Cool Encounters, Warm Legacies
Rudolf Raward travelled to Australia for the first time in his life in June 2025. He joined over 70 participants for the 13th Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL13). Raward is based in Papua New Guinea capital city Port Moresby, but hails from a small village on the north coast of the country: Matukar. This is one of only two villages in the world where people speak the Oceanic language Matukar Panau. In addition to giving his (first ever) conference presentation, co-authored with CHL's Associate Professor Danielle Barth, Raward met people who have played a role in the documentation and preservation of his language.
Raward was one of many people who sat down with ANU-based archivist Dr Jullia Miller, one of the lead operators of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Miller took COOL13 as an opportunity for researchers to deposit linguistic data, explore collections and improve metadata. Miller showed Raward the Matukar Panau resources in PARADISEC, which are considerable. Raward has had a hand in one of PARADISEC’s largest collections, which documents language use in his community since 2010. However, older recordings of Matukar Panau can also be found in PARADISEC, from ANU Emeritus Professor Malcolm Ross’s collection of Oceanic languages between 1977-1982.
While the names of the speakers are recorded in Ross 1986, until now PARADISEC has lacked metadata that matched the speaker names with the Matukar recordings. Miller and Raward worked together, listening to the recordings in PARADISEC and were able to identify the voices. They then enriched the archive’s metadata and credited the work of these speakers.
In addition to his work with Miller, Raward was also able to meet Ross and see the person who had worked with and recorded his community elders. From the COOL13 experience, Raward feels he has gained a much better sense of the purpose, importance and lineage of language documentation in academia.
Raward enjoyed his trip to Canberra, but didn’t particularly enjoy the weather: “It’s really cold”.
The Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL) is a major gathering for linguists working across the diverse languages of the Oceanic region. Held periodically since 1993, COOL brings together researchers, language workers, and community members to share work on linguistic description, documentation, revitalisation, and theory. COOL13, hosted at the Australian National University, continued this legacy by fostering collaboration between academic researchers and speakers of endangered and underdocumented languages, with a strong focus on practical outcomes and respectful knowledge-sharing.