Review: Stepping Off

 In the latest edition of Limina journal, I reviewed Thomas Wilson's Stepping Off: Rewilding and Belonging in the South-West.

I've always been a South-West girl: growing up in Goomalling; visiting my grandparents in Toodyay, and then Beverley, and then Northam; family holidays each year to Albany or Denmark or Rudyard’s Beach; my other grandparent's holiday home in Myalup, and then their vineyard in Kendenup; road trips with my sister or friends through Walpole, Pemberton, Balingup, Augusta, Busselton, Margaret River; year 12 drama camps to New Norcia; hiking day walks and overnight stretches of the Bibbulmun track.

This is my country.

And then I read Stepping Off while I was traveling for fieldwork (I mentioned it here), and on every page was something new I didn't know about the South-West, and I was like - oh, this is my country.

I highly recommend this book for sandgropers and visitors to the South-West alike, and anyone who has an interest in history, sociology, ecology, geology, botany, agriculture, rewilding, sustainability, and how we live. (So, everyone.)

You can read my review here:

http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-23.1-2017/review-budrikis 

Notes from Geraldton: People are the Best People

I grew up believing that, all things being equal, the difference between getting what you want and not getting what you want was whether or not you asked for it.

This is obviously the worldview of the youngest child.

As I got older I learnt that all things are not equal, and privilege has a lot to do with it, as it always does - either that people are more willing to give young white females what we want (I think, perhaps, under the assumption that we really are a bit helpless and needy?), or that being young, white, and female engenders us with the confidence to ask.

However I still think - at an interpersonal level, if not a societal or political level - that sometimes we underestimate the generosity of people to meet our needs because we don’t show people our needs.

So I know this. I live by this. And yet each and every field trip I am humbled by and in awe of how open-hearted and generous people can be.


This field trip started the night before when I went out for coffee with the friend who was going to look after my cat, for two weeks, for free, even though my cat is Such A Jerk. We came back to my car and discovered someone had broken my driver side mirror. The absolute and  unnecessary inconvenience of the whole thing still annoys me - and yet within half an hour, like platelets rushing to the site of a wound, my mum was offering to pick me up, my best friend was driving around Perth looking for a single roll of duct tape, and my cat-sitting friend was putting a Seinfeldian spin on things until we were both hanging in anticipation of what absurdity would befall me next.

The next day, when I realised how long it would probably take to get a replacement part on a fifteen year old Corolla and how much the delay would mess with the very tight schedule of my fieldtrip, I told my grandmother what had happened and asked to borrow her car - and just like that, my trip was back on.

(The irony of course is that the passenger side mirror on my grandmother’s car is also buggered; but it looks roadworthy, so it'll do.)

I’m staying at an airbnb while I’m here. The other day my host said to me, "I was really worried when I saw that you had booked for two weeks. I thought, what if you turn out to be horrible?" And yet this woman was going to cook a roast for me on my first night (until I convinced her I was vegetarian), stocks the fridge with other good things for me to eat, asks me how my day has been when I get home each evening, offers me advice, and calls me "Missy", "hun", and "chook".


 And then there are my interview participants. I will never get over how generous everyone has been, on every trip, to sit down with me for an hour or so and just teach me; to answer my sometimes badly worded questions and to explain things until I understand and talk with me like it’s not weird at all that I’m recording our conversations as data.

I guess the thing about working with people is that you’re forced to make yourself dependent on them - not necessarily an easy thing for researchers, even those of us in social sciences, because all research is in some way motivated by a desire for certainty and control - the opposite of dependence.  You want to know How Things Are (as if there is a single and knowable way things are), and you'd like to do it at minimum inconvenience to yourself, if possible. (Researchers who work with inanimate entities, please tell me that you at least enjoy the illusion of control?) And sometimes when you make yourself dependent on others, it doesn’t work out. For any number of reasons, it doesn't work out. But when it does - when you show up with your own needs and ask "hey, will you help me with this?" and they say "I'd love to" - it's so worth the risk.

On Writing

I started this blog a year ago and in all that time I haven’t written about writing, which I think shows remarkable restraint. (What utter cheek to call this post On Writing, the same title as Stephen King’s very excellent book. The nerve!)

The trouble with writing about writing of course is that it very quickly becomes a display of self-flagellation (at best), which might be relevant to writers who are generally a self-flagellating lot with weird interests in other people’s suffering, but please God may we have enough awareness to realise this spectacle is not always actually worth reading about.

This is also I think the trouble with being someone who writes - there's a temptation to think that everything you think is worth writing about - that every thought is worth documenting, that every emotion is worth capturing in words, that every thing needs to be commented on all the bloody time.

Things don’t, though. Probably. Probably there are ways of experiencing things without commenting on them, without writing about them, without pinning them down with language; ways of getting to the end of a day and saying 'well that was alright' and then going straight to sleep.

Listen this is my anniversary post so I’m going to write about writing, it’s inevitable, sue me.

The first job I wanted that wasn’t teacher or doctor or banker (that is, the jobs I saw other people having) was 'writer'; whether that meant actually to write, or to live in an apartment in London filled with books and a cat, I wasn’t fussed. But it became a thing I was sometimes good at and, more to the point, enjoyed, so long after I've let go of the idea of being a professional writer (a what now?), I still write everyday.

Occasionally I think I would like to stop writing, to stop turning everything into words in my head, but I’m pretty sure it’s too late. What started as a few lines to take the edge off has become the monkey at my typewriter, and I’ve grown fond of the little fellow.

There’s a rush you get when you nail a sentence, that you can’t get from anything else; a lovely dream you never quite give up on where maybe if you write enough, all your thoughts will join up and everything will be connected to everything else, and you will one day be a complete sort of person, a perfectly organised human being.

Imagine.

There’s also a stubborn shard of hope (all hopes are shards, and stubborn af) that says maybe one day you will write something that causes someone else when they read it to say "Oh!", and they will understand themselves in a new way, a better way, a more dangerous way, and your work on earth will be done - or at least you won't be alone in your understanding of yourself.

Writers are wannabe surgeons - good writing will cut you open where it hurts the most and leave you with just enough words to mop up the mess, and writers don’t even use anaesthetic or take the Hippocratic oath or anything, it should be illegal. I don’t know why we aspire to do this. Maybe because we’ve done it to ourselves so many times, we forget that others Might Not Like It. And all it costs us is obsession.

(This, by the way, applies as equally to academic writing as it does to poetry - truth is truth, and nothing cuts you open like truth.)

The joy of writing this blog - because it is a joy or I wouldn’t do it - is that it has become a space I have created for myself where the condition of entry is not to say something perfectly, but to say it at all. Over the year I’ve sorted through some of my thoughts and sewn them together in not too Frankenstein a fashion, I hope; and behind the scenes I’ve had some really interesting responses which (as my sister pointed out), are more than an academic might ever get from a peer-reviewed journal, so I’m practising gratitude for that: thank you. May you all keep doing whatever it is you do to make sense of who you are and your place in this world, and may you all share as much of that with other people as will make you slightly uncomfortable.

How To Make Your Vote Meaningful In A Meaningless Postal Survey

On the weekend I was honored to witness two dear friends marry each other; to see them turn to each other and say "I do". Of course they’ve been saying "I do" to each other for a long time now, in a myriad ways - but this time they did it in front of friends and family and a marriage celebrant, and they signed a piece of paper, and their "I do"s made something happen. It made them husband and wife.

In speech acts theory, marriage vows are a perfect example of a performative utterance, which is when you say something that doesn’t just describe the world, but changes it as well.

The Australian government is holding a plebiscite postal survey about marriage equality, and it’s dumb and offensive and the result of the plebiscite  postal survey isn’t legally binding. Moreover, the Paradox of Voting means that you are very, very, very unlikely to cast the vote that will change the result from 'no' to 'yes', or 'yes' to 'no' - it essentially makes no mathematical difference if you vote or not. So, in a sense, neither the plebisicite postal survey in general nor your vote in particular are performative utterances. They are not designed to change the world. Should you boycott the plebiscite postal survey?

No.

Also:

No.

[*edit: thank you to a friend who pointed out that it isn't even a plebiscite, it's a postal survey, which makes it even more ridiculous.]

To the people who are disgusted by the idea of voting for marriage equality: I take your point, it is disgusting, but - and I will never stop saying this - if this is the most disgusting, humiliating, or undignified thing that you have faced for LGBTQI rights, then you’re doing okay, honey.

But also consider - performative utterances are performative under a certain set of conditions. They’re not just words - they’re words in context. Marriage vows change the world when they’re uttered in the presence of a celebrant, accompanied by signatures. Likewise, a ‘yes’ vote can be made to be performative by changing the conditions of it.

In fact it’s really, really easy to make your ‘Yes’ vote performative: you tell people that you’re going to vote Yes.

(You don’t even have to actually vote to do this, but after you've told people that you'll vote, you may as well do it - it’ll take all of a cumulative two minutes to make an honest person of yourself.) 

One private vote may be pointless, but one public expression of ‘Yes’ has the power to make something happen.

We haven’t even started voting in this plebiscite postal survey yet and I can’t stop crying over how many groups on my Facebook feed - groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with LGBTQI rights, like the WA Youth Jazz Orchestra and the UWA Postgraduates Student Association - have shared 'how to enrol' information to their followers and said that they will be voting 'Yes' to marriage equality. Acquaintances put banners and frames on their profile pics to say the same. In real life, the City of Vincent recently declared its commitment to marriage equality, and will raise a rainbow flag outside its admin building.

Thing is, it hasn’t always been like this.

In the early 2000s - not even 15 years ago, really - I never heard any of my friends or classmates talking about gay stuff (although looking back, I’m pretty sure some of them were a lot gayer than I gave them credit for). If support for LGBTQI rights had been more obviously visible back then, we would all have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. I also grew up bisexual in a church that I was pretty sure couldn’t accept me.  Now, I’m still bisexual, and I’m still a Christian, and I go to a church with people whose support I don’t even have to ask for because they're just vocal about it.

You guys. This is not a small deal. Christians are supposed to be the ones against marriage equality and yet Australian Christians for Marriage Equality have just declared their campaign for Christians who will be voting Yes. We didn’t have this kind of visibility for queer little church kids fifteen years ago; we didn’t know who to ask if we would still be okay.

When you start the long, sometimes lifelong process of coming out, the first person who accepts you becomes a tiny island of security in an ocean of confusion and aloneness. If you're lucky, you think, you might find one other person who is okay with you, and you can swim between islands. The more people who accept you, the more islands you have, until one day you realise some of your islands have joined up and formed whole peninsulas, countries, continents of solid land and you don't have to swim any more. Declaring that you will be voting Yes makes you another safe place to tread.

There are lots and lots of ways you can support LGBTQI people generally; and lots of ways you can support marriage equality specifically. This isn't the final word on equality, not by a long shot, but this is a moment we're leaning in to, and we promise, if you cast this tiny, meaningless vote, we will hold it to your credit as meaningful. Your private vote is not performative, it’s not pivotal, but when you vote for marriage equality and then declare your intention to vote for marriage equality (how easy is that!), you change the world for someone you know.

Observations About Kayaking That Are Also Metaphors For Life, Like, Just If You Think About It

In an effort to get more exercise, avoid thinking about the inevitable heat death of the universe, and Try Something New, I started kayaking lessons.

Kayaking is dumb. It’s the dumbest thing you can do on the water in an oversized plastic coffin with a plastic stick. I love it. I’m so bad at it, you guys. Here are some observations about kayaking that are also metaphors for life, like, just if you think about it.

To paddle your kayak in a straight line you need to draw your paddle as close to the kayak as possible. This is a lot harder than drawing your paddle away from the kayak, which will send you spinning in a circle, so you need to practice it.

There are lots of reasons why you can’t draw your paddle close to your kayak - the kayak is too wide, the water is too choppy, the drag of everyone else’s kayaks is putting you off. When you can paddle in a straight line, all those things suddenly stop making a difference. Weird.

If you flip your kayak and fall out, you have to leave your kayak upside down, swim with it back to shore, and start again. If you try to flip your kayak back over in the middle of the river, it will inevitably fill up with water and sink to the bottom.

If you’re kayaking on your own, you need to think about the shoreline and how you’re going to get your kayak out of the water if you flip. Make it easier for yourself. Don’t kayak next to a wall.

You cannot get more wet than when you deliberately flip your own kayak, fully clothed; after that, getting rained on is like being towel-dried with tiny drops of water.

It’s harder to flip a kayak if you are physically light.

The best way to get warm at the end of your lesson when it’s ten degrees and raining is to help everyone else drag their kayaks up the beach and load them onto the trailer.

Kayaking is really tiring if you have noodle arms, but then you get to see everything - your university, your city, your life - from awholenother perspective and it’s worth it. (You guys. I got to go inside the blue boat house. Technically the blue boat house is private property and I will deny everything.)

Sucking at kayaking with a bunch of strangers who also suck at kayaking is so much fun.

You cannot think about keeping your kayak in a straight line and the inevitable heat death of the universe at the same time.

Everyday Things

Okay.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to write on this blog, like do I want to write something about Charlottesville, about the threat of nuclear war, about asylum seekers in detention centres, about this plebiscite for marriage equality, do I not want to write about these things, should I even write about these things or should I shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say because others have voices that need to be heard more and because really, we don’t need any more White People Having New Feelings About Things, and ultimately I think yes, I should shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say about these things - except to say two things:

One - and this does need to be said because staying silent and "not taking sides" is taking a side, although I hope you know me well enough to know which side I am on - but I’ll say it again for the record:
I am against white supremacy.
I am against nuclear war.
We need to bring asylum seekers out of offshore detention and into Australia and begin to do the work of admitting our mistakes, asking for forgiveness, and making repairs.
The marriage equality plebiscite is dumb and offensive, but kudos to the government for motivating so many people to update their electoral details, this will come in handy when we vote them out. Democracy!

Two - if you’re a grad student and you’re taking stock of how much work you’ve done in the last few days/weeks/months and you’re feeling kinda shitty about that, remember that trying to understand and respond to the world is also a kind of work, so don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re being an adult with normal emotional responses to awful situations and that takes effort too.

So those are the things I wanted to say, and here are some things I’ve been reading and pondering specifically in relation to white supremacy which may or may not be helpful to you. Ironically and unfortunately they are mostly from white writers, because those are the people I still tend to read the most, but I want to correct this.

What to do about Charlottesville
Here is a list of organisations in Charlottesville that you can donate to if you’ve got a spare couple of bucks. You can’t change people’s actions but sometimes you can meddle with the consequences of their actions, and it’s vaguely comforting to think that one of the consequences of white supremacy is more financial support for organisations that white supremacists hate.

White People: 0-60 for Charlottesville
This is about white people having new feelings about things that POC have been having feelings about for a long time, and what white people can do about those feelings.

Brene Brown did a facebook live video last night about Charlottesville from her perspective as a researcher on shame and fear, and she has a lot of interesting things to say about pain, owning our history, and the difference between shaming people and holding them to accountability. (For example, is it okay to find and publish the names of white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, even if they lose their friends and families and jobs? Yes. That's accountability.)

IndigenousX
We don’t get to shake our heads at the US and say "we're not like that" or "that'll never happen to us". Australia has its own white colonial past and present that we need to reckon with, which includes giving more space to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. IndigenousX is a really cool organisation that amplifies those voices.

Rave Sashayed is one of my favourite writers and she very frequently has something useful to say about Feeling Things, I found this post particularly helpful:

" [...] a really good thing and a thing i highly recommend in times of crisis is to get off the internet for a while. your brain thinks that only YOUR PERSONAL rapt, terrified attention will solve the problems that beset us as a world and a country, but god bless it, it is wrong […] i don’t know what it’s like where you are, but it’s beautiful outside in DC today. go breathe in that good air, if you can. get strength from that good sunlight. think of yourself like a tree. make your roots strong."

***

It’s weird when you drag your personal, rapt, terrified attention away from the news and people are doing other, everyday things - shopping for groceries, tweeting about their research, hanging out with their pets, getting married; so I’m going to try and get back into writing about the regular, everyday things that makes up being a linguistics grad student. This is the stuff of our lives, too, and I guess this is what we’re fighting for, to be able to live them as we see fit.

Motivation Is Overrated, Hack It Anyway

Winter is here, and productivity is low.

I’m not sure whether to cast this as a productivity problem or a motivation problem, actually. The problem with motivation is that, like passion and Pottermore, it’s overrated.

Let me clarify - when we talk about "motivation", we’re usually using the word in one of at least a couple of senses.

The first sense is the reason you want to do something - the reason you want to learn a language, or do a PhD, or run a marathon, or shear a sheep and knit a jumper from its wool in a day. This is a good kind of motivation, I think - it’s good to have a reason for doing something.

The second sense of motivation is the drive that makes you think Doing The Thing will be better than lying on the couch binge-watching Terrace House: Aloha State.

Y’all, this kind of motivation is overrated because your brain isn’t stupid. Your brain knows that nothing is better than lying on the couch watching Terrace House: Aloha State all day ("Torichan! Torichan!") and it will fight you to take this path, the fun path, the path of least resistance. That's its job.

The problem, then, with blaming your low productivity on "lack of motivation" is that this sort of suggests the solution is to get more motivation, and good luck with that.


Before I started this PhD I was working full time, so I approached my project much like I approached any job: show up 9 to 5, keep regular lunch hours, don’t watch youtube when people can see your computer screen. You don’t need drive to work a 9-5 job - you just need the desire to comply with the societal norm that this is how work is done, and the fear that you’ll get in trouble if you don’t.

But PhDs are not like jobs (not least because I don’t think you can legally be paid below minimum wage in Australia? Maybe? Who knows anymore?) When you do a PhD, you don’t get in trouble if you don’t work 9-5 - literally no-one cares - and so the work habits you spent years building up start to slip away.

In the first year of my PhD I thought I had productivity figured out. I went full-Hermione. I read books about it. Books that promised me I could hack productivity if only I knew the right strategies, the right approach.

But productivity - motivation - is tumultuous, frustrating, exciting. The relationship you have with productivity is, after the relationship you have with the person who makes your coffee in the morning, the most intense, rewarding relationship you’ll have during your PhD. (My barista knows my name. She gives me a bit of my soul back every morning. I don’t know her name. It’s not that kind of relationship.)

The one thing I’ve learnt about productivity and/or motivation in the eighteen months I’ve been doing a Phd now is that, for me at least, there is no guaranteed method of being productive. Productivity is trickery, sorcery, voodoo; as much an art as a science. To be productive is to be creative, to generate new ways of working and to alchemise the old. What works one month, one week, one day, doesn’t work the next.  You cannot "just get" more motivation, but you can create cheap knockoff copies of it. So, without further ado, here is a shortlist of my productivity tricks:

• Get to uni early. There’s no way you got out of bed at Stupid O’clock just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Stay at uni late. There’s no way you stayed after everyone else has gone home for the day just to sit in an empty office and shitpost on facebook.
• Study in the same place everyday; the repetitive environment cues your brain to the fact that it’s time to work, and if you’ve had a few successful days in a row, it gives you confidence.
• Study in a different place. You haven’t yet procrastinated in this place, so it doesn’t automatically trigger your procrastination habits.
• Pay for all day parking. If you pay for an all day parking spot, you’re going to stick around to make the most of it. (You guys. I know I’m not the only one who does this - if I spend $2 an hour on parking, you better believe I will use every hour. If only the government knew how little value I place on my own time.)
• Catch the bus to your study place. (Honey I did not fight a seventeen year old sporting a Backstreet Boys haircut for a seat on the bus just to stay in my office for one hour and then leave.)
• Work in short bursts. You can do whatever you should be doing for twenty minutes. I believe in you. The time will pass anyway. And then you might want to do more.
• Study with someone else. It helps to see someone else working. (If they also procrastinate on facebook all day, dump them.)
• Surround yourself with people. Study in the library. Study in the Galleria, it has three hours free wifi. Study in Ikea, it has crappy cheap coffee.
• Reward yourself. Tell yourself you can have chocolate/coffee/the next episode of Terrace House when you have done two hours. (Just joking. This almost never works for me, I take the reward first and then don’t do the work.)
• Find a task that you want to do less than the task you should be doing. Procrastinate on the new task by doing the old task.
• Hang out with friends and family who care - about your PhD, or about you. Sugar, you are a lot to care about. You cannot care about yourself all by yourself.
• And, as always, remember that finished is better than perfect.

Any more tips and tricks? Answers on a postcard, please.

Yassmin Abdel-Magied Is Part Of Everything We Need, More Than We Deserve

I haven’t been following the Yassmin story. Partly because she’s a "TV person" and I don’t own a TV. Partly because white privilege means white girls don’t have to keep close tabs on what happens to brown girls - not because white girls don’t care what happens to brown girls, but because white girls aren’t scared of the same thing happening to them. (First they came…)

I had an idea of course that Yassmin posted something about ANZAC Day on Facebook this year and it made some people angry, because there’s nothing so insulting to the memory of ANZACs dying for our freedom as remembering other people to whom we have not extended the same freedom. So when a friend had a spare ticket to hear Yassmin speak at UWA last night, I was like ‘cool, free tickets’, and I thought Yassmin would probably be interesting in an "outspoken", "controversial" sort of way.

Even if I had been paying attention to the Yassmin story - even if you had told me exactly what to expect - I could still never have been prepared for the sheer brilliance that is Yassmin Abdel-Magied.

Co-founder of Youth Without Borders at 16. 2015 Young Australian of the Year for Queensland. 1.8 million views on her TED talk What does my headscarf mean to you. Guest panellist on Q&A, The Drum, and The Project. Author. Mechanical engineer. Petrolhead.

"Did you know" said my friend, as we settled into our seats, "that she’s only twenty-six?"

What?

Yassmin is bright, intelligent, funny, bold, fearless, cynical, truthful, humble. She also has the best self-deprecating humour, a wicked broad Queenslander accent, and a fierce fashion sense to boot. On top of that, she didn't seem outspoken or controversial at all - just genuine and kind, caring and optimistic. Everything she said was backed by the weight of experience, the wisdom of an examined life, and common sense. I liked her straight away, and I usually don’t like people who are that good at everything.


Yassmin began with a story about how when her family first arrived in Australia as skilled migrants, one of the neighbours invited them to a party and told them to "bring a plate". How poor must these neighbours be? her parents wondered, so they brought plates, knives, forks, and a chair as well - just in case.

It’s unbelievable, shameful that people would send her death threats. How can you meet someone like Yassmin and think "yes, Australia will be better without her in it. I will send her details of what guns I want to kill her with"? (And her own received her not...)

She was asked how she deals with the personal attacks. To paraphrase, she said something like "Some days I remember it’s not personal - once you’re in the media, you’re an idea, not a person, and people are attacking the idea. Other days I don’t want to leave the house. But I know in my faith that I will not be given more than I can bare, so I look for what I can learn from it."

But that’s not what Yassmin came to talk about last night. Mostly she talked about unconscious bias - those unchecked assumptions and mental shortcuts that we use to justify our own limited perspective and that results in a lack of diversity.

We don’t need diversity just because it’s Nice or Fair or The Right Thing To Do. We need diversity because without it we only see things in one way and we make multi-billion dollar mistakes. Diversity - the combination of different perspectives - has economic value.  We need those different perspectives in Australia - which is why, by the way, Yassmin Abdul-Magied is only part of everything we need, because no one person can “be diversity”. That’s not what diversity means.

Similarly it isn’t one single person’s job to dismantle bias and promote diversity - it’s everyone’s job. We can all do it; and we all need to do it. We all need to speak up for each other because once you become an advocate for someone else - as Yassmin can attest from her own lived experience - you also become a lightning rod for vitriol and hate and no one should have to endure that by themselves.

Australia’s diversity is a gift - we should use it for our benefit. Where's the controversy in that?

Yassmin is moving to London, and if she’s doing it to take some time out from the hate and death threats she faces in Australia then who can blame her. But Yassmin also struck me as the kind of person who doesn’t back down; the kind of person who can smile at her enemies and find common ground over a shared love of Ducati motorbikes. She’s vulnerable and tough and warm - ‘indefatigable, blisteringly funny, and outrageously smart’, as Benjamin Law puts it- and she’s more than we deserve right now but Yassmin, I hope you come home soon. We need you.

Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg

Facebook reminded me this week that I went to Welsh Bootcamp three years ago.

Three years.

The last English-language status I wrote before bootcamp was about being nervous. I’d forgotten about that. I mean why wouldn't you just throw yourself into a holiday in the tiny seaside town of Tresaith with a dozen strangers who had all completed Cwrs 1 of the Say Something In Welsh online language lessons and who all had a perverse desire to speak only Welsh and definitely no English for a week and who were therefore, probably, a bit mad.

You guys, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

There is nothing - nothing - like sitting in a tavern on the west coast of Cymru, drinking cwrw and watching the sun set and listening to a bar full of Cymry Cymraeg break into a folk song about, I believe, a small saucepan - because that is a thing Welsh-speaking Welsh-people actually do.

I got free hot chocolate because the bar tender was so impressed I’d come all the way from Australia and I spoke more Welsh than he did. (Showoff.)

We didn’t spend all our time in the tafarn, of course. Just most of it. The rest of the time we went about the Welsh countryside on excursions designed perfectly such that we would only encounter other Welsh-speakers: to the cheese factory and the wool museum; to learn about sailing in a cwrwgl and the history of some castle or other - I don’t remember the name of the castle but I do remember several of us looking at each other at that point and saying “wait, we understand the tour guide”; to eat pizza and listen to a Welsh folk duo from America in a tafarn; to partake in Welsh folk dancing and singing with a côr in, okay, fine, a tafarn.

I also experienced my first Noson Lawen on that trip. I didn’t really know what a Noson Lawen was, but when on Bootcamp, fake it until you make it. I got the gist that we all had to perform something, so I wrote and illustrated (I mean) a picture book called "Ble mae …?" ("Where is …?"), with each page dedicated to one of my fellow bootcampers. It was totally rubbish and a huge success, although I did pick up afterwards that reading a children’s book you’ve written in an afternoon was perhaps an unusual choice for a Noson Lawen - but whatever, I’m Australian, so. I wish I’d kept the book. I also remember the toffiest English bloke (who was actually lovely and drove a red Ferrari and had no clue most of the time and will never read this blog, I hope) got up to sing, and I was like "this guy" - and then he sung and I cried. He had the most beautiful voice.

My friend Elizabeth Corbett visited Wales recently to research her next book (about Owain Glyndwr’s wife - it sounds fascinating); and she was interviewed by the TV show Dal Ati. I watched the clip one day in the language centre in Kununurra and okay, I got teary-eyed (this is a bit of a theme, you guys), because three years after Bootcamp, with opportunities to speak Welsh few and far between, I still understood most of what they were saying.

Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg 

I’m not Welsh. There's no Welsh blood in my family. The redhair gets pretty good mileage in Cymru and I have friends I know mostly yn Gymraeg, but this is not my heritage; and yet nevertheless listening to and speaking a few words in Welsh reminds me of a time in my life and a part of my identity that makes me happy and that sometimes I forget about, and I would love to move to Wales for a few years and just live in a community of Welsh-speakers, who - like stubborn-ass mountain goats clinging to a vertical cliff - hang on.

But as I learnt on Bootcamp, spending even a week speaking only Welsh requires careful orchestration. In the Welshiest parts of Wales, Welsh-speakers still have to use English daily to interact with non-Welsh speakers. You cannot live solely in your Welsh-language identity.

There isn’t a single Indigenous group in Australia that has the numbers Welsh has. In many Aborignal Australian language communities, spending a day in language would be a dream. Most endangered Aboriginal Australian languages also don't have the same money, or political power, or resources, or time, and who knows what 'success' will look like for these communities. Maybe it’ll be a new generation of first language speakers. (I’m an aspirationalist, fight me.) Maybe it’ll be kids learning greetings and songs and animal names in school and knowing that a whole language exists in archives, somewhere, waiting for them when they’re ready to take it on. (In Kununurra, I got to see the language workers travel between daycare centres and schools each day to provide twenty-minute language lessons to kids age 3-7. Some of those kids are now as comfortable playing "Mr Potato Head" in Miriwoong as they are in English. It was really cool.) Maybe it’ll be Welcome to Country openings in language, and some bilingual signs.

Regardless. What I’ve seen in each of the three communities I’ve been to now is the same perverse stubborness of individuals to hang on to those parts of language and culture that allow us to inhabit identities that, despite the crushing press of English, we refuse to forget.

Notes from Kununurra, Week 2: What a Country

Right this second I am sitting in Cornerside Cafe, a properly hipster joint on the Kununurra main strip, complete with exposed lighting, fake plants, and a morning crowd of lycra-clad park runners getting their protein smoothie fix.

(I’m drinking the protein smoothie, actually. It has cherries, beetroot, raspberries, banana, protein powder, ginger, almond milk, and lemon juice in it, and it tastes a bit like dirt - but, like, healthy dirt.)

Cornerside does brunches like this:

I tried to recommend the cafe to a French backpacker. He started learning English eighteen months ago when he first arrived in Australia and so far he’s picked up a great collection of swear words and does a pretty good job of pretending to understand Aussie accents but somehow he’s not yet come across the concept of brunch.

“Brunch?”
“It’s like breakfast and lunch.”
“…”
"Smashed avos and poached eggs."
"..."
“Young people eat it.”
“…”
“You don’t have brunch in France?”
“No.”

A friend of a friend has a car so yesterday we drove out to Wyndham and saw the sights along the way. Given the number of Wyndham license plates in Kununurra I thought Wyndham was a major service town, but obviously that’s the wrong way round; Kununurra is the major service town in this area. Wyndham is the major crocodile town:

All these dogs were eaten by a big crocodile.

"What do you mean 'please do not climb the crocodile'?"

Can’t get over how freaking beautiful the country is out here, nor do I want to get over it. It reminds me of every Namatjira painting.

(I think this is by Oscar Namatjira, not Albert. Can someone help me out?)

Except obviously the Namatjiras were painting the country around central Australia and I'm not sure how different central Australia is to the east Kimberley, ecologically; but a lot of the colours are the same - red and purple hills, yellow spinifex, white trees with bright green leaves, blue sky.

On Friday afternoon after work, one of the language teachers (who, by the way, describes himself as mad), wanted to go on a bush “walk” in Mirima National Park; and by “walk” I mean crossing streams over upended signposts and rockclimbing up the side of a water hole.

“Yes,” I said doubtfully, looking at the rock face. “But how are we going to get down?”
“Nah, don’t worry about.”

Normally when people say “don’t worry about it” I worry about it even more, and I definitely worry when people (Mum stop reading this) carry beer instead of water for hydration, but somehow, even when we had to cross back over the stream after dark, using our mobile phones to light up the cane toads along the way, it really did turn out alright? Trip highlight.

Amongst all this traipsing around the countryside of course I’ve been having really interesting chats with the Aboriginal language workers at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring - you know, project stuff (which I’m not really allowed to write about); and I've been trying to get my head around the Miriwoong verb system, which is legit complex. The fun challenge seems to be how to present two thousand verb forms without freaking people out. I tend to think that all languages are complex in some ways and simple in others, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as complex as this. I’d love to do a little side project about how people teach - and learn - so called “difficult” languages. Post-doc one day, maybe.

The other constant in my life right now is backpackers.

Honesty, I’m warming to them. They’re like small children - small, drunk, stoned children. They’re loud and don’t clean up after themselves and they sleep weird hours and have ambivalent standards of hygiene and some of them don’t wear pants to breakfast and they need constant amusement or they get bored and fight each other.

On the plus side - well, on the plus side, they’re seriously entertaining.

That’s about the only plus side, but it’s kind of worth it.

All the Italian backpackers hang out together, and they drink proper stovetop coffee and bake cakes, because, of course they do. Similarly the Germans hang out with each other, as do the English. The Belgians and the Dutch claim a more general European identity, and hang out anywhere in the Eurozone.

Everyone loves Mumford and Sons, and knows all the words to the ‘Sigh No More’ album. They will bust out tracks from that album any chance they get. They also listen to a lot of Guns and Roses.

You can leave your phone/laptop/kindle/backpack/boots/wallet/passport anywhere and three days later it’ll be exactly where you left it; but leave a packet of cigarettes or cutlery out in the open and it’ll get nicked as soon as you turn your back.

They’re all incredibly tan, and don’t believe I’m Australian.

They read real books, made with real paper. One particularly tan English puppy was carrying five big paperbacks in his luggage, including the Count of Monte Cristo.

They stay up to 3am and drink Emu Bitter and sing 'Little Lion Man' like they mean it, but if you turn the dorm light off, they know that means “no talking”. It’s the one “no talking” sign in this place full of passive-aggressive, completely ineffective signs they actually respect.

So while I’m looking forward to getting back to my own place in Perth, and I won’t miss getting kicked in the face every time the girl in the top bunk gets out of bed, I still can’t believe I get to do this, this phd life.

Notes from Kununurra, Week 1: Are Boab Trees Even Real?

"Flight duration is three hours and ten minutes, and the expected arrival time is 3pm."
The man sitting next to me on the plane turned to me. "Three hours?"
"I know," I said, "I thought it would take longer to fly so far north."
"I thought it would only take an hour," he said.
I had to ask. "Where exactly do you think you’re going?"

Kununurra country in Warnka-nageny (cold season), after a particularly rainy Nyinggiyi-mageny (wet season), is fresh and green and bright and expansive; a cool breeze after a hot day; water after salt; air after smoke. Kununurra country in Warnka-nageny is the unbearable lightness of being.

First day, the dormitory door at the backpackers wouldn’t lock. Next morning, the door wouldn’t close. That night, they fixed the door so it can be both closed and locked. Luxury.

I don't have a car in Kununurra because car hire is expensive; also you don't want to get known as the person who has a car. I walk to the language centre each morning, past the bougainvilleas and the boab trees, wearing my three-dollar thongs, carrying thousands of dollars of computer equipment in my backpack, and holding my hat on top of my head (my head is too big and my hat too small to sit comfortably by itself). So here I am traipsing blithely around the top end, ready to ask a bunch of strangers to sit and talk with me about their languages, and I have to say (not for the first time) that linguists are an odd bunch - and maybe I am one of them.

Apparently in New Zealand, thongs are called 'jandals', and in South Africa they're called 'plakkies', which has to be the most South African thing I've ever heard.

At the backpackers I've had the opportunity to extend my German vocabulary to include such words as Gemütlich. Google Translate suggests gemütlich mean ‘pleasant and cheerful’ but it’s probably best understood as the experience of savouring a beer in good company on a chill night.

I drank my first ever VB (yes), with a "reclaim" Australian and an English veterinarian. That's the genuine Kunners backpacker experience right there. And it turns out I do have something in common with racists - namely, an appreciation of the Harry Potter movies. (I know, I'm confused too.)

This is my favourite vet story (but it's not made up, it's completely 100% true): a rich young couple go to the vet to get their new Rottweiler puppies vaccinated, and they're very excited to have gotten such a good deal on the Rottweilers - only $500 a puppy. So they put the puppies side by side on the vet's table, and the vet looks at the puppies, and looks at the couple, and looks at the puppies, and looks at the couple, and finally he says, "They're effing guinea pigs."

Bathroom trips interrupted by frogs in the toilet bowl: two.
"You just do your business and flush them down," advised the admin assistant at the language centre.
"I am not shitting on a tree frog."

To Sleep, Perchance, To Dream

The first night you don’t sleep is fine. You were out late, you had a few drinks, your liver is grumpy, it makes sense.

The second night you don’t sleep is okay. You might have set up too many expectations by going to bed early to compensate for your lack of sleep the first night, and anyway, you had coffee later than usual that day.

The third night you don’t sleep is when you stare at the ceiling and wonder if this is what your life is going to be now.

Very, very luckily I slept on the fourth night. Thank you to everyone who asked me if I was okay and offered me suggestions re: breathing techniques and other relaxation exercises. I feel a bit silly for making a big deal of it, but I will file your advice away carefully for the future. In this PhD adventure, insomnia seems inevitable.

I also have my own advice to offer for tricking your brain into sleeping.

(This is for the little league insomniacs. If you’ve got big time insomnia then I don’t know what you’re supposed to do and I’m sorry.)

It seems to me that what keeps me awake is thinking in words, whether that’s mentally writing a blog post, re-writing a chapter outline, or re-hashing a conversation. So what I try to do is force myself to think visually instead, and I do this by working on a bunch of ‘locked room’ problems.

In detective fiction, a locked room mystery is a seemingly impossible crime - a murder victim found in the middle of a room with the door locked from the inside and no other points of entry.

Here are my locked room problems. Hillary Clinton once said she could sleep anywhere and she probably thinks about some of these problems too, just saying.

• if you entered your home and found a dead body on the floor and the door locked from the inside, how would it have happened?
• how would you kill someone without a trace? For this to be a perfect crime, it has to be absolutely untraceable to you. This means that if you don’t already have the knowledge, skill set, or equipment to commit a particular kind of murder (for example, if you don’t already own an edible pea shooter or know how to make poison-dart earrings) you need to find a way to acquire these things that can never be linked back to you.
• bonus, how would you kill someone without a trace if they were under constant security monitoring? (For example, a president?)
• how would you give the FBI the slip if you were under constant video surveillance, and every person you met could be a potential agent?
• how would you break into different buildings that you are familiar with, if you locked yourself out?
• how would you escape a zombie-nazi apocalypse? (Clinton almost definitely thinks about this last one.)

I find all these questions incredibly soothing to think about, and I'm glad to share my insomnia-busting tips with you. Got any other suggestions for sleeping, or any creative solutions to these locked-door problems? Answers on a postcard, please.

Don't Follow Your Passion

“You’ve got to find what you love … the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.”

Thus spoke Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, to which Cal Newport replied, bollocks. Actually he replied '"follow your passion" is bad advice' and then wrote a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You about why this is bad advice - not least because Jobs didn’t follow his own advice anyway, when he first got started - he just sort of tripped over his sandals into the computer industry and then got really good at it.

'Follow your passion' is bad advice, Newport argues, not just because the kind of passion that translates into a career is rarer than you might think, but because passion itself is dangerous: if you can’t find that job you were ‘meant to do’ then you set yourself up to be riddled with confusion and angst and never-ending job searches, and listen, do we need any more of these in our lives right now?

Luckily you don’t need to follow your passion to find work that you love; instead you need to leverage for traits like autonomy, control, and a sense of purpose or mission, all of which can be found in most jobs and careers.

(This is good news for those of us whose only original passions in life are eating pasta and yelling at drag queens on Drag Race. Seek is not advertising jobs that require these qualifications, I checked.)

But the traits of autonomy, control, and purpose that contribute to an enjoyable working life don’t come cheap, which is why we don’t all have them. They’re rare and valuable commodities, so you need to offer something rare and valuable in return. Newport calls this ‘career capital’, and says you acquire that by being so good they can’t ignore you (to quote Steve Martin) - and to be so good they can't ignore you, you need to put in deliberate effort and practice.

Which sounds like hard work, but, as Steve Martin points out, is much easier than going to cocktail parties.

I think this dovetails perfectly with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on Flow, by the way, which gives the whole thing a nice ring of construct validity - where Flow is that sense of satisfaction or even, dare we say, happiness you get from an activity, that can be found in any activity so long as it gives you an opportunity to immerse yourself, concentrate, and stretch your skills.

In other words, ‘working right trumps finding the right work’.

I loved and was inspired by Newport’s follow-up book Deep Work, which is a ‘how to’ for developing those rare and valuable skills, and this book is similarly both inspiring and practical  - ‘intensely pragmatic’, as Newport puts it. It’s not that the ideas in this book are new - in fact they’re exactly the sort of stuff your mother probably raised you on, if she grew up before the onset of the passion obsession - it’s that they’re common sense, but in a way that feels almost deliciously counter-cultural and like they just might work.

Obviously this has made me think about my own working life, in which studying a phd in linguistics signifies a return to my first true love - but while I do love linguistics, now, it's also the case that I didn't even know what it was before I started my undergrad. Let's be honest, my 'passion' for linguistics increased the more effort I put in. And while I still really enjoy doing this phd thing, it’s also liberating to think that I might be able to continue to enjoy it even when my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Because inevitably, enthusiasm and passion and all those good feelings come and go - but what you get in postgrad study (whether because you built up enough ‘capital’ to earn it, or because no one’s paying you enough to want to dictate the terms and conditions otherwise), is enough autonomy and control and purpose to annihilate a small village, or to give you the first taste of what you really need to find work that you love.

Kalgoorlie: What else is there to say?

The challenge of blogging about my latest field trip is that all my favourite stories involve people - people who haven’t necessarily given their permission to be blogged about - and of course it's the people who make field trips so good, so what am I going to blog about?

I can’t write about the people who ran the bar in the roughest part of town, who gave us free drinks because we came in with the minister who buried their father, and who then proceeded to tell us the story of their entire life because there’s no such thing as a free drink; I can’t write about the people who got me hooked on pointless game shows, and insisted I learn how to make a proper white sauce, and cooked me kangaroo bolognese, my first meat dish in fifteen years (it turns out that spag roo, cooked on the stove top for two hours with just enough vinegar to keep it interesting, tastes a lot like being taken care of); or the people who showed me how the local Aboriginal people made water trees by jamming a dead log into the young branches of another tree, forcing the new branches to grow around the old log until they formed a natural water bowl that would collect rain water and anticipate the thirst of people passing that way, thirty years later.

And I can't write about the people who with great grace and patience schooled my skinny white ass on the Australian 1967 Referendum and every piece of Aboriginal policy that surrounded it (and how can you force laws on people who you don't even consider to be legal citizens?); people who drove me around town to find my elusive hire car; people who could swap stories about what it’s like to be so shy as an eight year old that when your friend’s mum gives you a lift home after school one day, you can’t even interrupt her to tell her that she’s already passed your house.

And I won't write about little three year old people who thought I was the bees knees for absolutely no reason whatsoever but did just wonder what I meant by sighing all the time like that?; and seven year old people who begrudgingly became my friend when it turned out I was tall enough to open the lock they couldn't reach on their balcony door; people who I went to uni with ten years ago and who married a Welshie and learnt Welsh to pass on to their son (y freuddwyd o ddysgwyr Cymraeg, i fod yn honest) and who I then met within twelve seconds of arriving at a woodlands festival in Norseman, the centre of the known universe; and people who came to Norseman on a whim to manage a hotel because they thought it would only take a couple of hours a day to clean the rooms and book the guests, giving them the rest of the time to work on their PhD (and suddenly I saw my life flash before my eyes).

And how can I mention the people back home who lavished my cat with more love and attention than could possibly be good for him and who talked me through my fieldwork conundrums and who still needed me even though I was uselessly far away; and people who insisted on hugging me when I left Kalgoorlie because they’d met me twice, now, in three weeks, and they’d probably never see me again.

I mean. I can’t write about all those people. So what else is there to say?

It was a good trip; it was fun; I got to talk to lots of people and I fell in love with Karkurla Park and I ate karlkurla, or silky pear - for which Kalgoorlie is named, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise - and I obtusely refused to learn the names of different trees; and one time, I got to hold a snake.



And that was my fieldtrip.

On Prospecting and Place

Last fieldtrip I went bunburying. (I can’t believe I missed the opportunity to use that pun in my previous blog post; remedying that now.) This time, I’m going prospecting.

That’s right, I’m in Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Apparently, like Fremantle and Perth, these are two separate towns. Duly noted, but I'm going to continue to refer to them as one town.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder has a bit of a reputation for being rough, and before my trip I didn’t meet anyone who had anything good to say about the place. And look, I can definitely see why you wouldn’t want to go out by yourself at night or loiter on the wrong side of the tracks.

(As someone who has both high anxiety and a complete disregard for my own personal safety, I feel like a cat falling from a great height with buttered toast strapped to my back, suspended in indecision. (You know. Because cats always land feet first, and toast always lands buttered side down.) Should I avoid hanging my washing out after dark or should I sashay down the main drag in drag, WHO KNOWS.)

But what people don’t tell you is that the Goldfields are stunning.



I’m a sandgroper and I love the south-west coast and I want to always live by water but I love this country too, in a way that makes me glad my grandparents decided to move to Australia.

To be fair, Kalgoorlie-Boulder has had an unseasonably high rainfall this year. But still.

It's not just the natural beauty of the place. Kalgoorlie is home to the super pit, which is its own terrifying kind of beauty.

When I arrived on Saturday the first thing the friend I'm staying with did was give me the grand tour of the town, an orientation to the place, including some of its social and ecological history. You feel differently about a place when you know where you’re situated in it, both in space and time. Coincidentally I’m also reading Thomas Wilson’s new book ‘Stepping Off’, which is all about that intersection of history, culture, biodiversity, and land in South-West Australia; and it’s about how when you lose your land either through dispossession or through a collective urban amnesia, you get vertigo, a feeling of imbalance.

Actually this whole research project is turning into a big land/language exploration ("only whitefellas talk about language like it's not connected to anything else"), in ways that I can’t quite articulate yet; but I’m certain by the end of my PhD I’ll have a different or at least more nuanced awareness of who I am and my place in the world. In the meantime, I'm very much enjoying this small part of it.

Or Not To Be

Someone at some point in history was the first person to say 'if you believe in yourself, anything is possible'.

(Google reckons it was Miley Cyrus. Thanks Google.)

What absolute crap. Obviously. Of all the things you can do in this world, you will probably be mediocre at most of them, belief or no belief, and that’s just fine. You will probably also be limited by time and space and resources and bad instructions and structural oppression and that’s not fine but you can’t just believe that away.

However I suspect the converse is mostly true, or at least useful. If you don’t believe in yourself, everything is impossible.

'It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not'.

This quote we can more confidently attribute to Denis Waitley, a motivational speaker who wrote such books as ‘Quantum Fitness: Breakthrough to Excellence’ and ‘The Psychology of Winning for Women’, but we won’t hold those against him.

Who you think you’re not can be a good heuristic for saving time and effort in unnecessarily pursuing something that you won’t be good at or enjoy anyway. For example, a moment’s reflection would have told me I am not the kind of person who enjoys sailing in Thailand - I’m a landbound vomit grommet - so I shouldn’t have booked that holiday, and that’s okay.

Who you think you’re not can also help you make and stick to good choices. In my undergrad I didn’t want to be one of those students who worked on an assignment all weekend and then had to get up early on Monday morning to hand it in (it wasn't just that I didn't want to get up early on Monday mornings; I really didn't want to be the kind of person who did that) - so I learned how to be disciplined enough to submit assignments on the Friday before they were due.

The problem is when you become too committed to an idea of who you’re not. The Ancient Greeks (all of them, probably) said ‘Know thyself’, but sometimes ‘Know thyself’ feels like ‘Know thy brand’, where a brand is a very definite thing defined by not being other things - and you miss out on opportunities or make excuses for why you’re not doing something because it's 'not you', when you might be totally surprised to discover that something is you and you’re actually quite okay at that thing.

(No? Just me?)

The other problem is when you’re just plain wrong about who and what you’re not.

This video showed up this week, written by Cate Scott Campbell and directed by Carly Usdin, and it is giving me life.

Seriously, watch this video. I’ll wait.

Are you someone who’s just not good at maths? Do you just not have a maths brain? Are you just not that kind of person (i.e. a man)?

Actually what’s really interesting is that, at least according to this study (albeit a bit old now) by Ryckman and Peckham, men and women think about success and failure in maths in different ways. When men fail at a maths problem, they’re more likely to attribute that failure to lack of interest or preparation; when they succeed, they’re more likely to attribute that success to their own ability. Conversely, when women succeed in maths, they attribute that success to luck; but when they fail, they attribute failure to a lack of ability.

I am just not a maths person.

The same is true for languages - people will say 'I’m just not good at learning languages'; 'I don’t have the language gene'; 'I’m not the kind of person who can learn another language'.

Now to be fair, according to Zoltan Dörnyei (a well-respected second language acquisition researcher), the skills and processes involved in learning another language are composite; so it’s possible that you might have a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ working memory than someone else, for example; or you might be more or less tolerant of making mistakes and having a go.

But the idea that you’re just not a language learner? Poppycock.

The point isn’t that by 'believing in yourself', you’re going to become a maths genius or polyglot overnight. The point is that sometimes, the belief that you’re 'just not that kind of person' is wrong, your friends are getting annoyed with you, and it's holding you back.

Know yourself; forget about who you’re not.

(And if you succeed in this, tell me how.)

10 Questions I Found Answers To On My First Field Trip

Q: How annoying is the sound of your own voice when you’re transcribing an interview?
A: So annoying! (Solution: talk less, listen more.)

Q: How frequently does Microsoft Word automatically save your transcription document by default?
A: Every 15 minutes. This is not nearly frequent enough. Change it. Change it now.

Q: Can you get homesick when you’re doing fieldwork just two hours down the highway?
A: Yes! (This was unexpected.) Obviously staying in a hostel in what is basically now south-south Perth is nowhere near as challenging as, say, kayaking in the southern swamps of Venezuela. Doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to message your friends and family daily just because you miss them. That’s okay. That’s good. That’s what they’re there for.

"The northern swamps are pretty swampy." "They're nothing."

Q: Can you eat breakfast cereal with a fork?
A: Yes! For most foods, the difference between eating utensils is customary rather than functional.

Q: What is the minimum number of ingredients needed to make rice and beans?
A: Four: rice, beans, tomatoes, some kind of seasoning. (I recommend cumin or chilli.) Three ingredients would be uncouth. Four is couth.

Q: Do ESFPs really exist?
A: Yes!

It’s no secret that I like using the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory to think about and understand other people’s personality tendencies, but I guess given my own personality tendencies and life choices, most people I know are INF_s, _NFPs, or _NTJs. What would an ESFP even look like, I often wondered, as I tried to imagine someone who actually enjoys the company of crowds, who prefers the physical sensation of what’s happening now to the neurotic analysis of the past/the future, who “goes with the flow” and “leaves their options open”???

Such people do exist, and they are called backpackers. Bright, beautiful, irksome creatures. Stop having your parties outside my window and leave me to watch my murder mysteries in peace.

Q: How unpleasant is it to throw up at a backpackers?
A: The most unpleasant.

Q: Where can you drink alone without drinking alone in a bar?
A: Licensed cafes.

(This question is unrelated to the previous question. I found the answer to the previous question first.)

I often travel alone, which means I often dine alone. I haven’t yet mustered the courage to ask for a ‘table for one’ in a bar or nice restaurant (I wish I could, on principle), but sometimes you just need a drink, and it turns out it’s perfectly socially acceptable to drink by yourself in a cafe. Order a couple of beers and some nachos, bring your Kindle, and you’re good to go. (That or you can make friends with backpackers, I suppose.)

Q: Could the UWA “You” advertising be more annoying?
A: Yes! In the form of a giant ‘you can do the impossible’ billboard on Forrest Highway heading north; like the disapproving eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg; a symbolic reminder that your dreams are an empty lie.

Q: Is ‘hope’ an appropriate substitute for sunscreen? (As in "it’s sunnier than I thought, I hope I don’t get sunburnt?")
A: No. But I never learn.

Field work. It's okay.

This week I’m down at the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre in Bunbury. I’ve just finished my first interview, I’ve got a long list of interesting people to follow-up with, and every afternoon I get to go to the beach and play with my camera filters:

Field work. It’s okay.

As a feeble attempt to reciprocate the help that the Language Centre are giving me - and this barely scratches the surface as a ‘thank you’, holy crap, these women have taken it on themselves to be my PR in Bunbury and I’d be completely lost without them - I’m doing some research on the history of Noongar pronouns.

“So you're saying… you want me to go through this stack of old documents and find all the examples of pronouns and put them in a spreadsheet and look for patterns and create hypotheses and study the sources and do an analysis??”

I may have strayed into socio-linguistic-anthropology of late, but this right here is my original language heaven:

For confidentiality reasons I can’t really write about my project in terms of who I’m talking to and what they’re saying; but the other guests at the hostel, I have no ethical qualms about blogging their language views.

Sociolinguists: hostels are a microcosm of world Englishes. (Choose your own variables.) And the more people you share a dorm with, the more data you get, and the cheaper your research. It’s like the one time where funding correlates negatively with quality. You're welcome.

A case in point about language attitudes: I was chatting with this guy from Indonesia and across the table from us was this Australian bloke. These two guys were probably about the same age, same occupation, same current lifestyle; but the Indonesian guy grew up surrounded by five or six different languages, and could immediately articulate why it’s important to know your language(s) and why it’s entirely possible to learn another language, at least to get by. The Aussie guy, on the other hand - bless his determination to perpetuate all stereotypes  - the best he could manage was “in Australia people need to speak normal hey”. Like, literally that level of awareness, the monolingual mindset personified, the perfect indictment of a backwards political and education system.

Finally - I know what a pair of shoes dangling from a telephone pole means, but this is beyond my ken of semiotics. As I don't fancy waiting around under trees to find out, this will have to remain a mystery.

An (Incomplete) List Of Very or At Least Quite Important Things that Linguists Do

It’s my PhD birthday this week. Can you believe it? My baby PhD is one year old!

I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t start a PhD when I finished uni the first time around; I suspect it probably had something to do with needing to "get a real job". Unfortunately this also implies I had some sense that “doing a PhD” was Indulgent and “being a linguist” was Not Very Important In The Grand Scheme Of Things.

("Oh, do not repeat what I said then!")

As it turns out, studying languages all day is indulgent. But I am also now quite convinced that doing a Phd and becoming a linguist are Very Or At Least Quite Important In The Grand Scheme Of Things things.

Partly I am convinced of this because governments keep cutting funds for universities in general and for supporting Australian Indigenous languages (the focus of my phd) in particular, and if a government is cutting your funding you know you’re doing something worthwhile

But also, for your consideration, and in no particular order:

An (Incomplete) List Of Very or At Least Quite Important Things that Linguists Do

You might know that up to 90% of the 6000 languages spoken worldwide are predicted to become extinct (or dormant, depending on your point of view) by 2100. Linguists document and describe these languages, and work with communities to help maintain and revitalize them. Languages preserve thousands of years of human knowledge and are strongly linked to people's sense of culture and self; as if that wasn't enough, there’s also emerging research to link language revitalization with positive health outcomes in Indigenous communities.

Forensic linguists provide expert analysis of audio recordings used in the legal system. Did you know that it’s really easy to make errors about what someone is saying in a recording, and even be wrong about who is saying it? I’m not even clickbaiting you, GO WATCH THE VIDEO on Dr Helen Fraser's website. (I’ll wait.) Unfortunately, this analysis isn’t usually done by an independent expert but by detectives on the prosecution team. You can imagine how that might cause some difficulties for a fair and just legal system.

Forensic linguists also analyse things like orthography (spelling) and word choice to determine authorship. I don’t know enough about forensic linguistics one way or another to comment on the following example but I think this suggestion that the @RoguePOTUSStaff twitter account is actually a bogus account authored by Russians is an interesting read. The twitter user who came up with this analysis has (quite sensibly) made their account protected, so I hope you can still see their archived link. Part of the analysis asks 'how would a native English speaker abbreviate the word 'vacation' in a tweet?' For those of you who are playing along at home, the answer is vacay, obvs; only a non-native speaker would write 'vakay'.

Linguists promote language learning to decrease xenophobia, by teaching cultural competence and tolerance of ambiguity. (It just makes sense that learning another language makes you a more tolerant person - once you experience trying to learn and communicate in a second language, you suddenly have mad respect for anyone who can throw half a sentence together in your own.)

Remember that time we all got excited and judgey about the way some young women use ‘vocal fry’ when they speak? Yeah, it turns out that men use vocal fry as well and no one cares. Funny that. Linguists say: stop policing young women’s voices and actually listen to what they have to say, omg.

Linguists raise awareness of different communication styles in the legal system, as for example the work Diana Eades did to put Aboriginal English ‘on the map’ in Australia. This includes things like understanding different uses of silence (do you interpret silence as an admission of guilt, or as simply thinking about the question?), and uses of the word ‘yes’ (’yes’ doesn’t always mean agreement; it can also be used to mean that you’ve understood the question).

Sociolinguists study different varieties of English (e.g. African American Vernacular English, Aboriginal English) to show that, much like a ‘Standard English’ variety, these varieties are complex and quite logical. There’s nothing incorrect or wrong with the different ways that people speak English; there is something wrong with a jury discrediting a witness statement because of it

Finally - linguists tell you how to make the best protest signs. And you're gonna need them.

*

As in my PhD, so in the real world - this year is going to be hard, hard work. I don't have any words of wisdom or inspiration; all I want now is the audacity of hope.