Tomorrow is the first of October, which means two things.

Firstly, it means that the little green box with the date next to the title of my posts will be correctly formatted again, as it appears not to enjoy the length of the word ‘September’ (something I plan to fix when I go self-hosted), but secondly, and perhaps less trivially, the Earth will, at some point throughout the day, return to the same position, with respect to the position of the Sun, as it was when I published my first post.

Things didn’t really get underway for a couple of weeks in the beginning, most notably because I still had my honours thesis to write at that point. And even then, it takes a fledgling blog a while to gain any sort of audience. After a year I’m very chuffed with where things are. So a general thanks to you all for insightful comments, discussion and kind words, both off-blog and off-line, you’ve made blogging a very enjoyable experience for me.

I started off with some small-fish idea of writing about linguistic curios and the like, with the occasional perspective from the far-North of the country, originally intended to coincide with my occasional being in the far-North of the country. However, as the year’s events regarding indigenous people in this country (and abroad) have unfolded, I’ve moved further and further into territory that’s a little less benign and has the capacity to generate some heated debate.

Then came one of the most important challenges of social engineering that aboriginal people in this country have ever faced¹ (after English occupation and possibly equal-pay). I’m referring obviously, to the Intervention. It’s been such a huge part of this blog since mid-June that I’ve given it its own category. I was even lucky enough – though it’s hard to think in terms of ‘luck’ – to have been in the field for two very crucial months while the Intervention was going gangbusters.

So given all that has happened in this pivotal year, it’s hardly surprising that the focus of this blog shifted away from being primarily about linguistics to being about something immensely more important: indigenous issues. But I still like to dabble in the wonders of natural language every now and then.

Anyway, here are some stats:

After a year of activity, I’ve had a little less than 10,000 visitors (as counted by WordPress, which I understand counts hits different from other sites) and around about 500 comments, which, given some 100 posts, is an encouraging 5 (well, 4.95) comments per post². As an aside, I also had two changes of name, in quick succession.

Askimet has kindly prevented a modest 1,710 spam comments from appearing, though that unfortunately includes a few legitimate ones captured and summarily deleted erroneously. I think the number of spam is way below what other bloggers experience, which is apparently due to the fact that my tags include such erudite subjects as syntax, ethnotoponymy and language revitalisation rather than more popular ones like sport(s), cars or film. At least that’s how it was explained to me.

Anyway, thanks again for reading, and stick around for another year at least!

~

¹This is a paraphrase of something that Jane Simpson said during her excellent plenary talk on Thursday morning at the Indigenous Languages Conference in Tandanya (Adelaide).

²I’m relying on this post to push me over the 500 comment mark before tomorrow!