Image Credit: Dreamtime Creative by Jordan Lovegrove, Ngarrindjeri; from 2023 Annual Closing the Gap Report and 2024 Implementation Plan (p. 10) © Commonwealth of Australia, Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan 2024

Editor’s Note: The Australian Commonwealth’s Closing the Gap 2024 Annual Report and 2025 Implementation Plan was released earlier this week. In this post, Kristen Martin reflects on progress towards one specific ‘Closing the Gap’ target, namely Target 16, which aims to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

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It has been four years since the Australian Government included Target 16 – to strengthen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages – in the ‘Closing the Gap’ targets. What has been happening since Target 16 was announced? The status of Target 16 is officially ‘unknown’ (as of July 2023),  and the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey will not be published until 2026 but what has progress looked like so far? There is already some exciting, new work happening, as this blog will outline.

Voices of Country

A collaboration between the Australian Government, First Languages Australia and the International Decade of Indigenous Languages Directions Group, the Voices of Country Action plan is described as “framed through five inter-connected themes:

1. Stop the Loss
2. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities are Centre
3. Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer
4. Caring for Country, and
5. Truth-telling and Celebration.”

The purpose of the initiative is to pilot actions towards language strength based on community decisions, outlining various ways governments can approach the Closing the Gap targets. In a report released about the 10-year action plan, it outlines:

“Consistent with the Global Action Plan, the Australian Government will undertake and report on practical commitments that deliver progress against the framework set out in Voices of Country. The Australian Government will report against these commitments on an annual basis”

However, the Voices of Country Action plan is only one of many plans that the Australian government has invested in!

Language Policy Partnership

Alongside the Voice to Country Action plan, a key milestone in the progression of Target 16 is the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Language Policy Partnership, established December 2022 and known as the LPP. The LLP seeks to “establish a true partnership approach with truth-telling, equal representation and shared decision-making fundamental to the National Agreement for Closing the Gap”.

Image credit: The Wattle Tree graphic design agency by Gilimbaa with cultural elements created by David Williams (Wakka Wakka), acknowledging also the Traditional Custodians: © First Languages Australia and Commonwealth of Australia 2023, Voices of Country – Australia’s Action Plan for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032, p.9

The program is a collaboration between the Coalition of Peaks, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language experts, and various government members. Through the LPP and discussions with various communities, seven priorities have been outlined to make progress on Target 16 and strengthen Indigenous languages. The priorities are as follows:

1. Speaking and using languages
2. Supporting the people, groups and organisations who work in languages
3. Languages legislation
4. Access to Country
5. More funding that goes where communities need it
6. Bringing language home to the people and communities
7. Help people understand the importance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages

From this commitment, the LPP has also said

“The LPP is working to develop a national and coordinated approach to achieving Target 16. This includes working in partnership, centring the community-controlled sector, changing how governments work, and sharing the right data and information to make important decisions. The LPP will also work according to annual work plans and a three-year strategic plan.”

Since its establishment, the organisation has met seven times with published documents reflecting their discussions available.

The Australian Government has invested $9.7 million into the LPP and states the program will undertake evaluation after three years (in 2026).

A lookback on previous Target 16 process

As Alexandra Grey has noted back in 2021, funding  for the Indigenous Languages and Arts (ILA) program had been planned for the progression of Target 16. The ILA, in collaboration with First Languages Australia saw 25 language centres open throughout the country and teach the various languages in their surrounding areas. Following this, the ILA has also said it will invest over $37 million in 2024-2025 to “support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to express, conserve and sustain their cultures through languages and arts activities throughout Australia.”. What this funding will go to in 2025, we will have to wait and see.

International Decade of Indigenous Languages

Australia is not the only country to care about the status of Indigenous languages, as we are currently in the middle of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022 – 2032). Following the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, the UN has established this decade to focus on the “preservation, revitalization and promotion” of Indigenous languages. Australia is one of many countries to be a part of this celebration, developing the ‘Voices of Country’ Action Plan as “a call to action for all stakeholders”.

Impact of these actions

Of the many partnerships in place, it appears the Australian government has taken a community-based approach for this goal, consulting with community members and First Nations representatives for official and efficient actions. With all the great initiatives underway, it is easy to assume that progression with Target 16 is happening. However, we will not be able to truly know the effects of these initiatives until 2026 as we wait on the fourth National Indigenous Language Survey and the LPP program evaluation.

NSW Police (Image credit: Edwina Pickles, SMH)

Editor’s note: The Language on the Move team closely collaborates with the Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN). To raise awareness of LLIRN and feature the research of its members, we are starting a new series about exciting new research in specific areas of language and law.

In this first post in the series, LLIRN founders and conveners Dr Alex Grey and Dr Laura Smith-Khan introduce the research of three early career researchers working on language, policing, and criminal justice.

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Alex Grey and Laura Smith-Khan

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The Law and Linguistics Interdisciplinary Researchers’ Network (LLIRN) came into being in 2019, after an initial symposium involving a group of academics and students, mainly from Australian universities, whose research is interested in the various intersections of language and law. One of our key goals of the symposium was to learn more about each other’s work and create new opportunities to collaborate.

Since then, LLIRN has grown and we have organized and run a number of different initiatives, including multiple panels at conferences across both linguistics and law, a special issue that showcased the work of several of our (mainly early career) members, and a lively and growing mailing list.

Fast forward to 2024, our Listserv now includes members from at least 37 different countries, at diverse stages of their careers, working as academics, as language or legal professionals, and/or in policy or decision-making roles. However, as LLIRN convenors, we have felt that we still have much to learn about the members who make up the network, the expertise they have and their goals. This new blog series intends to address this gap: we want to learn (or “LLIRN”) more about each other, and to make our learning public so that others too can learn more about us.

Northern Territory Supreme Court (Image credit: Dietmar Rabich, Wikipedia)

In the first of this new series, we showcase LLIRN members, Alex Bowen, Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, and Dr Kate Steel, who are working in areas related to language, policing, and criminal justice.

Alex Bowen, University of Melbourne, Australia

Alex Bowen’s in-progress PhD looks at communication about criminal law and justice with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His earlier research was about how police in the NT explain the right to silence in police interviews, producing the publications listed below.  He has previously practised criminal and commercial law.

Alex Bowen is interested more broadly in police interviewing, language in legal processes, interpreting and translation, how we understand and talk about law and justice interculturally, and how legal language is influenced by monolingual and colonial assumptions. He is interested in discussing these topics, especially with Indigenous scholars and practitioners, and developing interdisciplinary and intercultural resources for training and education. He may be available for peer review related to the above topics.

Recent publications

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You don’t have to say anything’: Modality and consequences in conversations about the right to silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347–374.
Bowen, A. (2021). Explaining the right to silence under Anunga: 40 years of a policy about language. Griffith Law Review, 30(1), 18–49.
Bowen, A. (2021). Intercultural translation of vague legal language: The right to silence in the Northern Territory of Australia. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies, 33(2), 308–340.
Bowen, A. (2021). “What you’ve got is a right to silence”: Paraphrasing the right to silence and the meaning of rights. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 28(1), 1–29.

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, University of Lincoln, UK

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida has experience conducting ethnographic and conversation analytic research in police and judicial settings. This has included research on police interviews with suspects in the UK, criminal hearings in Brazil and, more recently, International Criminal Court (ICC) trials, producing the publications listed below. He is currently working on a paper about the role of judges in witness examination at the ICC, focusing particularly on the tensions associated with their dual-role as both referee and truth-finder.  He lectures in Criminology.

International Criminal Court, The Hague (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Ferraz de Almeida is broadly interested in studying social interactions in any form of police or legal context and welcomes contact from researchers with similar interests.

Recent publications

Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Drew, P. (2020). The fabric of law-in-action: ‘formulating’ the suspect’s account during police interviews in England. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, 27(1), 35-58.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2022). Two ways of spilling drink: The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects. Discourse Studies, 24(2), 187-205.
D’hondt, S., Perez-Leon-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2022). Evidence about Harm: Dual Status Victim Participant Testimony at the International Criminal Court and the Straitjacketing of Narratives about Suffering. Criminal Law Forum, 33, 191.
D’hondt, S., Pérez-León-Acevedo, J. P., Ferraz de Almeida, F., & Barrett, E. (2024). Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court. Language in Society, 1-22.
Ferraz de Almeida, F. (2024). Counter-Denunciations: How Suspects Blame Victims in Police Interviews for Low-Level Crimes. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 37, 119–137.

Dr Kate Steel, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK

Dr Kate Steel’s PhD (2022) and continuing research explore interactions ‘at the scene’ between police first responders and victims of domestic abuse, producing the publication below. This work draws from police body-worn video footage within one force area in the England & Wales jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. This research responds to the typical simplification of the crucial role of communication at the scene is and its under-emphasis in official procedure for the first response to domestic abuse, at both local and national levels.

Dr Kate Steel is now working with another police force to develop language guidance specific to the policing context of domestic abuse first response.  She lectures in linguistics.

Recent publications

Aldridge, M., & Steel, K. (2022). The role of metaphor in police first response call-outs in cases of suspected domestic abuse. In I. Šeškauskienė (Ed.), Metaphor in Legal Discourse (224-241). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Available from https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9900169
Steel, K. (2023) “Can I have a look?”: The discursive management of victims’ personal space during police first response call-outs to domestic abuse incidents. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 37(2): 547-572.

What about you?

Do you work or research in an area related to criminal justice and language, or another area where language and law intersect? Join the LLIRN!

What other language and law topics would you like to learn about? Have your say on our next LLIRN “What’s new in language and law research?” blog post. Let us know in the comments or join the network and send us an email!

Upcoming events of interest in this area

Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Dr Kate Steel will both be presenting their research in the coming months, including at the IAFLL European conference in Birmingham. Dr Fabio Ferraz de Almeida will also present at the Forensic Conversations in Criminal Justice Settings Symposium in Loughborough in September.

The Language on the Move team is here to help!

After the Language on the Move Reading Challenges of 2018, 2019, and 2020, this is the fourth time we are running the Language on the Move Reading Challenge.

This year, we have created a monthly calendar of reading recommendations to keep you company throughout the year.

As was the case previously, the Language on the Move Reading Challenge 2021 is designed to encourage broad reading in the discipline and beyond, and to make linguistics reading fun. Anyone with an interest in the intersection of linguistic diversity and social life can join.

Throughout the year, make sure to watch out for in-depth reviews and interactive conversations related to each reading, both here on this site and over on Twitter @lg_on_the_move.

Enjoy the recommendations from our team and feel free to add your own recommendations in the comment section below! We are interested in any good reads illuminating the intersection of language and social life.

January

Hanna Torsh recommends The Sydney Language by Jakelin Troy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2019, 2^nd ed.).

“Jakelin Troy documents the language of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Sydney Region, which no longer has any speakers. Drawing on historical sources, the book provides a classic example of language contact and intercultural communication. Shadows of those encounters between Aboriginal people and colonizers continue to exist in the vocabulary of Australian English. “Waratah” is a good example. The flower to which it refers is the name of the NSW floral emblem and of a major rugby team.”

February

Pia Tenedero recommends Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain (Crown Publishing, 2012).

“I like having Reading Group via Zoom because I feel more confident to express myself in this digital platform than in our face-to-face meetings – possibly an indication of my introvert side. This is partly why Susan Cain’s exploration of communication styles and the stereotypes linked to them appeals to me. There is a dominant belief that the ideal self, successful students, model employees, or the best leaders enjoy the spotlight, act quickly, and talk fast, aloud, and a lot. Extroversion is also perceived as a “Western” communication style. As a result, those who do not fit the pattern are oftentimes viewed through a deficit lens, as I have found in my research with globalized accountants in the Philippines.”

March

Vera Williams Tetteh recommends Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa by Nwando Achebe (Ohio University Press, 2020).

“In 2009, I gifted Ingrid (Piller) a glossy catalogue celebrating 50 years of Ghanaian history. She was puzzled at this short time span and asked where all the history before that was. Not having an answer at the time, I have become an avid reader of African history since. Nwando Achebe provides a brilliant African-centred history of women in leadership roles on the continent during pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. The book opens with my most favourite African proverb – “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter” and, throughout, addresses the question: whose histories, whose stories, whose archives?”

April

Loy Lising recommends Challenging the Myth of Monolingual Corpora edited by Arja Nurmi, Tanja Rutten, and Paivi Pahta (Brill, 2017).

“This book addresses how the monolingual mindset pervades even the discipline of linguistics itself, specifically the sub-discipline of corpus linguistics. The monolingual mindset manifests in the compilation, annotation, and use of corpora, and multilingual practices are converted into monolingual corpora at each of these levels. As one of the contributors to the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English, I am concerned that any non-English data in that corpus are either marked as <indig>, if they are in a local language, or <foreign>, if they are in Spanish. The book offers many helpful lenses through which to query these practices and to consider how non-English elements could be better incorporated so that they can serve as meaningful evidence of language contact and language change.”

May

Madiha Neelam recommends Language Policy: Hidden agendas and new approaches by Elana Shohamy (Routledge, 2006).

“This book inspires me to think more deeply about how language can serve as a means of control and categorisation. Shohamy explains how perceptions of language as a limited entity, governed by fixed boundaries, and strict rules of correctness make language amenable to manipulation for political, social, and economic purposes. Language tests, in particular, are powerful tools of control and social categorisation.”

June

Samar Al-Khalil recommends Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf by Osman Z. Barnawi (Routledge, 2017).

“Barnawi shows how education in the Gulf region is changing as societies move from oil-based to knowledge-based economies. In this context, education has become entirely subject to the needs of the job market and economic agendas. This has resulted in a series of tensions as this form of neoliberal and globalized education comes into conflict with Islamic values and Arab identities. The book helps me to think more critically about the broader socioeconomic context in which my research about the promotional discourses of private English language teaching institutes in Saudi Arabia is embedded.”

July

Shiva Motaghi-Tabari recommends Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc., 2018).

“Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia is an anthology of fifty short life stories written by Aboriginal people from all walks of life and spanning a variety of generations and regions. It is a compilation of diverse voices and perspectives which have identity, culture, and racism at their core. One of the themes that stands out throughout the book is the contributors’ struggles to understand their identity, and to find a sense of belonging and acceptance. The book enriched my own learning and understanding about Indigenous people in many ways, and I would recommend the book particularly to migrants to Australia, who can too easily avoid confronting Australia’s colonial history and the ongoing struggles of its First Nations people.”

August

Alexandra Grey recommends Language Investment and Employability: The Uneven Distribution of Resources in the Public Employment Service by Mi-Cha Flubacher, Alexandre Duchêne and Renata Coray (Palgrave, 2018).

“This book reports on a 9-month institutional ethnography inside various offices of Switzerland’s public employment service across the officially French-German bilingual Canton of Fribourg. It is a brilliant example of an institutional ethnography. The study demonstrates that language policy research should not always take a specific official language policy as its starting point. Instead, it is important for researchers to look at sites and processes where both overt and covert language policy is made and applied without taking on the official guise of ‘a policy about language’. Here, the rules, official policies and official discourses are, on their face, about eligibility for state assistance and employability, but the study shows how language practices, migration histories, and language repertoires are constructed within them.”

September

Ana Sofia Bruzon recommends Home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education by Annette Lareau (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000, 2^nd ed).

“Working-class families want their children to succeed in school, just like middle-class families, but they are not endowed with the same resources. Lareau shows that social class has a powerful impact on educational success; that is, parental involvement in schooling correlates strongly to children’s educational attainment. For working-class families, school and family life are strictly separated. By contrast, school and family life are interconnected for middle class families. Parental possession and activation of cultural resources yields social and educational profits for middle class children, which results in the strong connection between social class and educational outcomes. The book challenges me to think more deeply about how the class-school relationship is complicated when linguistic difference and migrant status also come into play. Schools should help fill the gap by providing inclusive multilingual information.”

October

Jinhyun Cho recommends Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu (Polity, 1992).

“I have read this book numerous times and treat it as my sociolinguistic bible. I continue to find new perspectives and insights into the relationship between language and society at each reading. By shifting the focus from language per se to its situatedness in complex social relations, Bourdieu’s theory of language as capital works seamlessly in the theorisation of linguistic markets, in which a price is formed on language, and censorship operates in order to distinguish legitimate language from other varieties. Although Bourdieu’s theory was formed in the French context of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century, it has been foundational to my own research related to translation and interpreting in contemporary South Korea, where English serves as a key instrument of distinction.”

November

Tazin Abdullah recommends Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia by Samia Khatun (University of Queensland Press, 2019).

“Much of the narrative surrounding Australian immigrants posits migration as a recent phenomenon. Australianama (“The book of Australia”), in contrast, is a refreshing insight into the historic connection immigrants have had with land and people. Khatun traces the South Asian Muslim presence in Australia using literature in South Asian languages and stories found in Aboriginal accounts. She explains, convincingly, that an understanding of immigrant history is found not in languages associated with European/colonial knowledge systems, but within the literature of immigrant and Aboriginal languages. The stories that Khatun unearths definitively illustrate the influence of historical, social and cultural factors that produce the linguistic representation of immigrants. I thoroughly enjoyed this fresh perspective on the story of Australia.”

December

Ingrid Piller recommends The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad and with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (Penguin, 2019).

“I’ve probably learned more about language – and life in general, I might add – from literature than from linguistics. And this anthology offers a kaleidoscope of the many facets in which language is entwined in the experience of migration. Ahmad has brought together a brilliant collection of migrant literature with pieces focused on the experience of leaving home, arriving in a destination, and creating, or trying to create, a new home. Although the US and UK still loom large among the destinations, Ahmad has made a huge effort to include a wide variety of origins and destinations. Another strength of the anthology is that, in addition to some well-known names, it features many newer writers who have not yet been widely anthologized – I’ve discovered a number of authors to add to my favorite writers list.”

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Source: Australian Museum

Editor’s note: This week (Nov 08-15) we are celebrating NAIDOC week. “NAIDOC” stands for “National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.” The theme of this year’s NAIDOC week is “Always was, always will be” in recognition of the fact that First Nations people have occupied and cared for the Australian continent for over 65,000 years. Indigenous Languages have been a inextricable part of this history. Yet the value of Indigenous Languages continues to be denied, as Gerald Roche and Jakelin Troy show here.

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A New Era for Indigenous Languages?

Despite decades of research and public outreach demonstrating the importance of Indigenous languages, negative attitudes about the maintenance and revitalization of these languages persist among the general public in Australia. Here, we argue that we need to think about the tenacity of these negative attitudes as a form of denial, like climate denial or genocide denial. We also argue that now is a crucial time to confront that denial.

2019 was nominated by the UN as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the years 2022-2032 have been nominated as the decade of Indigenous languages. These high-profile international mega-events seemingly promise a coming era of unprecedented attention to and support for Indigenous languages.

This promise extends to Australia. We joined in the International Year of Indigenous Languages, with numerous activities organized by the Department of Communication and the Arts. The Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies recognized 2019 as an “opportunity for all Australians to engage in a national conversation about Indigenous languages.”

Source: Australian Museum

Australia is the only country in the world that has a national schools curriculum that supports the teaching of all its Indigenous languages. ‘The Australian Curriculum Languages – Framework for Teaching Aboriginal Languages and Torres Strait Islander Languages’ provides for every school in Australia to teach one or more Australian languages—the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages. In spite of this historic development in our education system, most Australians seem to be oblivious or, worse, hostile to Australian languages. Plans are now afoot to take part in the coming decade of Indigenous languages, but how will Australia support Australian languages?

Ongoing trends and recent events in Australia suggest that significant challenges lie ahead. The Third National Indigenous Languages Report, published in August this year, found that most of Australia’s Indigenous languages are highly ‘endangered,’ while only a small and declining number (currently 12) are considered ‘strong.’ Meanwhile, recent efforts to bolster the role of English, seen in new regulations enforcing English requirements for partner visas, have strengthened problematic associations between the English language and Australian citizenship. And most disturbingly, we continue to see the destruction of Indigenous heritage by both commercial and state parties.

All of this suggests that Australia must still confront massive social and political barriers if Indigenous languages are going to flourish. As the analysis below demonstrates, denial of the importance of Indigenous languages and the reality of their revitalization persists, and are expressed in public forums with surprising impunity.

Indigenous Languages and the Australian Public  

Source: Australian Museum

We undertook a preliminary analysis of comments made on five articles in the Conversation, published between August 2014 and July 2020; the data we analyze is available here. These articles focused on different aspects of the maintenance and revitalization of Indigenous languages in Australia. We collated a total of 49 comments from them.

We began by classifying the comments into negative, positive or both/neither regarding their view of Indigenous languages. We found that  21 (42.8%) of the comments were unambiguously negative in their appraisal, while 14 (28.5%) were positive; the remaining were either neutral or ambiguous.

We then examined the negative comments for recurrent themes that were used to justify and rationalize these views. We found five major themes: language revitalization is impractical; it harms Indigenous people and communities; revitalized languages are inauthentic; government support for Indigenous languages is inappropriate, and; English should be promoted instead of Indigenous languages. Each theme is examined in turn below.

Commentators suggested that it was “impractical,” “absurd,” or not “feasible” to maintain and revitalize Indigenous languages, or that these languages are “doomed,” and therefore any interventions were useless. Some commentators took a modified position, suggesting that the proposed methods, rather than revitalization itself, were impractical. One commentator attempted to demonstrate the impracticality of supporting Indigenous languages with a hypothetical scenario: a factory in an “Aborigine area” where all signage would have to be in English as well as “the various Aboriginal languages/dialects,” leading to an unsafe work environment.

Another theme was that maintaining and revitalizing Indigenous languages is harmful. Some suggested that supporting Indigenous languages has adverse economic impacts, primarily because English is the language of economic advancement: “English, in Australia must be the language of the classroom as it will be the key to the factory, office and other workplaces.” Others stressed that supporting Indigenous languages would isolate Indigenous people: from the rest of society, in remote locations, and in the past. Support for Indigenous language was associated with Indigenous people living “in the desert, isolated from mainstream society,” “condemned” to becoming a “living museum,” unable to “appreciate their links to people in other regions.” A variant of this argument was that providing support for language revitalization takes funds away from communities where Indigenous languages are strong.

Source: Australian Museum

Commentators also employed a ‘bootstraps’ argument, insisting that government interventions in Indigenous languages were inappropriate because communities should take sole responsibility for their languages. One commentator stated that “The real responsibility lies within each community to promote language usage,” while another emphasized the need for “a grass roots commitment within the community.” This point was often stressed by making comparisons with successful efforts of migrant communities to maintain their languages in Australia. These comments seemingly imply that if Indigenous communities need government support, it is because they are either unwilling or unable to maintain their languages themselves.

A fourth theme in the negative comments focused on issues of authenticity. It was argued that the languages, speakers, or the use of languages were, essentially, fake. Regarding revitalized languages, it was argued that, “We don’t know what the languages were really like,” and that we can “never know” their pronunciation. Not only were the languages described as fake, but it was also asserted that, “Aboriginal people are really English speakers.” Finally, the use of such languages is also deemed inappropriate in the modern world, in places that “are now completely covered in concrete, industry, and modern life.”

A final theme was that English should be prioritized. The importance of English was sometimes suggested to derive from its official status: “English is the official language in Australia.” More often, it was suggested that English ‘simply is’ the dominant language, and that prioritizing it is mere realism: “Living in Australia means speaking English.” One commentator also suggested that English is a “very rich language,” that contains “the words needed for modern, global life.” This suggests that Indigenous languages are, by contrast, ‘poor’ and have vocabularies unsuited to ‘modern, global life.’

Source: Australian Museum

Understanding Denial

All the positions outlined above constitute denial insofar as they are counterfactual. In contrast to what these commentators suggest, language revitalization is thriving in Australia. Many languages of the south east and south west of Australia have come back into active use after more than one hundred years of dormancy. One such language is Kaurna of the Adelaide Plains, not spoken for more than one hundred years when its community began to reconstruct the language from sparse memories and some historic documents, assisted by linguist Rob Amery. It is now a thriving language with its community using the language on a daily basis for casual and formal communication. It began with the community wanting to teach the language in their schools and this continues today.

Rather than harming Indigenous people, language revitalization is linked to increased wellbeing. In talking about the renewal of Kaurna and other languages, Kaurna educator Stephen Goldsmith says, “When we’re talking about the Aboriginal culture, we’re talking about the cultural heritage of every Australian…When people go into communities they start to understand the depth and the knowledge of Aboriginal people and how we operate as part of the environment.”

Although language revitalization requires commitment from the community, it also requires government support, in both policy and funding. And languages that have undergone renewal of their use as community languages are as real and authentic as any language. Finally, English is not Australia’s official language nor is it an Australian language; it is a language of Australia, imported like the many others that are now languages of Australia.

Source: Australian Museum

These are all established facts, accessible to anyone who cares to look. There are debates about details, but not basic truths. Therefore, if the comments we analyze are expressions of ignorance, it is willful ignorance. More than merely counterfactual, however, these arguments are also denialist in the sense that they aim to obstruct a course of action that is suggested by those recognized facts. In this case, they aim to justify and rationalize an unjust status quo that Indigenous people have persistently spoken up against.

The denialist arguments described above follow a common pattern shared with denialist efforts to suppress language revitalization elsewhere. However, they also exist in a uniquely Australian context, and an important aspect of this context is anti-Indigenous racism. A recent survey found that three quarters of Australians hold ‘implicit bias’ against Indigenous people, and the Online Hate Prevention Institute has tracked rising anti-Indigenous racism in Australian online space, particularly following this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.

We need to better understand the relationships between anti-Indigenous racism and the denialist positions described here.

If the UN decade of Indigenous language is going to truly help Indigenous languages in Australia flourish, it will be essential to understand both the extent of denialist sentiments, and the complex ways they interact with the wider political context. Broad public support will be essential to promoting Indigenous languages: to create a safe space where Indigenous people can undertake the difficult and emotional work of reclaiming their languages; to protect communities and individuals from backlash; to ensure that funding is secured and its use supported; and as an essential part of any political change within our democratic political system.

To win this support, we have to stop denying the existence of denial, try and better understand how and why opposition to Indigenous language revitalization exists, and explore how it might be countered.

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The histories and everyday experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia are etched in the landscape, the waterways and the voices of those who can speak and understand ancestral Aboriginal languages. They also thrive in post-invasion contact varieties such as Kriol and Aboriginal English.

Researching Aboriginal English through yarning

When our sociolinguistic project into Aboriginal English in Nyungar country (southwest Western Australia) started in early 2019 little did we know how much our fieldwork would enrich us. The premise was simple: head out into metropolitan Perth, set up the cameras and talk to people. Then use those recordings to figure out how Aboriginal English is changing. But there were so many questions. What model of research would be favoured and why? How should we collect our data? Who should we approach? What would people talk about?

It would have been reasonable to follow existing practice in sociolinguistics. But the canonical methods of the field are mostly based on industrialised, Western cultures and societies. How could we ensure that different ways of knowing would be incorporated into the project? How could we move beyond the Eurocentric mainstream to “hear the voices” of people historically pushed to the margins?

Data collection in a Perth city park (Photo reproduced with permission)

To the rescue comes Glenys Collard, a Nyungar woman, a native speaker of Aboriginal English and an experienced language worker whose input into the project changed the research forever.

Instead of a sociolinguistic interview, our data collection tool of choice was “yarning” – an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation. This type of conversation and storytelling is highly dramatic, using much gesture, facial expression and variation in tone and volume. The lack of pre-defined questions in the “yarning” format allowed speakers to remain in control of what they wanted to share while the cameras were on.

Recruiting research participants through listening

Instead of institutions, we headed out to meet people in their homes. But there was a catch. A significant number of Aboriginal people are homeless. In 2016, for example, Aboriginal people made up 3.7% of the total population of Western Australia but accounted for a staggering 29.1% of the homeless population in the state.

Glenys Collard was adamant these people’s stories should be heard, too. She led us into the streets and parks they call home. She reached out to them, she explained what we were doing and why. The photo shows Glenys Collard and the four women we spoke to at a Perth City Park in mid-2019. Glenys explains what was special about yarning with these women:

These yorgas [women] were too deadly [great], they could spin a few good yarns and they took after yarnin flat out about who they was, what they been doin. It was deadly. Celeste talked to them and they already looked at me so I gave them the ok with my eyes and closed mouth. The four of them were Aboriginal English speakers. I don’t think another researcher would have chosen them to speak with because of the area and the other people who were there. They all had a yarn and they wanted to share so we stay an listen.

They wanted to speak to us because of Glenys. She made the research safe for them. At the end of the session, Celeste asked Glenys why people – both in the park and elsewhere – had been so keen to speak to us. Glenys replied: No one has ever listened to them before.

These feelings are echoed by Dr Chelsea Bond, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman and University of Queensland academic. Dr Bond explains that Australian society is founded on the non-existence of Indigenous people. She frames a lack of listening around police aggression. “Blackfellas are always speaking about police brutality – why aren’t people listening?”

Recording stories about police brutality and racism

Indeed, accounts of police brutality feature prominently in our collection. The corpus is replete with stories of racism and abuse.

Nita’s story stands out. We were outside a popular medical centre in downtown Perth when we saw her. Nita (a pseudonym) seemed upset, but she was keen to have a yarn so we set up the cameras. The microphones are on. Her twenty-something-year-old nephew is dead. Found dead at one of Perth’s private prisons. The police tells her and her family that her nephew killed himself. She and her family disagree: the bruises on his body indicate otherwise. She is sure her nephew was killed.

In another example, a prominent Aboriginal Perth leader spontaneously told us the story of a Nyungar woman who was evicted from her home in metropolitan Perth. When he arrived to try and stop the eviction, the woman’s heels were dug into the framework of the door, her little grannies (grandchildren) everywhere, police “by the mass”. He recalls seeing the police dragging the woman by the hair as her grannies looked on. He saw the Department of Child Protection officers take the woman’s grandchildren away.

Why aren’t people listening?

A young Aboriginal student we yarned with sums it up perfectly: “Someone who has grown up privileged cannot even fathom the idea of how we [Aboriginal people] might have grown up. It’s like a bad dream to them, like a nightmare. But that’s what we’ve lived, you know?”.

More than sociolinguistic samples

The voices in the stories we collected for our research are much more than high-quality linguistic samples of Aboriginal English. They are raw and real accounts of the community’s histories and everyday experiences. Our cross-cultural fieldwork allowed us to record the community’s voices using a culturally appropriate genre (yarning) and placing a community member, Glenys Collard, at the core. Her presence, experience and wisdom allowed us to move a step closer towards decolonising research into Aboriginal English. Importantly, her expertise allowed us to “hear the voices” of those rarely featured in sociolinguistic research.

Acknowledgement

This research is funded through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) (DE DE170100493) and a 2019 Australian Linguistic Society Research Grant.

Whether #writing was invented even more often is complicated because (1) incomplete record (2) unclear connections between writing systems (3) the history of writing is a colonial story

Side exploration: #Australian #Indigenous message stickshttps://t.co/ExI5ZcgOHe pic.twitter.com/sgLlWAAyWq

— Language on the Move (@Lg_on_the_Move) August 3, 2020

One of the reasons I don’t go into detail is that I’m not an expert and don’t know all that much about Australian Aboriginal Message Sticks myself. However, taking my Literacies unit online has offered the opportunity to create a lesson about them by bringing the world’s foremost expert on the subject, Dr Piers Kelly, right into my classroom.

Piers and I met up on Zoom and I brought along some of my burning questions: What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19^th/early 20^th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How did message sticks fit into the multilingual communication ecology of precolonial Australia? And, of course, the million-dollar question: are message sticks a form of writing?

To find out the answers to these questions, and more, listen to this audio-record of our conversation.

Context, context, context

One of the most intriguing points that Piers makes in the interview is that the symbols engraved on message sticks probably didn’t make sense on their own but only worked as part of the overall context: the symbols needed to be “read” together with the material of the stick itself, the identity of the messenger, and the context of reception.

This may seem unusual at first glance: as users of the alphabet we have come to see writing as one of the greatest abstractions of all, entirely independent of context. The key point of literacy seems to be the product – the text – that carries the information. Writing allows us to strip away all that seemingly irrelevant context.

This is certainly how Europeans approached message sticks: objects of sufficient interest to be collected but really quite unsophisticated if compared to the libraries full of books and huge monuments that other literate civilizations have produced. So, the message sticks got collected and put away in museums, and hardly anyone bothered to learn how they were used.

However, our ways of seeing literacy have changed and the idea that the most interesting aspect of literacy is not the written artifact but the way it is used has recently gained traction in Literacy Studies. The analytic focus is now on literacy events:

A key concept for the empirical study of ways of taking meaning from written sources across communities is that of literacy events: occasions in which written language is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes and strategies. […] In such literacy events, participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and sharing knowledge in literacy events. (Heath, 1982, p. 50)

Let me describe a modern literacy event to you that has many similarities to the way message sticks were used:

Sydney Water Sample Bill

Once a day, five days a week, a representative of Australia Post rides their motorcycle through my suburban Sydney street. Outside each house, there is a letter box with a number on it and sometimes the postie puts an object into that box. If they put something into the letterbox in front of my house and I’m at home, I might get up from my desk and walk out to get it. Or I might put it off till later because, unless I’m expecting a delivery of some online purchase, the object they put into my mailbox is inevitably a bill.

In other words, the object is a piece of writing but I know its content without having even sighted it, let alone read it.

Once I collect the letter and see, for example, the logo of Sydney Water on the envelope, I know that it contains the quarterly water bill.

I don’t need to read the details of the bill: focusing on the amount due and the due date, the bill makes me take action. I will log onto my bank account and arrange payment. I then place a little check mark on the bill and file it away in some folder. Usually, arrival and payment of the water bill also leads to one or more family conversations about water consumption.

Now imagine aliens landing on earth and starting to collect mailed letters. Like the European colonizers of Australia, they might conclude that our writing systems was not particularly sophisticated because so much information was actually outside the writing symbols: part of the message is in the person of the messenger (if it’s not the postie but a teenager who stuffs something into my letterbox, I know it’s advertising); part of it is in its placement (if it’s a rolled object that’s thrown onto the driveway out of a running car, it’s the free local newspaper); part of it is in the design of the envelope (if it has the logo of the local council, it’s the council rates); part of it is in the colors (if the amount payable appears in red, payment is overdue); part of it is in a diagram; and so on and so forth.

They might also miss that the artifact itself is not particularly important. What matters is that the bill spurs the recipient into action (i.e. payment) and leads to a conversation about water consumption. Of course, they might also be more enlightened and take a holistic view and understand that the text is just a prop that enables us to do things with words.

Collection of message sticks in the Australian Museum, Sydney (Image credit: Joys of Museums)

Now, you might wish to argue that my comparison between message sticks and mailed bills is flawed because bills are only one text form among many genres that we use in our society.

That is true but it does not invalidate the point that the meaning of writing does not exclusively – or maybe not even predominantly? – reside in the symbols that make up the writing system, and in the selection from this system that is assembled into any given text. The context of use and the use event fundamentally shape the meaning of all writing.

Can you help demonstrate this point by adding a description of a literacy event you engage in? How does the context shape the meaning of the text? And what kind of action do you undertake with that text as prop?

Additional resources about Australian Message Sticks

1. Kelly, Piers. Ed. (2018). Australian Message Stick Database
2. Kelly, Piers. (2020). Australian message sticks: Old questions, new directions. Journal of Material Culture, 25(2), 133-152. Open access
3. Kelly, Piers. (2020). A very short reading guide to research on Australian message sticks

Reference

Heath, Shirley Brice. (1982). What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in Society, 11(1), 49-76.

Chats in Linguistic Diversity

Did you enjoy this conversation? It is the first in a series of Chats in Linguistic Diversity. In the past some of you may have enjoyed our Lectures in Linguistic Diversity at Macquarie University. Due to Covid-19, we’ve obviously had to put this lecture series on hold. We hope that our occasional podcast Chats in Linguistic Diversity will make up for these for the time being. Feel free to contact us with topic suggestions.

Transcript (created by Brynn Quick; added on 15/03/2024)

Dist Prof Piller: You’re listening to Chats in Linguistic Diversity, brought to you by Macquarie University and the Language on the Move network, hosted by Ingrid Piller.

My guest today is Dr Piers Kelly, an anthropologist and literature researcher from the University of New England in Armidale. Piers’ PhD is from the Australian National University in Canberra on Eskayan. Eskayan is the utopian language that was created over 100 years ago by a radical prophet in the southern Philippines. That sounds super-intriguing, but he’s also an expert of something even more intriguing, and that’s Aboriginal message sticks, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

Piers is the creator and editor of the Australian Message Stick Database, a digital repository of more than 1,100 message sticks and their associated metadata, and he’s the author of a fascinating new article that has just come out to the Journal of Material Culture. The article is called Australian message sticks: old questions, new directions. Welcome, Piers.

Dr Kelly: Thank you.

Dist Prof Piller: Piers, how did you get interested in message sticks?

Dr Kelly: Well, I heard somebody in Europe give a talk, and in the talk she mentioned Australian message sticks as a kind of comparative aside, and I thought to myself, “Well why don’t I know something about this?”, and it was shortly before I was about to start a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in in Germany in a lab that was looking at the evolution of graphic codes of all kinds. And it occurred to me that I was the only Australian at the institute at that time, and I should bring something Australian to the topic.

So, when I was back in Canberra, I contacted the National Museum of Australia that had some terrific message sticks. The museum was very helpful, and they agreed to photograph the 50 or so message sticks in their collection at no cost. And this became the basis to the database that you mentioned, and I also got some help from ((((((. And back in Germany, I began very slowly developing the database mostly by visiting European museums.

I was surprised by just how many message sticks are in those museums, particularly in Germany and the UK. And I didn’t start out with any big questions, just a kind of curiosity to learn a bit more than I did. And it was never really my main project when I was at the Max-Planck Institute. I was mostly working on writing systems and the question of how communities that are traditionally not literate, how they appropriate or re-invent writing systems for their own purposes. And now I’m still interested in that, but I’ve kind of put that question on pause for a while, and I’m focusing more deliberately on message sticks.

Dist Prof Piller: Can you describe a message stick? What actually is it?

Dr Kelly: It’s a hard question because a message stick can look like anything, but a very typical shape, if you like, if you can imagine a piece of polished wood that’s about 20cm long maybe. It’s tapered at one end, and sometimes it’s tapered at both ends. It can be more or less flattened like a ruler, or it can be cigar-shaped, and then it has markings along its surfaces. So, the most common markings are simple notches and lines, and you also get dots or stippling, but there can also be quite elaborate and iconic pictures. And some of them are so fine and small that they are only visible if you look very closely in bright lights. That’s been my struggle in a museum setting where it’s not always possible to get a bright light. So that’s the typical shape – a tapered, polished stick that’s marked with signs.

But then there’s quite a diversity across Australia. So, there’s a message stick from Mornington Island in the National Museum of Australia that’s a metre and a half long, which is huge. It’s painted and it has emu feathers fixed to one end, a beautiful object. And in the database, the smallest one that I came across is just over 5cm long. It’s tiny and wrapped up in possum fur twine and it’s from people of western NSW.

But one of the things that I found that complicates the question even further of what a message stick is supposed to look like is the fact that, in a tight spot, Aboriginal people could use other things as message sticks. So, there’s a wonderful example of the spear-thrower from Victoria that was repurposed as a message stick, and sadly it’s been lost in a fire.

Dist Prof Piller: Now that we know what a typical message stick looks like, what did Aboriginal people do with it? How were they used? What is the purpose? Maybe you can break this up for us – how were these message sticks used in pre-colonial times? How were they used in the late 19^th/early 20^th century? And how are they used today? Or are they used today?

Dr Kelly: They are still used today in a different way than they were used before. They are certainly still used today. The traditional way that message sticks were used in pre-colonial times follow the kind of set routine that, to my understanding, is reasonably consistent across Australia. It goes something like this: Someone wants to send a message to another person or to another community that is outside of their territorial jurisdiction. They appoint a messenger, who is usually a man, and then they go off and harvest a small piece of wood which they then begin carving in the presence of this appointed messenger. While they are carving it, they explain the content of the intended message and the meaning of individual signs carved on it. For example, it might be “It’s fine to hunt kangaroos. They’re plentiful. We need to coordinate people for the hunt”. So, the person who is the sender is making the stick and explaining the message.

Then the messenger takes the message stick and sets off towards the camp of the intended recipient or recipients. And what’s important to say is that his identity and purpose as a messenger is made really clear. So, the message stick is displayed publicly. It can be hung on the end of the spear, or inside a net bag. It can be tucked in a waist girdle or a headband. There are examples of message sticks, really small ones, that have in fact been stuck through the nose or through the septum, but the point is that everyone must be able to see it. And the messenger can kind of signal his role through things like body paint as well. Everyone needs to know that he has a message because there’s a strong protocol of “We’re not shooting the messenger” (or not spearing the messenger) because once he passes into country over which he doesn’t have traditional rights of access he would otherwise be placed in danger of being killed as a trespasser on the spot.

So, he crosses over a political boundary without harm and approaches the camp of the recipient and usually sits some distance away, so everyone can see him and that he means no harm and that he has this kind of ambassadorial mission, if you like. And then eventually he’ll perhaps be given food and be invited to approach the camp, and at this point he delivers the message stick to the recipient along with a verbal explanation of what it means, as it was conveyed to him by the original sender. This, again, is all still done very publicly. The recipient might then carve a message stick as a response, or simply give a verbal reply which the messenger then takes back home.

So that’s the kind of classical routine with variance around the place. Some groups did all of that but without a message stick at all. For example, the Diyari people of South Australia didn’t use message sticks, but they still did that routine, and the messengers for the Diyari were women, always women. Most elsewhere in Australia it’s almost always men.

This routine of the messenger, sender and recipient began to change with the establishment of the colony. The Aboriginal people began to take advantage of different forms of transport, like horses, carriages, steamers and so on. The motifs that appeared on message sticks were also influenced by new finds, introduced by settlers. There’s an example of a message stick with a representation of a police insignia, for example. There’s one I saw at the Pitt Rivers Museum that has playing cards inscribed on it. There’s a few from the Kimberley region that have intriguing representations of what look like letters of the Roman alphabet.

It’s also in this time that there are cases of non-indigenous people, settlers, learning how to make message sticks and then using them to communicate with indigenous communities. So there becomes this kind of hybrid technology. Then as the 19^th century wears on it seems more common for women to be sending message sticks, or to be messengers themselves, even in places where women traditionally didn’t do that. So, the system is getting shaken up by the expanding colonies, and it’s finding ways to adapt.

By the early 20^th century, message sticks are no longer widely used in that traditional routine that I outlined before except in the Top End, in places like Arnhem Land, Tiwi Island, which are places that are very interesting for my research. It continues there in some places until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in the rest of Australia, there’s the emergence of the new tradition of what I’ve called “Artistic Message Sticks” or replicated message sticks. This tradition coincides with the rise of commercial indigenous art production. So indigenous begin making message sticks specifically as objects for sale to settlers. And in some cases, they may look similar, or even identical, to the traditional message sticks, but they’re not invested with any communicative meaning. And this is a practice that continues in various forms today. In fact, a large number of the message sticks in museums come from this tradition.

Meanwhile, back in the Top End, where the traditional practice was continuing, we get the emergence of yet another practice which is about using message sticks in very high-profile, political negotiations with non-indigenous institutions. For example, the earliest example I have of this is a group in the Tiwi Islands. They sent a message stick to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1951, and indigenous leaders from Acheron and Mornington Islands sent a joint message stick to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1974 to demand land rights. Bob Hawke got one in 1983. There was even a message stick tabled in the Senate in 2007. And last year you might have heard of a guy called Alwyn Doolan who’s an indigenous man from Queensland. He walked 8,000kms to deliver 3 message sticks to Scott Morrison who, in fact, refused them, which was kind of extraordinary.

So, this is a practice with kind of high-profile, political message sticks. It’s still going strong, and it’s very much a continuation of these earlier practices when message sticks could sometimes have a very strong diplomatic function. Late 19^th century ethnographies talk about message sticks being like a royal seal that authenticates the messenger and his message. And of course, one of the purposes, traditionally, was to solidify alliances. So, I think that’s a strong continuation of that, from a part of Australia where the tradition was very strong through the 20^th century.

What’s really different about the contemporary political use of message sticks is that they are almost being passed from an indigenous representative to a non-indigenous institution. Unlike the traditional routine, the sender and messenger are usually one in the same person. So, you make a message stick, and you carry it yourself to the Prime Minister or whoever else, so that’s an innovation.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s pretty shocking to hear, that the Prime Minister would actually refuse to accept a message stick. Unbelievable.

Dr Kelly: I was in contact with Alwyn Doolan at the time, and we were trying to together write something about this, but it was very hard because he had a smartphone but he was on the road so long. When he started out his journey, it was before the election, so this is how long his journey was. He arrived just in time for the results, so I wonder if it had have been Bill Shorten that had won the election, it might have been a different case. But it was a real missed opportunity, I think.

Dist Prof Piller: Indeed. And that kind of brings us to this question of why we actually know so little about message sticks. I have to tell you, the first I heard of message sticks was 2 years ago when I saw a tweet of yours about message sticks on Twitter. I believe this wasn’t the first time I actually saw message sticks because I had seen the Aboriginal collections of a number of the museums that house quite a few message sticks. I feel like I must have seen message sticks in museums before your tweet drew my attention to them. That, to me, in a sense, exemplifies that there is something going on with our lack of attention to them. Can you maybe explain why we know so little and also talk a bit about the lenses that have shaped our knowledge about message sticks.

Dr Kelly: Well, it’s interesting that all those museums are importing collections but, even so, you’re unlikely to have seen them on display. There’s quite a number of message sticks, but they’re all in storage. A few of them are on display in the local (German) library. But in the National Museum I’ve not seen them on display, South Australia maybe or maybe not, I’m not sure. It’s one of those curious things about museums. What you see is only a tiny fraction of what there is, and some of these things will never get seen unless someone asks to see them. They just sit there forever.

But yes, I don’t really know why there is so little written about message sticks. I was worried when I started out on this research area, that maybe they’re not that interesting in the end, maybe that’s why. And that’s certainly not true, it turns out. And it could have something to do with the fact that they don’t enter into the historical, public record until the 1870s. On the whole, settlers didn’t notice that this was going on, that indigenous people were communicating in this way. By the time they clocked onto it in the 1880s and 1890s, message stick communication was already entering into sharp decline across most of Australia. The colonies had expanded almost everywhere. There were, of course, restrictions placed on the movement and activities of indigenous people. Nonetheless, there was a strong wave of interest in message sticks from the 1880s through to the early 1900s. This kind of 30-year period is when most of the message sticks in museums today entered the collection.

But it’s also a period that coincides with the high watermark of social evolutionist theory in Europe, America and Australia. This idea that all human societies could be ranked on a continuum from “savagery” to “civilisation”. The aim of archaeological practice and anthropology was to go and look for those diagnostic markers that told you where a given society was on an evolutionary scale. The most important criterion in this model for attaining a civilisation was that you have writing. That was the crowning technology because it allowed records to be made and writing literally brought a society into history essentially. Indigenous people around the world were considered to be ahistorical or prehistorical because they didn’t have writing. They were kind of seen as representative of earlier phases of European prehistory. It’s important to recognise that this social evolution theory was not a fringe theory at the time. They were paradigmatic, and even critics of the theory who critiqued the model still took the premiss for granted. So very much hegemonic. Aboriginal people in Australia, in this framework, were placed on the lowest rung in that evolutionary scale on the basis of things like an absence of pottery, an absence of metallurgy and, of course, writing.

But then a German anthropologist by the name of Adolf Bastian got wind of message sticks in Cooktown when he was there in the 1880s. It was just as he was about to catch a boat home, and he talks about being so excited that he was debating whether he should miss his steamer in order to find out more about message sticks. He didn’t miss his boat, but in the few hours that he had he found an Aboriginal trooper who volunteered to make a message stick for him and to explain how it worked. And Bastian started thinking, “Hang on, this looks pretty much like writing. And if that’s the case, we really need to re-think what we understand civilisation to be”.

And this preceded a lot of discussion in various scholarly forums about message sticks, what they were. The well-known anthropologist AW Howard sent a questionnaire to settlers all over the country and asked, “Well what do you know about message sticks?”. Then he compiled and summarised the responses, and it led to a debate among settler scholars in a few journals about whether message sticks represented writing. It was framed as a debate, but really the hypothesis that message sticks represented some kind of language was always set up as a straw man – “Well, there are some people who maintain the view that message sticks are writing, but this is ludicrous because of x, y and z”. The consensus position was really that message sticks were largely meaningless and that all the real information was carried in the verbal exchange, and the message stick was really only a kind of token of authentication or a prompt to help the messenger remember the message. At the same time though, the very same people admitted that the signs on message sticks potentially had conventionalised semantic values. They even went so far as to identify them and gloss these meanings in these objects.

So, there was a contradiction at the heart of what settler scholars were doing, and I think it comes down to the fact that they were approaching message sticks from a very Euro-centric perspective that kind of admitted that the only significant or real graphic code out there was writing, something that modelled the sounds of language. If you did anything else with visual signs it was just a kind of noise or decoration. And I think this was a real missed opportunity because after having “solved the question” of what message sticks were, the research energy really waned. Tragically, collectors decided at this point that there was no need to make any effort to consult message stick makers, to understand what the objects were intended to mean. Collecting institutions are filled with message sticks that have ultra-detailed physical descriptions, you know, it’s 16.5cm long, it’s made out of this kind of timber, here’s the Latin name, it has fine cross-hatching, but nothing about who made it or what its intended meaning was. Sometimes not even where it’s from, or you get a label like “Western Australia” which is not very helpful. This is why I think the very best descriptions of message sticks were made before this prejudice took hold. So, settlers and ethnographers like Bastian were open minded about the possibilities, so they recorded much more detail, assuming everything to be relevant.

But after deciding that message sticks were not that interesting because they were not writing, we get these very extraordinary events cropping up in the archives and newspapers and so on. Accounts of message sticks that are successfully interpreted without a messenger, so there is no verbal message that is going alongside them. There are cases of messengers who died on their mission, but the message stick is recovered and then read. A bishop in the NT even conducted a kind of experiment where he was asked to deliver a message stick with a verbal message from Darwin to Daly Waters, and he decided, as an experiment, to withhold the verbal message and just hand over the stick to the recipient. And the recipient of the message took it and accurately read it. He correctly read it as a request for headbands and boomerangs, and he correctly identified the sender too.

Indigenous people also started sending them through the post, for example. There was one that I love that was sent by an indigenous soldier serving in WWII which got intercepted by the military censor, and it was released without censorship, which I think is glorious. Of course, no one would have been able to read it in the censorship office, I assume, let alone the enemy, whoever that was. So, it’s clear that these message sticks were doing something communicative. They’re not just redundant tokens or prompts for memory. I think the short answer to your question of why we know so little about them is that, very early on, message stick communication was mischaracterised, which derailed research. This is why we have ended up with so little, I think, in the way of substantial knowledge.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, it’s so sad and such a loss. Do we actually have a chance of ever finding out more about message sticks and their use in precolonial times? Or do we just need to go, “Oh well, unfortunately these settlers had the wrong idea, and not only did they not leave us any information, but they also messed up the practice, so it’s just lost”?

Dr Kelly: No, I think there is a chance. Certainly, there are about 150 or so message sticks that are reasonably well-described, where we get some detail about the context, the message. In very rare cases, we get the original transcription of the original language of the verbal message. We know where, we know when, we even have individual motifs that are glossed in even rarer cases. So that’s good. That’s one way to approach the question. There’s also, I mean some of my work up north is where message sticks were used quite recently, so there are people alive today who can still make a message stick, who can interpret a message stick, who can talk about message sticks. There are very few, I could probably count them on one hand, that I know of.

But as for finding out, going back before 1788, that’s a challenge. There are no message sticks, really, that are recovered from archaeological sites, which is not unusual because Australian climates and soils are not kind to things that are made of wood. There are very few wooden objects that turn up in Australian archaeology and even fewer that pre-date colonisation. There’s possibly one from a cave in Arnhem Land, but it’s perhaps not a message stick. I haven’t examined it yet.

To turn the clock back to before 1788 without recourse to archaeology, my clues that I’m hoping to be able to work on are firstly distribution, so figuring out where message sticks are traditionally used, and where they are not. So, we do have documentation, and maps can be powerful because they reveal patterns that otherwise weren’t obvious, so that’s something I’m trying to work on now. And connected to that process of figuring out the distribution, I’m looking at words for “message stick” in various Australian languages. I’ve only got about 60 so far, but I hope that this information will tell us something about contact and diffusion and inheritance and other wonderful things that historical linguistics can do on that lexical level.

And lastly, it’s a bit of a moon-shot, but I’m looking into oral histories. So I’ve been interviewing senior knowledge-holders in the Top End about their memories and stories that have been passed down to them. And this history is sometimes quite recent and sometimes potentially quite ancient. There are terrific stories that are nursed as temporal markers in the story. It’s not always easy to establish whether they relate to pre-colonial or post-colonial events. And I have one story, but I really need to work on this, so it’s a challenge.

Dist Prof Piller: Wow. You’ve just mentioned that you are looking at the different words for “message stick” in the different Australian languages. One of the hypotheses that you mention in your article is actually that message sticks may also have been used as a means of communication across linguistic boundaries. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about linguistic diversity and multilingualism in pre-colonial Australia.

Dr Kelly: Yeah, I mean that’s interesting too because I’ve just been looking at the words. I’ve been going back to that recently, and there are words for “message stick” that co-lexify often with words for other things, like “stick” or “wood” or whatever. But then, up in the Top End and in parts of the Kimberly and far north Queensland, the word for “message stick” is mark which is, I’m pretty positive, a borrowing from Creole, in parts of Australia where Creole isn’t really used as much. So, I’m just thinking about this. Why would you have a borrowed term, especially in places where the tradition in strong? It points to this kind of multilingual environment. And also, the fact that these are mobile objects. They are moving across territories where different languages are spoken. So, it presents another challenge, I think.

We do know that message sticks were certainly used across linguistic boundaries to the extent that language boundaries coincided to a greater or lesser degree with political boundaries, so that point where you must not cross unless you had permission. So, what this means is that the original verbal message might have been communicated to the messenger in one language, and then that messenger may have passed on the message to its recipient in another language. We have to bear in mind, of course, that we know indigenous communities were and still are highly multilingual. Multilingualism is not and never has been a barrier to communication. On the contrary, languages multiply your capacity for communication. They give you a bigger repertoire.

Having said that, I’m interested in the extent to which message sticks might have been used as an additional semiotic resource alongside language, alongside things like body paint and gesture. One thing that 19^th century ethnographers universally believed was that message sticks had an authenticating function and a pneumonic function. It authenticated your role as a messenger, it authenticated the message, and it helped you remember what the message was. And I think the authentication is real, but I don’t think they really had a pneumonic function because the messages that we have that are all recorded, that are documented, are all very short. At most, they amount to about 6 lines of text when you write it out, and traditionally Aboriginal people could and still can recall song cycles that went all day long. So, I think it comes from a mentality to assume that we can’t remember anything unless it’s written down.

What I think is more likely is that message sticks are about mutual reinforcement, so they reinforce and authenticate the oral message, but the oral message also reinforces and authenticates the message stick. So, if you’re delivering a message into a community with a different language, I can imagine that precisely because the message sticks are not linked to a specific language, they have the capacity to kind of mutually reinforce the message even across language boundaries. So that’s the way I’m thinking about it at the moment, keeping in mind that these are multilingual communities so those resources are there to communicate. But I wonder then, what is a message stick doing when all these other things are available to help handle the message in a particular way.

Dist Prof Piller: That brings us, really, to the million-dollar question – Are message sticks a form of writing? How are they related to other writing systems?

Dr Kelly: I think that’s a really great question. It’s worth revisiting that question because, of course, 130 years ago people were asking it. But we can revisit it, I think, from a less Eurocentric, or a less literacy-centric perspective. A standard definition of writing is that it is a system of visual signs that models some kind of linguistic structure. Usually what it models is phonology, so that’s why we talk about writing systems as being phonographic. They are coding for and reproducing salient sounds of language. But a writing system can also sometimes model morphology but in a more limited way. So we can call that process logographic or morphographic. An ampersand, for example, models the English word “and”, but it will also stand for counterpart words for “and” in other languages like und in German or et in French because it’s not latching on to a phonetic signal. It’s simply standing in for a word.

On the whole, message sticks don’t do anything like this. The signs on them convey meaning, but they are not phonographic or logographic on the whole. So, two people, interpreting the same message stick, will not come up with the same form of words. There are potential logographs on some message sticks. For example, some message sticks have signatures on them (what amount to signatures) that identify the messenger or even the recipient with specific emblems. There is an amazing message stick from Victoria, sadly it’s lost, we have a sketch of it. It has a rebus on it in the form of a picture of a hand, and the word “hand” in that language, spoken near Wannamal, is munya which is also the local word for “meeting”. This is very much writing according to the strictest definition of it because you’re drawing attention to the sound of the word by referencing a homophone.

But it’s clear from commentary that explanations produced by Aboriginal message stick makers and messengers that this is not a principle that’s generally at work in the production of motifs. But if message sticks are not, on the whole, writing as we understand the term then I don’t know how to account for these cases when message sticks were interpreted with accuracy without the benefit of a verbal message to gloss it, those cases where we don’t have a messenger. This is a central puzzle in my research.

I do have a few inklings, though. Certainly, when it comes to the most traditional or classical message sticks, there is only a finite range of themes that a message stick can actually be about. Most commonly it will be an invitation to ceremony. That’s the number one message – a young man’s initiation or a funeral, for example. These are the kind of ceremonies that involve large groups of people that are communicated about with message sticks. This is right across Australia. Then you get message sticks that are for coordinating hunting, you get declarations of war, requests for political alliances, you get requests for items, especially tradeable or luxury items of value. Sometimes you get a kind of a news bulletin, and so on.

So, if you’re seeing a messenger approach, you already perhaps have an idea about what the likely message will be on the basis of probability. The messenger could be painted up in a particular way, for example covered in pipeclay for mourning, so that gives you a good guess that it’s probably about a funeral. I’ve seen message sticks that have got pipeclay on them with fingerprints of the pipeclay, so it makes me imagine that the messenger was covered in pipeclay and that this has rubbed off onto the stick. Then the message itself will be from a specific named individual to another specific individual, and when you know who that person is and their relationship to the recipient, this again contains the possible topics. So, when my dad calls me and I see his number pop up on my phone, it’s often about fixing his computer, you know? I can pretty much guess, as soon as I see his number that’s probably what the topic is going to be. If my brother calls me, well that topic of communication is less likely. It could be a number of other things. And in Aboriginal Australia, we know kinship and social categories can regulate the kinds of things you can talk about as well as the way you’re expected to talk about them. There are expectations, in other words, based on the identity of the sender and recipient and their entire relationship. In many Aboriginal societies, as we know, the whole universe is divided along kinship or social category lines.

So, the kind of timber that’s selected for the message stick might be meaningful in terms of what it’s pointing to in the world, or rather who it’s pointing to in the world. So, in some of the fieldwork I did in Arnhem Land, message stick makers have used, for example, wood from paper bark tree. I asked about it and they said, “It’s soft wood, so it’s really easy to work”. On another occasion they produced a message stick from salvaged timber because we couldn’t get a 4-wheel drive, so we found some salvaged timber that was lying around the backyard and probably just an off-cut from construction. So, the point is with everything I’ve said so far is that, even before we get to the signs, even before we get to the motifs, there is already a pretty well-constrained frame of reference.

When it comes to the signs themselves, they can be quite basic and abstract. I mentioned notches and lines and dots. Nothing that jumps out at you as being pregnant with deep meaning. They can be quite multi-valer too, so a notch is often a person but it can also be a place. It can be a countable object. It can be an element in a narrative. A large part of my work is to try to identify signs and meanings and figure out what general class of information is being coded where. What’s being talked about in the verbal message, what’s recorded on the stick, and what’s entirely unspoken and implicit in these exchanges.

So, to sum up, I think a message stick can achieve results that are very like writing without actually being writing. You could make the case that the signs have, to some extent, semantic value but not language-specific linguistic value. When it comes to looking at how message sticks relate to other systems, I think it’s important to understand writing or language-based writing as just one kind of conventionalised visual code that’s out there in the world. There are many others, like Andean string quipus that are knotted cords once used in the Incan empire for quite complex accounting and administration. There are lots of symbol systems in west Africa and indigenous North America for recording information, sometimes ritual related, and I like to get a sense of where message sticks sit in that whole spectrum.

There are those who make the case that we need to come up with a bigger, more inclusive definition of writing. I actually don’t agree with it. I think the definition of writing being a representation of spoken language is a good one. It’s well-grounded. It’s the connotations that we need to challenge. Thinking in terms of decolonisation, I worry about well-intentioned moves to try to award prestige to a cultural practice on the basis of its underlying or superficial similarity to a western or European model. Instead, I think, let’s decentre writing in literacy as somehow being preeminent. Let’s accept and value that there are other ways to communicate with signs, with visual signs that are perfectly adequate. These should be defined on their own terms, not just in relation to writing. You want to compare, but you also don’t want to centre the colonial metric, if you like.

Dist Prof Piller: These are all such difficult and important questions to discuss. We could go on all day because this is so fascinating, but I’m very mindful that I’ve already taken quite a lot of your time. Before I let you go, if someone has been listening to this and gets really interested in this and wants to learn more, where can people go if they want to learn more about message sticks? Is there a way for anyone to actually join the research?

Dr Kelly: Yes! Yes to all of that. The best way to start is to google the Australian message stick database and click around. Down the bottom of the screen there’s a little map. You can click around and find what’s in your area from parts of Australia that you’re interested in or where you might be from. If you live in Australia, most towns will have a local cultural centre or keeping place where you might be lucky enough to see a message stick, and you can maybe join a locally led, indigenously led research on the ground. At the moment, I’m hoping to work with Aboriginal artists from in and around Armidale, NSW to reconstruct traditional techniques for carving message sticks. I’m really looking forward to that. Starting locally is always a great idea.

The fact that there hasn’t been very much written about message sticks is disappointing but that means there is very little that you have to read to be fully up to date. I have an annotated pdf online called “A Very Short Reading Guide to Research on Australian Message Sticks” which is just a beginner’s guide to get you started. There are endless topics in this area, so if you’re interested in pursuing research topics don’t hesitate to get directly in touch with me. I can point you further into the right direction, especially if you’re perhaps doing a Masters topic or an Honours topic I’m very happy to help there.

Dist Prof Piller: Thanks so much, Piers, and we’ll make sure to actually put up all those links together with this particular podcast and make them available. Thank you very much for your time, and good luck with your research.

Dr Kelly: Not at all, thank you very much.

Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at much higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians (Source: Australian Law Reform Commission)

Note: This post was co-authored with Laura Smith-Khan.

Language on the Move mover-and-shaker, Dr Laura Smith-Khan, and I are just back from the 14^th biennial conference of the International Association of Forensic Linguists at RMIT University in Melbourne (1-5 July 2019; program and abstracts here). This association, which goes by the acronym IAFL, brings together academics, police, lawyers, judiciary and language professionals, and offers stimulating research from scholars around the world, much of it revealing how legal processes and justice outcomes could be improved by better understanding language practices and mistaken beliefs about language.

The presentations by researchers, translators and interpreters here in Australia working with and on Indigenous languages were especially fascinating, and follows on from last week’s overview of IAFL research about law reform.

For international visitors, conferences in Australia can be an introduction to the customs of acknowledgement and welcome to Country. Attending this conference, we acknowledged that the conference venue sits on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Amongst the many presentations relating to the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and specifically to Australian Indigenous languages, a highlight was Michael Walsh’s (University of Sydney) keynote. He spoke about his many encounters with the mistaken belief by non-specialists that, if an Indigenous person speaks any variety of English, then their participation in complex legal matters in English will be fair and unproblematic. Drawing on the extensive work on Aboriginal ways of using English by Diana Eades (who also presented at the conference), Michael talked us through a range of Englishes which are often conflated with Standard Australian English and Legal English. He also explained differing English discourses, making the provocative suggestion that sometimes ‘bad English’ can be to the claimant’s advantage and ‘good English’ to their disadvantage.

Also provoking reflection and discussion, Ben Grimes (Charles Darwin University) moderated a panel of speakers from the Aboriginal Interpreter Service, and presented his own ideas for timely advocacy by linguists to the judiciary. Linguistic evidence is highly relevant when assessing whether a defendant’s admissions were made reliably, as the new Uniform Evidence Act section 85 calls upon judges to consider. This could, and should, include greater and more technical consideration of the linguistic challenges faced by many Indigenous people in Australia who do not have Standard Australian English as their dominant language variety.

Aboriginal Ways of Using English, by Diana Eades

Some of those linguistic challenges – which become challenges in equal access to justice – were presented by Alex Bowen (ARDS Aboriginal Corporation). Alex examined transcripts of police giving the “right to silence” caution to Indigenous people (for the broader context of research related to this caution, see here). Police guidelines recognise a potential for miscommunication and therefore require police to give the caution in undefined “simple terms” and to ask people they are arresting to explain back what they have heard so as to check their understanding of the warning. This is important legally because the assumption that the right was understood then means any admissions are taken to have been voluntarily made. However, Alex’s analysis revealed a great variety of apparent mistakes about the caution having been understood. Problems included conversational sequencing affecting how suspects interpreted police language; chains of paraphrases producing confusion, especially relating to the meaning of conditional clauses; failure to add information; and police not providing clear feedback to suspects about whether or not they have demonstrated an accurate understanding of their rights. Alex made the plausible suggestions that it would help if police announced the topic, i.e. explained that what they were about to do was to give a caution and test whether it had been understood, rather than to start an interrogation. His recommendations included:

• That people who lack familiarity with mainstream legal culture and institutions be educated about the legal system outside the interview room
• That police start with a clearer text in plain English if they are going to explain the caution (see CORG 2015 recommendation 1)
• That police develop and evaluate a process for explaining and testing the caution in arrest conversations

Problems with the police caution underpinned years of litigation relating to manslaughter for which Mr Gene Gibson, an Indigenous man from Kiwirrkurra in the Gibson Desert, was arrested in 2010. After years of imprisonment and legal appeals, Mr Gibson was finally released in 2017, when the WA Court of Appeal found there had been a miscarriage of justice. Mr Gibson’s first language is Pintupi and his second language is another Indigenous language, Kukatja. The court found that Mr Gibson’s initial guilty plea had not necessarily been “attributable to a genuine consciousness of guilt” but resulted from mishandled language barriers and mistaken assumptions about language.

It was encouraging to hear at IAFL that the expert evidence of Professor Diana Eades had been considered by the courts and played a key role in Mr Gibson’s eventual release. Diana’s presentation explained language problems which arose in the initial police interview. In this part of Australia (Western Australia), police investigations involving Indigenous suspects must include an “interview friend” to provide support. However, for Mr Gibson, the police misunderstood the difference between an interview friend and an interpreter, deciding not to call an interpreter and instead to rely upon the interview friend to interpret between Indigenous languages and Standard Australian English. Rather than relaying the information that Mr Gibson was free to choose not to answer police questions, and that, if he did, he risked incriminating himself unnecessarily, the interview friend advised Mr Gibson that he must answer the police questions. Not knowing the relevant Indigenous languages, the police officers did not pick up this problem at the time.

Diana Eades’ recommendations for basic linguistics instruction for police and lawyers

Diana used this case to illustrate two approaches to language: one in which meaning is (mis)understood as independent of context and one in which meaning is contextual. The de-contextualised approach is the source of many language-related injustices in legal processes, from taking simple words like “yes” on face value as consent or affirmation, to misunderstanding the different linguistic demands of an interview compared with a casual chat about the footy and therefore not arranging an interpreter. That Mr Gibson finally won his release was due to certain judges, unlike the police, understanding that meaning is contextual (see e.g. the 2014 judgment). Diana concluded with the recommendation that the points listed on the slide be taught to police and lawyers (see image).

Widening out to look across multiple cases of unreliable admissions of guilt, David Moore (University of Western Australia) reaffirmed that there are high-stakes linguistic “false friends” between Central Australian Englishes and Standard Australian English, e.g. “kill” and “rape”, which can lead to false confessions from Aboriginal defendants.

Natalie Stroud (Monash University) focused on another type of court, the Koori Court of Victoria, which is designed to provide a culturally sensitive forum for Indigenous offenders and give them a voice in the criminal justice system, including by integrating community Elders into “interactive sentencing conversations”. She highlighted that the introduction of video conferencing is impacting on their inclusion, narrowing the conversation back to a Magistrate-defendant dialogue.

These presentations about legal processes were complemented by research on phonetics. For example, Deborah Loakes (University of Melbourne) has been building up the technical description of the phonetics of two Victorian varieties of Aboriginal English, and the variations within them, which could better assist decision-makers in the legal system to identify speakers of these varieties and specific inter-lingual communication issues such as mistaken identification of a speakers’ background.

Attendees also heard from experts from beyond linguistics, for example lawyers from the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency presented the case for using cultural brokers instead of legal interpreters in Government service delivery to remote Indigenous communities. Similarly, Dima Rusho (Monash University) described the innovative collaborations of legal professionals and Indigenous community members in the Northern Territory to develop translations that draw on Indigenous conceptualizations to improve the understanding of key terms in legal processes.

In this International Year of Indigenous Languages, these researchers are helping us all think through the links between the minoritisation of Indigenous languages and the systematic inequalities faced by Indigenous people in Australia’s (and other nations’) legal systems, providing ideas and impetus for reform.

References

Bowen, A. (2019). ‘You Don’t Have to Say Anything’: Modality and Consequences in Conversations About the Right to Silence in the Northern Territory. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 39(3), 347-374. doi:10.1080/07268602.2019.1620682
Eades, D. (2013). Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Eades, D. (2018). Communicating the Right to Silence to Aboriginal Suspects: Lessons from Western Australia v Gibson. Journal of Judicial Administration, 28(1), 4-21.
Smith-Khan, L. & A. Grey (2019). Lawyers need to know more about language. Language on the Move.

Click on this image to view video about the role of English and local languages in the educational experiences of Aboriginal children in remote communities

Editor’s Note: March 21 is Harmony Day in Australia, coinciding with the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. On this occasion we examine how beliefs that Aboriginal languages are “nice to have” but basically useless in the “real” world of work and education disadvantage Aboriginal people in remote communities. Our contributor Brendan Kavanagh explores this linguistic disadvantage in employment in the text below, and in education in this video.

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In a 2007 article in The Australian, Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson put forward six policy recommendations pertaining to Aboriginal languages. He identified such languages as “inherently valuable as part of the country’s rich heritage” and “the primary words by which the Australian land and seascape is named and described.” However, Pearson argued for a “separate domain within indigenous communities for cultural and linguistic education from the Western education domain”, reasoning that “the primary purpose of schools is for our children to obtain a mainstream, Western education.”

This dichotomy is often established: local language is for the home; English is for the outside world. One is for culture; the other is for jobs. Such a perspective has pervaded the debate over bilingual education in remote Aboriginal schools since the mid-1970s, with early bilingual programmes established on the principles of connecting with one’s heritage and identity, as well as recognising and upholding basic Indigenous rights.

Conversely, the case for English-speaking classrooms draws upon the economic argument, positioning English as the pathway toward real jobs in the broader Australian workplace – an argument that supports the current four hours of mandatory English-only classes in all Northern Territory schools, as I explain in this 10-minute video about the schooling experiences of aboriginal children in remote communities. The assumption is that for an Aboriginal school-leaver, finding their way in the world means leaving their land, family, language and culture to pursue “real” opportunities within urban mainstream Australia. This perception is perpetuated in a policy report, which goes so far as to label local Indigenous identified positions, such as Aboriginal Health Workers, Assistant Teachers and Aboriginal Community Police Officers, as “pretend jobs” that lack equivalent positions in mainstream Australia. Drawing equivalencies to an “apartheid” system, the report paints their existence as a politically correct excuse for hiring Aboriginal people into inferior positions that lack the level of education required of nurses, teachers and police officers.

While it is true that such positions are not identical to mainstream positions, this is because the roles require a different and unique set of knowledge and skills, without which a community school, clinic or police station cannot operate. These include an understanding of the community’s social structure, appropriate cultural practices that do not offend the client, and, most importantly, the ability to communicate information in the vernacular. Such specialist skills cannot be learnt by outsiders through a mainstream education model.

Health clinic in a remote NT community (Source: ABC)

The role of an Aboriginal Health Worker is a pertinent example. Statistics show that in remote Indigenous communities, 55% of adults are smokers and the average person consumes 24% of their sugar intake from soft drinks, a rate which is twice that of the non-Indigenous population. Hearing and vision problems are also prevalent among children due to lack of basic access to hygiene. The expensive solution is to treat the problems at the symptom by flying in qualified specialists to treat diabetes, lung cancer, otitis media and trachoma. This option can require high wages, travel allowance and expensive chartered flights. Nevertheless, it is potentially ineffective, as many community members require a level of trust before they are willing to attend a medical appointment.

The most efficient and effective method is to treat the problem at the cause. Using language skills, an Aboriginal Health Worker can develop local health messages to convince people to give up smoking, eat healthier and wash their children’s ears and eyes. They can convince patients to attend appointments, and with enough training, can interpret complex medical jargon. These skills can be essential for suicide prevention, promoting sexual health and providing other vital health messages such as how to prevent lead poisoning by hunting with steel bullets instead of lead ones. Over the long term, Aboriginal Health Workers save money and, more importantly, save lives.

An Aboriginal Teacher’s Assistant is fundamental to a community’s future. Teaching roles in communities are often temporary stepping stones for graduate teachers with limited experience and no exposure to Indigenous culture, as I show in the video . In such a system, where there is a cultural risk to both the teacher and the students, it is vital that the Teacher’s Assistants act as cultural brokers. Their ability to communicate culturally appropriate content into the vernacular helps to deliver educational outcomes that an Aboriginal community actually wants. A study with 1,000 participants across remote Australia found that Aboriginal community members preferred educational outcomes to focus on “learning the local language” and “being strong in both worlds”, more than such mainstream goals as “economic participation”.

Aboriginal Community Police Officers (ACPO) arguably play the most crucial role, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners accounted for over a quarter (27% or 10,596 prisoners) of the total Australian prisoner population in 2016. An ACPO’s ability to speak in local language opens a channel of communication between community members and law enforcement, allowing them to understand the law, cooperate with the law and follow the law. As active participants of the legal system, they will view law enforcement as a useful means of strengthening the community by maintaining traditional culture through social order. Without this channel of communication, law enforcement is more likely to be viewed as a form of imperialism enforced by foreigners who speak a different language and lack an understanding of existing social structures. Keeping people on the right side of the law saves money, as the cost of imprisonment is approximately $305 per person per day, a figure that greatly exceeds the cost of hiring an ACPO.

These are just a few of the real jobs in which language skills are essential in the workforce. The cashiers at the local store are the only staff members who can communicate directly with clients to meet their needs. The artists at the art centre communicate their culture to the outside world, which in turn generates a real income. Aboriginal rangers can develop environmental health messages for their fellow community members to look after country.

Yet English literacy based on NAPLAN testing is our primary determinant for Aboriginal educational outcomes, as exemplified in the 2017 Closing the Gap Report, and argued in the above-mentioned 2012 Indigenous education report as part of its criticism of Indigenous identified positions. But studies have shown NAPLAN to be a linguistically and culturally inappropriate measure of achievement in remote Indigenous schools, filled with reading activities that present irrelevant and unfamiliar contexts, such as “going to the cinema” or “delivering newspapers”. Reading exercises rarely reflect the context of working in a community position, so rather than labelling Indigenous positions as “pretend jobs”, the argument could be made that the tests represent “pretend learning”.

The idea that local languages are irrelevant to the workplace is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the English-speaking workplace only sustains itself because local people are not skilled into positions of management. While it is true that language is important for preserving cultural identity, we should also argue that it is an essential tool for operating in the local economy. School curricula should not sideline language as a superfluous add-on, but embed it into student career paths in health, law, education, commerce and all other fields that are relevant to building a strong community.

A comment on last week’s post “Literacy – the power code” questions this ubiquitous connection between literacy and competence, and asks about other ways of learning: what about the son of a shoe-maker who learns by observation and participation? Or the daughter of a carpenter who is similarly apprenticed into the trade? Even without literacy, are they not competent and educated?

They sure are! There can be no doubt that it is possible to achieve an education, to become competent and to gain wisdom by learning from your elders and without engaging in literacy-mediated learning.

However, in a world that has a literacy fetish, as ours does, this kind of education and knowledge becomes devalued. Where knowledge and competence associated with literacy are highly valued, knowledge and competence associated with traditional ways are simultaneously discounted.

In fact, the elevation of literacy-associated knowledge over other forms of knowledge has long been a part of colonial projects.

Consider the ways we think about our relationship to the land on which we live: you might live on a plot of land or in a house and take good care of it; you might make sure it is maintained well and is a good place to live; you might tend to the plants and animals who live there; and you might make sure it will be a good place to live that provides shelter and food not only for yourself but also for your children and generations to come.

To be able to do that surely makes you a competent person and a wise and good human being. But what if you do all that but don’t hold a title to the land? If you don’t have a piece of writing that says this plot of land and this house is yours? You might not be able to do any of these good things and, even if you do, your efforts will not be much valued by society.

Now let’s consider the opposite case: you hold a title to a plot of land – i.e. you have a piece of writing that says the land is yours – and you go about destroying the land: you despoil its natural resources, exterminate the plants and animals, poison the water and generally ruin it, also for your neighbors and for those who come after you. While this sounds despicable, it happens all the time and, by and large, as a society we approve of such practices because there is that piece of paper that confers ownership and all kinds of associated property rights.

Our contemporary belief in the power of a piece of writing – the title deed – devalues all other ways of relating to the land on which we live, as is well-illustrated by the idea of terra nullius: the idea that, prior to European settlement, Australia was “a land belonging to no one”.

Terra nullius became one of the legal and moral justifications for the British colonization of Australia: the assumption was that the continent had not belonged to anyone until Europeans “found” it. While Aboriginal people had obviously lived in Australia prior to 1788, they were not seen as having a right to the land between Governor Bourke’s 1835 proclamation of terra nullius and the first successful native title claim in the Mabo case of 1992.

One of the indicators why Aboriginal people supposedly did not have a right to their land lay in the fact that they did not have any written ownership records or title deeds. Instead of recording their ownership of the land in written title deeds, Aboriginal Australians had a spiritual relationship to the land which they communicated through stories and songs, as the Papunya School Book of Country and History explains:

When the Tjulkura [= white people] came to Australia, they did not recognise that, between them, different groups of Aboriginal people owned all the continent. Because there were no pieces of paper saying which people belonged to which country, white people decided that the land was terra nullius. […] The Tjulkura did not understand that Aboriginal people had been recording their ownership of their country in songs, stories, dances and paintings since the time when law began.

To Europeans, knowledge recorded in and transmitted via “songs, stories, dances and paintings” seemed primitive and barbaric: in short, worthless.

That only literacy-mediated knowledge has value is, in this case, obviously a self-serving fallacy. However, it is easy to overlook this fallacy in our literacy-obsessed world. Imagine if we routinely thought about the human relationship to the earth not as one of ownership but as one of custodianship. Maybe some of the ecological disasters of our time could have been avoided if we were not so fixated on the power of written documents to establish knowledge and competence? And if we were less keen to discard and ignore all other forms of knowledge?

Can you think of other examples where forms of knowledge and learning that are not mediated through literacy are being devalued in favor of knowledge and learning that are associated with literate practices?

Further reading

If you want to read more about the colonization of Australia as a project that has partly been about imposing British ways of seeing and discarding Aboriginal ways of seeing, you might want to check out Chapter 3 of the newly released second edition of Intercultural Communication. A flier with a discount code is available here.

NAIDOC Week 2017 Logo

Every year, the first week of July marks NAIDOC Week – a time to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and recognise the achievements of first Australians. The 2017 NAIDOC theme is “Our Languages Matter”, a reference to the importance of languages to Aboriginal culture and identity.

The fact that Aboriginal languages matter barely needs explaining. All Aboriginal languages have been threatened by the European colonization of Australia and discriminatory government policies. Despite this, Aboriginal communities have worked hard to maintain and revive their languages. Today around one third of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children speak an Indigenous language, with even higher rates in remote areas. Yet, speakers of Aboriginal languages are often forgotten or ignored by policy makers, educational institutions and other services.

Take the Northern Territory (NT) for example, which has some of the largest groups of Aboriginal language speakers in Australia. Over the last 40 years, the NT Government has swayed to the differing (and often ill-informed) opinions on bilingual education. Devlin, Disbray and Devlin (2017) give a thorough chronology of these events which I will summarise here to demonstrate the issue. Throughout I have also sought out the views of Aboriginal authors, as the research on Aboriginal issues is too often dominated by ‘white’ colonial voices.

Bilingual education for Aboriginal students in the NT was first introduced in 1973, influenced by emerging international theories about bilingual education, and with the aim of “recognising and supporting the culture and language of the children and communities who speak those languages” (Devlin, Disbray & Devlin, 2017, p.49). Aboriginal teachers worked alongside non-Aboriginal teachers to develop teaching materials and resources, and this approach was soon producing results, with many schools reporting that bilingually educated Aboriginal students were outperforming Aboriginal students who were taught in English only.

In the 1980s and 90s, however, political opinions against bilingual education and in favour of English-only teaching gained greater attention, under the guise of it being better for children’s futures, yet clearly coming from a monolingual ideology that ignored the positive results of bilingual schools. The NT education department responded by, at first, rewriting the goals of bilingual education to have a focus on learning English, and then later, in 1998, under the pressure of funding cuts, phasing out bilingual education altogether. While it is true that servicing the needs of the many Aboriginal language groups in the NT is more costly than a ‘one size fits all’ English-as-a-second-language (ESL) program, it fails to take into account the savings associated with higher student engagement, better educational outcomes and, as a result, greater employment opportunities.

NT Intervention area (Source: http://everydayracism-au.tumblr.com/)

As funding cuts rolled out across the territory, the NT government was heavily criticised for failing to properly consult with schools, parents and communities, with protests and petitions happening around the nation. Unfortunately, the influence of the monolingual Anglophone mainstream proved to be stronger, and with it the belief that teaching in English was the best way to improve the students’ English skills.

Towards the late 2000s, two major events caused the NT government to tighten the reins on bilingual education even further. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (better known as the NT Intervention) legislated a series of changes to government services which ultimately took decision-making and control of out of the hands of Aboriginal communities and into those of government. Thomas (2017) links this shifting of power to subsequent policies that then took community control away from education. After all, bilingual education was based on a model of self-determination for Aboriginal communities, so, as the NT government took steps to remove self-determination, the suppression of Aboriginal languages in education followed.

The second event was the beginning of a new national literacy and numeracy test known as NAPLAN, which, despite many early concerns that it was biased against students in remote settings (Piller, 2016), was rolled out to schools all over Australia. As educational experts predicted, the first round of results found that students in remote parts of the NT could not compete on these tests, which was quickly labelled as ‘underperformance’. The NT government responded with further attacks on bilingual education in 2009, this time implementing the rule that the first four hours of every school day must be conducted in English.

Source: treatyrepublic.net

These forms of schooling, which Piller refers to as ‘submersion education’, often have long term detrimental effects on the children who are not only trying to learn the language, but also the content of the lessons. It can be a stressful and demotivating experience for children, with lowered attendance being one of the first indicators that schooling is not meeting their needs. By 2011, a number of NT schools were reporting large drops in attendance following the implementation of the new policy.

Submersion education can also have lasting effects on children’s linguistic identities and the status of their home languages. Most Aboriginal languages are highly endangered (of the 250+ languages that once existed in Australia, only 120 are still spoken in some way, and only 13 are considered strong), and compulsory education in English is partly to blame for this. If children are led to believe that their home languages hold no value, they may forfeit the use of their languages for English. Yalmay Yunupingu, a teacher in the NT who teaches in both Yolngu Matha (a group of languages of the Yolngu people) and English, speaks of the importance of children receiving an education that balances English with their home language:

“The decision to make English the only important language in our schools will only make the situation for our young people worse as they struggle to be proud Yolngu in a world that is making them feel that their culture is bad, unimportant and irrelevant” (Yunupingu, 2010, p. 25)

Yunupingu goes on to say that, if forced to teach in English, her students will not understand what she is saying, potentially becoming bored and misbehaving, and ultimately missing out on learning.

Despite insistence from governments that they are working to ‘close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage’, policies like the ‘first four hours in English’ only serve the interests of those who want to further suppress Aboriginal cultures and promote a monolingual society. Yingiya Mark Guyula, a NT politician (quoted in Thomas, 2017), states “that gap grows when Yolngu children are forced into English-only schools, taught in a language they do not speak or hear in their community”. Williams (2011) goes even further to say that forced teaching and learning in English not only contradicts the federal government’s promises to Aboriginal people but “it strikes at the very heart of all that we Indigenous peoples claim in the name of reconciliation, and what the international and national literature clearly asserts regarding the dreadful risks of Indigenous language and culture loss” (p. 120).

While discussing the topic of this paper with a colleague of mine who is a Gomeroi Aboriginal woman, I made reference to the NAIDOC theme “Our Languages Matter” but straight away realised how strange it was for me, a non-Aboriginal person, to say ‘our languages’ in reference to Aboriginal languages. My colleague was quick to point out: Aboriginal languages are the first languages of this country, so as Australians, they should matter to all of us. All Australians have a role to play in making sure that Aboriginal languages are appropriately respected and that they can be used by the communities who have a connection to them.

References

Devlin, B. C., Disbray, S. & Devlin, N. R. F. (2017). History of bilingual education in the northern territory: People, programs and policies. Singapore: Springer Singapore.

Piller, I. (2016). Linguistic diversity and social justice: An introduction to applied sociolinguistics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Yunupingu, Y. (2010). Bilingual works. Australian Educator, 66, Winter 2010, 24-25.

Supposedly Kriol signage at Rapid Creek, Darwin

When I shared this Kriol sign on Facebook as an example of a bad Kriol translation, a first language Kriol speaker commented:

Im nomo Kriol garjinga, bambai aibina sabi. [It’s not Kriol for goodness sake, otherwise I would’ve understood it.]

My thoughts exactly. And also the thoughts of every other Kriol speaker I know who has seen it.

Poorly translated signage isn’t uncommon. Everyone is familiar with the hilarity of Engrish. But when translation is just a commercial novelty, it doesn’t matter too much. However, when government departments seek out translation services, you can assume that it is for an important reason. And when that goes wrong, it is more serious and more embarrassing. My favourite example of this is an English sign emailed off to be translated into Welsh. The resultant sign features an ‘Out Of Office’ auto-reply message in Welsh!

The Welsh message on this road sign translates as “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

Kriol, as the most widely spoken language in the Northern Territory after English, is one of the main languages that people in the Top End seek out translation services for. There are challenges to providing translation services in Kriol. Firstly, while Kriol has a standard spelling system – courtesy mostly of the Bible translation work – it is not widely known (and not taught in any schools). Secondly, Kriol does vary from place to place so spellings are often altered to reflect localised pronunciations. Thirdly, translation is not something that can be done by anyone who knows two languages. It is a professional skill that requires training and experience before it can be done well.

While well-translated Kriol signs can be found, the sign recently put up by the Department of Primary Industries near Rapid Creek in Darwin is not one of those.

Well-written bilingual signage as you enter Barunga community

It doesn’t take a linguist to note the obvious spelling inconsistencies. Some words are spelled in Kriol such as krik (creek), kreb (crab) and masul (mussel). A few are Kriol-looking words with English spelling influences, like eatem (in Kriol spelling: idim) and lunga (meaning “in/at/on/to”, usually spelled langa). And the rest is in ordinary English spelling. Given the mixed-up spelling systems used, an obvious question should be: what language is this sign supposed to be in?

But the bigger issue is that it actually doesn’t make sense. At least not to any Kriol speakers I know (and I know a lot).

Two phrases are particularly nonsensical. Wadrim trabul (presumably derived from ‘water-im trouble’) is not a thing that makes any sense to me and nothing I would ever say if I was on an interpreting job.

The weirder one is …lunga being looked at… La or langa (their ‘lunga’) is a preposition locating something in space, usually translating as “in/at/on/to” in English. So the phrase translates to something like … ‘at being looked at’? Je suis confused. On top of that, the phrase ‘being looked at’ is not a structure you’d find in Kriol so I don’t know what it is doing there.

Another example of a well-translated English-Kriol sign

Sadly, despite the commendable gesture to provide signage in Kriol, this result is well below par. The apparent goal of the sign – to communicate a message in Kriol – has not been achieved.

When I first saw this sign being shared on Facebook, I immediately questioned its quality, as did others. All Kriol-speaking contacts – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – were equally confused by it (Numu gud wan dunja dat sign braja – “that’s not a good sign, brother” – wrote a Kriol-speaking mate from Ngukurr in imperfectly spelled but perfectly understandable Kriol).

So, in an effort to actually be helpful, I called the number on the sign to let the department know that their sign is poorly made. The response from the Department of Primary Industries was surprising. Despite my professional advice that it is poorly made, they are standing by it. They told me the translation was done by Aboriginal Broadcasting and placed importance on the fact that it was done by Aboriginal people. Whether they have produced a translation that is actually communicatively useful seems to be a secondary concern. I tried to point out some of the above – that the inconsistent spelling is a clue to it being a poor translation and that all Kriol speakers I know who have seen it find it poor – but it made no difference.

English only version of questionably translated sign at Rapid Creek, Darwin

This is all a bit of an unfortunate shemozzle. It is disappointing that Aboriginal Broadcasting has apparently delivered poor quality language services and disappointing that the Department of Primary Industries were apparently not interested in addressing the poor work they had commissioned.

The message here is, find someone who has skills and experience in translation, not just someone who can take your money and do an efficient-but-ultimately-poor job. And yes, the provision of quality translation services in Aboriginal languages is difficult and may take longer than you expect, but if you try a bit harder, you can make it work.

Someone on Facebook posted the English version of the sign, and it took me about one minute to translate it into something that would make much more sense to a Kriol speaker:

La Mei en Jun, mela testimbat dijan woda bla meiksho im klinwan en seifwan. Nomo idim eni fish, kreb o masul, dumaji im maitbi nogud.

***

An extended version of this post was first published on that munanga linguist.

If you want to learn more about Kriol, you might find this explainer on the Conversation useful.

Panel on Representing Culturally Diverse Clients

Cultural Diversity and the Law: Access to justice in multicultural Australia was a conference held in Sydney on the 13^th and 14^th of March. Jointly run by the Migration Council of Australia and the Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration (AIJA), the conference brought together an impressive group of speakers, including the Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, a range of other senior judges from around the country, key legal practitioners and community workers, the Attorney-General and shadow Attorney-General, and expert academics.

Plenary sessions focused mainly on the courts, considering the ways in which a changing demographic creates challenges for judges and other court officials. Hon Wayne Martin AC (Chief Justice of WA), introduced the Judicial Council on Cultural Diversity, which was recently established to improve inclusion in the Australian legal system. Importantly, he acknowledged his own status as “male, pale and stale” and how he could only understand discrimination from second-hand accounts.

Many of the judges who spoke discussed the concept of equality and how it has been dealt with, in and by the courts, explaining that there is scope for different treatment to ensure equal outcomes. They offered common examples of cultural differences that could create the potential for misunderstanding. Three or four speakers raised similar examples, such as the varied use and meaning of eye contact.

Many speakers focused on the conduct of trials and of judicial decision-making. Hon Justice Helen Wood (Supreme Court, Tasmania) focused on the case of Dietrich v The Queen. She argued that many of the principles raised in that decision related to fairness and discussed how these applied in terms of accommodating cultural diversity. Others discussed the importance of the broader physical context of the court building itself. They argued that ensuring court facilities are accommodating was one way to create greater ease in the stressful situation of appearing in court.

There were points in the conference that poignantly demonstrated the challenges we are yet to overcome. On a panel discussing “Justice, Security and Terrorism”, a representative of the Attorney-General’s department argued that we “need to hear from credible voices within their own community”. The irony of this statement in the context of an all-white panel was not lost on many of the audience.

Sessions and speakers that were particularly striking were those that took the broad ideas presented in the plenary and added greater depth and critical reflection to the discussion. A panel on “Ethics and Domestic Violence” offered up a discussion on intersectionality. The speakers argued that culturally inaccessible services can create to unique challenges for some women. Further, this panel comprised experienced and respected speakers from different cultural and professional backgrounds, better reflecting the conference values. One statement really stuck with me and (perhaps) challenged some of the underlying assumptions of the event as a whole: “We all have a culture” Maria Dimopoulos said, “and isn’t English a language?” For me this acted as an important reminder. We were not gathered there to address an “us and them” issue, to encourage the “us” to better accommodate the “them”. It was about actually stopping to consider the culture of the court and the law itself, and how our own culture and language may limit or influence the way we work and interact, and the assumptions we make. A question from the audience highlighted another overlooked intersection: the services discussed targeted heterosexual women and their children, bringing into question the inclusion of Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex people. This also made me consider the inclusion of people with disabilities and the Deaf community in discussions about cultural diversity, and the overall silence on this intersection throughout the conference.

Laura Smith-Khan with Hon Chief Justice Wayne Martin AC

Another interesting break-out session was on the status and role of interpreters in the court. Hon Justice Melissa Perry (Federal Court) explored the way interpreting is understood and dealt with by the court, and when procedural fairness issues may arise. Professor Sandra Hale (UNSW) shared findings from recent research looking at the status of interpreters working in courts. She argued that where the status, role or qualifications of the interpreter were not well understood, this might influence the attitude of the jury. In extreme cases, jurors may even mistake the interpreter for the defendant. She explained that practice between judges varied greatly. She advocated for greater respect and better conditions for court interpreters, as she saw these as closely linked with the quality of interpreting. Dr Georgina Heydon’s (RMIT) presentation complemented this argument. She introduced her research on vicarious trauma amongst interpreters. Her findings exposed alarming figures in terms of how often interpreters deal with distressing material, and uncovered a lack of support structures to assist them in addressing the second-hand trauma they may experience. Her participants reported that exposure to traumatic interpreting material compromised the quality of their performance. All three speakers on the panel identified the provision of briefing documents before a court hearing as one way to better equip and prepare interpreters for their work.

The issues of power dynamics and roles were taken up again in a fascinating presentation by Professor Simon Rice OAM (ANU) later in the day. After hearing from Hon Justice Helen Wood on fairness, and Ms Jessie Taylor (Barrister, Melbourne) on working with asylum seeker clients and the importance of rapport building, Professor Rice presented a critical consideration of the law. He picked up the idea of everyone having a culture, arguing that “Law has two ways of seeing the world: the law’s way or not.” He argued that many of the activities aimed at improving cultural inclusion are simply about trying to train or adapt people to conform to the system. In this one-way system, he had “trouble with what to do with my cultural awareness once I get it, because of the constraints in which I work.” He argued that “our idea of justice is a monocultural artefact” and that while the law declared a desire to respect cultural diversity, it was not open to legal diversity. In his own experience as an Administrative Appeals Tribunal member, Professor Rice described some of the small steps he took to make the Tribunal less intimidating, and more welcoming – the positioning of the various participants in the room, informal clothing, holding hearings in people’s homes or other locations. He saw these as some ways of “softening the edges” of what is an inherently imperfect system, which brings with it its own cultural limitations.

Professor Simon Rice OAM makes his presentation

This conference brought together a mix of professionals working in or around the Australian legal system. It is heartening to see these issues being addressed through the bringing together of very senior judges, legal practitioners, community workers and academics to start a conversation about what it really means to be culturally inclusive. Sessions focusing on migrant communities, alongside parallel sessions focusing on indigenous communities reflected an inclusive approach to cultural diversity. Focused sessions on linguistic- and gender-related challenges were also important in this regard. Hopefully future sessions will focus on sexuality and disability as other important intersections to discuss.

Perhaps the most important lesson I took away from the conference was one of critical self-reflection. Victorian Magistrate Anne Goldsborough put it perfectly. Accommodating cultural diversity in the law is not about learning everything about every culture. Rather, it is about learning to recognise and reject my own pre-conceived ideas – whether it be about my own culture and values, or the assumptions I make about others.

To discover more…

From conference participants:

ABC (2015), Interview with Ms Nyodal Nyuon, law student and spokesperson for the South Sudanese community in Australia and Ms Jessie Taylor, Victorian barrister.

ABC (2015), Interview with RMIT researchers Sedat Mulayim, Miranda Lai and Georgina Heydon.

Hale, S (2008) “Working with interpreters effectively in the courtroom”, conference slides, AIJA conference, 12-14 March, Freemantle, WA.

Perry, M and Zornada, K (2015) “Working with Interpreters: Judicial Perspectives”, conference paper.

Rice, S (2010) “Human rights issues relating to African refugees and immigrants in Australia”. Background paper for African Australians: A review of human rights and social inclusion issues, Australian Human Rights Commission (June 2010).

Other reading

Angermeyer, PS (2015) Speak English or What? Codeswitching and interpreter use in New York City courts. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eades, D (2013) Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Solan, L (ed) (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law. Oxford University Press.

Organisation websites

Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration

Migration Council of Australia

A full list of conference speakers and organisations

2014 NAPLAN Year 3 Numeracy test results by language status

In Australia the results of last year’s round of student and school performance on national standardized testing have just been published. As is the case each year since standardized testing was first introduced in 2008, the results of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN for short, throw up a strange anomaly with regard to language. As an example of this anomaly, let me quote from the summary of the national Year 3 results:

Across Australia, and in all jurisdictions except the Northern Territory, there is very little difference between these two groups [Language Background Other Than English vs. English Language Background] in the percentage of students who achieved below the national minimum standard in any achievement domain. In the Northern Territory, the proportion of students from a language background other than English who achieve below the national minimum standard across the five domains is generally three to five times as high as for students from an English language background. (p. 63)

How strange is that!? Language status makes no difference to literacy and numeracy performance in Australia overall but it makes a significant difference in the Northern Territory? How can this be?

Let’s start with the meaning of ‘Language Background Other Than English.’ Abbreviated as ‘LBOTE,’ it is part of the personal data collected about test takers and each test paper has a bubble to be shaded if ‘either the student or a parent/guardian speaks a language other than English at home.’

You do not have to be a social scientist or a linguist to see that this is a pointless category to have: a test taker who is considered ‘LBOTE’ could be someone who is a monolingual speaker of Standard English (with a parent who speaks another language), a bi- or multilingual speaker whose repertoire includes Standard English or some other form of English, and, finally, a monolingual speaker of a language other than English who has no proficiency in English whatsoever. In short, having ‘LBOTE’ status does not say anything about the proficiency of the test taker in Standard Australian English, the language in which the test is administered.

Because ‘LBOTE’ is a meaningless category, it is not surprising that it results in weird correlations: across Australia, there is little difference in the test results of ‘LBOTE’ and ‘non-LBOTE’ groups although ‘LBOTE’ students actually slight outperform ‘non-LBOTE’ students, particularly by Year 9 and particularly in mathematics. This situation is different only in the Northern Territory where ‘LBOTE’ students perform significantly lower than ‘non-LBOTE,’ as we have seen.

The obvious explanation is that most ‘LBOTE’ students across Australia are fluent bilinguals but that the situation is different in the Northern Territory, where most ‘LBOTE’ students are not proficient in English. We have discussed previously how NAPLAN testing discriminates against creole speakers in the Northern Territory.

Why do we accept a meaningless category such as ‘LBOTE’ to be used in national reporting and why do we put up with being presented with nonsensical correlations between ‘LBOTE’ status and academic performance year after year?

ANU linguists Sally Dixon and Denise Angelo found that NAPLAN is not alone but that data held by schools about the language status of their students are generally ‘dodgy,’ nonsensical and illogical. In a survey of 86 schools in Queensland they discovered that only two out of these 86 schools felt reasonably confident that the language data they held about their students were accurate. In addition to the ‘LBOTE’ status of NAPLAN test takers, schools also recorded a ‘main language other than English’ on enrollment in forms that were variously filled in by parents or administrators as they saw fit. If ‘main language other than English’ was left blank on the enrollment form, ‘English’ was sometimes entered on transfer into the database instead of a null response. Some students also received ‘English as an additional language or dialect’ status. This category was variously assessed by teachers if and when students seemed to have problems and funding for additional English language support was available.

These three categories were internally incoherent and did not match across categories in 84 out of 86 surveyed schools. This shocking finding is due to the fact that language-related categories are poorly defined, as we saw in the example of ‘LBOTE.’ It is also related to a general language blindness in schools, further evidence of the monolingual mindset of Australia’s multilingual schools. Furthermore, schools were particularly ‘language-blind’ when it came to indigenous children: creoles and contact varieties were not necessarily recognized as anything other than ‘English,’ even if judged to be ‘bad English.’ By the same token, some students with clear ethnic affiliations were categorized as speakers of the ethnic language irrespective of their proficiency in that language.

The overall consequence of all these ‘dodgy data’ floating around in relation to language is that educators come to see language as meaningless because it does not really distinguish between one group and another. Overall, ‘LBOTEs’ and ‘non-LBOTEs’ seem to perform more or less the same, and the same seems to be true of ‘MLOTEs’ (‘main language other than English,’ in case you have lost track) and ‘non-MLOTEs,’ and ‘EAL/Ds’ (‘English as an additional language or dialect’) and ‘non-EAL/Ds.’ However, it is not language that is meaningless as a factor in student performance. It is dodgy data that create this illusion. The very fact of proliferating data categories more or less referring to the same status will inevitably leave people confused and unwilling or unable to take ‘language’ seriously.

Language-related issues then become displaced onto race or socio-economic disadvantage. Educators and the general public fail to see a child needing English language support in order to achieve academically. Instead they see an aboriginal child achieving poorly. We then collectively throw up our hands in despair and decide that indigenous education is a problem that is too big and intractable to fix. Because there is nothing we can do, we might just as well ignore the problem for another year.

However, this is adding insult to injury. The misdiagnoses of the language-side of the academic failure of indigenous children are a significant part of the problem. A first step to address that problem would be to get our data in order. This entails compulsory language-related training or qualification requirements for Australia’s teachers, test designers and policy makers.

Reference

Dixon, Sally, & Angelo, Denise. (2014). Dodgy Data, Language Invisibility and the Implications for Social Inclusion: A Critical Analysis of Indigenous Student Language Data in Queensland Schools. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 37(3), 213-233. [open access available] ]]> https://languageonthemove.com/dodgy-data-and-language-misdiagnosis/feed/ 4 18691 https://languageonthemove.com/linguistic-diversity-and-social-inclusion-in-australia-2/ https://languageonthemove.com/linguistic-diversity-and-social-inclusion-in-australia-2/#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:01:23 +0000 http://www.languageonthemove.com/?p=18585

2012 workshop on ‘Linguistic Diversity and Social Inclusion in Australia’ at Macquarie University

How does language intersect with social inclusion in contemporary Australia? Do social inclusion policies address linguistic diversity? What do we know about the relationship between linguistic diversity and inclusion in schools, workplaces and higher education? It is questions such as these that a special issue of the  Australian Review of Applied Linguistics devoted to Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia addresses. Guest-edited by Ingrid Piller, the special issue brings together selected presentations from the 2012 Macquarie University workshop devoted to the same topic.

Please find abstracts of the articles in the collection below. All the contributions in the special issue are available for open access through the National Library of Australia.

Linguistic diversity and social inclusion in Australia

Ingrid Piller

This editorial introduction orients the reader to current public debates and the state of research with regard to the intersection of linguistic diversity and social inclusion in contemporary Australia. These are characterised by a persistent lack of attention to the consequences of linguistic diversity for our social organisation. The editorial introduction serves to frame the five original research articles that comprise this special issue and identifies the key challenges that linguistic diversity presents for a fair and just social order. These challenges run as red threads through all the articles in this issue and include the persistent monolingual mindset which results in a pervasive language blindness and an inability to even identify language as an obstacle to inclusion. Furthermore, where language is recognised as an obstacle to inclusion this usually takes the form of assuming that an individual suffers from a lack of English language proficiency. Improving English language proficiency is then prescribed as a panacea for inclusion. However, on close examination that belief in itself can constitute a form of exclusion with detrimental effects both on language learning and equal opportunity.

Language and social inclusion: Unexplored aspects of intercultural communication

Simon Musgrave, Julie Bradshaw

Social inclusion policy in Australia has largely ignored key issues of communication for linguistic minorities, across communities and with the mainstream community. In the (now disbanded) Social Inclusion Board’s reports (e.g., Social Inclusion Unit, 2009), the emphasis is on the economic aspects of inclusion, while little attention has been paid to questions of language and culture. Assimilatory aspects of policy are foregrounded, and language is mainly mentioned in relation to the provision of classes in English as a Second Language. There is some recognition of linguistic diversity but the implications of this for inclusion and intercultural communication are not developed. Australian society can now be characterised as super-diverse, containing numerous ethnic groups each with multiple and different affiliations. We argue that a social inclusion policy that supports such linguistic and cultural diversity needs an evidence-based approach to the role of language and we evaluate existing policy approaches to linguistic and cultural diversity in Australia to assess whether inclusion is construed primarily in terms of enhancing intercultural communication, or of assimilation to the mainstream.

Dodgy data, language invisibility and the implications for social inclusion: A critical analysis of indigenous student language data in Queensland schools

Sally Dixon, Denise Angelo

As part of the ‘Bridging the Language Gap’ project undertaken with 86 State and Catholic schools across Queensland, the language competencies of Indigenous students have been found to be ‘invisible’ in several key and self-reinforcing ways in school system data. A proliferation of inaccurate, illogical and incomplete data exists about students’ home languages and their status as English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) learners in schools. This is strongly suggestive of the fact that ‘language’ is not perceived by school systems as a significant operative variable in student performance, not even in the current education climate of data-driven improvement. Moreover, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the annual standardised testing regime, does not collect relevant information on students’ language repertoires and levels of proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE). Indigenous students who are over-represented in NAPLAN under-performance data are targeted through ‘Closing the Gap’ for interventions to raise their literacy and numeracy achievements (in SAE). However, Indigenous students who are EAL/D learners cannot be disaggregated by system data from their counterparts already fluent in SAE. Reasons behind such profound language invisibility are discussed, as well as the implications for social inclusion of Indigenous students in education.

‘Like the fish not in water’: How language and race mediate the social and economic inclusion of women migrants to Australia

Donna Butorac

Learning English is an important aspect of post-migration settlement in Australia, and new migrants with beginner to intermediate proficiency are strongly encouraged to attend government-subsidised English language classes. Underpinning the framing and delivery of these classes is a commitment to the discursive construction of Australia as an English-monolingual nation state, in which increased English proficiency will lead to new migrants gaining employment, thereby achieving an important benchmark of successful inclusion in Australian society. The assumption that English language acquisition leads to social and economic inclusion is not challenged within the settlement English program, and the language learner is seen as linguistically deficient in English, rather than as an emerging bi- or multilingual. Moreover, the ways that race, as well as gender, mediate both language learning and social inclusion are never problematised. This paper is based on data from a longitudinal ethnography that examines subjectivity in three interactional domains – family, society and work – in order to explore how language, race and gender impact on the post-migration settlement trajectories and sense of social inclusion of women migrants to Australia.

Working it out: Migrants’ perspectives of social inclusion in the workplace

George Major, Agnes Terraschke, Emily Major, Charlotte Setijadi

This paper explores the concept of social inclusion from the perspective of recent migrants, from language backgrounds other than English, at work in Australia. We adopt an understanding of social inclusion that acknowledges the importance of economic independence, while also considering migrants’ feelings of connectedness at work and their sense of belonging. Based on qualitative interviews with migrants collected two years apart, we explore the ways language and language practices can lead to feelings of inclusion or exclusion at work. The data suggests that migrants who felt included at work often had colleagues and/or bosses who actively supported and encouraged them in learning new skills, and made an effort to connect with them through small talk. In contrast, participants who felt excluded were unable to fully participate in work activities and/or workplace interaction because of limitations they or others placed upon them based on their English proficiency. We suggest that social inclusion, as it relates to employment, can also encompass different things for different people. For some, a sense of belonging is not promoted solely by having work or the ability to connect with colleagues, but also by obtaining employment of a type and level commensurate with their pre-migration status.

Writing feedback as an exclusionary practice in higher education

Grace Chu-Lin Chang

This ethnographic research probes into feedback on academic writing received by Taiwanese students in Australian higher education institutions, and examines whether the feedback received helped students to participate in the written discourse of academic communities. Academic writing dominates the academic life of students in Australia and is the key measure of their academic performance. This can be problematic for international students who speak English as an additional language and who are expected to acquire academic literacies in English ‘by doing’. As a social practice, academic writing depends on participation in dialogue for students to be included in the community of academia. However, the findings show that few participants received any useful feedback. Some assignments were never returned; in other cases, the hand-written feedback was illegible, and often included only overly general comments that puzzled the participants. As a result, the learning process came to an end once the students handed in their assignments; feedback failed to promote further learning related to content, and particularly to academic writing. The article highlights the few instances where participants received helpful feedback that was accessible and constructive, and which can be considered best practice for the promotion of academic literacy.

Gunbalanya School in West Arnhem Land (Source: abc.net.au)

Last week, the results of the 2012 National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) were published. As has been the case since NAPLAN was first introduced in Australia in 2008, the Northern Territory (NT) has, once again, underperformed dramatically. More than 30% of Year 3 students in the Territory perform below the national minimum standard in Reading, Writing, Spelling and Numeracy. For Grammar and Punctuation the number of NT students performing below the national minimum standard is close to 40%. Across Australia as a whole, these numbers are between 5-7%.

Around 40% of students enrolled in NT schools are indigenous. Across Australia as a whole, that number is 4%.

Putting two and two together, it won’t be long before we’ll see yet another highly politicised debate about aboriginal education. Conservatives will blame ‘underperforming schools’ and progressives will blame ‘systemic socio-economic disadvantage.’ As usual, both sides will be right and wrong in their own ways and after a while the failure of aboriginal education in this country will be shelved as too intractable for yet another year.

Meanwhile, few will stop to consider that NAPLAN doesn’t actually tell us anything about literacy and numeracy achievements in remote NT schools because NAPLAN is a test designed and standardized for first language speakers of English while English is a second language (ESL) across remote NT locations.

Those who do recognize the fact that aboriginal children are being tested in an additional language on a test designed for first language speakers usually dismiss that problem as minor, as, for instance, Indigenous Education 2012 does. The authors of that report argue that language is not an issue because it is not an issue for migrant children for whom English also constitutes an additional language. Indeed, the difference between migrant ESL test takers and first language test takers seems to be only 1 or 2 percentage points on average, with many ESL students outperforming their mother tongue peers.

A recent article in the Australian Review of Applied Linguistics explores the fallacies of the argument that language does not matter in low literacy and numeracy achievements in the NT. The authors, Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson and Deborah Loakes, argue that there are a number of linguistic challenges faced by aboriginal students in remote locations when it comes to literacy and numeracy assessment in English.

First, most ESL kids in cities grow up in suburbs where English is the language of wider communication. School is thus rarely the only domain where they are exposed to English. This is different in remote communities: English is often exclusive to the school.

Second, most migrants come from literate backgrounds where education is highly valued. This is usually not the case in remote indigenous communities.

Third, the problems inherent in speaking two clearly distinct languages are much easier to recognize and to address than the problems inherent in speaking a different language that is not recognized as such. While aboriginal languages have become relatively rare, most indigenous people in remote locations now speak Kriol. Creoles spoken in Australia differ widely but most have English as the lexifier language and are structurally based in an indigenous language. Australian creoles thus often sound like English but may, for example, not have subject-verb agreement nor distinguish singular and plural. When examining Year 3 NAPLAN sample tests, the researchers identified many linguistic problems that would have made the test misleading to a Kriol speaker.

As an example they examine the spelling test item: “We jumpt on the trampoline.” Test takers have to correct the underlined item. Leaving aside the fact that presenting an incorrect item to a learner is highly problematic in itself, test takers would need to identify that “jumpt” is in the past tense and that the final [t] sound is therefore graphically represented as <ed>. However, past tense in Australian creoles would usually be realized as bin jamp. This spelling item is thus testing grammatical knowledge that Kriol speakers are unlikely to have.

The problem is compounded by the fact that ear infections are extremely high in remote indigenous communities and about 70% of all children there are affected by some form of hearing loss. Final stops such as [t] are extremely difficult to hear with high frequency hearing loss.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that the reading passages in the test are littered with cultural concepts quite alien to the experience of children in remote Australia. The sample tests examined by Wigglesworth, Simpson and Loakes are populated by cinemas, paperboys, picket fences, letter boxes and parking meters – none of which exist in remote communities.

In sum, the researchers demonstrate that the NAPLAN test is linguistically and culturally problematic for creole-speaking children in remote communities. A standardized test designed for first-language speakers of English will always fail second-language speakers who are not even recognized as such.

In contrast to all the big problems bedevilling aboriginal education in this country, the language problem is actually relatively easy to fix: bilingual education with the use of the mother tongue in the early years of schooling and simultaneous systematic instruction in English as an additional language work well in minority contexts elsewhere. And, of course, tests designed for the actual population of test takers rather than an imaginary monolingual mother tongue speaker of Standard English.

Gillian Wigglesworth, Jane Simpson, & Deborah Loakes (2011). NAPLAN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENTS FOR INDIGENOUS CHILDREN IN REMOTE COMMUNITIES: ISSUES AND PROBLEMS Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 34 (3), 320-343.
Available for open access here.

Caroline Tennant Kelly with two of her photos from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement (Source: Sydney Morning Herald at http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-bohemian-and-her-mission-20100416-skgk.html)

In 1924 the first university Department of Anthropology in Australia was founded at the University of Sydney. The founding professor was Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a theoretical anthropologist whose aim it was to have anthropology accepted as one of the natural sciences. Not a fieldworker himself he was nevertheless successful in establishing anthropological fieldwork in Australia and soon the new department had dozens of fieldworkers around Australia, in Papua New Guinea and on various Pacific islands. What these researchers expected to study was the social organization, the cultures and the languages of ‘native tribes.’ However, what they found was colonization in full swing: in Queensland, the 2^nd or 3^rd generation of post-contact aboriginals were mostly living in new social formations on missions and reserves.

And so these new fieldworkers abruptly faced a set of ethical questions for which they were unprepared. Should they seek out the small number of remaining groups who continued to live ‘in their natural state’? Or should they concentrate on studying the much larger numbers of aboriginal people living on missions and reserves, often with little regard to traditional group and clan affiliations? Should they seek out the testimony of elderly aboriginals born before colonization and focus on researching pre-colonial life? Or should they record ongoing transformations in the lives of these people? Should they concentrate only on the romanticized ‘full-bloods’ or also consider the experiences of the increasing number of ‘half-castes’? Was their role merely to record what they observed or should they speak out about the abject living conditions they observed? Who were their non-academic partners? The aboriginal people who they studied or the administrators who controlled access to the missions and reserves (as, at that time, most aboriginal people were wards of the state)?

Let me give you two examples. One of Radcliffe-Brown’s supervisees, Ursula McConnel went to Aurukun in 1927 to conduct ethnographic research among the Wik-Mungkana people on Cape York Peninsula, who today – on May 22, 2012 – are having 75,000 hectares of their land returned from the State of Queensland. In addition to her anthropological research focus on traditional social organization, culture and language, she also found a culture of abuse on the Presbyterian mission: inmates were punished for disobedience by whipping or by being chained to trees; imprisonment without food or water in a small iron shed was a regular occurrence. Other punitive measures included head shavings and chained work gangs. She also observed two women and three men being rounded up a gunpoint, chained together and force-marched a distance of 380 kilometres across the Cape York Peninsula for transportation to another settlement (see Kidd, 1997, pp. 119ff.).

What did Ursula McConnel do? Ignore these abuses as outside her research brief or bring them to the attention of the wider world outside the remote mission? She chose the latter path. The result was a media scandal, the first in a long list of public embarrassment for the Queensland state over its managment of aboriginal affairs throughout most of the 20th century. However, this was not followed by a public enquiry or any material change on Aurukun or any other aboriginal settlement. The only material consequence that followed was for anthropology and McConnel personally: administrators closed ranks against ‘the new science’ and anthropologists found it much harder, if not impossible, to gain permission to work with settled aboriginal populations.

McConnel found her field maligned as ‘ideologically eccentric and administratively naïve’ and was personally vilified as ‘objectionable,’ as having made ‘disloyal and damaging statements’ and as ‘very eccentric and somewhat hysterical’ (quoted in Kidd, 1997, p. 119). Judgements such as these came from the aboriginal affairs administrators but she had no support within her discipline, either.

A.P. Elkin, who became Radcliffe-Brown’s successor as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney and who was to dominate Australian anthropology over many years, took a different approach to McConnel: instead of going to the media, he worked behind the scenes, including through lobbying his personal friend, the then-Home Secretary, to achieve a greater influence of anthropology over aboriginal administration. Faced with the charge that anthropologists were ‘not inclined to practicality’ (p. 123) he demonstrated his ‘practical’ approach by making sure that inconvenient anthropologists were cut out from National Research Council grant funding (p. 123).

Privately wealthy, McConnel’s research did not depend on grant funding but even so her career petered out and she never received the PhD nor the university position to which she aspired. The Australian Dictionary of Biography ends the entry about Ursual McConnel as follows:

The importance of McConnel’s scholarly contribution was recognized after her death. […] her publications form the foundations of present-day anthropological research on western Cape York Peninsula. She had devoted much of her life to this endeavour, driven by a sense of duty and justice towards the Aborigines with whom she had worked.

Another anthropologist of the time who had to face difficult questions of professional ethics was Caroline Tennant Kelly. A student of Elkin, she gained permission to conduct field work at the Cherbourg aboriginal reserve (where some of the surviving descendants of the Yiman peope, about who I wrote recently, were relocated). Elkin had assured the superintendent that ‘Mrs Kelly is possessed of plenty of common sense and tact and will not cause any implications on the settlement’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 125).

However, all her ‘common sense and tact’ did not prepare Tennant Kelly for the entrenched and grinding poverty she was to see at Cherbourg. Shelter and food were so inadequate as to be life-threatening and resulting in high mortality rates. Tennant Kelly was particularly dismayed to discover gross financial irregularities at Cherbourg. Under the 1897 ‘Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act’ wages received by aboriginal people were banked by the state. In order to access their own money aboriginal workers had to make a withdrawal application to the local ‘protector.’ Despite the fact that aboriginal people often earned less than a quarter of their non-aboriginal counterparts, the state of Queensland thus held a considerable private fortune. Mix a substantial sum of poorly accounted money with the fact that many aboriginals were illiterate, drug-dependent or ignorant of their (meagre) rights, you can imagine that fraud and financial malpractice were rife in this system.

As Tennant Kelly found, aboriginal people had to justify any expense for which they wanted to use their own money and she was incensed by the humiliation involved. Examples listed by Kidd (1997, p. 179) include permission denied for buying *two* pairs of trousers, on the grounds of ‘extravagance;’ permission denied for a ticket to visit the Brisbane Exhibition on the grounds of ‘lack of effort;’ or permission granted to purchase a coat on the grounds that the applicant was ‘a very careful boy.’

Tennant Kelly considered state control of aboriginal wages a form of economic slavery and started a national campaign to expose Queensland’s handling of aboriginal wages and savings to national scrutiny. Similar to McConnel’s experience a decade earlier, her lobbying did not affect policy in the short run but made her powerful enemies. The aboriginal protection board and even senior politicians lost no time in playing the gender card: ‘the activities of women Anthropologists [have] not been very satisfactory or harmonious,’ stated the superintendent (Kidd, 1997, p. 125). As McConnel before her, Tennant Kelly was personally attacked for spreading ‘beastly lies’ and even for her appearance: ‘It is no wonder she was taken for a half-caste. She dressed like a Native, sat under the trees with natives, often with her arms around them, her hair was always untidy’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 128).

How did fellow anthropologists react to the new scandal? Elkin stood by his student: ‘We are up against vested interests and cannot hope to obtain any desirable reform without drastic change in Government policy’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 135). McConnel, too, weighed into the debate but not with solidarity as one might have expected. She wrote a private note to the Superintendent, stating that Tennant Kelly was ‘not a fully qualified Anthropologist’ and suggested she could act as consultant on ‘any project concerning anthropological co-operation in aboriginal affairs’ (Kidd, 1997, p. 135).

Despite Elkin’s support, Tennant Kelly’s academic career, too, was going nowhere and, during the war she shifted her attention towards issues of migrant integration and Jewish settlement in Australia. She ended her working life as a town planner and died a recluse in 1989. Of course, all that changed with the rediscovery of her field notes, photographs and letters in 2010 and she now ranks as one of the pioneers of Australian anthropology.

Reading about the experiences of Ursula McConnel and Caroline Tennant Kelly as well as those of other anthropologists of their generation, I could not help but ask what would I have done? The questions of the relationship between research and activism raised by their experiences are uncomfortable ones. Our professional ethics make a clear distinction between research and activism and they are both guided by different sets of expectations. However, in the field the distinction between research and activism is largely artificial as these researchers found.

Speaking out about matters which were strictly speaking outside their field of expertise, these researchers were immediately personally vilified and maligned as putting their politics before their research. However, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and A. P. Elkin, too, made political choices: to largely ignore fieldwork in favour of theory, as Radcliffe-Brown did, or to lobby behind the scenes and through established channels of government, as Elkin did.

What would you have done?

Kidd, Rosalind (1997). The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs – the untold story University of Queensland Press