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.