Endangered by Desire T.G.H. Strehlow and The
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Introduction
Introduction The subjects of ethnographies, it should never be forgotten, are always more interesting than their authors. —R.J. Smith (1990) In the autumn of 2016, I met with two Arrernte men, Shaun and Martin, who had flown from the remote township of Alice Springs, in the center of Australia, to meet with me at my office in the Melbourne Museum. The purpose of their visit was to discuss the potential return of sacred ritual objects to central Australia. I had known both of these men for a number of years, but Shaun and I had a particularly long association. We had worked together at an Aboriginal youth service in Alice Springs over a decade earlier, and as we struck up a friendship he had taken me on a hunting trip for kangaroo on his homelands at Arewengkwerte. Our paths had diverged over the years, but we had once again come together as professionals in the Indigenous museum and heritage sector. Shaun now worked as a researcher at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, and I had returned to my home city of Melbourne where I worked in the museum’s Indigenous Cultures Department. Over a number of days, Shaun and I looked into the history of these sacred objects, with Shaun’s uncle Martin providing prudent counsel, pon- dering how they came to be in the possession of a museum 2,300 kilometers from their place of origin. Our research and discussions meandered along a path that eventually led us back to questions about the degree of agency exhibited by central Australian men in the production of collections such as this. -
Anastasia Bauer the Use of Signing Space in a Shared Signing Language of Australia Sign Language Typology 5
Anastasia Bauer The Use of Signing Space in a Shared Signing Language of Australia Sign Language Typology 5 Editors Marie Coppola Onno Crasborn Ulrike Zeshan Editorial board Sam Lutalo-Kiingi Irit Meir Ronice Müller de Quadros Roland Pfau Adam Schembri Gladys Tang Erin Wilkinson Jun Hui Yang De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press The Use of Signing Space in a Shared Sign Language of Australia by Anastasia Bauer De Gruyter Mouton · Ishara Press ISBN 978-1-61451-733-7 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-547-0 ISSN 2192-5186 e-ISSN 2192-5194 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ” 2014 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin and Ishara Press, Lancaster, United Kingdom Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Țȍ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements This book is the revised and edited version of my doctoral dissertation that I defended at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Cologne, Germany in January 2013. It is the result of many experiences I have encoun- tered from dozens of remarkable individuals who I wish to acknowledge. First of all, this study would have been simply impossible without its partici- pants. The data that form the basis of this book I owe entirely to my Yolngu family who taught me with patience and care about this wonderful Yolngu language. -
Aboriginal and Indigenous Languages; a Language Other Than English for All; and Equitable and Widespread Language Services
DOCUMENT RESUME ED 355 819 FL 021 087 AUTHOR Lo Bianco, Joseph TITLE The National Policy on Languages, December 1987-March 1990. Report to the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. INSTITUTION Australian Advisory Council on Languages and Multicultural Education, Canberra. PUB DATE May 90 NOTE 152p. PUB TYPE Reports Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC07 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Advisory Committees; Agency Role; *Educational Policy; English (Second Language); Foreign Countries; *Indigenous Populations; *Language Role; *National Programs; Program Evaluation; Program Implementation; *Public Policy; *Second Languages IDENTIFIERS *Australia ABSTRACT The report proviCes a detailed overview of implementation of the first stage of Australia's National Policy on Languages (NPL), evaluates the effectiveness of NPL programs, presents a case for NPL extension to a second term, and identifies directions and priorities for NPL program activity until the end of 1994-95. It is argued that the NPL is an essential element in the Australian government's commitment to economic growth, social justice, quality of life, and a constructive international role. Four principles frame the policy: English for all residents; support for Aboriginal and indigenous languages; a language other than English for all; and equitable and widespread language services. The report presents background information on development of the NPL, describes component programs, outlines the role of the Australian Advisory Council on Languages and Multicultural Education (AACLAME) in this and other areas of effort, reviews and evaluates NPL programs, and discusses directions and priorities for the future, including recommendations for development in each of the four principle areas. Additional notes on funding and activities of component programs and AACLAME and responses by state and commonwealth agencies with an interest in language policy issues to the report's recommendations are appended. -
German Lutheran Missionaries and the Linguistic Description of Central Australian Languages 1890-1910
German Lutheran Missionaries and the linguistic description of Central Australian languages 1890-1910 David Campbell Moore B.A. (Hons.), M.A. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences Linguistics 2019 ii Thesis Declaration I, David Campbell Moore, certify that: This thesis has been substantially accomplished during enrolment in this degree. This thesis does not contain material which has been submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name, in any university or other tertiary institution. In the future, no part of this thesis will be used in a submission in my name, for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of The University of Western Australia and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint-award of this degree. This thesis does not contain any material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text and, where relevant, in the Authorship Declaration that follows. This thesis does not violate or infringe any copyright, trademark, patent, or other rights whatsoever of any person. This thesis contains published work and/or work prepared for publication, some of which has been co-authored. Signature: 15th March 2019 iii Abstract This thesis establishes a basis for the scholarly interpretation and evaluation of early missionary descriptions of Aranda language by relating it to the missionaries’ training, to their goals, and to the theoretical and broader intellectual context of contemporary Germany and Australia. -
Than One Way to Catch a Frog: a Study of Children's
More than one way to catch a frog: A study of children’s discourse in an Australian contact language Samantha Disbray Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics University of Melbourne December, 2008 Declaration This is to certify that: a. this thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD b. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all material used c. the text is less than 100,000 words, exclusive of tables, figures, maps, examples, appendices and bibliography ____________________________ Samantha Disbray Abstract Children everywhere learn to tell stories. One important aspect of story telling is the way characters are introduced and then moved through the story. Telling a story to a naïve listener places varied demands on a speaker. As the story plot develops, the speaker must set and re-set these parameters for referring to characters, as well as the temporal and spatial parameters of the story. To these cognitive and linguistic tasks is the added social and pragmatic task of monitoring the knowledge and attention states of their listener. The speaker must ensure that the listener can identify the characters, and so must anticipate their listener’s knowledge and on-going mental image of the story. How speakers do this depends on cultural conventions and on the resources of the language(s) they speak. For the child speaker the development narrative competence involves an integration, on-line, of a number of skills, some of which are not fully established until the later childhood years. -
Comparing Sign Language and Gesture: Insights from Pointing
a journal of Fenlon, Jordan, et al. 2019. Comparing sign language and general linguistics Glossa gesture: Insights from pointing. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 2. 1–26, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.499 RESEARCH Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing Jordan Fenlon,1 Kensy Cooperrider,2 Jon Keane,3 Diane Brentari3 and Susan Goldin-Meadow2 1 Languages and Intercultural Studies, Heriot-Watt University, GB 2 Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, US 3 Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, US Corresponding author: Jordan Fenlon ([email protected]) How do the signs of sign language differ from the gestures that speakers produce when they talk? We address this question by focusing on pointing. Pointing signs play an important role in sign languages, with some types functioning like pronouns in spoken language (e.g., Sandler & Lillo-Martin 2006). Pointing gestures, in contrast, are not usually described in linguistic terms even though they play an important role in everyday communication. Researchers have focused on the similarities between pointing in signers and speakers (e.g., Cormier et al. 2013), but no studies to date have directly compared the two at a fine-grained level. In this paper, we compare the formational features of 574 pointing signs produced by British Sign Language signers (BSL Corpus) and 543 pointing gestures produced by American English speakers (Tavis Smiley Corpus) with respect to three characteristics typically associated with language systems: conventionalization, reduction, and integration. We find that, although pointing signs and point- ing gestures both exhibit regularities of form, pointing signs are more consistent across uses, more reduced, and more integrated into prosodic structure than pointing gestures. -
Australian Studies Journal 31/2017
Regina Ganter Griffith University Too hot to handle A German Missionary’s Struggle with Ethnography in Australia Pastor Georg Reuther (1861–1914) was the Lutheran missionary in charge of Bethes- da mission at Lake Killalpaninna for eighteen years, from 1888 to 1906, precisely during the three decades when Germany joined the ranks of colonial empires with its own external acquisitions (1884–1915).1 Reuther and his junior colleague Pastor Carl Strehlow accomplished the first Bible translation into an Aboriginal language, the Dieri of the Coopers Creek area of South Australia – also known as Diari, or Dyari. Reuther then continued to engage with Dieri language and customs, pro- ducing a massive manuscript that became a translation of Dieri religious texts into German, rather than the other way around. He was quite unaware that this move from missionary translator to ethnographic interpreter represented a paradigm shift: from teacher to learner, from cultural innovator to conserver of tradition. It was the ultimate faux pas of a colonizer, a form of ‘going native’, but of course Pastor Reuther could not conceive of himself as a colonizer – he was a saver of souls, an idealist consumed with the metaphysical, in his own estimation truly the opposite of a self-interested colonial settler. Reuther struggled with ethnography, both in the sense of his engagement with the body of knowledge that he was trying to map, and in the sense of his relation- ships with significant others in his discipline: his employers, colleagues, the academ- ic gatekeepers, and his Indigenous informants. Reuther’s material legacy is so vast and, in fact, so half-finished that it is still largely untapped, except that his register of place-names has been published, and the intrepid linguist Luise Hercus (2015), now in her nineties, has been “looking at the detail” of his language records. -
IV. the Making of a Masterpiece
IV. The Making of a Masterpiece The publication of Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien was the result of the collaboration between Carl Strehlow and his editor and friend, Moritz von Leonhardi.1 Although his editor understated his contribution in the making of this masterpiece, his contemporaries N.W. Thomas (1909), P.W. Schmidt (1908), Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss2 were aware of his involvement. Durkheim remarked that it would be ‘proper to add to Strehlow’s name that of von Leonhardi, who played an important role in the publication. Not only was he responsible for editing Strehlow’s manuscripts, but also, by judicious questions on more than one point, he led Strehlow to specify some of his observations’ (Durkheim 1995: 89, fn. 21 quoted in Kreinath 2012: 408). Von Leonhardi carefully studied Carl Strehlow’s manuscript, compared it with all other literature available on the subject, compiled long lists of questions, added references, had Australian animals, insects and plants classified, inserted their Latin names into the text and, finally, went yet again through the arduous work of reading the proofs. But most importantly he never tired emphasising empiricism and displaying scepticism when Strehlow’s field results seemed inconsistent. The research at Hermannsburg was driven by von Leonhardi’s never-ending desire for empirical data and the precise questioning of what it really was that Strehlow encountered daily at his mission station. Armchair- researching the cultures of central Australian Aboriginal people in Germany, he had noticed gaps, contradictions and broad generalisations in the existing material. He wanted to know what the different researchers had exactly observed in different parts of the continent and why their research yielded different results. -
Reflections on the Preparation and Delivery of Carl Strehlow's Heritage
Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 18 Archival returns: Central Australia and beyond ed. by Linda Barwick, Jennifer Green & Petronella Vaarzon-Morel, pp. 47–63 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp18 3 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24877 Reflections on the preparation and delivery of Carl Strehlow’s heritage dictionary (1909) to the Western Aranda people Anna Kenny Australian National University Abstract This chapter reflects on the predicaments encountered while bringing ethnographic and linguistic archival materials, and in particular an Aranda, German, Loritja [Luritja], and Dieri dictionary manuscript compiled by Carl Strehlow and with more than 7600 entries, into the public domain. This manuscript, as well as other unique documents held at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs and elsewhere in Australia, is surrounded by competing views about ownership and control. In this case study I discuss my research and work with Western Aranda people concerning the transcription and translation into English of the dictionary manuscript. I also discuss the immense difficulties I faced in seeing the dictionary through to final publication. I encountered vested interests in this ethno-linguistic treasure that I had not been aware of and ownership claims that I had not taken into account. They arose from diverse quarters – from academia, from individuals in the Lutheran church, from Indigenous organisations, and from the Northern Territory Government. One such intervention almost derailed the dictionary work by actions that forced the suspension of the project for over 12 months. In this chapter I track the complex history of this manuscript, canvas the views of various stakeholders, and detail interpretations and reactions of Aranda people to the issues involved. -
A Grammar of Jingulu, an Aboriginal Language of the Northern Territory
A grammar of Jingulu, an Aboriginal language of the Northern Territory Pensalfini, R. A grammar of Jingulu, an Aboriginal language of the Northern Territory. PL-536, xix + 262 pages. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 2003. DOI:10.15144/PL-536.cover ©2003 Pacific Linguistics and/or the author(s). Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. Also in Pacific Linguistics John Bowden, 2001, Taba: description of a South Halmahera Austronesian language. Mark Harvey, 2001, A grammar of Limilngan: a language of the Mary River Region, Northern Territory, Allstralia. Margaret Mutu with Ben Telkitutoua, 2002, Ua Pou: aspects of a Marquesan dialect. Elisabeth Patz, 2002, A grammar of the Kukll Yalanji language of north Queensland. Angela Terrill, 2002, Dharumbal: the language of Rockhampton, Australia. Catharina Williams-van Klinken, John Hajek and Rachel Nordlinger, 2002, Tetlin Dili: a grammar of an East Timorese language. Pacific Linguistics is a publisher specialising in grammars and linguistic descriptions, dictionaries and other materials on languages of the Pacific, the Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor, southeast and south Asia, and Australia. Pacific Linguistics, established in 1963 through an initial grant from the Hunter Douglas Fund, is associated with the Research School of Pacific and Asian Shldies at the Australian National University. The Editorial Board of Pacific Linguistics is made up of the academic staff of the school's Department of Linguistics. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world. Publications are refereed by scholars with relevant expertise, who are usually not members of the editorial board. -
Deborah Bird Rose1 Senior Fellow, North Australian Research Unit
Deborah Bird Rose1 Senior Fellow, North Australian Research Unit Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University PO Box 41321 Casuarina, NT 0811 Australia Fax: 618 8922 0055 Email: [email protected] Stream: Aboriginal Totemism, Regions, and Co-management in Aboriginal Australia DRAFT INTRODUCTION I aim to explore possibilities for dialogue that will enable Indigenous people's understandings of ecology to find ground in current world debate around environmental issues and in co- management relationships. Dialogue must take place on ethical ground if it is to produce ethical outcomes. I work with the two main principles articulated by Fackenheim (1994: 129): that dialogue begins where one is, and thus is always situated, and that dialogue is open, and thus that the outcome is not known in advance.2 The effect of openness is reflexivity, so that openness toward outcome destabilises one's own ground. In open dialogue one holds one's self available to be surprised, to be challenged, and to be changed. My broad purpose here is to lay out some of the ground on which ethical dialogue toward co- management may take place. At this time co-management is something to be worked toward rather than something that has been achieved, as Nonie Sharp contends. The ground of 'working toward' must be founded in ethical dialogue if co-management is to be mutual. Such a ground requires reflexivity and critique. Thus, an examination of western preoccupations explores some limits to western thought, limits which only become apparent by moving outside of them. Analysis of management of common property resources in Aboriginal Australia has been hindered by a number of western preoccupations: that hunter-gatherer peoples do not manage resources, but only make use of them; that totems stand for or symbolise something other than themselves; that the boundaries of local land-based groups are congruent with boundaries of responsibility; that a discourse of rights, and particularly of property rights, is capable of encapsulating an indigenous jurisprudence. -
Imagereal Capture
ARTICLES The Hon Justice Michoel Kirby AC CMG* BLACK AND WHITE LESSONS FOR THE AUSTRALIAN JUDICIARY ABSTRACT Using the 'celluloid metaphor' of the new Australian film Black and White, the author describes the features of the case of Rupert Max Stuart that reached the High Court in 1959. He outlines the imperfections of the legal process and acknowledges that the prisoner's life was ultimately saved not by the legal system or the judicial process but by a dedicated group of journalists and other citizens who shared the High Court's expressed 'anxiety' about the case but were more determined to give effect to that 'anxiety'. The author describes improvements in the criminal justice system since 1959. These include legal protections for indigenous people; the requirements of legal representation as expressed in Dietrich; the rigorous rule for confessions to police adopted in McKinnej.; the stricter rules governing criminal appeals: the larger insistence on prosecutorial impartiality; the enforcement of requirements for competence of lawyers; and the advent of DNA and other scientific * Justice of the High Court of Australia. This article is based on a lecture given at the Law School, The University of Adelaide, 12 August 2002. 196 KIRBY - BLACK AND WHITE LESSONS FOR THE JUDICIARY evidence to reduce the risks of miscarriages of justice. The author suggests that the Stuart affair illustrates how cleverness is not enough in the law. There must also be a commitment to justice. t seems that everyone who lived in South Australia in the late 1950s and 1960s was touched by the Stuart affair.' Most have a story to tell.