There’s been a lot of whining in the government over the last week. First we had Downer having a hissy fit because Rudd chose to greet Hu Jintao in his native language, then we had Howard crying because no one likes him anymore, and now we have Brough getting all blurry-eyed and tremor-lipped because the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is ‘unfair’.

“We haven’t wiped our hands of it, but as it currently stands at the moment, it would provide rights to a group of people which would be to the exclusion of others,” he said.

“The best way of putting it is, it’s outside what we as Australians believe to be fair.”

In other words (I love doing this), “Waa, the UN says we have to stop needlessly persecuting the most disadvantaged demographic in the country and make up for over 200 years of appalling treatment by giving them privileges? It’s Just Not Fair!“

Grow up Malcolm.

I’ve just read that the UN has just listed the creole spoken on Norfolk Island as an endangered language.

The language, known locally as ‘talking Norfolk’, is a mixture of Olde English¹ and Tahitian and can be traced back to the Bounty mutineers.

A quick look at Ethnologue leads me to Pitcairn-Norfolk as the language this article refers to, though it probably has a different vernacular name altogether.

Anyway, it leads me to think about what exactly constitutes ‘endangered’ when it comes to languages and the relative population of speech communities. The Ethnologue page says that Pitcairn-Norfolk had 580 speakers (second language only) in 1989 on Norfolk Island alone, and more in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere in the South Pacific. I’m tempted to say this is extraordinarily many, considering the state of many endangered languages in the world (Wagiman has probably 5), but in my opinion it comes down to how many children are learning the language as a proportion of the total speech community. So if a language of 600 speakers has only 20% rate of child acquisition, then I consider it to be more endagered than a language of 50 speakers with 90% of children learning it from birth.

Does the UN consider languages as endangered or not as a function of the raw population of the speech community, or does it look at the rate of uptake as the more important criterion?

Either way, I’d be happy to do a little bit of fieldwork on Norfolk Island in a bid to preserve linguistic diversity.

~

¹Olde English? Really? I’m certain they mean some form of Early Modern English, and most likely a maritime/naval dialect thereof.

During the week, MLA for Daly, Rob Knight, visited the community here to explain the federal government’s initiatives and plans in straightforward terms.

I always try at least to be healthily sceptical whenever listening to a politician. In spite of how much I still favour his party’s policies over the federal government’s, recent resources-related issues have made me bitter towards both Labor and the Coalition.

That aside, one of his main points was to differentiate between those aspects of Howard’s plan that are more or less recommended by the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle “Little Children are Sacred” report, and those that were not at all mentioned in the report. While the former were all pretty much related to health, housing, alcohol and drugs, pornography and so on, most of the latter were related to land or, more specifically, to the federal reclamation of aboriginal land.

It’s not hard to imagine this. They have, after all, been trying to do away with the Land Rights Act for years, but have never had the support to do so. This report gave them the political ammunition to take control.

Of course, there have been other reports in the last 10 or so years, all saying much the same thing: that living conditions in many aboriginal communities in remote Australia were well below the poverty line, that this contributes to alcohol and drug abuse, which in turn contributes to domestic violence and child abuse and neglect. But no other report was ever taken up by the government, let alone has one ever provoked any change.

Why, for instance, didn’t the government latch onto the finding of several months ago that health in aboriginal people in Australia lagged behind the rest of the country, or the entire west even, by a rough estimate of 100 years? Surely that’s a very serious issue and is huge cause for alarm, yet it sparked no emergency response, no taskforce and no military intervention.

As an aside, a letter to yesterday’s Herald made the profound point, keeping in mind that he is soon to celebrate turning 68, that had Howard been an aboriginal man, chances are he’d have been dead before being elected in the first place.

~

As I started saying in this post before getting distracted, it’s all about land. Alan Ramsey’s opinion piece¹ in today’s Herald provides plenty of evidence for this. It goes right back to late-nineties and Howard’s attempt to ‘gut’ the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (ALRA) of 1976, using a report that recommended as much, commissioned by the government back in ’98, compiled by John Reeves QC, a former Labor-right NT mining advocate. Reeves now serves on the PM’s Emergency Response Taskforce.

It emerges that most of the initiative that the government is proposing in repsonse to the apparently above-average levels of child abuse (though not in reality, it seems), that is, the 5-year leases (after which there is no guarantee that the land will revert to the current ownership), the taking over of town-camps, the 99-year leases in the Tiwi Islands and the Kimberly and the scrapping of the permit system, are all basically rehatched versions of the recommendations in Reeves 1999 report.

With some modifications, the current proposals are a revisiting of the 1998 review by John Reeves, QC. Reeves’s central target was the role of traditional owners under the act. He recommended breaking the nexus between traditional owners and decision-making. His recommendations were widely criticised at the time and were rejected by a 10-member parliamentary committee in a unanimous cross-party report in 1999.

Reeve’s recommendations were unanimously rejected. So how is it that 8 years later, the government is able to get away with much the same, with very little meaningful or even vocal opposition (I’m talking to you, Kevin Rudd)?

~

In other news, Northern Territory police support the current permit system.

¹Yes, I know I’ve linked to Ramsey’s column two weeks in a row now, but realistically, he’s just spot on when it comes to the political history of these issues, and of most of Australian local politics over the past 40 years or so. Today’s is a brilliant piece, as usual.

ABC Radio National’s indigenous arts and culture program Awaye is broadcasting over five weeks, beginning last week, a series of lectures by the Canadian Cherokee author, Thomas King, about storytelling.

Last week’s story, “The truth about stories”, was a thoroughly interesting talk in which King tells his version of the Cherokee creation story. He combines autobiography, history, theology, mythology and science to recount a compelling, hour-long tale that ultimately concerns the art of telling stories.

This small excerpt is the science bit. For Background, “she” is Charm, the mother of the Cherokee creation, who fell off another planet and is now heading rapidly for the prehistoric Earth, which is entirely water and inhabited only by the water animals.

And as she came around the moon the water animals were suddenly faced with four variables – mass, velocity, compression and displacement – and with two problems. The ducks who have great eyesight could see that Charm weighed in at about 150 pounds. And the beaver who had a head for physics and math knew that she was coming in fast; accelerating at, oh, 32 feet per second per second to be precise, give or take a little for drag and atmospheric friction. And the whales knew from many years of study that water does not compress while the dolphins would tell anyone who asked, that while it won’t compress, water will displace.

I’m not going to give away any more of that story here, I think it’s worthy of listening to, but unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, it can’t be downloaded as an mp3, it has to be streamed from the Awaye website.

This week’s story, “You’re not the Indian I had in mind”, focuses on the difference between Indians, as they exist in mainstream American cultural ethos, the sort of person who wears a feathered head-dress and a bone breastplate sitting in a tipi smoking a peace-pipe, and an Indian with a name, a personal identity and a background, the one that is often ignored.

King also tells about the period of his life he spent in New Zealand and Australia. Despite working for a little while as a miner in Tennant Creek, he never saw an indigenous Australian, nor had the people he worked with, while they were happy to profess to know that it was their own fault that they were in such debilitating poverty. King characterises the different cultural attitudes to indigenous people in Australia and in New Zealand with an epitaph that’s probably no less applicable today than it was back then.

The two groups [White New Zealanders and Maoris] seem to have organised themselves around an uneasy peace between equals. In Australia there was no such peace. Just a damp, sweltering campaign of discrimination that you could feel on your skin and smell in your hair.

There will be three more of these lectures and since I thoroughly enjoyed these first two, I’ll be waiting patiently for the rest.

This post has been attracting altogether way too much spam of late, so comments are now off. If you wish to leave a comment, email me.

I have to confess, I can’t recall precisely hearing this, but it seems to be so widespread that, well, I must have heard it. Even so, I seriously doubt its veracity. I rushed to my Macquarie Aboriginal Words to find something from a reputable source, but alas, it contained nothing helpful to inject some sense into this garbage.

This is so widespread that it appears in a myriad of languages, including Czech:

Když angličtí objevitelé přijeli do Austrálie, viděli podivná skákající zvířata (klokany). Zavolali domorodce a snažili se ho zeptat, co je to za zvíře. Domorodec řikal “Kan Ghu Ru” … odtud Kangaroo. Bohužel Kan Ghu Ru v jeho řeči znamenalo: “Já vám nerozumím”.

Arabic Farsi/Dari [My bad. Thanks to Bulbul for the correction] (sorry if the unavoidable italics makes the script look odd):

آيا ميدانستيد که: مهاجرين انگليسي در استراليا با حيوان عجيبي روبرو شدند که بسيار بالا و دور

مي پريده. هنگاميکه از بوميان در مورد اين حيوان با حرکات بدن پرسيده اند آنها در جواب گفته اند:
Kan Ghu Ru

که در زبان انگليسي به Kangaroo تبديل شده است.

در حقيقت منظور بوميان اين بوده که “ما منظور شما را نمي فهميم”.

Romanian:

Cand englezii au ajuns in Australia au vazut un animal ciudat care sarea prin paduri. Au chemat un bastinas si l-au intrebat prin semne ce animal era acela. Cum bastinasul repeta “kan ghu ru” ei au adoptat acel nume pentru animal. Dupa mult timp cercetatorii au constatat ca bastinasul de fap spunea “nu inteleg”.

And Italian – although it looks like this particular writer has taken a little creative license, especially when pointing out that the ‘indigeni’ were ‘extremely pacifistic’:

Quando i conquistatori inglesi arrivarono in Australia, si spaventarono nel vedere degli strani animali che facevano salti incredibili. Chiamarono immediatamente uno del luogo (gli indigeni australiani erano estremamente pacifici) e cercarono di fare domande con i gesti. Sentendo che l’indio diceva sempre “Kan Ghu Ru” adottarono il vocabolo inglese “kangaroo” (canguro). I linguisti determinarono dopo ricerche che il significato di quello che gli indigeni volevano dire era “Non vi capisco”.

In case you’re not familiar with any of these languages, here it is in English:

When the English settlers landed in Australia, they noticed a strange animal that jumped extremely high and far. They asked the aboriginal people using body language and signs trying to ask them about this animal. They responded with ’’Kan Ghu Ru’’ the english then adopted the word kangaroo. What the aboriginal people were really trying to say was ‘’we don’t understand you’’, ‘’ Kan Ghu Ru’’.

There are plenty more versions of this myth in many languages. A Google search for the exact phrase “kan ghu ru” returns 11,800 hits, most of which appear to be this story precisely. Just imagine all those variations that didn’t use that precise spelling.

Given its ubiquity then, why should I think it’s utter nonsense have reservations about it?

Well, a number of reasons. First, these different versions are all identical apart from the language they’re in (a superficial difference), which suggests just how recent it is (although this could be an artefact of the five minutes on Google that is my half-arsed attempt at serious research). Obviously the older a story is, the more variable it becomes, as different people tell a slightly different version. Chinese whispers on steroids.

Secondly, this story is heavy on detail, such as the spelling of the supposed actual utterance and its meaning, yet it contains nothing about where this encounter may have taken place. It merely refers to when the English ‘arrived’. I think I recall hearing that ‘kangaroo’ comes from Cook’s first encounter with aboriginal people in Cape York, and possibly from as far back as the first voyage, in the 1770s¹ (other online sources identify ‘kangaroo’ as deriving from Guugu-Yimidhirr, which vindicates my vague memories).

Thirdly, doesn’t it seem way too light in morphemes to say all that? I mean, I don’t know squat about Wik or Kuku languages, and while it’s entirely possible for the four mains bits of meaning, we, you, understand and not, to correspond to the possible four morphemes here, ka-, -n, -ghu and ru, I am still heavily sceptical.

Lastly, Wik-Mungkan, one of the language on the Cape, was the well-documented source of other names for animals, such as the Taipan, Thuuk Thaipan (accounting of course for noun classifiers), so the two parties were clearly able to communicate beyond this fairy-tale, ‘We don’t understand you’ rubbish!

So when you next hear such misinformed folk etymology, tell them where to go.

~

¹Or whenever it was that Cook sailed south to observe the Transit of Venus.

I read in the Herald today that archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered chicken bones in South America, in territory occupied by the Mapuche people, which predate Columbus by at least 70 years. The chicken bones are important historically, because obviously, chickens aren’t native to the Americas. DNA evidence places the ancestry of these chickens in the South-East Pacific and carbon-dating places them between 1304 and 1424. In short, the chickens were imported by the Polynesian seafarers.

How brilliant! For hundreds of years, Italians had as a source of national and ethnic pride that one of their own ‘discovered’ the New World. This shows that some of the world’s indigenous populations were also excellent seafarers and were able to navigate across the treacherous south-Pacific using nothing but traditional technology.

A while back there was a historian, I think, who professed that the Americas were first visited (after being initially colonised, of course, and not including the Vikings who decided that Scotland, Iceland and Scandinavia were much nicer) by the Chinese in traditional junks. It turned out that there was very little good evidence for his theory and, although he steadfastly holds to it, it has since been conclusively debunked.

~

Why do I care about 15th Century Polynesians reaching South America?

Well, about 6 months ago I wrote about Microsoft using the Mapudungun language in their latest Word release without the consent of the Mapuche indigenous people who claim ownership of the language. As a result of that post, I have at least two ‘orphan’ tags, ‘Mapudungun’ and ‘Mapuche’, in my list of ‘categories’. This irks me.

I can now write another post, publish it under ‘Mapuche’ and successfully give an otherwise lone tag another instantiation. Ironically though, in doing so, I have added new tags, such as ‘Archaeology’ and ‘Historical Osteology’ (okay, the last one was made up). I have also set a precedent whereby I must start finding posts to fill other orphan tags.

Anyone know a good story about Highland Scottish Gaelic?