Customarily, after getting the UE qualification, students with an academic or sporting bent would stay on at high school for another year in order to study for national scholarship exams and/or play for the schools' elite sporting teams. At the end of 1957, when I was 16, I decided to leave school and go to the University of Auckland to study anthropology. The connections I made in the course of that year pretty much determined the direction of the rest of my life. There I played quite a lot of sport and did English, French, History and Geography for University Entrance (UE) exams, and taught myself a bit of German on the side.ฤก958 was a watershed year. High school years, from 1954 to 1957, were more stable-I went to Napier Boys High, on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand. My mother's profession as a high school teacher took her to many places and I attended about 12 different primary schools, chiefly in her home state of Tasmania and in New Zealand. I did not meet my father again till I was 33 for most of his career as an agricultural economist he was based in Rome. My parents, both graduates of the University of Sydney, separated when I was two. I was born in Sydney but had a mobile childhood. I also owe a huge debt to my wife, Medina, who has managed family and job during my frequent lengthy absences on fieldwork and has spent years hosting speakers of Pacific Island languages who have come to live with us. I've been very fortunate in having mentors and colleagues who provided inspiration and opportunities at various key points. Other bits have to do with such matters as the role of speech formulae in nativelike command of a language, short term memory constraints on encoding speech, Australian Vernacular English, English rhyming compounds, cricket commentaries, ethnobiology, and the craft of lexicography. I've had a fairly complicated career, in that I've taught at universities in several different countries and done research on quite a diverse range of topics (1) A large part of my research and teaching has been concerned with the description and historical development of Austronesian and Papuan languages (which together number about 2000, or almost a third of the world's languages) and with what linguistics and other disciplines can tell us about the history of human settlement in the Pacific.
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