Last time John Howard’s ship came in, it was a Norwegian freighter, as Max Gillies observed. Today’s Crikey has a Special edition: Howard’s Aboriginal emergency, which suggests that this time, he’s running the Aboriginal flag up the masthead.
Ten years ago when Howard came to power, his new Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, said that his predecessors had got it all wrong. He wanted Aboriginal ‘self-empowerment and said that the Howard government would adopt ‘practical, commonsense policies’ on health, housing, education, employment and improve Aboriginal people’s lives.
That didn’t happen.
Jane Simpson
FollowIndigenous Languages Strand – LingFest 2008 – Call for expressions of interest
LingFest 2008 will be held at the University of Sydney, Australia, 1 – 13 July 2008. LingFest is a series of linguistics conferences and the Winter Linguistics Institute.
In conjunction with LingFest 2008 , the Indigenous Languages Strand will run between 7 – 11 July 2008. It will be held at the Koori Centre of the University of Sydney. The Indigenous Languages Strand will be a useful forum for a wide range of people working in the area of the revival and maintenance of Australian Indigenous languages.
More details follow, or download the form for expressions of interest here – deadline Friday August 24.
Lewis O’Brien’s biography
Lewis O’Brien continues to be one of the mainstays of Kaurna Warra Pintyandi, the Kaurna language movement. There’s a favourable review in the Sydney Morning Herald of a book about him And the clock struck thirteen – assembled by the linguist Mary-Anne Gale from conversations and archival research. Nothing on the language in the review … Read more
WOTA LOTA – Gail Woods
[From Gail Woods, Lecturer, Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics, Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Education, with respect to the Languages in Crisis summit] Whilst the discussion paper is clearly focused on Languages Other Than Australian (LOTA) and the inherent security and economic risks associated with monolingualism, its sentiments could/should be subversively harnessed to develop the … Read more
More opinions on the loss of Indigenous languages
A link here [thanks to Simon Musgrave!] to international linguistic opinion on Mal Brough’s and John Howard’s poorly informed English-only push. Here’s Geoff Pullum at Language Log today, Punishing speakers of Aboriginal languages:
Plenty could be done to improve the lot of aborigines in Australia without doing anything to insist on their learning English (which is probably going to happen anyway, along with the extinction of the aboriginal languages). Australia has a lot to atone for. Such atonement will probably not occur.
The Australian Greens are better informed than the Government about the language loss that’s happening:
Languages in crisis
Next week, on 7 June in Canberra, will be an event Languages in crisis, at the National Press Club. It’s billed as a “National Languages Summit, calling for simple, effective measures to utilise and develop our national language capacity”. It’s organised by the Academy of Humanities, and they’re going to launch a Research Paper. BUT, … Read more
Sorry Day
National Sorry Day, the fortieth anniversary since the Referendum, and here’s the Government’s response. Today the Prime Minister implied that “the right to live on remote communal land and to speak an indigenous language” keeps Indigenous people poor. But there is no causal relation between speaking an Indigenous language and living in poverty. In country towns across Australia many Indigenous people live on welfare and speak English.
And on Saturday, Sorry Day, I read that the Govenment is offering the 70 traditional owners of Ngapa (Water) country on Muckaty Station (NT) about $60,000 a year for the next two hundred years to experiment with storing nuclear waste on their land. Or alternatively, $171,000 today to each Ngapa clan member. That’s before tax, lawyers and accountants’ fees and administrative costs. And traditional owners (all family) of neighbouring country have said that they don’t want the future value of their land decreased by nearness to a nuclear dump.
Ignorance-based policy from Australia’s Indigenous Affairs Minister – by Carmel O’Shannessy
[ From Carmel O’Shannessy, who’s worked in the NT Department of Education for many years, and has recently finished a PhD on children’s Warlpiri]
Mal Brough shows how much he doesn’t know about Australian Indigenous children’s schooling when he suggests in today’s Australian that compulsory learning of English would be something new. All children in Australian schools compulsorily learn English. Children in bilingual schools in the NT, of which the school in Wadeye community is one, also learn an Indigenous language at school. By the end of their primary years, if the school is well run and good programs and teaching methodologies are in place, the children in bilingual schools perform slightly better in English than the children in similar communities who attend English only schools. And they can also read and write in the Indigenous language, so they have learned twice as much.
!Khwa ttu: San culture and education centre
We just heard from a Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) member about their recent follow-up visit to !Khwa ttu: San culture and education centre, 70 km north of Cape Town. The San (sometimes called ‘Bushmen’) are the indigenous people of Southern Africa, and, like indigenous peoples in many countries, they have suffered dispossession and loss … Read more
Open access or open slather? Nick Thieberger
[ from Nick Thieberger, PARADISEC, Melbourne University branch ]
I am a firm believer in open access to information, especially research information that has been created by taxpayers’ funds. Thus it came as something of a surprise to find myself likened to the main man of the dark forces of corporate information ownership on a site formerly known as the ‘Stolen Grammars’ site.
Constructed by a linguist in Stockholm, the site offered downloadable versions of many grammars which had been copied from various locations (“Browse my collection of stolen .pdf reference grammars if you’d rather not pay.”)