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.