I’m an Australian who lives and works in Indonesia. This website is about my engagement with Indonesia. In the website, I’ll be telling some stories about Indonesia that I find interesting as an Australian. I’ll also be telling some stories about Australia that I think Indonesians might find interesting. And I’ll be talking about some of  the things I engage in with my work as the director of a research centre where we study local languages and attempt to engage in language and development issues.

I first came to Indonesia as a PhD student ready to embark on my research into the Taba language from North Maluku province in Indonesia’s relatively undeveloped east. Taba is just one of well over 700 indigenous languages spoken across Indonesia. Most of these languages are undescribed, undocumented in any serious way, and, these days, under threat of extinction. In 1993-1994 I spent nearly a year living in a remote Taba speaking village, learning the language, trying to understand its grammar, and pestering my new Taba friends with questions on details of their language’s grammar. But I think the most important thing I Iearned was that wherever we come from, whatever we fill our days with, and however rich or poor our circumstances might be, people all over the world are essentially the same. We all want the best for our kids, we all want good friends and good relationships with our families, and we’d all like to be happy.

When I came back to Australia after my first experience living in Indonesia, I embarked on an academic career in linguistics. After my PhD was completed I spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher in the Netherlands and then a little over ten years as a Fellow in linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Through all this time I’ve stayed engaged with Indonesia and made regular visits to the place. I also spent some time doing research in Timor-Leste. Since the beginning of 2010, I’ve been living in Indonesia again, now in Jakarta. It’s a fascinating, diverse, and sometimes frustrating place to live. But it’s always interesting and there are a lot of great things happening in spite of its problems. This is my place to share the fascination and the frustration. Selamat datang (welcome).