Research into language, culture and history
Research overview
Researchers at the University of Melbourne are documenting and safeguarding linguistic and cultural resources, celebrating the creativity of contemporary culture, and working to understanding our entwined histories.
See also PARADISEC, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages, School of Social and Political Sciences, School of Languages and Linguistics.
Projects we're involved with
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The ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) set out to establish a new approach to the science of language, departing from the universalising logic that dominated linguistics from the late 20th Century. CoEDL placed diversity, variation and change at the centre of its research model, believing that appreciating this diversity could improve understanding of the evolution of language, culture, society and humankind.
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This project will build an innovative modularised infrastructure to implement standards of data governance for cultural heritage records. This new infrastructure aims to build on the award-winning Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures collection and to capitalise on new technologies for metadata harvesting, temporal mapping, crowdsourced metadata, and automated transcription.
The project expects to promote national and international research collaboration with Australian archiving communities and to build capacity in Pacific cultural institutions. The project will benefit research data communities across the sector as well as community custodians of cultural heritage collections.
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This project aims to recover and make usable the history of Caribbean sugar as a labour migration model, cultural repertoire and source of investment for the early Australian sugar industry. Working with international slave studies centres and Australian South Sea Islander organisations, we will use methodologies from four disciplines to explore the question of Pacific labour from every perspective.
The latest digital humanities techniques will be utilised to create a database of Pacific Voyages. This will further understandings of Australia’s place in global labour and race history, create new resources for research and teaching in history, literature and sociology, and further Islander community initiatives.
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This project aims to examine the hidden histories of the Western Pacific’s Anglo and German plantations. Benefits include bringing the Pacific into conversation with global debates on unfreedom and slavery and advancing political change across Australia and the Western Pacific.
Grant Holders: Prof. Penny Edmonds (Chief Investigator, Flinders University), Prof. Deirdre Coleman (Chief Investigator, University of Melbourne), Prof. Dr. Pia Wiegmink (Investigator, BCDSS), Dr. Margaret Mishra (Investigator, University of the South Pacific), Dr. Oliver Lueb (Investigator, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum Cologne), Imelda Miller (Investigator, Queensland Museum)
Project Term: 2025–2028 -
The project will build spoken-language corpora (collections of recorded speech) in the three main English-based Pacific creoles: Tok Pisin (PNG), Pijin (Solomon Islands) and Bislama (Vanuatu). The main goal is to assist potential users, eg from Australian defence, to develop tools, based on naturalistic speech in these creoles, which can be used to communicate with locals in case of such emergencies as disaster relief operations.
Our partners
- Australian South Sea Islanders
- EASTCO (Equipe d'Accueil Sociétés traditionnelles et contemporaines en Océanie)
- Islands Bible Ministry (Solomon Islands
- Kulu Language Institute
- Massim Museum and Cultural Centre
- Melanesia Media Freedom Forum
- National University of Samoa
- Papua New Guinea National Museum
- Pacific Early Career Ocean Professional (ECOP) network under Pacific Community Center for Ocean Science (PCCOS) and Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)
- Solomon Islands National University
- Solomon Islands National Museum
- Tahitian Language Academy
- University of French Polynesia
- University of New Caledonia
- University of Papua New Guinea
- Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta
- University of the South Pacific (Fiji, Cook Islands)
Our people
Dr Sergio Jarillo de la Torre
Recent publications
Our researchers contribute to a large range of publicly-accessible publications.
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Alexeyeff, K., 2021. Back to the Future: Rewriting Fashion History from the Cook Islands, in K. Alexeyeff & G.H. Presterudstuen (eds.) Fashioning Culture: Transforming Perspectives from Oceania, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, 12(1): 25-48. Link
Alexeyeff, K., Bainton, N.A., Cox, J. and McDougall, Debra, 2021. Unequal lives: gender, race and class in the Western Pacific (p. 580). ANU Press. Link
Ballard, Chris, Stuart Bedford and Nick Thieberger 2024. 'History from fragments: reconstructing the depopulation of Efate, Vanuatu.' In Chris Ballard and Christophe Sand (eds) The Oceanic Exchange: Disease, depopulation and disruption in the post-contact Pacific. Canberra: ANU Press.
Coleman, D., 2025. Pleasure and pain in the Pacific: Review essay. The Journal of Pacific History. Link
Cox, J., Maltzahn, K., Lee, H., Whiteside, M. and Maclean, S., 2022. Bingo, gender and the moral order of the household: everyday gambling in a migrant community. Journal of Consumer Culture, 22(4), pp.852-869. Link
Dwyer, P.D. and Minnegal, M., 2020. On Reading Patrol Reports–3: Burnett River People. The Journal of Pacific History, 55(4), pp.520-533. Link
Dwyer, P.D. and Minnegal, M., 2020. On reading patrol reports–1: South of the Blucher Range. The Journal of Pacific History, 55(1), pp.115-125. Link
Dwyer, P.D. and Minnegal, M., 2020. COVID‐19 and Facebook in Papua New Guinea: Fly River Forum. Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, 7(3), pp.233-246. Link
Hicks, R.E., McDougall, D., and Oakeshott, D., 2021. The Promise of Education: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific. The Contemporary Pacific 33 (2): 301–36. Link
Jarillo, S., 2022. The Kula of the Gospels: Christianity, Magic, and Exchange in the Trobriand Islands. The Contemporary Pacific, 34(2), 293–325. Link
Jarillo, S., 2021. Trobriand Tales, Kwanebuyee Kilivila: Myths and Folktales from the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press https://doi.org/10.5479/si.14125958.v1
Jarillo, S., 2021. How Malinowski sailed the Midnight Sun: the academic conference as ethnographic performance. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27(2), pp.360-383. Link
Jarillo, S., Darrah, A., Crivelli, C., Mkwesipu, C., Kalubaku, K., Toyagena, N., Okwala, G. and Gumwemwata, J., 2020. Believing the unbelieved: Reincarnation, cultural authority, and politics in the Trobriand Islands. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(2), pp.409-419. Link
Jarillo, S., Darrah, A., Crivelli, C., Mkwesipu, C., Kalubaku, K., Toyagena, N., Okwala, G. and Gumwemwata, J., 2020. Where are our ancestors? Rethinking Trobriand cosmology. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(2), pp.367-391. Link
McDougall, Debra, and Zobule, A.G., 2021. ‘All Read Well’: Schooling on Solid Ground in a Solomon Islands Language Movement. The Contemporary Pacific 33 (2): 410–39. Link (preproof)
McDougall, Debra, 2021. Gendered Ambition and Disappointment: Women and Men in a Vernacular Language Education Movement in Melanesia. In N. A. Bainton, D. McDougall, K. Alexeyeff, & J. Cox (Eds.), Unequal Lives: Gender, Race and Class in the Western Pacific pp. 183–211). ANU Press. Link
McDougall, Debra. 2020. “Beyond Rupture: Christian Culture in the Pacific.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 31 (2): 203–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12364
Minnegal, M. and Dwyer, P.D., 2023. The Beharell Patrol of 1938: The First Government Patrol Across the Land of Kubo People (Nomad District, Western Province, Papua New Guinea). The Journal of Pacific History, 58(2), pp.158-175. Link
Minnegal, M. and Dwyer, P.D., 2020. On Reading Patrol Reports–2: Travels in East Awin. The Journal of Pacific History, 55(3), pp.383-393. Link
Pearson, J., McNamara, K.E. and McMichael, C., 2022. International student mobility: Pacific Islander experiences of higher education in Australia. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 63(2), pp.194-206. Link
de Saint Leger, D., & Mullan, K., 2021. New Caledonia: a semiotic analysis of the landscape as an opportunity for learning. In G. Niedt, & C. Seals (Eds.), Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom (1st ed., pp. 57-74). London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. Link
de Saint Leger, D., & Mullan, K., 2018. A short-term study abroad program: an intensive linguistic and cultural experience on a neighboring Pacific island. In C. Sanz, & A. Morales-Font (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Study Abroad Research and Practice (1st ed., pp. 293-307). Great Britain: Routledge - Taylor & Francis. Link
Passmore, S., San Roque, L., Gillespie, K., Nath, S., Davey, K., Mullan, K., Cawley, T., Biggs, J., Billington, R., Evans, B., Thieberger, N., & Barth, D. 2025. English-based acoustic models perform well in the forced alignment of two English-based Pacific Creoles. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Vol. 1: Long papers, pp. 31172–31183). Association for Computational Linguistics. Link
Thieberger, N., 2025. Records of Pacific languages: Where are they and who can see them? (Department of Pacific Affairs In Brief series). Department of Pacific Affairs, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University. Link
Thieberger, N., Aird, M., Bracknell, C., Gibson, J., Harris, A., Langton, M., Sculthorpe, G., & Simpson, J., 2024. The new protectionism: Risk aversion and access to Indigenous heritage records. Archives and Manuscripts, 51(2), 23–42. Link
Thieberger, N. and Harris, A., 2022. When Your Data is My Grandparents Singing. Digitisation and Access for Cultural Records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). Data Science Journal, 21: 9, pp. 1–7. Link
Thieberger, N. (ed)., 2021. John Willoughby Layard: Notes re villages of Pango, Vila and Eretap. Link
Vernaudon, J., Thieberger, N., Bambridge T., and Parent T., 2021. Un nouveau souffle numérique pour les corpus en langues océaniennes, Journal de la Société des Océanistes, 153: 323-336. Link