{"id":6690,"date":"2026-02-10T16:45:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T21:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=6690"},"modified":"2026-02-10T16:46:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T21:46:43","slug":"report-25th-anniversary-fellowships-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2026\/02\/10\/report-25th-anniversary-fellowships-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: 25th Anniversary Fellowships"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Report: 25th Anniversary Fellowships<\/h1>\n\n
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Jodie Lea Martire<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Conference & Workshop report<\/a>, <\/span>Reviews<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Image<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The SHARP 25th<\/sup>-Anniversary Fellowship supported the research of a case study in my doctoral thesis at The University of Queensland, which is examining minority-language publishing in Australia. The\u00a0 case study was with my partner organisation, Muurrbay Aboriginal Language & Culture Co-operative.\u00a0Muurrbay is a language centre which publishes materials in seven Aboriginal Languages in the state\u00a0 of New South Wales, Australia, and it is based in the small oceanside town of Nambucca Heads. (Now is the moment to Google how beautiful it is!) To conduct my research \u2013 ethnography,\u00a0 documentation and interviews \u2013 I relocated from Ipswich, QLD, to Nambucca Heads, NSW, between\u00a0 February and July 2025. I wanted to learn how, in practice, a small community organisation had\u00a0 chosen to make books to reawaken sleeping Indigenous Languages \u2013 not just once, but through 40\u00a0 years of publishing. This fellowship funded 10 weeks of accommodation at tourist-town rates so I could share the same office as Muurrbay staff, publications and Aboriginal Community.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t want to be in Nambucca Heads just for the views (gorgeous!) or to hold in-person interviews with Muurrbay\u2019s authors, linguists, designers and readers \u2013 although of course those recordings made better \u201cdata\u201d because I had built friendships and working relationships on-site. Nor was it for\u00a0the calibre of documentary evidence that I amassed, far more abundant and fascinating than any I\u00a0could have gathered via the internet or interlibrary loans. My image and document files expanded as I made countless trips to visit bookshops, libraries, museums, cultural centres and national parks,\u00a0searching out Muurrbay\u2019s materials where they were archived, held, displayed, used and sold.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main reason for completing my research in Nambucca Heads was to meet a parallel aim of my research: to contribute more to my partner organisation than I \u201ctook\u201d in research data. Drawing on my 20+ years of experience in the book trades, I proposed to Muurrbay that I would like to volunteer\u00a0my publishing skills while doing my research. I figured my broad-based professional know-how\u00a0 (writing, translating, editing, production management, rights sales, bookselling, library studies\u2026) might prove helpful to a small NGO \u2013 and I was right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the nearly five months I worked with Muurrbay, I went from learning how Muurrbay\u2019s\u00a0 publishing worked to providing specific documentation, training and mentoring to staff so they could\u00a0 keep making beautiful, relevant Language materials for their Communities. I took stock of the books,\u00a0audio, DVDs, posters and other materials the organisation had published in its four decades of work,\u00a0and collated this information into a dataset for Muurrbay to keep and update. (With permission, a\u00a0copy has since been provided to AustLit [the national literary database] for greater dissemination to\u00a0readers, researchers and Aboriginal Communities.) I did small brainstorming activities with various staff to understand how Muurrbay coordinated its publishing processes, then reworked this\u00a0 information into an interactive, step-by-step training process of what needs to be done to create a\u00a0 book or video or\u2026 anything. I compiled manuals on metadata and legal-deposit requirements,\u00a0 provided guidance on what to look for when contracting an illustrator, editor or designer, and helped\u00a0 the office staff spruce up the mail-order process and the little bookshop near the front door.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you can tell, I love the nitty-gritty, practical side of making books \u2013 and it doesn\u2019t hurt when the\u00a0people you\u2019re sharing your knowledge with are just dying to learn more. Plus, another PhD goal was to make sure that I got to make books while I was researching them; collaborating with Muurrbay was clearly a win on all fronts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most important contributions I made to Muurrbay was to help the board and staff gain\u00a0clarity on how making books and publishing materials fits into their organisation \u2013 now, today, in\u00a0 2025. I facilitated a participatory workshop which let the team consider, together, what materials they wanted to make (language-teaching materials), who they were making them for (Community!), who could author them (those with Community support), and for what reason (\u201cto keep the Language alive\u201d). These results were all held tacitly by Muurrbay\u2019s workers, but the workshop allowed them to explore their views with peers, and come to a shared, positive understanding of\u00a0 how important publishing was for the organisation\u2019s core work. It was an exhausting day of sticky note activities, shared brainstorming, and group prioritisation \u2013 but immensely satisfying for all\u00a0 concerned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the small matter of my PhD research per se\u2026 well, that happened too, all in the same time period. There were, of course, the standard research processes: interviews, ethnographic notes,\u00a0 unending photos of books, detailed searches for Muurrbay titles in local library holdings. But by far the strongest findings came from being on Gumbaynggirr Country in the company of Muurrbay\u00a0 colleagues. The training and mentoring processes gave me a nuanced understanding of how different\u00a0 Muurrbay workers saw the entangled relationship between publishing materials, revitalising\u00a0 Languages, strengthening Community and living (on) Country. An outing to locked-up areas of the\u00a0national park, where the Aboriginal ranger said that certain forest places were so old he could only\u00a0 speak his Language there, not English. Visits to local writers\u2019 festivals and Indigenous events that\u00a0showed how Muurrbay was synonymous with its local Communities \u2013 Muurrbay\u2019s name popped up\u00a0 at each event, regardless of whether it was officially part of the day\u2019s activities. Seeing Gumbaynggirr\u00a0 Language on signs at lookouts and waterfalls and headlands taught me how Muurrbay was using the \u201clinguistic landscape\u201d to publish its Languages on Country, where they belonged. And learning how\u00a0Muurrbay\u2019s decades of book-making had slowly but surely created an ecosystem of books in and\u00a0about Gumbaynggirr Language, showing that the committed, loving work of creating materials in\u00a0Aboriginal Languages can bear fruit in people, skills and publications.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have not yet fully processed my research \u201cdata\u201d, but as a research experience I suspect this one will remain unparalleled. And I offer SHARP my deep gratitude for helping enable it. Thank you.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jodie Lea Martire BA, CELTA, Grad Dip Sci(Info Serv), MCommun(CSC) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PhD candidate at UQ\u2019s Centre for Communication and Social Change <\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORCiD ID: 0000-0002-8997-8755\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

j.martire@student.uq.edu.au | www.jodiemartire.net\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With gratitude and respect for the Jagera and Turrbal peoples of Ipswich and Brisbane<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The SHARP 25th-Anniversary Fellowship supported the research of a case study in my doctoral thesis at The University of Queensland, which is examining minority-language publishing in Australia. The\u00a0case study was with my partner organisation, Muurrbay Aboriginal Language & Culture Co-operative.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6692,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1889,1887],"tags":[1935,1953],"class_list":["post-6690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conference-report","category-reviews","tag-indigenous-studies","tag-publishing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6690"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6696,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6690\/revisions\/6696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}