Jane Simpson

News: Papuan programme

5 February 20117 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

James McElvenny has put up the preliminary program for the Pearl Beach workshop on Papuan languages. How can you miss “Kalam Rhyming Jingles” “Books, papayas and chicken cries in Bunak”, or the drum rolling finale: Mark Donohue “The end of Papuan”? The workshop runs from the evening of Friday the 27th of October to Sunday … Read more

Mother tongue education: the right to understand what the teacher says

5 February 20116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Pitjantjatjara people in South Australia are thinking of abandoning their experiment with monolingual English education after fifteen years. At the same time, some communities in the Northern Territory are suffering from dysfunctional schools which happen to be bilingual, and so are thinking of abandoning their bilingual education programs, and the attendant teaching positions for community members. Churn churn. It’s not about whether the program teaches English literacy and numeracy only. It’s about children understanding what is happening in the classroom, and it’s about communities understanding language shift. The evidence is that dropping bilingual education is no magic silver bullet for a miraculous improvement in children’s English language and literacy.
But there’s more evidence that bilingual education can produce better results than monolingual education. In The Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter Number 103, September 2006 (thanks David!) is an article by Ute Eickelkamp On a Positive Note: The Anangu Education Service Conference. Ute describes a conference held in Alice Springs in which half of the more than 200 delegates were Anangu staff and tertiary students “and many discussions and workshops were held in Pitjantjatjara”. Yes!

Blog-catcher – Aragonese and Fiji

5 February 20114 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to prowling around the web, we’ve come across Vakaivosavosa, a blog about Fiji and the Pacific, life, history and culture, which has lots of links to material on the Pacific and other blogs. AND – how cool is this.. TLaC’s first citation in a blog about a minority language in that minority language! o … Read more

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

Summer school courses in Australian Indigenous languages

5 February 201130 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Want to learn some Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay in Sydney this January? John Giacon passes on this information. Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative and Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre, in association with the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney, are facilitating Ngaawa-Garay, a summer school which will offer one week courses in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay from Monday 15 – Friday 19 January, 2007.

Bush School: The Warlmanpa and the Bakers

5 February 201128 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

There was an engaging documentary Bush School on SBS tonight, about Warrego School in a ghost mining town out of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. It started a few years ago with eleven Warlmanpa children from the Mangarlawurru [Mungalawurru] Aboriginal community travelling 80 km each day to get to there. They’re still going, singing their lessons in the bus. They attend 100% of the time, achieve national benchmarks in English literacy and numeracy, focus on horse-riding and swimming. The school is working hard to combat the hearing loss that most of the kids suffer from (ear infections have meant that several of the children have hearing aids). And they’ve sent one of their brightest students to study at a private girls school in New South Wales.

Where have all the old blogs gone?

5 February 201127 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

I got inspired to preen our blogroll, by following up blogrolls on other linguistics blogs (notably Language Log). This meant hours of pleasure going through musings, dead blogs, frozen blogs, (very!) personal blogs, e-learning blogs exhorting us to use blogs in teaching, e-learning blogs exhorting not to use them, pictures of cats, gardens, parrots, business blogs, meta-blogs..
The results?

invitation… to the launch of the Yuwaalaraay-Gamilaraay Language Programs resources

5 February 201124 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

To all our readers who’ll be in the Tamworth area (New South Wales) on Friday 20 October, 2006. Remember the post on the excellent new Gamilaraay Yuwaalaraay resources?
Well this is your chance to admire the resources, and to see performances from the kids learning the Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay languages. John Giacon passes on this invitation.

Noongar, Native Title, Linguistic evidence: a small celebration before the night

5 February 201121 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

The cause for celebration is Justice Murray Wilcox’s finding that Noongar people have ‘native title’ to certain parts of the Perth Metropolitan area (Federal Court (Bennell v State of Western Australia [2006] FCA 1243), Perth, 19 SEPTEMBER 2006).
The pursuit of native title (like the Snark) has cost heaps and caused much grief. But when native title is recognised, it’s great, and when the value of linguistic evidence in determining it is recognised, this is also great. Wilcox’s findings have lots of interesting things to say about Noongar language, what the claimants said, and the expert linguistic evidence provided by PARADISEC’s Nick Thieberger.

Market value of ‘Aboriginal’ words

5 February 201119 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Diverting myself from contemplation of pronouns, I was led via the Indigenous alert (you get this by e-mailing library.research AT facs.gov.au) to a story on a spa in Queensland where the writer was testing

“Lowana from Li’Tya, a range of products and treatments which draw inspiration from indigenous Australian culture”

‘Lowana’ caught my attention, since I have been idling around with the etymology of lubra, which takes in Oyster Bay Tasmanian lowana ‘woman’. HO, I thought, a Tasmanian enterprise perhaps. ‘Woman’ I thought, good name for spa consumers. ‘Lowana’ – fits English speakers’ sense of euphony. So I went further to Spa care from the Australian Dreamtime. My machine was instantly taken over by a buzzing drone-pipe, but I fought on (with the help of the volume control), wading through the piccies of cute painted-up people, in search of WORDS..