[ Barry sent this in response to the Artefacts, labels and linguists post. He is the curator responsible for the Pacific Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum, and has a brilliant website for an Upper Sepik-Central New Guinea project on the relations between material culture and language, geographical propinquity, population, subsistence and environment.]
The outcome of the renovation of the Pacific Gallery is a compromise between the enormous task of upgrading and relabelling an exhibition of 3000 artefacts and the available funding. A lot of money went into removing the 1960s ceiling, replacing aircon, carpet and lighting, and a paint job. I did not agree with the shiny black but the Goths had the numbers in the committee.
We have begun the difficult task of providing renewed labelling in the wall cases – difficult because one case may have around a hundred items and in such instances we can’t provide a label for each individual item – instead we will try to say something about the collectivity of objects that gives the viewer some sense of what they are looking at, in terms of types and geographical distribution (such as in the display of over 80 stone headed clubs). Electronic means of providing information will not be limited in this way and individual items will be provided with full data, including language groups (speech communities) from which the objects have come (where known).
Jane Simpson
FollowWhy not make films in Indigenous languages?
2006 saw the release of several films with actors speaking endangered languages – Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (Mayan) and Rolf de Heer’s film Ten Canoes, set in Arnhem Land, and with actors speaking mostly in Ganalbingu (and see Anggarrgoon on it).
Leaving aside the pleasure of hearing actors speak in Indigenous Australian languages, I liked Ten Canoes – it was funny, it gave an idea of the good and the bad about small societies – you’re looked after, but you have reciprocal responsibility, and NO privacy – everyone knows what you’re thinking. The filming was beautiful – both the recreation of early photos, and the shots of the light on the water and the tangled trees in the swamp. And the authors worked hard to “make a film that would not only satisfy local tastes and requirements but would also satisfy Western audiences used to Western storytelling conventions.” [1]
Ten Canoes won awards, it had some box-office success, and it has resulted in several spin-off projects which benefit the Ramingining community e.g. recording traditional songs, publishing Donald Thomson’s photographs of Arnhem Land in 1937, training older teenagers (with help from Save the Children and Create Australia) in film-making.
Good eh? But oddly, some people have found it offensive that the Australian Catholic Film Office and the Australian Film Institute would vote Ten Canoes Best Film of the year.
Laughing at the powerful
Summer brings out stories about humour in the media. A right wing commentator complained that Australian cartoonists only lampooned rightwing politicians (ignoring the fact that we have a conservative far-right Government). “How the hell did we get here?” ABC TV 6/1/07 presented the Australian baby-boomers’ top 20 TV comedy shows – mostly Australian but including some British (Yes Minister, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers) and American. Number 1 was M.A.S.H., and the show host said, reflecting an irritatingly widespread attitude, that it was surprising to find an American show with such an Australian sense of humour. Look out, however, for the start of a new claim – that the Australian sense of humour (whatever that is) may actually be an Aboriginal sense of humour. I saw it last week in an article, The joke’s on us by Shane Brady in the Sydney Morning Herald (2/1/07).
Artefacts, labels and linguists
What can a linguist do on a hot summer’s day on North Terrace in Adelaide? Once upon a time I loved the SA State Library &mdash they had a very good collection of books looked after by helpful specialist librarians who knew the collections inside out, and the Friends of the State Library of South Australia did an excellent facsimile publishing service which ensured that nineteenth century materials on South Australian languages were available. Now, while the Friends are still doing good things ..there’s an enormous Christmas tree and fake-looking presents in the new energy-inefficient glass foyer, a closed Circulating Library (“You can hire this book-lined room for a party!”), a billboard for the Bradman collection merchandise, and the historic Mortlock reading room has been converted into a low-lux display room (oh yes, and you can hire this room for functions too!). OK – so the library needs to raise money, and maybe someone who buys a Bradman t-shirt will browse a book. But when the rumour spreads that the State Liibrary is going to evict the Royal Geographical Society library and its superb Australian collection, you have to wonder if some people think of books as Christmas trees, temporary decorations for a convention centre. Please tell us the rumour is false!
The Art Gallery of South Australia? Sure &mdash there’s a Tiwi art exhibition Yingarti Jilamara (glossed as ‘lots of art’), and there are some interesting early colonial portraits of encounters between Aborigines and Europeans.
But the must-see is the Pacific Cultures Gallery in the South Australian Museum. It’s free, it’s cool, and it has the largest collection of Pacific artefacts in Australia. This will attract people working on languages of Papua New Guinea (including Bougainville), the Solomon and Santa Cruz Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, as well as Fijian and Maori.
Three Australian Indigenous Language events in 2007
16-18 March 2007 Workshop on Australian Indigenous languages at the Crommelin Field Station, Pearl Beach. This is organised by the Departments of Linguistics of the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle. There’s a call for papers out. 24 -26 April 2007: Puliima National Indigenous Languages Information Communication Technology Forum “Modern ways for ancient words” at Newcastle. … Read more
Power, open access and language rights
Whether languages can be property has generated further discussion, on Language Log, and on several anthropology blogs (thanks Kimberly!). Two themes emerged: power, and the potential conflict with open access.
Click here – new grammar of a Papuan language
Hilário de Sousa’ s doctoral thesis is now available in the University of Sydney thesis repository. It’s a grammar of Menggwa Dla, an endangered Papuan language of the Senagi family spoken in Papua New Guinea and West Irian. The language has complex cross-referencing and is undergoing an amazing change in how switch reference works – … Read more
Barking up the same tree: the need for digital archives
The surprise for me from the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork workshop (aka Suzzy Data..) was how much plant taxonomists and field linguists have in common. And how much we need to work together with librarians and archivists. We both have to look after records – the decaying recordings of the languages, and the dried specimens in the herbariums. We both work with the living communities, the trees that will get logged and the communities that live with the trees, and the families and children who will switch to speaking another language.
Suzzy Data Workshop – Guest blogger Simon Musgrave
Several of the regular bloggers here are associated with PARADISEC, and they are modest folk. We cannot therefore expect them to tell you that the conference which they held this week (Sustainable data from Digital Fieldwork) was a huge success and a really wonderful event.
But this is a message which should be broadcast, so I felt that a guest post was appropriate.
Click now – thesis on acquisition of Light Warlpiri and classical Warlpiri
Carmel O’Shannessy has just lodged her doctoral thesis Language contact and children’s bilingual acquisition: learning a mixed language and Warlpiri in northern Australia in the Sydney eScholarship Repository (D-Space) at the University of Sydney. It’s on the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia, and on … Read more