Of research and vaudeville

The item on top of the work pile at the moment is a now very battered advance proof copy of a novel called The Little Shadows by the Canadian writer Marina Endicott, published in Canada last year and due for release in Australia in February. It's about a family in vaudeville, working the circuits along the border of the US and Canada; set from 1912-1917, it shows how their lives are affected by the forces of history.

With my curiosity piqued about vaudeville and its history in Australia -- obviously such an 'American' thing was going to make its way to Canada, but did it have a substantial history here? -- I went looking in the astounding new(ish) resource provided by the National Library, Trove, which -- well, go over there and have a look.

I spent many happy hours on this site last year and the year before when I was researching Adelaide and found, among other things, a great deal of family history buried among Family Notices and roundups from 'The Country', where the ferocious rivalry between my Scottish grandma and her bossy sister-in-law regarding the organisation of fund-raisers for the War Effort in Curramulka can be seen between the lines of often profoundly corrupted text.

Apropos of which, I decided early on that since this magical resource had been provided to me then the very least I could do was take an active part in the way it works: crowdsourcing to correct the scanned text, since obviously the resources don't exist for it to be done professionally. I decided that I would correct every article I used. There's no measuring this, but my guess is that, as with Wikipedia, the longer it goes on the more accurate it will be, as more and more people use it and contribute.

Anyway, vaudeville. Oh yes indeed. There's a thesis in this topic alone: 'Racism in the content and language of journalistic reportage of vaudeville in Adelaide, 1920-1940.' Here, for example, is a paragraph from The Advertiser of September 30, 1926:

CELEBRITY VAUDEVILLE. 

Special interest is attached to the Southern Revue Company, which will be appearing for the first time in Adelaide at the Theatre Royal next Saturday, under the J. C. Williamson management. Many of the members of Joe Sheftell's revue are even blacker than negroes are usually painted, but this is not true about the chorus girls, who are much fairer than their men folk. One of the members of the company remarked while in Sydney "how mighty good every one has been to us." This is the first impression gained of Australia by one of the darkest of the members. He also explained that in the Land of Liberty "culled" folk have to travel in their own special "Jim Crow" railway carriages, and are segregated in special hotels and restaurants. This company includes many talented performers, who have been a great success in both Melbourne and Sydney — Minta Cato, the colored soprano; Joe Sheftell, the producer; Bob Williams, the comedian; McConn, Saunders, and Williams, the nifty steppers, and the chorus girls.

Did you blanch over that word 'culled'? Language is a wonderful thing when it come to the return of the repressed. It took me a few seconds to work out that it was merely an attempt at phonetic approximation of the accent of the unnamed  'dark member' (oh dear, it just gets worse and worse) and his pronunciation of the word 'colored' (interesting that the Advertiser was using American spelling in 1926).  I also enjoyed the snide reference to the Land of Liberty, implying that we in Australia have no such unenlightened attitudes, oh my wordy lordy no.

And as for the forces of history, I couldn't help noticing the tour dates on this one, from The Advertiser of September 21, 1929:

VAUDEVILLE PERFORMANCE 

Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher, announces that the annual concert to be given by her students will be held in the Thebarton Town Hall on October 22. The programme will contain several spectacular ballets, solo dances, and vaudeville acts.

(And for anyone looking for ideas for fiction, there's a whole novel for you right there in the phrase 'Trixie Wilson, the well-known ballet teacher.') Unbeknownst to either the journalist or Miss Trixie, the 1929 Wall Street Crash was imminent: Black Thursday was October 24th, two days after the concert.

Vaudeville was a notoriously unstable and insecure profession even at the best of times, as Endicott's book makes clear, with acts being sacked and theatres closing down and impresarios going broke left and right. I wonder what happened to everyone in the wake of Black Thursday: to Miss Trixie, whose pupils' parents must have hurriedly reassessed whether the budget could stand ballet lessons? To those 'culled' troupers from three years before? To all vaudeville everywhere: the performers, the backers, the managers, the theatre owners, and the audiences, many of whom may have abruptly decided that going to the vaudeville was a luxury they could definitely do without? What happened to the nifty steppers, the Men of Mirth, the chorus girls, the acrobatic violinists and the 'Gypsy' dancers, in the wake of October 24th, 1929? Whatever did they do? Wherever did they go?

Whingeing

Dear Telstra, American Express, etc etc,

You know when you get some young minion to ring me up and try, under the guise of doing me a service, to screw even more of my money out of me than you're already getting? You know those calls?

Don't tell the young minions to call them 'courtesy calls', okay? You obviously don't know what 'courtesy' means, or you wouldn't apply it to the act of invading my privacy via telephone, almost always in the middle of a sentence/paragraph/train of thought that I am trying to finish, in order to try to get your despicable corporate mitts on more of my hard-earned. 'Courtesy' is not the word for that, however you might try to dress it up. You know what it is they say you can't polish.

And while I'm here, the next young minion (or indeed anyone else) who tells me 'Not a problem' – when what s/he actually means is 'Certainly, Madam' or 'Yes' or 'If you say so' or even just 'If you must' – is going to get a smack upside the head.

Especially if those kids are still on my lawn.

Lots of love,

Pav xxx

Language corner

Because of reasons, I have perforce made the acquaintance in the last few weeks of a couple of bits of medical terminology with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. Those who, like me, have always regarded medical language as technical, dry and incomprehensible may be as delighted as I am by these two dramatically emotive terms. Trauma to any bit of your body by way of injury or infection is referred to as an insult. And the word for abnormal liver function tests is deranged.

Una selva oscura

This morning I paid the princely sum of $10 for this new book:

I was halfway to the bookshop counter, wallet at the ready, very possibly with Casey's recent lovely post about Dante in the back of my mind and thinking $10 was a really good deal for one of the great classics of literature, even if I did have to read it in unsatisfactory translation (for I've never seen a translation of the opening three lines that seemed to me exactly right, and I don't even speak or read Italian, but I know what I like), when I idly opened it at random to check the print size and found to my great joy that what I was about to pay a pittance for was a parallel text, with Dante's exquisite, lucid, singing Italian -- late-medieval vernacular Italian and therefore linguistically at two removes from me, and yet somehow available to instinctive reading -- opposite the translation.

Five years of excellent teaching and intermittent hard slog at Adelaide Girls' High back in the mists of time has left me with the ability to nut out a little bit of German and quite a lot of French if it is put in front of me, but such Italian as has sunk in, ie almost none (though I still remember the Italian for the first phrase I ever consciously learned: Posso provarlo? 'May I try this on?') has done so by accident and through some sort of process of osmosis.

But it strikes me, not for the first time, that this verse is so beautiful one could teach oneself Italian simply by studying a page of this book a day. A dark wood, in which one has lost one's way: can you think of a better metaphor for middle age?

...Françoise sat down beside me with a volume of Dante and construed a few lines of the 'Inferno' to begin showing me how the language worked. 'Per mi si va tra la perduta gente' - 'Through me you go among the lost people'. A line that crushed the heart, but in the middle you could say 'tra la'. It was music.

– Clive James, Falling Towards England

The opening lines likewise crush the heart -- 'In the middle of this life we live, I realised that I was in a dark wood, and the path was lost.' Or words to that effect. Also words to crush the heart, but look at the paper (or whatever it is) that they were written on.

Cross-posted at Read, Think, Write

Translations: tradies

WHEN THEY SAY

It's supposed to be like that.

WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN IS

I don't feel like driving back to your house and fixing the thing I should have got right in the first place, and besides, you're a woman so I can probably con you into thinking there isn't a problem.

The facts, ma'am, just the facts

"People have not got over her knifing of Kevin Rudd"

No, and they won't, either, for as long as formerly respectable and responsible journalists like Michelle Grattan continue to use flamboyantly loaded language like this in what is supposed to be a reporting of facts.

Grattan is not a fool and she is a very experienced journalist, so the only conclusion it's possible to come to is that she is being disingenuous, pretending to report the facts in a neutral fashion while at the same time reinforcing prejudices and preconceptions with grossly prejudicial language like that.

I'm very ticked off with Gillard myself at the moment, but I am also actually a bit shocked by this shoddy bit of journalism. I used to expect better from The Age, and I still do expect better from Michelle Grattan.

In which Tony Abbott falls on his ass but doesn't get a special cookie from his mommy

In the Senate, Labor's Doug Cameron said he was concerned about "the disintegration of the Liberal Party". "The barbarians are at the gate of the Liberal Party," he said. "Who are these barbarians? They are extremists. They are Tea Party imitators. They are the remnants of Pauline Hanson's One Nation. They are the radio and newspaper bullies whose ignorance is in direct proportion to their pay packet. If you get close enough, you can smell the fear of the Liberal Party moderates as Mr Abbott leads them down the dry well of fear and ignorance."

Tea Party imitators? Members, more like. Did you see the spelling on some of those signs? I don't mean the basic illiteracy, I mean 'mom' for 'mum' and 'ass' for 'arse'.

Who wrote those signs and at whose behest? Who were the people carrying them? Were they actual Americans, or did they copy them boilerplate-style from some lunatic-fringe website?

Also, is that the Doug Cameron with the charming Scottish accent who quite some years back used to be a scone-hot rabble-rousing unionist extremist annoying the bejesus out of parliamentarians by running rings around them in arguments? I kind of liked him back then, too, but I like him even more now.

Quotation from here; more on the subject at Loon Pond; and Margaret Simon on the way The Australian, in contrast with The Age, is pretending this morning that none of it ever happened. Which in itself is telling; even The Australian has disowned this mob this morning.

I am a woman, not a test mouse!

Don't listen to this at work unless it's all right for you to be LOLing at your desk.

Royal ropes

Kate Middleton in her official engagement interview said she was afraid she didn't 'know the ropes'. She's known William for nearly ten years and been his official girlfriend for most of that; if she doesn't know the ropes by now you have to wonder what the prognosis is.

In the meantime, Rope #1: learn the language of the country of which you may become Queen.

She admitted joining the Royal Family was a “daunting prospect” but she added: “Hopefully I’ll take it in my stride.”

Of course, she might have simply meant that she will take it in her stride in a hopeful manner. In which case, no wuz.

Planet Janet: populated by unexamined metaphors

You know, the Greens are - I like to call them, you know, a pack of wolves in koala costumes

-- Janet Albrechtsen

Now, presumably this is an allusion to the expression 'wolves in sheep's clothing'. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense.

So: vicious destructive ferocious creature dresses up as innocent harmless ditto. So far so good.

But wait. The point of the wolf in the sheep's clothing is to pretend to be a sheep. Why does it pretend to be a sheep? So that it can fool the shepherd and get up close and personal with the sheep, unsuspected of being a wolf; maybe it can even get penned in with the sheep, so that in the dead of night it can unmask its wild and ferocious muzzle and midnight feast on leg o' lamb to its wild and ferocious heart's content.

That is the point, if you are a wolf, of dressing up as a sheep.

So. The Greens dress up as koalas so that they can fool ... um ... the koala shepherds.

They do this because they ... ahrrm ... want to eat the koalas.

Wait, what?

A Green. As you can see, they are intellectual ay-leets as well as wolves. Approach with extreme caution, or, better still, not at all.

UPDATE: On the other hand, if this is a real koala then it is a koala in academics' clothing. Some of you had better run for your lives.

That old chestnut

I see the addiction to alliteration persists when people are trying to dream up catchy titles. The meeja seems particularly addicted to putting the words 'feminism' and 'failed' together, as indicated by the title of this forum, 'Has Feminism Failed?' I suppose we should all be grateful that there's a question mark.

But 'Has feminism failed?' is a completely meaningless question. Has feminism failed what? 'Feminism' is not a person with agency and volition. Feminism is the name of a set of strategies for viewing, analysing and dealing with the world. Strategies don't 'fail', only the people trying to use them to achieve some stated goal. And that's usually because some actively anti-feminist entity or force has intervened, whether it's John Howard quietly dismantling the government programs for women, or some single-digit IQ footballing nuff nuff who thinks any woman who's come home with one of his mates must be fair game for whoever happens to be passing, or a rabidly reactionary female journalist explaining how awful it is for the poor menz to be accused of sexual assault, or some blogger explaining how women just don't understand that men have Urges.

Putting the words 'feminism' and 'failed' together in this manner is nothing more than a fairly transparent strategy, complete with begged question (as in 'When did you stop beating your wife?), for bagging feminism and trying to make women turn away from its principles.

But if people feel they just absolutely must put those two words together in a title or a headline, here's an alternative suggestion. Instead of asking whether feminism has failed us, how about a feature article or public debate called 'Have we failed feminism?'

In which we use words to mean whatever we like

Anyone following the entertaining shemozzle that Australian federal politics has recently become (usually it's a fairly boring shemozzle) will have noticed in the last few days that Tony Abbott and his henchpersons, most recently Christopher Pearson (whom I know knows better; tch) in this morning's Australian, make reference as often as they can to Julia Gillard 'clinging on' to power.

Now call me a pedant but if anyone can show me any dictionary or lexicon in which 'clinging on' is listed as a synonym for 'following due process', I will give them $10,000. And if Tony Abbott does indeed end up Prime Minister, will they tolerate anyone talking about his having 'forcibly snatched power away from the incumbent Prime Minister'? Because forcibly snatching stuff away is what you have to do, when someone is clinging on. Live by the connotation, die by the connotation.

In which recycling occurs

Back in 1994 I was writing a TV column for Eureka Street. Here's what I said about Laurie Oakes, whose weekly political interviews were the cornerstones of Channel Nine's now-defunct Sunday.

The 'political' interview often becomes a news event in itself, a focal and sometimes pivotal point in the affairs of government. While it purports to deal with the events of recent days, bits of it frequently end up in everybody's news bulletins on the following Monday night; constructed thus as 'news', it sometimes produces further consequences.

Keeping track of these unfolding causalities is disquieting. Among other things, they indicate just how much power Oakes has to help make things happen; his recent interviews have had a hand in the ebb of Ros Kelly's fortunes [remember Ros Kelly? -- Ed] and the flow of Bronwyn Bishop's. Remarks edited out of context, and then repeatedly re-broadcast both by Nine and by other stations, can have major consequences; and sometimes those remarks have been lured, coaxed or goaded out of reluctant ministerial mouths in the first place by strategies comparable in subtlety and sympathy to a well-aimed jackboot to the groin.

Cheryl Kernot, interviewed a week or two before Ros Kelly's resignation and taking a tough stand on accountability, is one of the few politicians I have ever seen remain unflustered by Oakes throughout an entire interview. Kernot, like Gareth Evans [ooh, prescience! -- Ed] but unencumbered by what Jane Austen would have called his uncertain temper, is both spectacularly well-informed and possessed of high-level debating skills; at one point she left Oakes speechless, sweetly but mercilessly showing him up through a hole in his own research.

One of the most noticeable features of this interview was the difference in its participants' rhetoric: Kernot's images and metaphors were those of consensus and integration, Oakes's those of strife and fracture. His language, illuminated by the difference, revealed his view of political affairs as essentially antagonistic, competitive and hierarchical; 'win' and 'lose' are two of his favourite words. This world view, like the medium through which it is expressed, is coercive; in shaping his questions according to it, Oakes builds whole suburbs of verbal dark alleys down which it becomes very difficult for his subjects not to go. Most politicians' terror of silence is such that a simple 'I don't accept the terms of your question' would never occur to them, even when that is clearly the case.

When Julia Gillard patiently said 'I don't accept your premise, Kerry' to Red Kezza on the evening of the day she became Prime Minister, in response to just such a begged question about the 'stabbing in the back' of Kevin Rudd, I whooped and hollered and applauded and frightened the cats. I'd been waiting (at least) sixteen years to hear a politician say that to a journalist.

Much of the rest of it also reads as though those sixteen years had never existed. Perhaps these are the glory days for which Oakes yearns, and that's why he's behaving the way he is now.

What's prompted me to dig this out of the filing cabinet is the news that Cheryl Kernot may be standing as an Independent for a Senate seat. Go Cheryl.

Far, far too much information

One particularly detestable bit of all-purpose politics-and-public-service jargon is getting a good workout during this limp election campaign period: 'roll out' as an all-purpose verb to mean either 'introduce', 'develop', 'implement', 'put into practice' or any one of half a dozen other specific activities depending on context.

But I can't help wondering whether The Australian's Cameron Stewart has seen it used this way before, whether he's decided to extend its meaning, and/or whether he actually checked this bit of copy before he filed it. Who knows, maybe he did it on purpose and thought it was funny. Here you go:

Mr Abbott pointedly opened Sunday's debate by reminding voters that he and his wife understood what it was like "to raise a family, to wrestle with a big mortgage, with grocery bills, with school fees".

And yesterday he rolled out wife Margie for the first time in the campaign.

Abbott has said publicly that he feels sex-starved when on the campaign trail, which is in itself far too much information. But I would pay a lot of money not to now have in my head a sequence of unwelcome images involving the rolling out of Margie. Really I would.

Moving Australian working families forward with a great big new tax

Can anyone familiar with PR and/or media training please explain to me the reasoning behind advising pollies (for surely they must have been advised; they can't be doing anything this stupid off their own bat) to just keep plugging away with slogans despite the fact that it makes everyone in the country want to take to them with a baseball bat after they've heard it the first ten times or so?

Is there some deeply rooted belief that slogans will sink in if repeated often enough despite conscious resistance to them? I do not believe that this is true. None of them have sunk into me yet, nor into anyone with whom I've discussed it. Every time Kevin Rudd said Working Families I thought Christ this is a stupid slogan, it doesn't even make sense, unless you picture tiny tots being shoved up the chimneys or down the mines. Every time Tony Abbott says Great Big New Tax, all I think about is how pathetic and unrealistic people are who expect the guvmint to do stuff for them, like build roads and provide hospitals, with fairy dust or leprechaun money, and I redouble my commitment to paying tax even for stuff I don't personally approve of. (Someone who wants the guvmint to support opera needs to be pretty generous in her tolerance of supporting the Institute of Sport, after all.)

And now we have Julia Gillard chanting Moving Australia Forward, another bit of meaningless wankery. No, no, let's move Australia backwards. Eventually we'll bump into South Africa. (And won't that be fun.)

Gillard is a very very bright person and must be aware from her years in the law how easy it is to irritate and alienate the people you are talking to. She gave Working Families a fair old nudge herself when she was Deputy PM and there's obviously some heavy pressure coming at her from somewhere to keep this chanting up. But why? And from where? And why don't the pollies rise up in a bipartisan body and say No we're just not doing this any more, it makes us look like idiots? And who invents these mindless little choruses in the first place?

The language of deception

It's been a week and a half since Julia Gillard became Prime Minister in what was, contrary to much of the hostile commentary and despite the involvement of certain less than savoury characters, an orderly takeover from a PM who couldn't even muster enough numbers to make a show of meeting a challenge, and who was, as all who have read Robert Manne's detailed analysis in the current issue of The Monthly will be aware, in a state of deepening crisis before Gillard's challenge.

All the same, Gillard was accused on many if not all sides of 'stabbing Rudd in the back'.

In that week and a half I've been seeing a great deal of anti-Gillard commentary from people who until two weeks ago were her biggest fans. Obviously they wanted her in charge until she actually took charge, and frankly I think that's a bit suspicious in itself. Now that she has made her position clearer on asylum seekers, and believe me I'm not super thrilled about it either (despite the fact that I think she may actually be doing something else, something we haven't seen from federal politicians before), she's getting some hysterically abusive flak around the traps for what people are calling 'dog-whistling'.

I have my own theories about why some people are so emotional about Gillard and I'm not going to air them here, but as is my wont I'd like to focus on the vocabulary that's being thrown around. First of all, 'backstabbing', which implies sneaky, underhanded deception and creeping up on people who trust you, when they're not looking.

How was it backstabbing? Gillard did not go behind Rudd's back at any point. She has always been his obvious successor. He obviously did not trust her or anyone else; indeed he was so paranoid and untrusting that she had to learn from reading the paper that her (up to that point repeatedly tested and demonstrably iron-clad) loyalty had been questioned and checked up on by Rudd's confidante and golden boy chief of staff Alister Jordan, which hardly suggests that Rudd was 'not looking'. When Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib et al urged her to challenge Rudd for the leadership, she insisted that proper open soundings be taken on the Caucus numbers. She openly challenged Rudd for the leadership, and she won.

So say she stabbed him if you must, but if she stabbed him at all, she stabbed him in the chest.  There may have been ruthlessness, but there was no deception.

And as for 'dog-whistle' -- I'm starting to wonder whether city folks actually understand this metaphor. A dog-whistle is a thing that humans beings can't hear, sounding at a frequency that only dogs can hear. It was used during the Howard era to describe coded remarks that looked innocent of sinister meanings but could be picked up by Howard's natural constituency because their ears were attuned to his real meaning and it was what they wanted to hear.

But Gillard is saying exactly what she means. You may not like it. You may be outraged that other citizens of the country who don't agree with you should have their right to free speech affirmed, however unpleasant one may find what they say. And you may, like me, be particularly irritated by Gillard's use of the phrase 'political correctness', which long ago became something that could only ever muddy the waters of meaning. But again, there is no deception. It's not a dog-whistle. It's a whistle.

Some of the rest of us are insulted as well

In all the endless masses of coverage of Andrew Johns' racist slur, Timana Tahu's dignified withdrawal, and all the other fallout in the leadup to the Great Big Rugby League Game on Wednesday night (apparently Johns is "shattered"; diddums), I've not yet seen anyone mention that "black cunt", used as a term of abuse, is not only a racist slur.

Hi ho and so on

Is there some even more than usually sinister plot in the media to use language to confuse and discombobulate the populace? I refer, of course, to the word 'miner', which some time in the last eight weeks or so appears, at least in Australia, to have substantially changed in meaning.

Since when were obscenely rich mining companies making obscenely rich profits called 'miners'?

Miners are the people that Margaret Thatcher brought to their knees in the 1980s. Miners are the dudes with the pickaxes, the dirty faces, the high mortality rate, the not-high-enough salaries and the really really terrible lungs.

Andrew Forrest is not a 'miner', and neither is any of his sorry ilk.

(In the process of checking the date of the UK miners' strike on Wikipedia, I found this, which is too good not to share:

On 13 November 2009, rumours of Thatcher's death were erroneously circulated within the Canadian Government whilst they attended a black-tie dinner, after transport minister John Baird sent a text message announcing the death of his pet tabby called Thatcher. The news was reported to Prime Minister Stephen Harper as the death of Baroness Thatcher, and almost caused a diplomatic incident between Canada and the United Kingdom, but the Canadian Government rang Downing Street and Buckingham Palace to seek verification.)

Sometimes what you're advertising isn't what you meant to say

I've just come home from brunch with friends down the posh end of town, and as I crossed the road to return to the car I became mesmerised by a large banner slung overhead across King William Road. It was an ad for Pulteney Grammar School, one of Adelaide's pricey private schools, showing a picture of a little girl with plaits, bent studiously over an exercise book.

Above the photo, in giant letters wholly innocent of punctuation, appeared the following exhortation:

SEE YOUR CHILD DISCOVER WHO THEY REALLY ARE

(Thinks: 'Hello darling, how was your day?'
'Excellent! I saw Ermintrude discover who they really are!'
'Who who really are?'
'Ermintrude.'
'Um, what?'
Etc.)

Now, I don't have any kids, and if I did they'd probably be beyond school by now, but if I had and they weren't and I was looking to educate them, any school that advertised itself using the so-called 'singular they' would get crossed off my list sharpish.

It's only words

Tony Abbott's argument against the formal acknowledgement of traditional owners at public gatherings is that it's 'tokenistic'. (Note to Tone: the people who do it do usually actually mean it. If they didn't, they wouldn't bother to do it. QED.)

He seems to be offering this, as so many concern trolls do, as a good argument for not doing it at all. I note that, monarchist and Catholic that he is, he's not making the same argument for acknowledging any monarchs or vice-monarchs present at the beginning of a speech, or for Parliamentary prayers.

Yet surely the same argument applies. I bet there are more people in Australia working hard for the improvement of Aboriginal people's lives than there are working hard in the cause of retaining the monarchy, for a start. And I bet there are a lot more people who find the prayers and the nods to governors that they are obliged to make 'tokenistic' than people who feel the same about acknowledgement of traditional owners.

But that line isn't really worth arguing with anyway; nor do I have anything to say about Wilson Tuckey except that he and people like him are the price we pay for democracy. I'm more interested in the widely-held assumption behind Abbott's pronouncement that 'mere' words are worth nothing.

This from a politician, and one who's worked as a journalist and written several books to boot, is particularly ironic, but that's by the way as well. What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It's nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know -- it makes opining so much easier -- but you'd think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.

Because speech is an act, and so is thought, and so is decision-making about how you will behave. To acknowledge traditional owners at a public function is to remind everyone present of Aboriginal history and culture. It's a small reversal of erasure and a little raiser of consciousness. Recognition is an act, and so is the expression of respect.