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.