What is wrong with the language centre?

Okay, here it is.

So me and my merry band of student journos were taken last week to a language centre for a guided tour. The language centre's main aim is to preserve and promote the use of the different dialects amongst aboriginal people.

We're given the guided tour of a new building they're moving into, and I put it in the back of my mind that the fight against fading languages may just be a good story down the track.

So, today I decide that it's down the track and I wander on over to the centre. I ask if it's okay to interview someone about the good fight and I'm taken through to the manager of the centre only for her to say that they didn't wish to cooperate at this time.

Wah? Jah? Bah?

Apparently they're into giving journos guided tours but not into spreading the word. Go figure. So today I'm pretty much left without a story to write and am fuming like a Dickensian chimney.

Oh well, what are you going to do?

Anyhow, it's two days out from the end of my sojourn to Port Hedland and overall I would deem it to be a beneficial experience. I reccomend going out to a remote area for a bit of work experience for any up-and-coming journo.

So rarely do you get the opportunity to work in that sort of environment, and at the end of the day you manage to get a few bylines for your portfolio. Speaking of bylines...

That SMS story I wrote about a month and a half ago finally made it onto the pages of The West Australian. Of course there's been a whole song and dance in my own family about wee Jimmy getting his first byline in a masthead but now that I have one in there, I can't say I'm all that fussed by it.

It's odd, as a green journo I should be proud as punch to get my name in a masthead (with a full page no less) but I'm not jumping up and down.

Perhaps subconciously I see it not as the end goal of student journalism but as the first steps on the path of professional journalism. Despite the enormity of the occasion, I'm not overwhelmed by it and I'm certainly not stopping people in the street and yelling "I'M IN THE WEST" in an attempt to start a broad musical number.

More on this introspection as it comes to light.

'Till next time