The accounts of Casey’s wife, Maie Casey, by contrast, leap off the page and make me want to read more about her. So I’ve gone and got myself hold of Diane Langmore’s 1997 biography of Maie Casey “Glittering Surfaces”: www.booktopia.com.au/glittering-s...

The biggest decline in enrolments observed in 2023 were in Chinese (down 9.4%), Japanese (down 5.3%), and Indonesian (down 12.4%):

The 2023 data shows another significant (3.9%) year-on-year decline in the number of Australian students studying languages at Year 12 level. This equates to approximately 700 fewer Year 12 students studying languages nationally in 2023 compared to 2022.

The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) recently published national Year 12 subject enrolment data for the 2023 school year* -- including for languages:

www.acicis.edu.au/wp-content/u...

In 2023 the number of Year 12 students enrolled in languages in Australian schools declined to a new record low of 7.6%--or roughly 18,000 of Australia’s 237,000 Year 12 students. This is down from 8.2% of the national Year 12 cohort in 2022.

Data released recently by the Western Australian School Curriculum and Standards Authority (SCSA) shows that 50 students from nine WA schools sat the Year 12 ATAR examination in Indonesian in 2024--down 22% from 64 students from eleven schools in 2023.

Hi @erincook.bsky.social. Reading now while on holiday in Guilderton, WA. Loving the sense her (Bondan’s) personality it imparts. She was so clearly her own person and such a do-er. What a bad ass.

High up on my reading list: www.dukeupress.edu/the-complete...

Read the 2008 Inside Indonesia book reivew here: www.insideindonesia.org/archive/arti...

As Yogyakarta-based author and literature researcher Muhidin M Dahlan explains, the broad-based granting of THR to Indonesian workers was a hard-won concession that the Indonesian labour movement campaigned for during the 1950s and 1960s.

Fingers crossed "1 Kakak 7 Ponakan" will be available to Australian audiences soon. 🤞🤞🤞

1. 'Amir Sjarifoeddin: Politics and Truth in Indonesia’ by Rudolf Mrázek. Among a crowded field of charismatic 20th-century Indonesian nationalists and revolutionaries, the biography of Indonesia's 2nd prime minister is a v. compelling and poignant read: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

Full NSW data deck is available for download here: www.acicis.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20250128_LP-Deck-2024_NSW_FULL-DECK.pdf

In % terms this is the largest yoy growth in HSC languages enrolments since 2003. The jump in 2024 was due to big yor increases in HSC enrolments in Spanish (up 27% or 114 students on 2023), Chinese (up 13% or 105 students), French (up 11% or 99 students), and Italian (up 14% or 69 students).

More encouragingly, the number of students sitting the HSC in (all) languages actually grew by 6.6% (or 363 students) in 2024—from 5,514 students in 2023 to 5,877 students in 2024.

The number of Year 12 students in New South Wales who sat the HSC examination in Indonesian fell by a further 3.7% last year according to the latest statistics from the NSW Education Standards Authority (tinyurl.com/5yv6wnc9) from 82 students in 2023 to 79 students in 2024.

As recently as September last year (2023), the Australian Government’s newly formulated 'Invested: Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040' had as its first recommendation (p.27) that...

Without addressing the upstream problem (tinyurl.com/3ccb8y2x) of falling rates of language learning in schools--particularly senior secondary--it is unlikely (read: impossible) that the universities will turn these trends around on their own.

The study of languages by Australian university students hit a new 23-year low in 2023 with just 1.73% of the nearly 1.1 million domestic students enrolled at Australian universities in 2023 studying a language as part of their degree. This is down from 4.04% in 2005.