Keogh Bay group papers
Cross-cultural communication papers - 1
Communications Failure at the Sentence Level
Matt Wrigley, Director Keogh Bay Group
st
1 of June, 2014
Introduction
Richard Trudgeon has rightly observed that the most significant mechanism at work in
Indigenous disempowerment can be found in the minutae of daily mis-communications. He
says:
“I believe the communication gap is the main reason underlying the people’s continual loss of
control over their lives. And it is this loss of control, this powerlessness that manifests itself in
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the current crisis in health.”
This is a very strong claim. It means that the abstract ideas of dispossession, marginalisation,
disempowerment are made real at the level of communication – the exchange of information
that allows an individual to make effective and practical choices in their daily life. In former
times, disempowerment was embodied in discriminatory laws, removal and violence. Today
the dominant mechanism of disempowerment is isolation from the knowledge critical for the
effective management of personal and community life.
In the careers of Keogh Bay directors and staff we have seen a disturbing number of
instances where Indigenous people felt unable to take control or manage a situation because
they did not understand critical facts about the situation. Some of these misunderstandings
were major (“What kind of government person is this? What is this meeting for?”). Other
misunderstandings were minor but many and accumulated into a broad failure to understand
mainstream people and mainstream society.
Many authors have made similar observations of the gaps in Indigenous conceptions of the
functioning of mainstream Australian society. See for example Barbara Sayer’s analysis of a
failed cross cultural communication and David Martin’s discussion of Wik use and
understanding of money in the references at the end of this paper.
This gulf in understanding is certainly not one way, indeed the failure of mainstream people,
to understand Indigenous societies is perhaps more complete. Aboriginal Australians, by and
large have managed to learn some English. Few mainstream Australians have learned an
Aboriginal language.
Examples of Communication failure
Trudgen provides numerous examples of the gaps in Indigenous understanding of
mainstream society. The most painful of these is his remarkable story “Thirteen Years of
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Wanting to Know” in which a Yolngu man, David, after 13 years of suffering kidney disease,
finally came to understand the physiology of his illness and underlying reasons for his
doctor’s advice. Strikingly, as Trudgen notes, David appeared to speak English well, even
working as an interpreter. Yet he did not understand the causes of the disease that was killing
him.
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Trudgen, p70.
Ibid pp 98-101
Keogh Bay Group
Cross-Cultural Communication Papers - 1
In my own experience in Aboriginal Australia, I have observed many similar events, though
few as poignant. This example highlights how the partial understanding of the meaning of a
word can disable engagement:
Once I was working with a senior Traditional Owner, Alan, whose country is in the central
Kimberley region. We were driving through Mt Hart station on the Gibb River road that had
long been managed by the State Government as a national park. Part of Jack’s country was
within Mt Hart and it annoyed him that there were all sorts of rules on Mt Hart about camping,
dogs, hunting and driving around. Alan asked me why gardiya (non-Aboriginal people) have
to make things like national parks with all these rules. He’d say, “Why can’t they just leave it
as a station, then a man can do what he wants so long as he doesn’t muck about with the
cattle or the fences?”
On the face of it, Alan spoke good English. He held many responsible positions on stations
and active since the late 70’s in campaigning for rights to his land. Alan had been part of
many discussions with non-Aboriginal people about land issues.
It surprised me that Alan asked the question, because he had been using the phrase “national
park” as long as I had known him. He’d said things like, “Yeah, the government made a
national park up at Mt Hart, they got another one there at Windjana and at Geikie. All the
gardiya tourists go there for holiday to look around at the country. Camping out.” To listen to
Jack, you would think he knew what “national park” meant.
To answer his question, I started with the idea that there are so many gardiya in Australia
now that unless the government puts some country to one side and protected it from things
like hunting, logging, mining and farming there would not be much natural bush left. I
explained that national parks were a way to make sure that there was still natural bush left for
animals and plants. Alan replied, “But there is plenty round here in the Kimberley.”
I said, “But down south there is not much and lots more gardiya. In the wheat-belt you can
drive for days and only see a few trees on the side of the road. There used to be trees all over
it but they have all been cut down.”
Alan had little idea about the impacts of European culture on the environment, nationally, let
alone globally. He therefore had a poor understanding of why one would want to set up a park
and stop people shooting the odd kangaroo. Imagine if Alan had been asked to join the
management group for Mt Hart. Would any discussion make sense to him?
In fact, Alan did not know what “national park” meant.
A common misapprehension among mainstream Australians is that most Aboriginal people
speak English well and understand most important concepts captured by English words.
While I know of no systematic studies that examine Aboriginal competence or comprehension
of Standard Australian English, the preceding anecdote (and many others in Sayers, Trudgen
etc) shows that partial understanding of an English concept can remain hidden by the
pragmatic use of the word and only become apparent in rare situations.
A skilled and long time Indigenous employee in a mining business, Joanne, struggled with
writing basic reports. She often missed out key information and her grammar and spelling
were poor in spite of the fact that her spoken English seemed excellent and she composed
emails, kept notes and developed project plans effectively. Joanne’s work was exemplary in
other ways and many in the organisation wondered why she was not yet a superintendent.
Joanne’s leader identified the need to develop her written composition skills as an important
part of her professional development plan. As part of coaching connected with this
development plan he gave her the 10 International Council on Minerals and Mining (ICMM)
principles of sustainable development and asked her to circle which words or phrases that
she didn’t know, or wasn’t confident about. The ICMM principles are written in formal
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Keogh Bay Group
Cross-Cultural Communication Papers - 1
management language (see http://www.icmm.com/our-work/sustainable-developmentframework/10-principles).
Joanne circled over 50% of the words in the document.
Fundamental was one of the words she hadn’t circled, however, when asked to define
fundamental, she paraphrased it as important. She did not make the connection between
fundamental and foundation.
This partial understanding of words is a common feature of people who speak English as a
second language or dialect. People who have not effectively completed high school or a
tertiary education may have similar difficulties with formal or “high English” vocabulary.
In talking about how her knowledge of English affected her work she said that she found it
stressful to go to meetings with managers because she didn’t follow parts of the discussion.
She felt she had to pretend that she understood everything. She worried that at any moment
she might be asked a question that she didn’t understand and her pretence would be
revealed.
Joanne had devised a range of techniques to maintain the appearance of understanding,
including answering questions with paraphrases that trailed off…to be completed by an ever
helpful manager.
Knowing that she didn’t command “company language” eroded Joanne’s confidence and
willingness to write reports that she believed must be written in this language.
A final recent example. Keogh Bay Training conducts training for supervisors and leaders
entitled Working with Indigenous Employees. The program is delivered by an Aboriginal
facilitator and a non-Aboriginal facilitator working in a tag-team. On this occasion I was
working with Sandy McEwan, an owner of Keogh Bay Training and a skilled facilitator. We
agreed at the start of the session to count the number of words that each of us used that
might not be known to (a) the audience of non-Aboriginal leaders OR (b) Aborginal people in
Sandy’s social network. Over the course of the day Sandy used 21 words from traditional
languages or Aborginal English that were not known to his audience. In many cases, had we
not stopped to explain these words, many important points may have been lost.
The count of the words that I used which Sandy felt would require explanation to his family
and community members was stopped at 100, before morning tea. Although I was talking to
an audience of non-Aboriginal people, the count demonstrates the kind of barriers that might
exist if I continued to use my natural speech to an audience of Sandy’s family members.
Consultation and Engagement Processes
Failing to account for the detail of miscommunication in engagements with Aboriginal people
in areas where Aboriginal English, creoles or traditional languages are dominant may doom
the engagement to failure.
Most consultation processes start with the bald assumption that Aboriginal people, as citizens
of Australia, are fluent in standard Australian English.
Consultations that start and continue this way have some of the features described below.
Consultations may be directed towards a few people with a strong English or education
background and exclude the majority who do not. People with strong English or a good
education may be foisted unwillingly into the position of “spokesperson”. The role of
spokesperson, created by a mainstream inability to deal with Aboriginal methods of
communication, may cut across communal authority and decision making processes and lead
to conflict.
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Cross-Cultural Communication Papers - 1
In some places, this pattern is so established that the majority of people have widthdrawn
from engagement with the mainstream, preferring to leave it to a few spokespeople who are
provisionally trusted to look after their interests. I cannot count the number of meetings
where the majority of the audience converses (at the back) in a traditional language, a creole
or Aboriginal English on matters unconnected with the meeting’s purpose. The business of
the meeting continues at the front, conducted by a small group of actors in formal English or
management speak.
This situation can, in turn, lead to a lack of accountability and oversight of the activities people
that mainstream agencies may see as “leaders of their community.”
Although a consultation or negotiation process can be carefully planned so that it is legally
watertight, appropriately staged and provide ample opportunity for the provision of
information, feedback and discussion at each step, unless communication works at the microscale of individual sentences and words, then the whole process will fail, because it is
founded on the effective transmission of information at this level.
These ideas seem painfully obvious, but are frequently ignored. “Communications Planning”
in many western agencies is most often thought of as ensuring that the right stakeholders are
in the room, producing publications on a regular basis, organising public forums so that
“everyone can have their say”, planning key messages etc. In much Communications
Planning there is often an assumption that information encoded in language, images, tables
or other means flows transparently from group A to group B. This most fundamental level of
human communications is generally paid little attention.
Tragically, many government and corporate representatives meeting with Aboriginal people
do not pick up on the cues that mis-communication is occurring – stolid silence from among
their audience, weary assent to any proposal put to them (including proposals containing
either\or statements) and odd misplaced comments unrelated to the matter at hand are
common. Perhaps the most prominent cue that something is going wrong with an
engagement is that Aboriginal people simply do not attend meetings organised (from the
perspective of the government or corporate representative) for their benefit.
In the worst cases, Aboriginal people are blamed for this non-participation and their rationality
questioned, when in fact, it more often represents a very rational decision about the effective
allocation of time on the part of Aboriginal “stakeholders”.
Solutions
There are a range of techiques that help address language and conceptual barriers. Some of
the most valuable include:
•
Communications Planning: Understanding the audience, their preferred forms of
communication and designing a communications strategy that makes best use of this
information.
•
Plain English for Aboriginal audiences: Specialised forms of Plain English have
proven to be very effective for speakers of Aboriginal English, creoles or English as a
second language (ESL).
•
Show not tell: A range of techniques, including explanatory graphics, site tours,
demonstrations and multimedia allow communication to take place without too much
reliance on language.
•
Interpreters and bilinguals: Using interpreters in situations where the audience is
most comfortable in a traditional language or a creole is valuable.
We will cover the use of these techniques in more detail in subsequent papers.
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Keogh Bay Group
Cross-Cultural Communication Papers - 1
References
Trudgen, Richard, 2000, Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, Aboriginal Resource &
Development Services Inc
Sayers, Barbara J., author. 1999. "A pragmatic analysis of a failed cross-cultural
communication." In Logical relations in discourse, Eugene E. Loos (ed.). pages 73-112.
Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Martin, David, 1993, Autonomy and Relatedness, Phd Thesis, ANU, Canberra. Available at
http://www.anthropos.com.au/Downloads/Thesis_DFM.pdf, see chapter 3 in particular –
Money Nothing for us
About the author
Matt Wrigley worked for many years as an applied linguist in the Kimberley region of Western
Australia. He later went on to advise on cross-cultural communications for a number of major
mining companies. A full profile can be found at:
http://keoghbayconsulting.com.au/people/matt-wrigley/
Matt can be contacted at [email protected] or 0419 763 101
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