Saturday, May 25, 2019

free Behrouz from Manus Prison

The MEAA (Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance) is collecting signatures from writers in support of Behrouz Boochani. Details here

See here and here for earlier blogs about his book, No Friend but the Mountains.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

I heard it on the radio ....

... that Bob Hawke died and someone thought he was great

But then I saw it on You Tube, that:
promises can disappear
just like writing in the sand
best to follow the direct link to Yothu Yindi's Treaty

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Knowledge Unlatched

Open research library
The Open Research Library (ORL) will include all Open Access scholarly book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books will be openly accessible for everyone. Libraries investing in the Open Research Library contribute to the development of a vital infrastructure for the global research community, while participating libraries have the opportunity to benefit from a set of exclusive services.
- About Open Research Library

Sunday, May 05, 2019

Writing through Fences

The true knowledge of Australian political realities does not lie within the phoney puppet show of the try hards Morrison and Shorten but is contained in the writings of the oppressed who from other countries attempted the journey to "free" Australia and for their troubles and suffering were then incarcerated by our government.

Behrouz dedicated his amazing book, No Friend but the Mountains to Janet Galbraith, "who is a bird". This is explained on page xvii. Behrouz sometimes uses a pen name and they discussed birds. The Pacific Heron is a bird that flies between Manus Prison and Australia.

Looking further we discover that Janet co-ordinates Writing Through Fences which supports the writing of incarcerated or previously detained refugees:
Writing Through Fences aims to create a safe place in which writers and artists can explore their ideas, creativity, experiences and identities within, before and despite immigration detention. We aim to open a place to re-member, a place to launch our work from, and to push aside walls that would attempt to contain and destroy us and our work. We believe that creation is necessary to ward off the killing effects of destruction.

Arrernte Language app

Update 14/12/2019:
There is now a *long* list of Arrernte words with their pronunciations at Eastern and Central Arrernte Learners’ List
/update

Arrernte is an indigenous language of Central Australia (Alice Springs / Mparntwe). English speakers, such as myself, find the words hard to pronounce. With this app someone learning the language can sit with a fluent speaker and if they mispronounce the words the fluent speaker can record a better version.

It comes with 50 Arrernte words already recorded and stored in the cloud DB.

It wouldn't take very much work to convert this app to any other language where new speakers find the words hard to pronounce.

Here is the direct link to the Arrernte language app. This app was written by myself with the help of my friend Paul using MIT App Inventor.

This version is an *.aia file, which is the editable source code created by App Inventor. You can load it in App Inventor and convert it to an *.apk (the executable version) there for use on your Android phone.

My apps (both *.aia and *.apk versions) are stored on Google Drive, here, if you want to check them out. Probably you will have to send me a request asking for permission to access.

More: write your own apps