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Dr Kazuko Obata
Kazuko Obata arrived in Australia from Japan in 1991. She first worked on her first language, Japanese, in order to understand why some aspects of English grammar is hard to learn for Japanese. This inspired her to study previously undescribed languages and wrote a PhD thesis on a grammar of Bilua, a language spoken in the Solomon Islands. 
In completing her PhD thesis, she decided to use her knowledge and skills for the maintenance of Indigenous languages and moved to a remote Aboriginal community, Warburton, WA, where she worked as a community linguist for the Ngaaanyatjarra language maintenance program. She holds a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Language Studies, ANU.
Kazuko is the AIATSIS Language Unit's Access Research Fellow. She is responnsible for integrating the ASEDA database into the Australian Indigenous Langauges Electronic Collection (AILEC).
Current research focus
- AUSTLANG (web-based Australian Indigenous language database)
- ASEDA (Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive)
- OZBIB 2 (a linguistic bibliography of Aboriginal Australia and Torres Strait Islands)
- National Indigneous Languages Survey 2 (NILS 2)
Contact
kazuko.obata@aiatsis.gov.au