Thursday 14 November, 2.00-3.30pm
Debate about the nation occurs through language, but the impacts of Australia’s changing demographic profile, multicultural ideology and policy, and the reinvigoration of Indigenous languages, have shifted the meaning of Australia as one of ‘the English-speaking peoples’, a still common formulation when Horne was writing The Lucky Country. This session will explore how these changes provided openings for Indigenous languages and cultural resurgence, enabled multicultural understandings of what it means to speak with an Australian voice, and drew conservative resistance that echoes older assimilationist assumptions about the nation.
Chair: Professor Kate Burridge FAHA
Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University and Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She completed her undergraduate training in Linguistics and German at the University of Western Australia. This was followed by three years postgraduate study at the University of London. Kate completed her PhD in 1983 on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. She also taught at the Polytechnic of Central London before joining the Department of Linguistics at la Trobe University in 1984. In 2003 she took up the Chair of Linguistics in the Linguistics Program in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
Kate’s main areas of research are language change (focus on changing vocabulary and grammar), taboo and euphemism, public opinion about language and value (and its fall-out); change in Germanic languages (current focus on the structure and history of English); health communication (particularly around ageing). She has authored / edited more than 20 books on different aspects of language. Her most recent books are: Forbidden Words: Taboo and the censoring of language (with Keith Allan, 2006); Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English language history (2010); Wrestling with Words and Meanings (with Réka Benczes, 2014); Understanding Language Change (with Alex Bergs 2018); Introducing English Grammar (with Kersti Börjars, 2019); For the Love of Language (with Tonya Stebbins 2019); Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes in the Twenty-First Century: Language, Society and Culture (with Pam Peters, 2021).
Kate is a regular presenter of language segments on ABC radio and 3AW, and has appeared as a weekly panellist on ABC TV’s Can We Help (2007-11). She has given a TEDx Talk on euphemism and taboo.
Speakers
Dr Amanda Laugesen
Paper title: What is Australian English now? Perspectives from the lexicographical trenches
The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins has documented the Australian English lexicon since 1988 when the first edition was published. The aim of the project is to document the unique vocabulary of the Australian variety of English and through this tell a story about Australia. The first edition told a story of a settler colonial nation; the second edition (published in 2016) expanded that story to capture more diverse stories of the country. As chief editor of the project, I continue to grapple with the challenges and opportunities of using a dictionary and a record of the language to tell stories about Australia. In this talk I hope to reflect on what a dictionary such as this can add to our conversations about identity, culture, and society, as well as point to some of the limitations. I will also talk about some of the trends in the Australian English vocabulary that provide insight into the ways in which our words and our changing use of language reflects our current social, cultural, and political preoccupations.
Associate Professor Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer, and is currently director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the ANU. She is Chief Editor of the Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins, and the author of numerous books on Australian and US history. Her most recent book is Australia in 100 Words (2024).
Professor Emeritus Joseph Lo Bianco AM FAHA
Paper title: It’s ‘best made in bed’: Donald Horne’s sense of difference
“Senses of Difference” is the intriguing, multi-directional, confused, and confusing chapter on culture, assimilation, language, ethnicities (and comparisons with the US and other societies) in Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. It is here that he takes on the third of three identity forming concepts propounded by Noel Pearson, Guugu Yimithirr elder from Hope Vale Queensland, and prominent Indigenous land rights activist, although Horne doesn’t ever come to terms with the formative power and effects of Pearson’s formula. These three cultural formations are “our ancient heritage, our British inheritance, and our multicultural triumph” (Pearson, 2014), a triumph Pearson later described as the “Gift of Multicultural Migration“. In The Lucky Country there is no such lofty and eloquent language to capture the culturally constitutive forces of the Australian polity, and none of the now normal celebratory liberal multiculturalism. Instead for Horne the aim is assimilation, and this is “best made in bed”. He states that “Australia has managed to be an immigrant country for most of its history without even thinking about it”. It’s certainly true, or at least it was in 1964, that compared to the USA, Australia had not projected any image of itself as a “haven for the oppressed or as a market for the talents of the world” yet both claims to national chest thumping have become staples of the public boast that Australia is the world’s “most successful multicultural society”. In this presentation I will use language policy, and multilingualism, as lenses through which to view Horne’s claims and assumptions as “talk and taboo” and track what they authorised, what they became, and what imprint they have left.
Pearson, N. (2014), A Rightful Place: Race, Recognition, and a More Complete Commonwealth. Quarterly Essay, September 2014, QE55. https://www.quarterlyessay.com.au/essay/2014/09/a-rightful-place
Joseph Lo Bianco AM FAHA is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne and International Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Prior to this he was Chief Executive of Language Australia Ltd: the National Languages and Literacy Institute, of which he was the founder. He has been commissioned to advise on language policy and literacy planning in South Africa, Hawai’i, Italy, New Zealand, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Western Samoa and other Pacific Island countries, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Scotland and Slovenia. He was a member of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO for 10 years and he previously served as Academy President from 2009–2011. He researches and advises on language and literacy policy, intercultural education and peacebuilding and language rights for minority populations in conflict affected settings in SE Asia.
He has three major publications in press
- Helal and Lo Bianco, Language politics in Tunisia: A study of language ideological debates. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, (currently in press, likely 2024 publication),
- Lo Bianco, Lundberg and Spolsky, (eds), Language Policy and Planning; State of Research and Future Directions, London: Bloomsbury, (likely January 2025 publication)
- Lo Bianco, Loh and Shum, (eds), Supporting Learners of Chinese as a Second Language: Implications for language education policy. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.
Professor James Walker FAHA
Paper title: Who Speaks Australian English? Language(s) in the Lucky Country
Although not always acknowledged, language lies at the heart of questions of belonging that are central to contemporary debates in Australian society. The linguistic landscape of Australia has changed considerably since Horne’s book was written in 1964: European sources of migration have become eclipsed in recent years by migration from Asia and Africa, and an increasingly diverse set of home and community languages co-exists alongside Australia’s Indigenous languages and its majority language, English. This diversity raises issues of social cohesion in which language plays a crucial role, reflected not only in increasing multilingualism but also in ethnically marked ways of speaking English (‘ethnolects’), the subject of overt public commentary. Ethnolects are sometimes viewed as deficiencies, but recent and ongoing research in Australia’s largest cities shows that they form part of linguistic repertoires that reflect the hybridity of social identities in 21st century Australia. Rather than being intrusions into the linguistic landscape, we can see them as new ways of speaking Australian English.
James A. Walker is Professor of Language Diversity and Director of the Centre for Research in Language Diversity at La Trobe University. He is internationally recognised for his research on phonetic and grammatical variation in situations of contact, not only varieties of English (in the Caribbean, the Canadian province of Quebec and the multilingual cities of Toronto and Melbourne) but also Sango (Central African Republic), Swedish, regional Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese. He has received research grants from the US National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
After receiving his BA (Honours) in Linguistics (1989) and MA in Anthropology (1991) at the University of Toronto, he worked at IBM Canada before undertaking an MA (1995) and PhD (2000) in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. He held various positions at York University (Toronto) and was promoted to Professor in 2014. In 2017 he relocated to La Trobe University, where he was Head of the Department of Languages and Linguistics until 2020.
Professor Walker is fluent in French, German, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish and has some command of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Greek and Russian.
Professor Jakelin Troy FASSA MAIATSIS [online]
Paper Title: Australian languages and the fight to have a voice in our own land.
Australian languages have been and continue to be oppressed. Our voices are too strong for most and a source of fear and shame for us as we try to push back against the hegemony of English. We are tabu and our languages are outlawed. But the movement to renew and strengthen our language is strong and sweeps aside negative public forces.
Professor Jakelin Troy leads the Sydney Indigenous Research Hub. She is Director, Indigenous Research within the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) Portfolio and an academic in the Department of Linguistics at Sydney.
Her research interests are currently focussed on documenting, describing and reviving Indigenous languages. She has a new focus on the Indigenous languages of Pakistan, including Saraiki of the Punjab and Torwali of Swat. She has two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects one with Prof John Maynard FAHA on the history of Aboriginal missions and reserves in eastern Australia and the history of Aboriginal people who were not institutionalised. The other DP is about the practise of ‘corroboree’ by Aboriginal people in the ‘assimilation period’ of the mid 20th Century in Australia. She is interested in the use of Indigenous research methodologies and community engaged research practises. Jakelin is an Aboriginal Australian and her community is Ngarigu of the Snowy Mountains in south eastern Australia.
