Jane Simpson

Last Saturday was the launch of Aboriginal Placenames: Naming and re-naming the Australian landscape by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, at University House, ANU. You can find the details on this excellent book, (edited by Harold Koch and Luise Hercus) here, although not, alas on the publisher (Aboriginal History)’s website. Facebook friends of Julia Miller can see rather good piccies. And there’s a little bit about it in the news.
Rudd started with his favourite rhetorical structure: Why am I launching this book? He answered himself: Three reasons. First, Harold and Grace Koch are Decent Human Beings. (Wild applause at this point). Second, interest in Indigenous studies. And third, appreciation of scholarship.
All good reasons*..
Scholarship shines through the book — lots of papers stuffed with interesting data, from careful linguistic reconstructions, to fine observations of attitudes to introducing names, to details on the stories behind names, to methods for studying placenames. It’s interdisciplinary: Indigenous owners of places, linguists, historians,geographers, pastoralists, archaeologists, anthropologists all have ideas to share. Workshops and meetings of the Geographic Names Boards have provided places for this sharing. And, as so often, Luise Hercus’s paper brings us back to the places themselves, with photographs that show us why people wanted to give them names.
More will be done – Rudd noted a reason why another book on place-names is needed – the table of contents reveals Only One Paper on Queensland placenames – Paul Black’s paper on Kurtjar.
The lovely thing was celebrating unusual achievement – in this case, intelligent, modest people gathering and interpreting information in sensible and enlightening ways, and producing a book whose wealth of material will make it last.

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[ from Jeremy Hammond, who has just joined the MPI’s group on Syntax, typology, and information structure]
This is a blog-post from Tanna, Vanuatu, where in the past few days I’ve seen two views on vernacular languages. Normally, I don’t take sides in politics but something I heard this morning spurred me into action.
I’ll start on Thursday which was the conclusion of a community workshop on Disaster Planning. An aside, it is good to see some aid projects in action with the community getting involved. The cyclone drill was enlivened when two bigmen of the village turned up to the practice evacuation centre with full rain gear, hurricane lamps and 20ltr jerry cans of water – getting right into the spirit of things.
Anyway, at the completion of the drill, the ni-Van project manager (a woman from another island) gave a nice speech to the new disaster committee which consists of young men and women. Part of the speech was close to our hearts as language and culture researchers. In sum, it was that it was now their responsibility to seek out the elders in the community who still retained some traditional indigenous knowledge of the weather systems. They were charged with the task to learn the signs of the terrain and the animals, that could otherwise soon be lost. While mobile phones (and to some extent radios) are omni-present nowadays, during a time of crisis it is likely that these links to the outside world will be lost and the community’s well being relies on them retaining an understanding of the weather systems. They were told to try harmonize their newfound western-based knowledge of disaster planning and their people’s history. Nice.
In contrast, on Friday morning I went up to the local French high school which was having a presentation for some new EU funding for upgrading the school buildings. While I wholeheartedly agree with this kind of investment in the infrastructure, the politics behind it leave a bit to be desired. I paraphrase from one speaker:

It is important that you talk French. It will help you in finding work and building better lives. If you only talk language, you will not have access to work. Our language is [sic] not useful.

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