how... revealed in a long, extremely self-indulgent post that hopefully has enough reflection and self-awareness to not make you vomit into your hat. Here's where it all began:  http://munanga.blogspot.com.au/2005/02/oh-my-ive-got-blog.html I started this blog in 2005 in pre-Facebook days when the main ways of keeping in touch with friends and family was phone, email or snail mail. The beginnings of this blog were very innocuous - a way for friends/family to read about what I was up to (I'm a crap emailer and letter writer). At the time I was a few months into my only major stint of living remotely, spending around three years in Ngukurr as a community-based linguist. It was a tough job and I was on a steep learning curve very much out of my cultural comfort zone. I soon found that blogging was a good way for me document and process the interesting and challenging experiences I was having. There were also a group of f...

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...