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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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Check out Nicolas Rothwell’s article in Saturday’s Australian. It’s about yes well maybe after all it wasn’t such a good idea the way the Intervention demoralised Indigenous people and engendered a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of Government and its bureaucrats. So, which newspaper has hammered Indigenous people for incompetence and dysfunctionality over the last 4 years? Which newspaper has been applauding itself for triggering the Intervention?
And thinking of other misusable data, the My School Site was launched recently, showing how students across Australia performed on the NAPLAN tests of English literacy and numeracy.
I’m all for numbers, but I do share Bruce Petty’s concern about how these are being used. The numbers we’ve been given are seriously flawed for understanding what’s happening in Indigenous schools in the NT.
These are ENGLISH literacy tests administered in ENGLISH. So if the kids start monolingual in a language other than English it’s kinda obvious that they’re going to do badly in reading and writing English in their first years at school. And they’ll continue to do badly if they don’t get good ESL teaching and if they get so bored at school that they stop attending.
Lots of the remote NT schools (bilingual and non-bilingual) do really badly. What is unforgiveable is the comparison with so-called “statistically similar” schools. They do not seem to have factored in first language. So, among the schools compared to Yuendumu (majority of children speak Warlpiri as a first language) are schools where most children’s first language is English, Aboriginal English or an English-based creole. Here are some (there are probably more but I don’t know all the communities).
Borroloola School, Borroloola NT 0854
Camooweal State School, Camooweal QLD 4828
Goodooga Central School, Goodooga NSW 2831
Moree East Public School, Moree NSW 2400
Wilcannia Central School, Wilcannia NSW 2836
Even if you speak an English-based creole rather than standard English, you’ll still do better than a child who only speaks a traditional language – just as English-speaking children find it easier to learn French than Chinese. There are so many similar words.
Who could be surprised that these children do better on English tests?
And, the information one really wants isn’t there on the site. You can get mission statement blah. So the Feds have said they’ll give more information – what parents think about schools…. Brilliant, what blame-avoiding PR person thought that up?
I bet parents would be MORE interested in the following sets of numbers, which the State and Federal Departments could provide MUCH more cheaply than by conducting an expensive survey of parents:

• How much do the State and Federal governments spend per child in the school?
• how many students per teacher?(see a nice opinion piece (1/2/2010) in the Sydney Morning Herald)
• how many first year out teachers are there in the school?
• what’s the teacher churn in the school?
• in schools with high numbers of children who don’t speak English, how many properly trained ESL teachers are there? (and I don’t mean ESL training via a day’s workshop with a department trainer)
• how long has the principal been there>

Throw those into the statistical blender and see how that changes the “statistically similar schools” clumping.
Apparently the Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, wants us to use the My School website to ‘hold schools and teachers to account’. Give us the numbers ON THAT SITE so we can hold Governments to account.
On the other hand, take the much maligned bilingual education programs. Last year the NT government demoralised communities with bilingual education programs by unilaterally abolishing those programs, against the communities’ wishes. All in the name of improving NAPLAN scores.

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