“If we talk about ‘totemism’ any more, it will be in ignorance of Levi-Strauss or in spite of him.” - Roger Poole, introduction to Penguin edition of Totemism (1962)
The idea that Levi-Strauss somehow discredited or dissolved the concept of totemism is exaggerated.
Levi-Strauss shows that there is no workable formal definition of totemism, since the things […]
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Posted 01 January 2012
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My friend Daniel had been talking for some weeks about going out with me to show me his country, and I had been looking forward to this. So I was happy when I heard the clatter of rocks on my metal roof one afternoon (this is how you announce a visit in Wadeye), and found […]
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Posted 09 November 2011
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Yesterday I was playing football with the lads down at the oval, and damn it was hot. The heat and humidity are creeping up again now, especially in the afternoons.
After a bit some of them went over and casually broke the water mains, so the water started spurting out all over the oval. We all […]
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Posted 29 August 2011
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Lately I’ve been having those waking nights, the jaw-clenching, and that conversational incapacity which means that something is making me anxious. What is it, I ask myself. Something frightening, a risk, a vulnerability? Yes, all of those: I am growing closer to the people who I came here to “study” (or something), and I am […]
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Posted 21 August 2011
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[all names changed but one]
I came back from a visit to Adelaide bearing gifts. David had requested a Carlton football guernsey, to which I said okay. After a pause he asked if I could bring him a coat too, I said maybe; then he asked if I could also get him some football boots, I […]
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Posted 12 June 2011
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My research has mostly ground to a halt over the last week. Problem is: no-one is around. The town is quiet, everyone I know hiding in their houses. They do come out, mostly at night though, and not in the mood for a nice chat about language.
It all started about a week ago, when there […]
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Posted 20 May 2011
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[from my fieldnotes at Wadeye. names are all changed, even mine]
There are hundreds of children everywhere. Naked or semi-naked, excitable, babbling, unconstrained children.
The first phrase I learn of Murrinh Patha is _Tjuku warda!_ Some older children in the main street keep yelling this at me. They say it enough times that I am able […]
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Posted 08 May 2011
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So, I’m here. I’m here. I have arrived.
At 7am, this feels like the first act of a new life. Unlike what came before, this is an act that I have planned, considered, researched. And the planning has brought me here, Wadeye, where sitting alone in a shipping container, my new home, which I am renting […]
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Posted 25 April 2011
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We were driving out of Armidale when I saw him, maybe a hobo, walking up the road with a drag-along shopping cart. I thought he was hauling home his shopping, and having a tough time of it, so I pulled over and offered him a lift.
“Yes please,” he said, “I’m going to Glen Innes.” Which […]
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Posted 19 April 2011
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Our hallway is carpeted in rich and garish patterns - purple, orange and yellow. I guess this design must have looked hideously ugly when it was originally produced some time back in the 1980s, but now it looks so bad that it has started to look good, in a kitschy way. At the time, no […]
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Posted 01 March 2011
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