The Australian of the Year 2021 Local Hero Awardee and recipient of the Order of Australia Medal 2022 proudly launched the book at the Embracing Equity Forum organised by the Community Migrant Resource Centre to celebrate International Women’s Day 2023.

In addition to being an author, Rosemary works as Multicultural Community Liaison Officer with the NSW Police, serves as Swahili-English interpreter, is co-founder of the African women’s group for women at risk of domestic and family violence, and engages in film making, including the documentaries The Baulkham Hills African Ladies Troupe and Rosemary’s Way.

In her memoir A Joyful Life, Rosemary, who was born in Kenya, takes the reader through her survival story back home in Africa of a life strewn with hardship, grief, and trauma, to her migration to Australia. She shares her initial settlement challenges and how she made Australia her home.

The overall message is how Rosemary has found a joyful life, which she generously shares with everyone she meets.

Rosemary taps deeply into the experiences that have shaped her into a courageous person who champions the cause of vulnerable people by advocating for migrant women and women of refugee backgrounds. In the telling of her story, Rosemary is quick to point out, though, that she does not seek to be pitied. On the contrary, she lets the reader know that “these experiences did not break me. If anything, they are what sparked and then fuelled the fire inside me. They have allowed me to help others and live a truly joyful life.”

Rosemary Kariuki OAM has just published her memoir “A joyful life”

Over the years, in her desire to empower vulnerable people with whom she crosses paths, Rosemary has identified new arrivals’ information gaps as their biggest problem. For Rosemary, information is vital to growth, “when you have information you have the power of choice, when you have the power of choice you can earn money when you have money, you can earn independence, you can do anything you want.”

A true believer in embracing people, sharing, and learning from each other, Rosemary also co-founded the African Women’s Dinner Dance, which is now in its 16^th year. Through the event many Australian women from African backgrounds have connected, have gained confidence, and their lives have been positively influenced.

With so many accolades to her name, Rosemary has indeed blazed the trail as a truly inspirational migrant woman, a woman of African descent, a survivor of hardship, grief, and trauma. Having healed, she now uses her past to carve out a future that is joyful for her, and to give back to other vulnerable women, so that they can find their own healing and their own joyful lives.

Hearty congratulations again, Rosemary!

“How bad is your cultural cringe?” (Source: Jenna Guillaume, BuzzFeed)

Keith: I’m still really shit at pronouncing Lisa’s surname. With the umlaut o.
Hanna: What is Lisa’s surname?
(laughter)
Keith: Do I get three goes?
(Keith, Australian, in a relationship with Lisa from Germany)

Despite the increasing value of multilingualism in a globalised world, English-speaking countries such as Australia remain stubbornly monolingual. At the same time the benefits of speaking more than one language are regularly touted in public discourse. My research investigates how speakers of Australian English with a partner from a non-English-speaking background feel about their linguistic repertoires. Embarrassment, as in the example above from Keith (all names are pseudonyms), comes up a lot. So does inferiority. Because of their low proficiency in foreign languages (often as a consequence of their poor quality or limited language learning experiences in formal education) these participants feel they are bad language learners. This response seems to be one way of engaging with and mitigating their own privilege as native speakers of the powerful global language, English, compared to their partners who learned English as an additional language.

“It’s my deficiency”: being a bad language learner

And I I think I was completely in awe of that the fact that she could speak so many different languages freely, and a little bit jealous, and at the beginning was a bit more kind of definite about trying to learn German, um and I think the whole experience intimidated me cause I think I’m the kind of person who if they don’t pick something up really quickly kind of just gives up very quickly (…) (Keith)

For Lisa and Keith, Keith’s first and Lisa’s second language, English, has been the language of their relationship. Keith sees Lisa’s language skills as impressive while blaming himself for his own inability to learn German. He feels that Lisa “probably speaks better English than most native English speakers in Australia”. While Lisa learnt languages formally in her school education as a child and young adult, Keith faces all the frustration of learning another language as an adult.

In his own education Keith’s choices were limited. Although he comes from an Italian migrant background, Italian was not available at his public school in inner Sydney in the 1990s. He decided to take Latin instead, but he dropped it after junior high school when he lost interest in his schooling. He has done no further foreign language study in contrast to Lisa, who studied four languages over many years in her schooling in Germany. So when it comes to saying Keith’s Italian surname their pronunciation reflects their differing language learning trajectories:

Hanna: And how are you at pronouncing Keith’s last name (laughs)?

Lisa: I am tempted to pronounce it Italian which then nobody understands (laughs).

Keith: She- like I’m reading out a, a pizza on the pizza menu from our local pizzeria and she makes fun of my Italian accent. You know like quattro formaggi, she’s like (puts on a strong Australian accent) quattro formaggi. ‘Cause she speaks Italian, you know, these fucking Europeans!

(laughter)

In Keith’s comment about his partner’s Italian pronunciation of his Italian surname we could read humorous disparagement of her ability to pronounce it in the Italian way; in Australia foreign names are usually anglicised or pronounced in an English way. Both his lack of educational opportunity to study Italian and his Anglicized pronunciation cause him in that moment to position himself as a (monolingual) Australian in opposition to (multilingual) Europeans.

Stephen, from Australia, who is married to Christina from Argentina feels similarly critical of his own poor Spanish skills. He describes his attempts to learn Spanish as “a token effort”, says he “hasn’t got an ear for languages” and it dismissive of his own attempts to learn Spanish:

Hanna: You said you’re the odd one out; how do you feel…

Stephen: No, not at all, because uh because I recognise that it’s my deficiency in not having had the time to devote to learning a language. Now, I I make the standard joke I have 50 words of [unclear] of Spanish that I know. I work very hard and uh it’s a standing family joke (…)

In fact, Stephen studied Spanish at night, has a Spanish speaking community in Sydney and has two children who are bilingual. He also regularly visits Argentina and has frequent Argentine house guests. Spanish is a regular feature in his life. In the interview he also says that learning Spanish is “a commitment I’ve probably made and haven’t fulfilled” and feels he is a “handicapped Aussie” compared to his multilingual relations.

Another participant, Amy, has a strikingly similar evaluation of her own language skills. When I asked her why she was interested in talking to me about language she said:

Well, I suppose, I suppose it’s just there and I suppose for me it’s that I’ve got to learn more Spanish (…) And I went to lessons and I started learning and I was enthusiastic because we were going to Columbia, but as soon as we came back from Columbia I was just like that’s it, I’m just not interested anymore. And I learnt that I’m not a good language learner(…) (Amy, in a relationship with German from Columbia)

Amy’s language learning experiences at school were typical for my participants. In twelve years of state school education all she studied was ten weeks each of Italian, German and French in her seventh school year. In contrast, she praises her partner for his excellent English language skills which he acquired in Columbia from the “movies and music” he consumed from their powerful northern neighbour.

A new kind of language cringe

It seems these participants characterise their persistent monolingualism as a personal failing, a source of embarrassment, a source of language cringe. In Australia language cringe is a child of the cultural cringe. It has traditionally been associated with being embarrassed about speaking Australian English, rather than the more highly valued British English of the mother country. However, in my research I have found a new form of language cringe, related to monolinguals who speak the most valuable global language compared to multilinguals who are non-native speakers. This kind of language cringe contradicts the idea that a native speaker will always be “better” than a non-native speaker through an acknowledgment of the level of skill and knowledge which come with learning an additional language to a high proficiency.

This is most obvious when it comes to accent, because language cringe views an Australian native accent as lower value than (some) non-native accents. Lisa points out that she found the Australian accent strange on first hearing.

Lisa: I just remember the first Australian I ever met in my life (…) we started talking in English and I just thought who the fuck is this person? (laughter) It sounded so outlandish I’d never heard that before.

When I asked Keith about what kind of accent he would like his daughter to have, he reluctantly admitted that he wanted hers to be more “international”. Stephen points out that on first travelling to the United States with his wife, the locals “struggled” with his “obvious Australian accent” while she “was much more readily understood”. The implicit high value of a native accent is challenged by the transferability of a more international non-native accent.

Understanding and being able to explain the grammar of a language is another site where language cringe manifests itself. Paul, from Sydney, met Sara from Spain while travelling around South America. He was quickly hired as an English teacher because he was a native speaker. But it was Sara who taught him enough English grammar to make it through the first lesson.

(…) when Sara and I first met I needed to get some work and we were in Chile, um I just before I arrived to Chile we’d split up for a few weeks on the way to. and I’d asked Sara can you hand out a few CVs to English schools when we get there, or when you get there, which she did and I basically arrived and there was a job waiting for me which was perfect. But I’d never taught, I’d never thought about English I had no idea [Sara laughs]. and so the very first lesson I had to do (…) and uh [laughs] they, you know, the school said uh here’s the book this is Headway, this is what you’re using, they’re up to page thirty two or whatever. I opened it up and it was the present perfect and I looked at it and I was like what’s the present perfect, what’s a past participle and Sara sat down and taught me. (Paul, my emphasis)

Sara also spoke four languages to, at that time, Paul’s one. Although Sara is the one with the multilingual skills, Paul was seen by the language school as a better language user because he is a native speaker.

Managing native speaker privilege

Like Keith, Paul is impressed by his wife’s linguistic skills but he also recognises that because of the privilege of the English native speaker Sara’s multilingualism may be less valued. Rather than being embarrassed about his own failings as an individual language user Paul draws attention to the wider failings of the native speaker ideology in terms of its tenuous relation to actual knowledge about language as a system or teaching expertise. Paul acknowledges his partner’s linguistic superiority and the inherent injustice of an employment situation where he benefitted from a discriminatory language ideology because he is a native speaker.

For my other participants it may be that their conception of their own language skills as inferior in relation to the linguistic repertoire of their partners is their way to manage the inequalities brought about by this privilege. Recognising their own limited linguistic repertoire and casting it as a personal failing may be a way to tip the scales back in favour of the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual partner.

Voice of China Sydney 2015, Program Booklet

It’s a weeknight at the Sydney Town Hall, an ornate 19^th century building in the city centre. Almost everyone bustling in the entryway is of Chinese extraction, except the ushers (and me). They’re all ages, and as I pour inside with them I hear Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka, and a little English. There are posters and flyers using simplified and traditional Chinese characters alongside English text. These scripts are not in-text translations but code-switching sentences working together within each ad to sell Australian Ugg boots or New Zealand throat lozenges. The ticket I hold and the banners on stage are also multilingual. They read “The Voice of China 中国好声音 澳大利亚招募站 Season 4 Australia Audition”. The tickets were free and ‘sold out’ days before this event. It’s the final audition – in a live concert format – for the upcoming season of a popular reality TV franchise, based on ‘Voice of Holland’, and available on a subscription channel in Australia. This is the first season of ‘Voice of China’ in which ‘Overseas Chinese’ can compete for the chance to be ‘The Australian Contender’ and flown to mainland China to film the series.

In-Group, Ethnicity and Language

The Town Hall this night is clearly a space where people operate within “multi-sited transnational social fields encompassing those who leave and those who stay behind”, as Peggy Levitt and Nina Glick Schiller (2004, p. 1003) have put it. These sociologists posit that migrants may simultaneously assimilate into a host society and maintain enduring ties to those sharing their ethnic identity, “pivoting” between the two. This is a useful lens through which to regard the event. What is most interesting with ‘Voice of China’ is the use of language to extend who counts as “those who leave”. The contestants have not necessarily actually left China, many are originally from Australia. Maybe their parents, or even their grandparents, once migrated. The audition’s winner [SPOILER ALERT!] is one of the few contestants without a Chinese first name: Leon Lee, a university music student from Sydney.

As these contestants pivot towards China – particularly through their use of Putonghua-Mandarin – so too does the Chinese community pivot towards the diaspora through the vehicle of this show, both by holding these Australian auditions at all and by incorporating Cantonese and Australian English. Together, the singers, hosts, judges and audience are constructing a transnational social field that incorporates both Australia and China; Sydney is not simply a city in Australia but an Asian migration hub located in reference to Beijing. All the fans sitting around me, who might watch other ‘Voice of China’ events in virtual spaces – online and on international pay TV – while living in Sydney, demonstrate the layers of place in one geographic space.

The use of language also reveals interesting dynamics in who counts as having a shared ethnic identity. In an adjustment invisible to the audience, one contestant did not perform in his first language, the Kam-Tai language Zhuang, which is an official ethnic minority language in China. The show’s producers had said he could choose only English, Mandarin or Cantonese songs.

There is a normative equivalence of language and ethnicity being reproduced here. The way in which language features associated with Mandarin, Cantonese and Chinese minority languages “index” (Blommaert and Rampton 2011) Chinese-ness (or do not index it) is shown to be more complicated as the auditions unfurl. It is a linguistic manifestation of a recurrent normative tension over what features are identified with the Zhonghua Minzu. On one hand, Chinese minority languages and common Chinese-heritage dialects in Australia such as Hokkien and Hakka are totally absent from stage. On the other, Cantonese, although it is officially deemed a dialect not a minority language, is used by the hosts, contestants and judges. Despite Cantonese’s status, until recently it, rather than Mandarin, was the language identified as “Chinese” in Australia. Cantonese is also the Chinese language historically strongest in Hong Kong, and after all it’s a Hong Kong station (TVB) organising and presenting these auditions. Cantonese is given equivalent official status in the Town Hall show, with hosting duties meticulously shared between a Mandarin speaking man and a Cantonese-speaking woman.

But there’s still an observable norm of language dominance. When Jessica and Deborah Kwong, two Melbourne sisters, use Cantonese to introduce themselves in their pre-recorded video, then sing a live duet in English, a judge doesn’t hesitate to give all his feedback in Mandarin. They nod as he speaks. It’s only when the next judge takes his turn that the girls ask to switch to “Guangdonghua” (Guangdong Speech, a colloquial name for Cantonese) that we all realise the sisters didn’t understand the first judge. There’s laughter all round, and the judges pledge to ask all future contestants which language they’d prefer. For all the deliberate announcements in Cantonese, not being fluent in Mandarin is not ‘normal’ in this context.

Leon Lee sings a lovely, English-language mash-up of rap, R&B and John Lennon’s Yesterday, ending with a modest xiexie (‘thank you’ in Mandarin). True to their recent pledge, the judges ask if they can comment in Mandarin. Leon explains – in Mandarin – that he speaks it imperfectly but understands it, and the judges proceed.

Only one contestant sings in Cantonese in the round, although many more speak Cantonese in their videos. Their practice again reveals the language expected by ‘Voice of China’s mainland producers and viewers. (While a Hong Kong station produces the auditions, it’s a mainland Chinese station, ZJTV, that produces and airs the series.) Sydney, being oriented to China but not actually in China, is a space where different linguistic norms can apply and so we get a slightly uncomfortable, simultaneous centralization and marginalization of Cantonese.

Translocal and Global

In addition to the associations between language and Chinese identity, tonight’s language practices happen under conditions of globalization. The singers at once use features associated with American English to link to the global scripts of reality TV song contests, and Australian-accented English to localize themselves. Their use of Mandarin can be understood as an additional attempt to localize, to differentiate from the global English language, global pop culture and global TV media.

Some contestants take on American accents in singing English-language songs, including Gaga’s Paparazzi, or employ the style of Anglo Pop music by inserting “yeah yeah yeah” into Mandarin songs. The judges also use features associated with American English – “Dude, your range is incredible,” says one judge – which functions to harmonise the show with the “international” American style of reality TV. However, when the contestants speak English to thank the crowd, they have unabashed Australian accents.

The contestant I’ve come to support, Wei Baocheng, linguistically localises in a different way. He makes his rendition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ more Australian than the American original not through accent but through prosody in his laconic rendition. The judges employ some translanguaging to describe it as “hen[很] laid back” and “hen[很] ’Strayan”. Hen is the Mandarin word for ‘very’, and ’Strayan is a jocular, colloquial term for “Australian”.

Localization is also achieved through song choice, amongst other things. For example, contestant Wang Chen sings the yearning rock ballad “Beijing, Beijing”, popular in China in recent years (and already on Voice of China in 2012). The pathos with which he performs it reinforces that, for him, Sydney Town Hall is oriented to China. Wang is singing about a city at the imagined heart of the community he (and the producers) imagine the audience to be.

Blommaert, J., & Rampton, B. (2011). Language and Superdiversity. Diversities, 13(2), 1-22.

Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. (2006). Conceptualizing Simultaneity: A Transnational Social Field Perspective on Society1 International Migration Review, 38 (3), 1002-1039 DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2004.tb00227.x

Losing your voice or learning academic writing? (Source: business2community.com)

“A latent function of the educational system is to instil linguistic insecurity, to discriminate linguistically, to channel children in ways that have an integral linguistic component, while appearing open and fair to all.” (Hymes, 1996, p. 84)

Academic literacy as a way to demonstrate one’s knowledge and cultivation in tertiary education takes a huge amount of time and effort to develop. For some students, this learning process can be consistent and accumulative all along the way of education; however, for some, the process can be disrupted by a change in the medium of instruction. I’m thinking particularly of overseas students from non-English backgrounds studying in Australian higher education. In this context, it is a common-sense truth that formal academic English has to be embraced as the natural and neutral vehicle to pursue the truth of the universe. In this context, it is also a common-sense truth that English is equally transparent to everyone, regardless of their linguistic or cultural background.

However, these common-sense truths fracture when it comes to the actual experience of overseas students’ academic literacy learning as I am discovering in my ethnographic research of the language learning experiences of Taiwanese students in Australia. Specifically, I have discovered that academic literacy serves just as much to instil linguistic insecurity and deny the voices of overseas students.

Let me illustrate my point with two vignettes. Both vignettes occurred during a five-week academic writing class particularly designed for Ph.D. students. When the class was advertised, it came as a timely rain to Ph.D. students in this cohort irrespective of language background or visa status. They had all been in need of writing assistance because each of them feels daunted by the challenge of having to produce a 70-100,000-word thesis.

In the academic writing class, students were given intensive tasks each week to practice their writing. The idea was to progress from a summary to a critique and then to a paper by the end of the course. The instructor, a native speaker of English and an academic literacy professional, gave them instruction and feedback on the tasks and assisted them to spot problems and overcome them.

 Vignette one: Nonsense language

In week 3, one of the participants, let’s call him Owen, received the following comment on a short summary he had written about an aspect of education policy in Taiwan:

Owen, please watch your “Chinese expression” directly translated into English. They do not read well and either need extra explanation or need to be written in an expression that makes sense in English.

Owen was puzzled. He could not recall where in the text he had used a Chinese expression and the instructor’s line and circle back to the original problem did not identify a Chinese expression. Indeed, the offending expression were not even his original writing but appeared in a quote from a senior researcher in the field. They were “Mandarin-only” and “Mandarin-plus.” It had been the point of the summary to describe changes in Taiwanese education from the use of only one language to a greater variety.

Owen was no longer puzzled but felt angry: the instructor had arbitrarily judged the terms as “Chinese expressions” upon seeing the word “Mandarin.” Apparently, she had not been able to make sense of them in the context of the summary.

Vignette two: Useless language

The event described in the second vignette took place a week after the one described above. Owen shared with me this excerpt from his diary:

Before the course commenced, the instructor wanted to see how we really write and asked us to send her something we were working on. I was excited about this tailored approach, which I desperately need but couldn’t have obtained from any other sources within the university except my academic supervisor. I quickly sent my draft chapter to her and asked for her advice since some contents covered in class did not apply to my case. The instructor replied, saying she would like to discuss my work after next class. I was very much looking forward to the meeting; however, the discussion turned out to be rather disappointing.

To begin with, the instructor told me she was using her own time to do this and it was too costly. So, she had not been able to read my 20+ pages as it would be unfair to other students. Plus, she had to leave in ten minutes for another appointment. She then started to comment on trivial things such as page numbers, table numbers, and how the boxes of interview excerpts would turn off readers. While I was getting the message of how little I could benefit from this conversation, her final comment really offended me. The instructor commented on an interview excerpt. My original interviews were in Mandarin and so the transcripts are in Mandarin and I present excerpts in blocks in Mandarin followed by the English translation.  “Why do you put Mandarin there?” she asked. “Uhm… that is the language the research participants speak and it is what they used in the interviews, so these are the original data and I have to present those.” The instructor ignored my response and went on to ask: “Who is going to read it anyway?” I was really irritated inside by this ignorant question! There are 1.2 billion speakers of Mandarin in the world! But, I couldn’t express my anger. “Uhm… I think there might be an examiner of my thesis who speaks Mandarin.” was the lame excuse I mumbled politely.  Within a few seconds, she rushed out of the door for her next thing and left me behind.  The experience made me feel like I was a beggar, for English and for academic writing.

These two vignettes reflect an English-only ideology that denies students’ voices in at least two ways: they have to use only English and they have to target only English readers. First of all, English is the default. Everything has to be translated into something which makes sense only in an imagined homogeneous English-only world. If no equivalent term exists in the material, scientific, spiritual, cultural, emotional or political world of the writer, they have to provide an extended explanation or risks being “nonsensical” with their own non-English expressions.

Put another way, English-only hegemony is disguised in academic literacy by making other languages invisible, by rejecting the legitimacy of writers from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds and by suppressing the richness of meaning human beings can express in languages other than English.

One may want to argue that since English is extensively used in global academia it is reasonable to require researchers to write proper English which can survive the judgement of English speakers. However, as the second vignette shows, the imagined English-only reader is an imposition, too. English-language readers have never been homogeneous and today’s global academics are more likely to use English as a lingua franca than as a native language (Graddol, 2006). Many if not most academic readers are thus unlikely to be monolinguals.

Unfortunately, academic literacy instruction seems largely unperturbed by these facts. It seems that its purpose is not to help novice researchers find their own academic voice nor to allow them to speak to a global multilingual academic audience but to instil in them linguistic insecurity and delegitimize their voices, as Hymes observed in another educational context all those years ago.

References

Graddol, D. (2006). English Next. British Council.

Hymes, D. (1996). Report from an underdeveloped country: Toward Linguistic Competence in the United States. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an understanding of voice (pp. 63-105). London: Taylor & Francis.

This was a conversation I had in the reception area of a storage company on one of my first days in Australia back in 2008. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary ‘cap’ can refer to (a) ‘a head covering,’ (b) ‘a natural cover or top,’ (c) ‘something that serves as a cover or protection,’ (d) ‘an overlaying or covering structure,’ (e) ‘a paper or metal container holding an explosive charge,’ (f) ‘an upper limit,’ (g) ‘the symbol ∩ indicating the intersection of two sets’ or (h) ‘a cluster of molecules or chemical groups bound to one end or a region of a cell, virus, or molecule.’ While I may not have had all these definitions at the top of my head, as someone who had studied English as a foreign language in Iran for many years, the general thrust of all these meanings of ‘cap’ was clear to me. The problem was that none of these meanings of ‘cap’ seemed to make sense in the context in which I found myself.

While I was frantically trying to figure out in my mind what I was supposed to help myself to, the receptionist noticed my incomprehension and beckoned me to follow him into a corner where there was a coffee machine. He pointed at the coffee machine and slowly started to explain that this was a coffee machine, that coffee was a beverage, that it was nice, and that Australians liked to drink coffee, and that there were different types, and that a cappuccino was particularly nice because it had a frothy top.

As it dawned on me that in the receptionist’s variety of English ‘cap’ had nothing to do with ‘coverings’ of any kind but was short for ‘cappuccino,’ I was mortified. The receptionist had thought my lack of comprehension was a sign not of a linguistic problem but of my ignorance and backwardness. I was so offended that anyone would think a sophisticated Tehrani like myself didn’t know about coffee! How dare he be so ignorant, insular and condescending?! Even so, I could not confront him. Fuming inside, I meekly accepted my bitterest-ever cappuccino. I took all the blame to myself for not having adequate English to have a smooth communication with ‘a native speaker’.

Intercultural communication over coffee (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

 
This humiliating encounter made me question the many years of English language learning I had been engaged in since my early childhood. Despite all my best efforts of many years and the investment of my parents, here I was in Australia incapable of effortlessly and gracefully accepting a cup of coffee without being taken for a barbarian. It all seemed extremely unfair and in the past four years I’ve often experienced a nagging feeling of jealousy that my English was still deficient despite all my striving while ‘native speakers’ could have it all – and without the least bit of effort!

I have also come to realise that ‘English,’ like all languages, is dynamic and subject to change and that even ‘native English speakers’ encounter new words every now and then and miscommunicate in unfamiliar contexts. This realisation has been one step towards healing my tarnished linguistic confidence.

Trying to extend myself and to understand my in-between position better, I undertook a postgraduate course in Cross-Cultural Communication, where most of the teaching and reading I was exposed to stressed cultural differences as the source of miscommunication in intercultural communication. This has been an ongoing source of puzzlement for me: in theory, it made perfect sense that Australian and Persians, for instance, had different cultural values and orientations and so, of course, there would be problems when they meet. In practice, however, none of the miscommunication I have experienced in Australia seems to have anything to do with culture. My humiliation at the hands of the receptionist had nothing to do with the fact that Persians prefer indirectness and elaborate politeness routines where Australians are direct and to the point. On the contrary, as far as culture was concerned, this was a misunderstanding between two coffee lovers, i.e. culturally similar people.

Despite the fact that I now hold an MA in Cross-Cultural Communication, my feelings of English deficiency together with a lack of real cultural differences has remained a brainteaser until a short while ago when I read Ingrid Piller’s new book Intercultural Communication and there the explanation leapt out at me from Chapter 10: when misunderstandings in intercultural communication are derived from linguistic problems, they are often unfairly attributed to cultural issues as soon as it comes to “English-language learners, particularly if their proficiency is more than just basic” (Piller, 2011, p. 147).

So, my English is the proud result of my efforts, and Australians and Persians are pretty similar. It’s just that newcomers and old-timers in this country find themselves in positions of unequal power (or legitimacy) which they like to dress up as cultural differences.

Iranian coffee culture, by the way, dates back to the 9^th century!

Memorial to Yiman leader Bilba at Wallumbilla (Source: Goodbye Bussamarai)

On October 27, 1857, a group of Aboriginal Australians, members of a group known as Yiman carried out a massacre: they attacked Hornet Bank Station, a newly-established large sheep run in Queensland. Three white men, two women and six children were killed in the attack. The women and an 11-year-old girl were raped and one man was castrated before they were clubbed to death. The event is remembered in Australian history as the ‘Hornet Bank Massacre.’

By contrast, there is no name or single term of reference for the events that led up to and that followed the Hornet Bank Massacre. In the lead-up to the event, the Yiman had been dispossessed of their lands on the Dawson Plains by white settlers establishing sheep runs. In the process, they had been subjected to violence and humiliation, including wanton killings and rape. After the event, an irregular paramilitary force, the so-called Native Police, as well as white vigilante groups, engaged in brutal revenge killings. The Yiman decorated themselves with crescent-shaped cicatrices on the chest and people with those characteristic markings were shot on sight. The numbers of those murdered in this revenge killing spree are debated – the most conservative estimate is that 150 Yiman and related people were killed in the 18 months after the Hornet Bank Massacre. Many others were maimed and displaced. Within a decade, the Yiman as a distinct group with their own culture and language became extinct.

No anthropological or linguistic account of the Yiman exists and so we will never know whether they had a word for ‘massacre’ or not. I made the headline up although the idea that they didn’t is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Aboriginal law operated as a redistributive justice system within closely circumscribed limits. Ted Strehlow, the eminent anthropologist of Aboriginal Australia, noted:

[…] in spite of considerable differences in point of language and as regards local customs, no tribe sought to dominate or terrorize its neighbours. […] even if a local totemic group was almost wiped out in a particularly fierce blood-feud, the successful raiders respected the sacred sites and made no attempt to seize the hunting grounds of the vanquished for their own use. No ursurpers would have risked the vengeance of the local earth-born supernatural beings. (Strehlow, T. G.H., The Sustaining Ideals of Australian Aboriginal Societies. Melbourne, 1962, p. 10)

I first became interested in the Hornet Bank Massacre when I read about it in Egon Erwin Kisch’s Australian Landfall (1937). Kisch seems to have been the first to have noticed that by most counts the events following ‘the massacre’ were more of a ‘massacre’ than the event that bears that denomination.

Many people get excited by the fact of linguistic relativity and think it matters hugely in intercultural communication whether a language has a word for something or not. They are wrong. Whether Yiman had a word for ‘massacre’ or not is entirely pointless: what we know is that speakers of that language committed one and suffered a series of massacres that led to their extermination. What is of real interest in intercultural communication is whose point of view gets recorded, whose voice matters. Dell Hymes has called this communicative relativity:

[I]t is essential to notice that Whorf’s sort of linguistic relativity is secondary, and dependent upon a primary sociolinguistic relativity, that of differential engagement of languages in social life. For example, description of a language may show that it expresses a certain cognitive style, perhaps implicit metaphysical assumptions, but what chance the language has to make an impress upon individuals and behaviour will depend upon the degree and pattern of its admission into communicative events. (Hymes, Dell., Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia, 1974, p. 18)

75 years have passed since Kisch first observed that Australian history was only told from the invaders’ point of view and I was curious to see how much that has changed since then. Have aboriginal voices got a better chance now to make an impress? Have they been admitted to Australian history? I’m sure there has been much progress but as far as the colonial war of expansion fought in Queensland in the mid-19^th century is concerned, we don’t even have a term for it yet.

Wikipedia has an entry for ‘Hornet Bank Massacre’ but none for ‘Yiman massacre’ or similar although the latter does appear in a list of massacres of Indigenous Australians. The website Monuments Australia categorises memorials to ‘conflict’ into 14 themes: one of these is ‘indigenous’ and there is a memorial listed commemorating the Hornet Bank Massacre: it is described as a “cairn at Hornet Bank Station in memory of Europeans killed by the aborigines.” No memorial to the Yiman is listed although I’ve discovered one on another website (of an out-of-print book commemorating aboriginal resistance fighters).

Off the internet, there is an excellent book about the events under discussion: Gordon Reid’s A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser Family at Hornet Bank Station, Central Queensland, 1857, and Related Events. The book is out of print. My local public library doesn’t hold a copy but Macquarie University Library does – in the Automated Retrieval Collection (which means it’s not displayed on the shelves but has to be requested). Requesting an item from the Automated Retrieval Collection is easy enough but you have to know what you are looking for. The time stamps in the back of the book indicate that this particular copy is taken out for loan on average every two years. So, there is a detailed fair and balanced account incorporating all available evidence and voices – but its “chance to make an impress” is evidently extremely limited.

One more piece of evidence: according to all records I’ve read, William Fraser, surviving son and brother of those killed, “never lost an opportunity of shooting a wild blackfellow as long as he lived” (contemporary, quoted in Reid, p. 145). Despite the fact that there were witnesses to many of his murders, he killed with impunity. There never was even an inquiry into his murders despite the fact that simply shouting “Watch out, Billy Fraser is about!” was a common tease of aboriginal people at the time and sent them running away in terror. When he died in 1914, the local newspaper described him as “one of the oldest pioneers of this part of Queensland [whose] death will be received with regret by a large number of old residents in Queensland” (quoted in Reid, p. 153). Has that assessment of his character changed? I looked up the man who is reported to have killed more than 100 people in his life in a list of Australian mass murderers: his name is not there.

As we’ve remembered the men and women serving in the armed forces once again this Anzac Day, Aboriginal voices are still left largely outside the communicative event that is Australian history: their stories remain hidden.

Reid, Gordon (1982). A Nest of Hornets: The Massacre of the Fraser Family at Hornet Bank Station, Central Queensland, 1857, and Related Events Melbourne: Oxford University Press

By Addo Tetteh

Racism is an inevitable part of growing up black in Australia. As a mother of two African-Australian boys, one of the hardest things is that I can only do so much to protect my children from being the targets of racism. Many African-Australian youths grow up permanently alienated from the mainstream. Our hope is always for our children to grow stronger and more compassionate. Both my sons have been profoundly influenced by the experience of racism. Very often this has been the cause of great sadness and anguish for me. When I see them triumph over adversity, it has also been a source of strength and courage. I am very proud to be able to share my sons’ creative engagement with racism here on Language-on-the-Move. The lyrics were written by my 16-year-old son Nii as an English assignment and the artwork was produced by my younger son Addo when he was 12 years old.

Elsewhere, accents fractionate people into place of origin but there is no change in inflection among the Australian-born from Perth to Parramatta.

As one of the comments on the Sydney Morning Herald website, where the piece appeared, says: “You should get out more. This is patently wrong.” It is patently wrong on two levels:

1. There is heaps of linguistic variation among the English-speaking Australian-born: in terms of region, class, age, ethnicity and gender, to name the most-researched. A good place to start learning about variation in Australian English is the Australian Voices website at Macquarie University; and there’s of course always Barbara Horvath’s 1985 classic Variation in Australian English: The Sociolects of Sydney.
2. English is not the only language of the Australian-born: according to the 2006 Census, 21% of Australians speak a language other than English at home; in metropolitan Sydney, where Ross Cameron lives, 29% of the population speak a language other than English at home. While many of these will be first-generation migrants – a group the author willy-nilly excludes from the nation – many are also “Australian-born.”

If Ross Cameron had just got the linguistic facts wrong, that would be bad enough but I probably couldn’t be bothered to blog about his piece. What interests me more is the language ideology behind the falsehood: supposed linguistic uniformity appears in a list of the things that are wonderful about Australia. Australia is great because it’s monolingual?! Huh??? I find it hard to follow that reasoning. Sure, there is the Tower of Babel myth but our thinking about unity in diversity has shifted a bit in the past 3,000 years …

Australia is a multicultural and multilingual society. However, while we celebrate the former, we ignore or denigrate the latter. While we are proud of the diversity in cuisines that are available in our cities and the diversity in the dance and music performances we can put on on Harmony Day, the evident linguistic diversity is either willfully ignored as in Ross Cameron’s case, or treated as a cause for public concern. Michael Clyne has coined the terms “monolingual mindset” and “aggressive monolingualism” to describe these Australian linguistic attitudes.

As it is, linguistic uniformity is not a cause for celebration but one for lament! The monolingual mindset is hurting Australia as a recent report by the Australian Academy of the Humanities shows. The Communiqué of the National Languages Summit blames “complacent and aggressive monolingualism” for “our national deficit in language capability, […] Australia’s great unrecognised skills shortage – and the one most directly relevant to our competitiveness, security, prosperity and social harmony in an increasingly global environment.”

When Donald Horne coined “the lucky country” as an epithet for Australia in 1964, he used it ironically to mean that Australia had become prosperous through the good fortune of its natural resources; a fact that had made Australians lazy and complacent in Horne’s view. Almost 50 years on, and we still get a politician opining in the Sydney Morning Herald that to be monolingual and linguistically uniform is the smart way to go about being a nation in the 21^st century … lucky country, indeed!

Reference

Clyne, Michael (2005). Australia’s Language Potential UNSW Press