Tongan

We have so many variations of cousins.

So if I say Ibn Khalti, that means the son of my... auntie on my mother's side if i say bentami that means the daughter of my uncle on my father's side and so you know when you think about arabs and lebs you think about like hundreds of cousins but actually for us it's way more detailed than that in how we articulate our relationship to our cousins but in contradistinction if you look at the tongan language um and pacifica languages in general there's also no word for cousin but it's not broken down the way arabs do it there's all this distance and all these details um in the tongan language and i'm drawing this information from one of the authors we'll talk about later on today as we need done but in the tongan language you know, every cousin and every auntie and uncle is a type of sibling and a type of parent.

And so you can already see how just having linguistic diversity on a street, if you had a street where people are speaking Japanese, Arabic and Tongan, which is actually a very normal thing in Western Sydney, that description of those three language groups, you know, speaking their language, you know, in three homes alongside each other or in an apartment block, is very normal.

And so each one of those languages introduces a different way of experiencing and imagining reality.

So just imagine all the kinds of realities you have in Western Sydney.

My favourite debut novel is Dirtport Islanders by Winnie Dunn.

Winnie Dunn is the general manager of Sweatshop, a wonderful editor and also has a very deep personal relationship with me, so I am biased.

But this was the first Tongan Australian novel ever written.

you

or Samoan?

No, I'm Maori.

I have to rep the MMT, man.

Actual?

I have a lot of friends, yeah, that are Tongan.

And so I'm like, hey, if they can do it, I'm going to do it too.