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.

I'm a linguist and I say NO to Roe 8

After deliberately ignoring the Roe 8 / Freight Link $1.9 billion dollar shitshow that's been playing south of the river for months (or is it years now?), using the excuse that I have finite energy to care about finite things and I cannot commit to caring about this - I finally went to a Roe 8 protest this morning, and now I want to tell everyone who cares (and anyone who doesn’t): this is a total disaster.

(At this point I’m humbly chastised by Angela People’s comment at the Women’s March last weekend: “If you’re a white woman thinking, “What’s next? Everything seems insurmountable” - welcome to the fucking party." )

If you are the one other person in Perth who hasn’t been following local politics, the Barnett government has decided it wants to extend Roe Highway through to Freo, ostensibly to speed up the route for freight trucks to get to the port. Roe 8 is that part of the extension that goes right through the Beeliar wetlands, an internationally-recognised biodiversity hotspot.

There are lots of reasons this “solution” should piss you off, and these are mine.

(If I’m wrong about any details, please let me know - I’ve been playing catch-up for the last 24 hours and I’m happy to be corrected on facts.)

One. Extending a four-lane highway is not going to speed up freight overall. Trucks are only going to get stuck in the Freo bottleneck - either on the bridges or at the port - so why spend all that money on infrastructure that doesn’t even solve a problem?

Roe 8 is a poorly-conceived, poorly-planned, and poorly-managed infrastructure disaster. I hate poorly-conceived, poorly-planned, poorly-managed infrastructure disasters. I feel personally affronted by them. It’s like, remember when you were a kid and you were taught how to make good decisions that are reasonably sound and educated and financially responsible? And then you grow up and discover the rules don’t apply to adults in government.

(Don’t even get me started on how personally affronted I feel by Donald Trump’s uneducated, irresponsible, incapable imitation of a publicly-elected official.)

And the thing is, I love infrastructure. I love traffic management. I’m a traffic management wonk. One of my secret dream jobs is to be a town planner, working in Main Roads WA, with the authority to make decisions. (I think about this a lot.) I’ve taken the same freeway exit heading south nearly every day for the last five years, and a couple of years ago they made two tiny changes to my route. The first was to make the outer-left lane, as you come off the freeway, a left-turn-only lane. The second was to install traffic lights at the Mounts Bay road roundabout for east-bound traffic. All it took was a bit of paint, a sign, and some lights, and the flow of morning peak hour traffic improved dramatically. It was the right solution for the problem. Paint, a sign, and lights. People expend more energy on New Years’ Eve party decorations for goodness’ sake. Traffic management win!

My point being, there are some really great ideas for alternative infrastructure that will strengthen the freight link. Have a look at www.rethinkthelink.com.au. Roe 8 is bad infrastructure.

The second reason of course is that Roe 8 goes straight through the Beeliar Wetlands - a significant site for the local Indigenous people - but if you’re Indigenous in this country, your voice and wishes aren’t counted and that's not okay.

At the protest this morning we listened to Rev. Sealin Garlett, a Noongar Elder, speak quietly and with great feeling about how this is another example of the government disrespecting and disregarding Aboriginal people - saying, you don’t matter, you’re nobody. This is especially poignant right after Australia Day, the ultimate celebration of a nation that says, some people don’t matter.

Hey, remember when you were a kid and you were taught to be kind and respectful to all people even if they looked different to you, and you learnt that even if you have enough money to buy a bulldozer that doesn't mean you can bulldoze other people's stuff?

Bulldozing and laying bitumen over sacred Aboriginal sites in the name of ‘progress’ is a pretty great metaphor for what’s been happening to Australian Aboriginal languages, by the way. First you bulldoze the language (a stolen generation or two should manage this), then you lay over the waste with English.

So, a question: How many Indigenous voices does it take to equal one white voice?

Actually in this instance, I think it’s okay to specify: one white voice with money.

Part of the issue the protest has had seems to be the way protesters have been portrayed by the media as a bunch of hippies with no jobs - and no one cares about unemployed hippies who want to save the trees. That’s just what hippies do.  So people have been showing up with signs saying “I’m a physiotherapist and I say no to Roe 8”; “I’m a bookkeeper and I say no to Roe 8”; “I’m a primary educator and I say no to Roe 8.” Here’s mine:

(Not that linguists are ever going to be mistaken for people with money, mind.)

Apparently if you are perceived not to have money, your voice doesn’t count either. This should worry you. It worries me.

I'd like to see the Government grow up, take responsibility, and have the courage to admit its mistakes and change its mind.

There’s going to be a silent protest at Forrest Place Mall on Sunday, and we’ve been told: no banners, no slogans, and wear “smart casual” clothes. We need to show that it’s not just Aboriginal people and ‘hippies’ who care about this stuff. So if you’re a Perthie who doesn’t necessarily want to chain themselves to a bulldozer but is disgusted by the poor management of WA’s funds and the shockingly disrespectful treatment of our city's Aboriginal heritage, please come along and show your support.