March is the month for Warlpiri in Sydney. Some people from Nyirrpi, a southwest Warlpiri community are putting on an exhibition of paintings, Emerging at Gallery Gondwana, 7 Danks Street, Waterloo, until March 13.
And then, just as they leave, some women from Lajamanu, the northernmost Warlpiri community, will be down as artists in residence for painting workshops at the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales from the 13th to the 23rd. They’ll finish their visit by performing a public yawulyu (women’s ceremonial dance and song series) on 23rd March. This will take place during the launch of a book Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience by Jennifer Biddle (UNSW Press).
Jane Simpson
FollowIndigenous languages conference; Linguist wanted for Australian Indigenous languages project
Two items for people who haven’t read the Australian Linguistics Society February 2007 newsletter (subscribe! get all the goss AND the Australian Journal of Linguistics).
• LINGAD 2008 25 – 28 September, Adelaide comprises 3 meetings, including:
••the Australian Linguistics Society Conference 26 – 28 September, abstracts due 16 March; (reminder: same due date also for the associated workshop on the language of poetry and song – 300 words abstracts in word or PDF format to christina.eira AT adelaide.edu.au.)
•• Indigenous Languages Conference 2007, 25-27 September 2007,
•• AUSTRALEX
• CAAMA (the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) got squillions from DCITA for work on endangered languages and now want a linguist to help them do it. (In several procrastinatory moments I searched the DCITA website to find out how many squillions, but the site didn’t yield the information in an obvious way. Can anyone tell us?)
Eternity pills and common e-research problems
All over Australia now people are writing reports on the progress of their grants – to attach to their begging-letters for more grants. Reading the reports gives you the sense that Australia is a garden of projects, each a mass of bright blossoms fragrant with success. (So why haven’t we solved world poverty or climate change yet?) That’s why it was really really good to go along to the ARC E-Research post-funding workshop (14-15 February), where participants were encouraged to report on the problems they encountered in their projects…
Events in March and April
• the Central Australian Linguistics Circle call for papers on language description, education, literacy and indigenous knowledge. Friday 20 – Saturday 21, April 2007, Charles Darwin University, Alice Springs Campus, Australia. • the programme for the Pearl Beach Workshop on Australian Languages Friday 16 – Sunday 18, March 2007, Pearl Beach, Australia. • a reminder … Read more
Genographic project: endangered language grants and web maps
A post by Valerie Guerin on the Research Network for Linguistics Diversity list leads to a new source of funding open to individuals, groups, and organizations for language work (the Genographic Legacy Fund) on endangered languages (grant application deadline June 15 and December 15). It also leads to a rather interesting web-site which has time-aligned … Read more
Two little somethings for your grant application
It’s Australian grant application time! Joy, rapture! (Skips lightly around the room) If you’re thinking about what to spend your requested squillions on, here are two thoughts: Archiving Be realistic about how much it will cost to prepare your recordings for archiving, and then the cost of archiving itself – if you don’t have a … Read more
Language, tourism, two-way education, reclamation
After weeks of hot weather and blame-firing over failed native title compensation land deals, rape, gangs, children taken into state care etc., it was like a fine lemon gelato to come across a couple of good news stories on Australian Indigenous languages. New flavour-of-the-year language and tourism, and long-term favourite language reclamation.
Modern grammars from nineteenth century mission materials
God and languages are in the air. The Australian Federal Government is cross with a radical Islamic sheik who preaches in Arabic (translator spooks required!). The sheik points out, correctly, that many churches advertise services in Korean, Tongan, etc., and this causes no offence (= no drain on the spook translator budget). The NSW State Opposition leader wants immigrants to Australia to learn a subject called “English as a first language”, not “English as a second language”. “Second”, he thinks doesn’t reflect the importance of English. Maybe he wants immigrants to talk to their gods in English. Clearly, what linguists think a first language is is not yet a mainstream thought.
And linguists have been debating our connections with missionary linguists, language work done by missionaries, and linguistic software built by the missionary linguist organisation SIL (Semantic compositions (11/1/07) on the panel at the LSA and Anggarrgoon). On one side there are people saying that missionaries roll Dalek-like through the societies of the speakers of the languages they study and do bad things, and so their work is irredeemably sinful. On the other side people say that linguists are also a Dalek species, and so, what the hell, if the SIL software’s good and the linguistic descriptions are good, use them. (Setting aside Earthlings who say that both species of Dalek are only into extermination).
And there’s the position taken by Heidi Kneebone in a 2005 University of Adelaide doctoral dissertation, The language of the chosen view: the first phase of graphization of Dieri by Hermannsburg Missionaries, Lake Killalpaninna 1867-80. PhD dissertation, Linguistics, University of Adelaide (noted at OzPapersOnline )[1]. Kneebone takes linguists to task for NOT looking at early grammars of the languages they’re working on.
Name that spider
Today’s Australia Day, the anniversary of the British invading Australia in 1788. Bang! Plants, animals, birds, land-forms got English common names, and the Indigenous language names were displaced. The exceptions were things which had no obvious look-alikes in England: unfamiliar animals (kangaroos, koalas), birds (currawong), plants (kurrajong, quandong), land-forms (billabong, yakka), fish (ponde), and some man-made things and ideas (boomerang, wurley, corroboree).
Two hundred years later, words from Indigenous languages are gradually coming back as parts of scientific names for species.
Guest blogger John Giacon on the NgaawaGaray summer school
STOP PRESS
SBS news – Tuesday January 23, 2007 – is likely to have an item on NgaawaGaray.
NgaawaGaray was a summer school in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay – two New South Wales languages. [Ngaawa and Garay are the words for ‘language’ in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay]. It was sponsored and organised by Muurrbay and Many Rivers language centres from Nambucca and held at the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney on January 15 – 19. There were 16 students in the Gumbaynggirr course and 11 in Gamilaraay. The Gamilaraay course consisted of part of the ‘Gamilaraay 101’ – taught as ‘Guwaalmiya Gamilaraay’ – a first year subject at University of Sydney, and also taught in TAFE. The Gumbaynggirr course was adapted from the regular course run each year at Muurrbay.