Yiligawu – ‘I’m alright now, I’m ready’ (but it isn’t exactly true).

I leave for the Northern territory on Monday morning, to start my third fieldtrip, the longest one yet, at a lazy 8 weeks. Unfortunately, work has been considerably busy over the last week, tying up all the loose ends, making sure I’ve finished any jobs I was working on, et cetera. After all that, there hasn’t been too much time left over to actually prepare for my fieldwork.

Plus, the price of gold makes things considerably more difficult. What has it got to do with the price of fish gold, I hear you ask? Accommodation, that’s what. Pine Creek is a gold mining town from way back, 1850 or so. In it’s heyday, the town was bursting at the seams with gold-diggers and the population was in the thousands. Then, the gold ran out, or more accurately, the nuggets ran out; there’s plenty of gold left in the soil, but it’s expensive to process. The town all but collapsed to a small blip on the map, nestled somewhere behind the intersection of the Stuart and Jabiru highways.

Only since the price of gold has shot through the roof in recent years has it actually been worthwhile to process the ‘tailings’ – as the dirt is referred to – to extract whatever minuscule trace elements of gold there are. Plus, the resources boom generally means it’s now worthwhile to go deeper into old mines and extract other minerals, like iron ore and copper.

The result? A small town that can really only cope with 500 people at the most (that is, there are only three pubs), is full of miners employed by any one of three global mining corporations, who, among themselves, own all the mines in the area.

Ergo, I can’t find accommodation. That’s what it’s got to do with the price of gold!

Thankfully there are various people in town who know me quite well now and they’re all nice people, so I’m sure I’ll find somewhere to sleep. It’s just going to have to be a matter of getting into town and seeing what I can muster up.

Besides trying to get my accommodation organised, I have to pack, make sure my computer is all ready to go (truth be known, I’m sick to death of the thing; it’s an oversized, heavy, loud thing, which I’ll probably reformat and convertto a linux machine when this fieldtrip is over) and gather together my recording equipment and essential accessories.

I should also be preparing my actual research, but there’s been precious little time left to do so, and I may have to do it in situ. Plus, there’s another speaker in town whom I haven’t previously met, which will be interesting and exciting.

As for the blog, well, I won’t be posting very regularly as the internet speed out there is remarkably slow. But I can get on broadband from an internet café in Katherine, which I’ll probably do every two weeks or so, every time I go to see the footy. Right Wamut?

I went second-hand book shopping today, at some local Saturday markets. I usually don’t find anything worthwhile – perhaps some Penguin 20th Century Classic going for 8 bucks a pop – but today I found a rare treat.

It looked like an old, 1970s collection of psuedigenous stories, of the sort that claims to be ‘Authentic Aboriginal’, but provides no clue as to where they’re from or which language they would have originally been told in. Being interested nonetheless, I picked it up and had a perusal.

I was rather surprised as it was a collection of transcribed songs and poems each presented in full in both the originating language and English. It was clearly the sort of thing you could spend half your life looking for and never find, so I resolved to pay whatever exorbitant price the seller was asking.

Six bucks – bargain!

I just put it on my LibraryThing collection and found that there’s one other person listed who has it; none other than Claire.

Anyway, the book is called The honey-ant men’s love song and other Aboriginal song poems edited by Bob Dixon (of course) and Martin Duwell. The title of this post is the name of the Anmatjarra song after which the book is named. It is an epic piece of 65 verses, complete with notes. I’ll give you a teaser:

Nyanuwa, januwaji,
Yamurajilina,
Jirdilkirdilkila.

Narrumpa jilina,
Jijilkiwilki,
Waljilajilina.

Lover, lover,
Mother-in-law,
Snared, entrapped.

Close-cousin loved,
Resisted,
Forbidden love.

The underlying meaning of this relies in understanding the kinship system, which is way too complicated to go into now again, but basically ‘mother-in-law’ shouldn’t be taken as the English translation but more like ‘person with whom marriage is forbidden’.  Wild (the researcher)’s note accompanying these two lines reads as follows:

Verses 29 and 30 convey the fact that love ceremonies may result in illicit or immoral unions, either between a man and a woman, who is in the relationship of mother-in-law to him, or between a man and a woman who are genealogically close cross-cousins (father’s sister’s daughter/son or mother’s brother’s daughter/son), In the latter case, genealogically distant cross-cousins, that is those who call each other “cross-cousin” but cannot trace an actual genealogical relationship, may legitimately marry, but sexual relations between close cross-cousins are forbidden.

Affarijiet, a mate of mine from Malta wrote a poem in Maltese called “X’minnek?” Where have you gone? It laments the gradual loss of the Maltese language under the pressure of a dominantly English-speaking community.

If you know nothing about it, Maltese is viewed as a semitic language deriving from Arabic and has, due to its different periods of colonisation in recent times, borrowed heavily from various Italian languages and English.

Affarijiet assures me he’ll post an english translation in the next few days, but I’m sure there’ll be some keen semitophiles who wouldn’t mind seeing it in the original Maltese first.

[Update 7/1/2007] The translation is up. It’s in a comment on Affarijiet’s post.

Ten Canoes completely dominated the AFIs last night in Melbourne by winning six awards out of the seven for which it was nominated, including the big one, Best Picture. The others were Direction, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing and Sound.

I suspect it would have taken out Best Music and Costume too, had there actually been any music or costumes.

Co-Director Peter Djigirr managed to cram a little bit of Yolŋu Matha into the speeches – unlike at the recent IF awards apparently. Djigirr gave his speech in Matha and Rolf de Heer translated (I suspect it was pre-rehearsed, but don’t tell anyone).

In other news, Ten Canoes has just opened in cinemas in Norway and the UK and will open in US cinemas in January 2007 (I heard this on the radio this morning but I can’t substantiate it). The DVD is due out in late January.

I’ve just learned that Ten Canoes, the first (of many, we hope) full-length films made in an Australian language, has taken the “Grand Prize for Best Film” at the Flanders Film festival in Ghent, Belgium. This award includes a cash prize (€20,000) to be used for distribution in Flanders and Brussels.

Ten Canoes also took the ‘Special Jury Prize’ (I suppose that’s a consolation prize) at Cannes earlier in the year. Then, in late August, it won a silver medallion (not that I have any idea what that means) at the Telluride Film Festival in the US.

If you didn’t already know, Ten Canoes is Australia’s official entry for the category of Best Foreign-Language Film at the Academy Awards in 2007. So all these other accolades bode well for its chances in the Oscars.

But, so what? I mean, the Oscars are usually just a bunch of film industry types getting together once a year to massage each other’s bits and to congratulate each other on being great, right? Well maybe. But considering this is the first full-length film to be made in an indigenous Australian language (Ganalbingu, to be specific), getting at least a mention at the Oscars would be a serious boost for the plight of languages in this country. Although I can already sense some glaring errors – one Belgian newspaper who shall remain unnamed included this in their review:

It’s the first film ever to have been completely made in the Aboriginal language. The cast too consists almost entirely of Aborigines.

The Aboriginal language? An almost entirely Aboriginal cast? Oh well. They gave it a good review.

If you haven’t seen it yet, do so!