CAMRA research trip to the Central Darling - my opening 'speech'

As the CAMRA research team from University of Technology, Sydney, are about to set off for the Central Darling to work with local people and do cultural mapping in that region of western New South Wales with a video booth, I thought it would be a good time to start a blog of this journey (...and also, I was ordered to by our Community Manager, Katrina Fox!).

I also thought it would be a good chance for me to trial a speech recognition dictation software program, Mac Speech Dictate, to save my fingers doing the walking while blogging. This is my first experience with this type of software, and these are the first two paragraphs I've ever created by talking into a microphone on a computer. It is being written into a Word document as I speak. The results as you can see, are quite surprising, and in fact after only two paragraphs I am completely delighted with the time-saving future I can see in this new software.

But the speech recognition software program is just part of the technology that we are taking with us on the trip. Apart from the very obvious, velvet covered video booth -called the Outhouse-we are bringing GPS data loggers and digital recorders with us to interview artists and cultural leaders in that region.  We are also bringing paper maps for people to draw on and tell us about places of inspiration, creativity and powerful memory.

It will be interesting to see how the mix of technology and outback marred and dust work together. (I can see that the software has just typed marred instead of mud.) What is not an unknown is the helpfulness of the local people that I have been speaking to in the Central Darling in planning this trip. Today I was speaking to Dick Wagner, cultural organiser and a true local from White Cliffs, and with one phone call I feel as if we have found a real friend for the success of this research during our four days in that opal mining town. In Tllpa we have found similar support from local property owner and historian Michael McInerney. But it's not all blokes, in Menindee Margot Muscat, Auntie Beryl Carmichael, and Lorraine Looney have all given useful advice for our planned visit.

But Menindee will be the last stop on our tour which starts next week in Ivanhoe. Before we go I will try to publish a map of our itinerary and my travelling companions and researchers, Andrew Warren from the University of Wollongong and Samuel Van Ransbeeck from the Catholic University of Porto, will also, no doubt, have much to say in blog or Facebook updates.

(But just one final comment right now-I am SO impressed with this voice recognition software: a couple of names were spelt incorrectly and it couldn't cope with a town named Minnie Indy, which I will correct when I stop speaking, but everything else in this post is exactly as dictated. Time-saving in D!...also got that last word wrong.)