Research Assistant to Prof. Jakelin Troy, University of Sydney

My current sociolinguistic research has been tremendously informed through my experiences working alongside Professor Jakelin Troy, Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at The University of Sydney, where I was a Visiting Scholar for the month of August 2016.

Jaky is a linguist, an educator and an Indigenous Australian of the Ngarigu people, Snowy Mountains, who has been both innovative and entrepreneurial in the development of Indigenous language revival initiatives. I was drawn to her work after she completed the new Framework for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander varieties, a curriculum giving all Australian children access to learning Indigenous Australian varieties.

My interests focusing on how performance can positively influence varieties that have been negatively influenced by colonisation drove me to work with Jaky on the draft report Possibilities through Performance: Putting Performance on the National Language Revival Agenda. The aim of this report was to provide examples of performance of Indigenous Australian varieties as cases for language continuation and reconfiguration. Due to the short period of time together, it was a background paper which hoped to influence research and programme design as part of a new Indigenous language development at the University of Sydney.

My research questions included a) How can practice involving performed indigenous spoken varieties inform initial strategy development within the (confidential development) at the University of Sydney?; b) What are the ways it could be informed? i.e.: educational frameworks, collaborative models, programme design; and finally, c) What current practice offers evidence for this?

Included in this report, I put forward examples of performances in Indigenous varieties in Yirra Yaakin’s Sonnets in Noongar as well as Bangarra Dance Theatre’s production of Patyegarang.

My time spent with Jaky was rewarding not only through the richness of the research but as an outcome of the conversations that were had in the hall, over lunch and the occasional evening drink. Jaky is the type of person who really sees people, and goes out of her way to make sure that all ventures that she undertakes involve reciprocal learning processes, reaching far beyond the expectations of all of her interlocutors.