[Intro music]
Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello, and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Myfany Turpin. Myfany Turpin is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. She has been working on Australian Aboriginal songs and languages since 1996. Her research interests include the relationship between language and music, especially of lesser-known cultures; and identifying ways to support the continuation of endangered languages and performance arts. Her work examines Aboriginal song-poetry and its relationship to spoken languages and the documentation of Kaytetye language and encyclopaedic knowledge, an Arandic language of Central Australia.
I was so excited to do this interview with Myfany Turpin. She is the first musicologist we’ve ever had on Field Notes, so that in of itself was a bit of a thrill, and I learned so much hearing her talk about her research and how song is universal across cultures and her work on how rhythm encodes meaning. She also talked a bit about her work in revitalization efforts, particularly a project that created Aboriginal emojis for the Kaytetye community, and also hearing her talk about how in terms of repatriation of archive material and language document material, how, as linguists, we’re really working with something that is private property. So, language is private property; the speakers own the language. And I’d never heard this phrasing of a language being private property, so I thought that that was just a very apt way to describe it. And yeah, I’m so excited to share this interview.
MTB: Okay. Hi, Myfany. How are you?
Myfany Turpin: I’m very well. Thanks, Marti.
MTB: Great. I’m so glad to have you here. The first thing I’d like to ask you is, how did you first become a linguist?
Myfany Turpin: Well, it was when I was doing my undergraduate degree. I was actually doing a music degree, and I was very interested in Indigenous Australia, and there was a unit called Introduction to Australian Languages, which I took. I’d never done linguistics, didn’t really know much about it, and it was very interesting and immediately made me want to learn more about this discipline, linguistics. And then I completed a linguistics undergraduate honors degree and went into the field as soon as I could. I was actually doing a music performance degree, and so I could never be far away from the instruments. After my last day of public recital, I just went straight to Central Australia.
MTB: Oh, wow. So that’s how you got into musicology then, because you started by studying music.
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, I’d been studying music as a child, and that was sort of just the trajectory that I was on, really. As soon as I discovered Australian languages, I thought this was a pretty interesting thing to do.
MTB: Yeah, that’s so interesting. I’m so excited because we haven’t had any musicologists on the podcast yet, so can you explain a bit about how musicology and linguistics interacts in your work, and maybe explain with our listeners why musicology is so important in language documentation?
Myfany Turpin: Well, I think people mightn’t easily think, “Oh, language, song.” But song is actually universal. Instrumental music is not completely universal. It’s very widespread. So singing, like speaking, is something that all cultures do, and singing is a mix of language and music. So if one’s interested in how people use the voice and how people use language, then learning about song and singing is a really important part of that. And although those two interests didn’t necessarily come together in my mind from the beginning, over the following years of documenting spoken languages, I then commenced a PhD on traditional songs. And from then on, I’ve been really interested in this issue of singing and the relationship between language and music.
MTB: That’s really interesting. So was it something that you kind of discovered? Was there a point in time where you were like, “Oh, this is what I want to do. I’m interested in Aboriginal song-poetry,” or was it more of a slow burn?
Myfany Turpin: I’d certainly been doing a lot of linguistic documentation on Australian languages before I really got into traditional singing, which I might talk more about later. But when I was doing my PhD, looking at the song series of the people that I’d been working with for some years, and I realised that there was some aspects of the phonology, a particularly unusual sound, a uvular approximant, not that common in speech, but I realised it was treated very differently in the rhythm. And there’d been a musicologist before me, Professor Cath Ellis, who’d written a lot about how music encodes meaning. And it was sort of, yeah, it was, you know, there’s sort of something not quite right about that claim. There were some steps missing. So I felt very excited when I, she’d been working on Arandic languages, the same sort of region that I had to, when I realised that it’s because of this particular phoneme, which was unusual, and it’s, you know, it’s a semivowel, essentially, and how it was treated in a special way in song. And unpacking that, I could see that the vocabulary that contained this phoneme is quite restricted to initial position, and certain words use this phoneme in particular. It was like, I realised that these singing traditions actually encoded this sound into the way the rhythm was set. So talking about the difference between long notes in musical settings, so I guess if you think back to different types of poetry where you might have a language that contrasts short and long vowels in speech, well, the Arandic languages aren’t really like that, but there’s something similar going on with this semivowel, which always had to be set to a syllable twice the value of any other syllable. Then we could see the sorts of words, there’s very few that have that sound, and how one could then see that a lot of meanings can come through this particular rhythmic motif, rhythmic pattern, purely because there’s not many words that have that sound. So words to do with “sun” and “heat,” and yes, and things like that would feature in the songs. So then I sort of think, well, you know, it’s not just that we all, you know, sing and we all speak, but there’s actually elements in the sound system that are taken on board when we sing, and what sounds right and what sounds wrong.
MTB: Yeah.
Myfany Turpin: You know, you think about how, if you sing Happy Birthday, how a particular person’s name that you put into it will sound better some ways than others. And of course, we know all about this with English, which is a stress language, and we like to match stress. But, you know, these languages are doing very different things. But we’re all doing it. You know, we’re all conscious at some level about how our sound systems affect the perception of what sounds good when it’s sung. Well, I suppose that was one of the main findings of my thesis.
MTB: That’s really interesting. So this semi-vowel, you said it’s only found in songs, is that right? Or it’s used in speech as well?
Myfany Turpin: No, it’s in the spoken language. It’s just a very uncommon phoneme, and it only occurs in, can only be the first consonant of a word. It’s never the second or third or fourth. So, you know, there’s only a few… You know, this sound’s not in very many lexemes. But they’re quite important lexemes, you know, words for sun, words for anger, words for heat.
MTB: That’s so interesting. That’s really cool. So can we go back to your fieldwork biography a bit, so like where you’ve worked and with whom?
Myfany Turpin: So primarily, my linguistic research has been with Kaytetye-speaking people in Central Australia. So Kaytetye is an Arandic language of the broader Pama-Nyungan language family, and Pama-Nyungan languages occupy most of the continent. So the Arandic subgroup where Kaytetye is, it’s really sort of a dialect chain, so there are a lot of similarities between adjacent languages, but from one end to the other, it can be quite hard to see the similarities in the languages, and sometimes it’s not really clear cut where, language names, what they apply to, you know, there’s different varieties of these languages like Eastern Arrernte, Central Arrernte, Western Arrernte. So for the Arandic group as a whole, it’s probably about 4,000 or 5,000 speakers, and the strongest one of the identified language groups, I suppose, when we look at the census and the sorts of numbers of speakers that come up is the Arandic language Alyawarre, which has got about 2,000 speakers, according to our 2021 census. But Kaytetye in the last census has 109 speakers, which is decreasing from the last time, so it’s a very small and highly endangered language group. Probably Kaytetye and one or two other varieties are really struggling to keep their speaker base going, so it’s certainly not one of the strongest ones in that region. And I’ve… I suppose I’ve been working with Kaytetye people now for 26 years.
MTB: Oh, wow.
Myfany Turpin: Of course, I’ve done many other things as well, but that relationship started as soon as I went up to Central Australia, and… Yeah.
MTB: Yeah. That’s really nice. So are there any revitalization efforts happening at the moment?
Myfany Turpin: A lot. And really, that’s why I began working with the Kaytetye people to compile a dictionary of their language, which was really the start of the revitalization efforts on that language. Throughout the many years that I worked for an Indigenous organization in that role, working with Kaytetye people to compile a dictionary, we did a lot of other activities that fed into the dictionary, but were aimed quite specifically. We did like a Sesame Street video series to teach people literacy and words and all sorts of cultural practices as well. And that was a lot of fun working with the local media, Aboriginal media organization. I’ve done a learner’s guide to the language. There are many people who identify as Kaytetye but haven’t grown up speaking it, so the aim is that people will be able to learn through that. And it’s very different to a grammar. We had lessons and cartoons through it, so it’s quite a different sort of publication to a straight sort of grammar or a sketch grammar, and there’s audio through that. There’s also local schools that have had the opportunity to do language programs. And I’ve worked with Kaytetye community people and teachers to help create and work through how to use resources. We’ve done a picture dictionary as well, and many song books. So I work with an organization called Music Outback Foundation, and we might spend a week at the school once a year where we create songs in language as well as English and teach literacy and go on field trips. That collaboration has been going about 20 years,, and it’s really lovely as well.
MTB: Wow, that’s cool.
Myfany Turpin: So yeah, plenty of work in the language revitalization space. We’ve just done a Kaytetye emoji project. You may have heard of an app called Indigemoji, which is a series of Indigenous images, spoken text and written text. It’s based on Arrernte, and with our good relationships and sharing of resources last year with a small Kaytetye family group, we created a Kaytetye set, and we’ve got example phrases of these words and images. So that’s also been a fun project. Yeah, there’s lots of really interesting things that go on, and there’s always something of great linguistic interest that come out of these projects as well, so it’s a real joy to be involved in those.
MTB: That’s so amazing. I want to hear more about the emoji project. Did people submit ideas for like, “Oh, we should have this emoji or that emoji?” Like, how did you decide like what emojis you should have?
Myfany Turpin: Well, the Arrernte team had sort of pioneered this and we springboarded, you know, sort of the sharing of resources idea. And we went through and looked at their emojis, all the Kaytetye people did that were there in this project. And some of them, they used those emojis, but actually selected a very different word, right, to what it meant. But some of them, it wasn’t clear to them what the picture was symbolizing, so they chose not to use it. But, you know, most of them were used and then a further 30 were developed by Kaytetye people, and the sorts of ones that they really wanted to use were kinship terms because they have a highly developed… in fact, all Central Australian languages pretty much have a sign language, auxiliary sign language. So they chose a lot of signs from their sign language to exemplify kin terms.
MTB: Oh, cool.
Myfany Turpin: So it’s quite a lot of those, as well as a few other key sort of plants and animals or topographic features that they thought were really crucial to part of their identity and the place that they’re from.
MTB: That’s really cool. So for the auxiliary sign language, would the emoji look like then like a little person making the sign or like just the hand doing the sign, or would it depend on what the sign was?
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, it’s just the hand. It does depend a bit. I’m not saying it’s just the hand, the way that the fingers work, but then I thought of the hand sign for “food,” which also means “hungry,” which is the hand on the stomach, so for that one, we’ve got a bit of the belly in the emoji as well.
MTB: I love that. Can you explain a bit about your work with ceremonial songs?
Myfany Turpin: Yeah. So when I did my PhD, which I finished in 2005, that was on a particular song series of Kaytetye people. And really it’s straddled both disciplines, linguistics and what I call musicology, but many people know as ethnomusicology, which is a term that really just refers to non-Western music and looking at music structure and its role in society. So some people like to use the term “ethnomusicology” because it really distinguishes not just the focus on non-Western music, but also the role of music in society, which musicology doesn’t always do. But in Australia, we don’t really have separate disciplines, so musicologists tend to look at all these things and quite…
MTB: You do it all.
Myfany Turpin: So yeah, just, it was in a PhD in musicology as well as linguistics. Yeah. So yeah, in Central Australia and really much of Indigenous Australia and Indigenous people around the world, singing and dance and visual art are all combined into a single art form. So there’s no distinction of like music, dance in terms of different art forms, and there’s also no word for music as such, but there are many words for genres, right? So you get all these genres, but no single word for “music,” which makes sense given that these things are a whole, there’s not the tradition of just singing with not doing anything else. It is hard or different for English speakers to understand, but when you look at many other cultures, it’s actually not that uncommon. And in fact, in our history too, we don’t have to go far back in our history when the word itself, “music,” comes from a tradition of poetry and performance, so it’s not specifically just music. So that’s the sort of context of the songs that I’ve spent a lot of time documenting, so it’s not just sound. And there are also group performances, and this is like the prototypical context of performance or music or singing. And there’s many different genres. They perform for different reasons, from initiation to intercultural gatherings, maintaining the health of the country and particular species and relationships, goodwill with people. Songs really, and performance is really a tool in this context to do things with, so it’s not just something you do for fun. It’s got a bigger purpose. And through performance, it’s really also the forum that people learn about their role as specific kin and what other kin perform to them, gender. So this is all about identity, right?
MTB: Yeah, absolutely.
Myfany Turpin: Different roles in society. And this sort of thing’s really important in Central Australian society. Of course, they also learn about lots of ecological knowledge and religious knowledge as well. If you think about identity, I’m trying to find some sort of analogy that, what it means to be a mother or a woman or whatever these things are. Ceremony and music actually gets you doing it in a very symbolic way and lots of iconography in the art and dance. So I think that’s a really interesting thing, how doing it can help you learn these things and reinforce the values that your society wants you to learn.
MTB: 100%. Is it really common across Arandic languages to have this really strong performance culture? Do they all have this performance aspect tied into identity with music and transfer of knowledge, and would you say that’s pretty common across the dialect continuum, or do some groups have it more than others?
Myfany Turpin: Well, it’s certainly very common across Aboriginal Australia, and it probably is in a lot of Indigenous cultures around the world. But yes, definitely in Aboriginal Australia and probably in the Torres Strait Islands as well, but that’s not an area that I have any fieldwork experience in.
MTB: Can you share a bit about your other main research interests?
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, originally, when I came to Central Australia to take the job of compiling the Kaytetye dictionary, you very quickly realise that compiling a language also means documenting the practices and really the encyclopaedic knowledge that people have. So I’ve got very interested in the natural world. A huge part of the dictionary is to do with all sorts of detailed observations of country and plants and animals. A lot of these things are specialist and not very common knowledge in English, I guess. You’d have to be a specialist in butterflies and a lepidoptera expert to really understand some of these things. So I have done work in collaboration with a number of biologists looking at really trying to unpack what words mean. But in the process, it’s all very interesting, and there’s a lot of knowledge that is at risk. And my late collaborator of many years who I really have to acknowledge as why I do this work, and she’s just been such a great teacher. She was very concerned about this sort of knowledge, the way humans interact with the natural world, what particular plants mean, what sort of behaviours those particular ecological happenings mean you have to engage in.
So I’ve been doing a number of ethnobiology projects. Most recently, I’ve been trying to document or understand the 30-odd species in one of the five food classes, which can be translated loosely as edible insect larvae, really important food class in Central Australia. Yeah, so working with entomologists, insect specialists, to work out what these are.
MTB: That’s fascinating.
Myfany Turpin: They’re really important in Kaytetye society, not just as a food source, but…
MTB: Yeah. What are the other four food groups?
Myfany Turpin: Meat (which includes eggs and cheese), plant-based food (fruits and vegetables, essentially), and sweet food, or “delicacies” it’s sometimes translated as — this would include things like honey ants, nectar from plants, and lerp made by insects that’s on the leaves, like manna, which people eat. So there’s a whole range of sources for sweet food. It could be plants, animals — as well as a lot of introduced foods, obviously. Western world has done well on introducing sweet foods. Too well. And the other one is, I guess we might call it like flour or edible seeds. So that’s a little bit different to the fruit and vegetable, which is straight out of the ground, but the edible seeds require a lot of processing. I mean, they’ve probably received more attention, really, those four food classes. Yeah, understandably. They’re sort of easy to get your head around, but trying to find some of these 30-odd edible insect larvae can be quite challenging, although where I spend a lot of my time, where I live in Alice Springs, edible insect larvae is one of the main dreamings of the region, of the town, and you see various caterpillars and yeah, across all sorts of public spaces and the names of things. So certainly in the mythology or religion and people have traditional names, and often these are derived from species in the natural world, so certainly plenty of people who would have this as their traditional name, some of the species in these classes. So anyway, we sort of set about to try and find all these things. We didn’t really find them all, but we’ve made very good progress because some of them are very seasonal, only in after heavy rain. In fact, yeah, one of them found recently after about seven years of looking for it. So that was quite exciting.
MTB: Oh, my gosh. Congratulations. That’s cool.
Myfany Turpin: Now getting identified and my colleague is actually rearing the caterpillar to see what it turns into.
MTB: Oh, wow. That’s really cool. I wanted to be an entomologist when I was a kid, actually, so in a different life, I might have been doing that. That’s so cool. Has climate change affected any of these aspects of the culture? Like are any of the edible larvae harder to find or more scarce than they would have been previously?
Myfany Turpin: I wish I had facts on this, but I don’t.
MTB: Okay.
Myfany Turpin: All I have is anecdotal evidence. And certainly there’s been a huge amount of changes since colonization. It’s very hard to unpack the causes for the loss of certain species and the increase in species. Is it to do with the effects of colonization and introducing species or the complexities in that or is it to do with climate change? It’s hard to know, but there is no doubt that there has been massive impact on plants, animals and ecological events since colonization. I mean, most of the land where I work is what you’d call ranches, massive farms that run cattle, massive cattle stations, so that has a very large impact on the environment.
MTB: Like cattle were introduced by the colonizers?
Myfany Turpin: Yes. There were no hoofed animals in Australia. So it’s had millennia to develop plants and many other things untouched by hooves, right? So that’s a particular impact. So very, very big change once humans and hoofed animals came and cats and all sorts of animals — wonderful animals, but just has meant a huge impact on the environment.
MTB: Yeah, that’s really interesting. Can we discuss a bit about what repatriation in the linguistic data and archiving context might look like? I know you’ve done a lot of archiving work. Do you have thoughts on this?
Myfany Turpin: Yes, I think it’s complex and it’s useful to remember the big picture that language loss in Australia is a result of colonization. And we as linguists have livelihoods, it’s very valuable livelihood that depends on the existence of these languages. And these languages are owned by Indigenous people, very different situation to a language like English, which is a universal language. These are very small languages, intimately tied to people’s identity. And in the case of Kaytetye and probably many other languages, there’s a site where they have their religious origin from. So we’re working with people’s private property, essentially, really personal property. And these are people who’ve in many cases had their languages taken away from them directly through government policies, beaten for speaking them, and less directly through the pressure to assimilate. That’s quite a very large pressure and very complex pressure,
so I think we’ve got a responsibility to ensure that any work we do, all this very valuable work we do, is discoverable. How do people know that it exists? We’ve got to make sure people know that it exists.
How do they get it? We’ve got to make sure that we show people how to get hold of these things. In some parts of the world, the archive is a long way and the language of the archive is very different. So accessibility is a big issue.
And then we also have to make sure that people use it. I mean, how can we expect people to be able to use linguistic documents that are in its own specialist language?
So, you know, repatriating something is the aim, but it’s got lots of complex steps that we need to unpack. So I think when people say, “Oh, we want to revive our language while teaching the school.” “Great. Here’s a list of all the resources that linguists have collected on your language since 1850 in the archive.” Right? It’s not necessarily going to be very understandable. So I think we have a responsibility too, to help transfer the sort of information in these documents to be more…
MTB: User-friendly.
Myfany Turpin: Yeah. And to actually have a think, where are people at? What sort of knowledge needs to be used to fill in the gaps and how are people learning? So really thinking deeply about how learning can occur in a community right now at the time that people wanting to say, “Hey, let’s write a song in language. Let’s do a first-year subject,” or whatever it is. So yeah, there’s a long way to go before we can actually help with repatriation in a functional way. It’s really important work, and I think it’s actually very interesting too, because we’re interrogating our own information systems and also how to translate that and how to maybe look at other ways for learning. An example from working on traditional songs, coming from a Western music background where perhaps I wasn’t always aware of how ingrained it was, but trying to get to the bottom with one of the speakers and say, “Well, what can we do to get young people to learn these things? They say they want to learn them, but they’re finding it really hard to learn this song.” And I say, “Oh, well, here it is. I’ll break it up into syllables. I’ll do this. I’ll do that.” And the woman says, “No, they’re not learning it because they’re not on country enough.” So it’s just a really different way. And in her experience, it was being on the site that the song was about that enhanced the ability to retain information. It’s almost like this mnemonic thing. If you’ve been to that site, it’s going to ensure the learning of the song of that site will stay with you for longer. And maybe it’s also about a deeper sort of understanding, too. Maybe it’s about an emotional connection. I’m not sure exactly, but it’s just an example of how we need to think of different ways of repatriating material so that it’s absorbed.
MTB: Yeah, that connection between language and land, I’ve heard of that in other Aboriginal languages, and I think as a Westerner, like a monolingual English-Western perspective, it’s hard to imagine that connection between land and language.
Myfany Turpin: Yes.
MTB: But Dorothea Hoffman also mentioned this in her work on MalakMalak about the connection between when you’re telling a story, the story changes depending on where you are and what part of the country you’re speaking it from.
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, it’s like those things that Dorothea identified. If you are with Aboriginal people as they go on country, they are engaging in particular oral practices that show that place and language are really tied. So, if you go to a place that people haven’t been in for… they will engage in sort of ritualistic conversations with ancestors. That’s just what happens. And that only happens on that place. So, yeah, it really inspires particular language practices. And yeah, in their world, it’s singing as well. The idea of singing songs when you don’t know the place, probably quite novel in a traditional world for you.
MTB: Yeah, that’s cool. Can we talk a bit about your experience training graduate students? Do you have any guiding principles for training students to do this work?
Myfany Turpin: I’ve had and I have a diverse range of graduate students, what we call postgraduate students in Australia. Some of them have done fieldwork, some of them haven’t, some are in music, some are in linguistics. So, I don’t really have any guiding principle, but I think respectful relationships with the people you work with is vital, and I’m sure that’s applicable for many contexts of doing any work.
MTB: Everyone. Yeah.
Myfany Turpin: And perhaps another thing that I’ve found helps students is just remembering the big picture. You know, what is this project really aiming to do? So, it’s really easy to get caught up in the details of your own study. But if you can take a step back and say, “How is this helping us understand the bigger issue or a bigger issue?” I don’t know, “How can we reverse language endangerment?” or “What does a comprehensive language documentation look like?” If we can keep those in our minds, and that can help us tackle more efficiently the smaller problems. I guess, so that’s reflecting a bit of my own work with obsessing with these rhythms in the traditional songs too, and then, looking at this bigger picture, which I had in mind, which was the claim that Cath Ellis had made about how rhythm encodes meaning. So, I was like, “Oh, hang on.” Always taking a step back and looking at something bigger can help you get through it.
MTB: I think that’s such a good reminder because it is so easy to forget and get caught up in your own research question and really get too laser focused on like, “Oh, but I really need to figure out this morpheme,” and not be aware of what is the big picture.
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, if you can’t communicate, why should a reader be interested? Why does this matter? It’s very hard to say something that’s going to be of value.
MTB: Yeah, absolutely. What further research would you like to see being done either by you or someone else? Anything you think should be done by someone in the future or something you’re looking forward to doing?
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, well, I could comment on working language documentation, but given that you haven’t had a musicologist on the show, maybe I’ll say something about musicology there.
MTB: Okay, cheers.
Myfany Turpin: Many ethnomusicologists have actually been interested in this question, but it’s puzzled me, I suppose, that more linguists haven’t been concerned with it, and the question is really to do with why people sing. You know, Anthony Seeger, there’s been a number of people interested in this, but it doesn’t… I mean, linguists tend to be more interested in the semantics of song, and that’s indeed very interesting, but people less often think about why we sing songs we already know or songs that have no meaning, which we do all the time both those things. And I think it’s of relevance to linguists as we think about what is the function of language. So this tends to focus on those semantic, very valuable questions, but less so on, I guess, the social role of language. You know, the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, who really got linguists to consider this question, you know, why do humans all over the world engage in verbal art (we all engage in some sort of poetry or song), and how does it relate to spoken language? So I don’t think this is really understood yet. There’s still a lot of interesting work that can be done. There’s been some research that has stated the vital role of language and verbal art in creating social cohesion, ingroups, outgroups, you know, modify and spur humans into action. But we really need a lot of ethnographic work in all sorts of contexts to answer this question, you know, urban and rural and new and old practices, practices in times of peace or war and in the home and in public. So there’s so much work that can be done to help us understand what verbal art does for people, individuals and society. So yeah, I think that’d be something I look forward to reading about.
MTB: Yeah, that’s a great question. Okay, last question. How has the pandemic changed your research, if it has at all?
Myfany Turpin: Yeah, I think it opened up possibilities that I didn’t realise were there. So I had an MA student when the pandemic started who decided to do a grammar of a sleeping language. In fact, I got the request from a senior man of this language, William Santo, he’s Gudjal. This is a sleeping language, no one speaks it today, and there’s maybe a few hours of audio recordings that were made of this language and some field notes. And so this student thought, “I’ll happily do that job,” as William asked me to find someone. And they did it entirely over Zoom. I mean, it was essentially sort of an archive project, going through the archives, looking for things and transcribing what’s there. William, who is the Gudjal elder, could fill in all that context and lead the student to the resources, because he created a few language resources himself and knew what was around. So they had this wonderful, it was only a one-year project, entirely on Zoom, which worked really well. And I actually got that learner’s guide coming out later this year.
MTB: Amazing.
Myfany Turpin: So yeah, I think I would now consider, encourage students, if there is the right context, to do such a project, even if they can’t go in the field, because I’ve realised that it’s quite possible.
MTB: That’s amazing. What a cool project. Well, thank you, Myfany, so much for your time. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I’m so excited to have you on the podcast and be able to share this with our listeners. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work?
Myfany Turpin: Well, I’m at the University of Sydney and have a list of publications and projects there at Sydney Conservatory of Music. I’m actually in the, we have a Centre for Music Diversity. I’m based in there, and I’ve also got some websites about various, well, three projects. So one is the Gudjal project, the learner’s guide’s coming out, and one is Kaytetye, the linguistic research that I’ve been involved in, and the other one is on a particular ceremony that is very widespread, and I’ve just actually got a podcast series released on ABC Radio National, which you can listen to on a website and various subtitled interviews from people.
MTB: Amazing.
Myfany Turpin: So yeah, that was a song series, a song, — a ceremony, really — about 30 verses that’s known over nearly two-thirds of the country. I was very lucky to get some support for documenting that and talking to people that still remember them. Yeah, so those links I’ll send to you.
MTB: Perfect, and I’ll put them in the show notes so people can find them easily.
Myfany Turpin: Great. Thanks, Marti.
MTB: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Claire Gawne is our editor, and Luca Dinu is our transcriptionist. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have fieldwork experience to share, email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, consider becoming our patron on Patreon to help keep our content ad-free. Thanks for listening!
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