Indigenous Word Lists

The focus of Indigenous language collecting in the 1800s in the Northern Territory was the British military settlements, overland telegraph stations, colonial towns and Christian missions.

The people collecting languages were rarely trained linguists and were motivated by many different reasons. Language preservation was only one of them. The languages collected sometimes bear no resemblance to languages today or have significant discrepancies.

The context in which the language collecting occurred was not often recorded. Indigenous peoples’ viewpoints, their names and their circumstances are seldom given or described. Glimpses of Indigenous agency can however be found in Aboriginal people seeking compensation for their work, undermining projects by supplying incorrect words or mediating which words or languages would be supplied.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) has established the AUSTLANG database which provides information about hundreds of Indigenous languages.
 

Thomas Wilson’s 1835 journal is one of the oldest publications the library holds containing language material from the Northern Territory.

Wilson was a surgeon, medical supervisor of convicts and keen explorer. In June 1829, he visited the Fort Wellington military settlement at Raffles Bay on the Cobourg Peninsula. While there he collected ‘the dialect of the natives of Raffles Bay’. Modern linguists describe this ‘dialect’ as a mix of Iwaidja and Marrku. Wilson also recorded men and women’s personal names, body parts, plant and animal names, place names and words for weapons and utensils.

Wilson wrote of his difficulty in obtaining ‘the true sound’ of Aboriginal peoples’ words. He also observed that although Aboriginal people across the colonies were physically similar they possessed ‘little affinity of language’. Wilson’s observations show that as early as the 1830s there is an understanding of the diversity of Indigenous languages spoken throughout Australia.
 

George Windsor Earl travelled to the military settlement of Port Essington in 1838 bent on a scheme to colonise the north of Australia. He was an active contributor to the emerging science of ‘ethnography’ and published his observations of both ‘Papuans’ and Australian Aboriginal people in 1853.

Earl collected short word lists from five different locations along the north Australian coast - Port Essington, Popham Bay, Croker Island, Van Diemen Gulf and Mountnorris Bay. 

Earl documented the way that coastal Aboriginal people had become proficient in the language of the Macassan trepang fishers and how they chose to use this language in their communication with strangers. This caused initial confusion and Earl notes, “some vocabularies were collected which consisted almost entirely of this patois, under the supposition that it was the language of the [A]borigines” (p223).
 

The Italian priest Don Angelo Confalonieri arrived at Port Essington in 1846 determined to convert local Aborigines to Christianity. Learning their language would be his means of doing it. He built a small hut away from the Victoria settlement and began work. In exchange for rice, Aboriginal people supplied Confalonieri with words and he produced two phrase books in a mixture of Garig and Iwaidja languages.

Confalonieri’s phrase books are far more detailed than the word lists being collected at the time. He also produced a unique map of the Cobourg region. Inscribed with the names of seven ‘tribes’, it signifies an early awareness that specific Aboriginal groups belonged to distinct tracts of land. 

In the main, Confalonieri’s informants chose to supply him with the Macassan names for places. Additional evidence that Aboriginal people mediated the type of knowledge they were prepared to divulge is apparent in the following observation:

“… when he applied to them in writing his vocabulary, they would tell him some obscenity instead of the word he wanted, and when the poor padre came to address the natives he wondered how it was they laughed so at his sermons” – The Journal of John Sweatman.

Wulna/Djerimanga people from the lower Adelaide River supplied their words to draftsman John Bennett who was part of the 1864-66 NT Survey Expedition. He described their language as the ‘Woolner District Dialect’. 

Bennett’s published vocabulary comprises around 230 words in two lists – one in English, the other in ‘Woolner’.

Following the recall of this expedition to Adelaide, Bennett joined Goyder’s 1869 expedition to Port Darwin and continued his language collecting work. The surveyors did not take heed of warnings that they would be speared in a reprisal for earlier violence. In May 1869, Bennett was fatally speared and his work was published anonymously.

That language collection was considered to be an aid to colonisation is evidenced by the copy of Bennett’s vocabulary held in the State Library of New South Wales, annotated with Larrakia words and place names by Police Inspector Paul Foelsche who arrived in Darwin in 1870.
 

During the 1870s, Tasmanian born writer, Edward Micklethwaite Curr, embarked on a project exploring differences and similarities in Aboriginal culture, society and languages across Australia. 

He sent questionnaires to newspaper editors, government officials, missionaries and rural workers around the country asking a number of questions. The questionnaire included a list of 63 common English words for which he wanted the local Indigenous equivalent. 

Curr published his survey results in a monumental 4 volume set called ‘The Australian Race’. Volume 4 contains more than 7,000 Indigenous words gathered from 160 different places throughout Australia. The vocabulary list included commonly-used words for plant and animal names, body parts, weapons, relationship terms, numbers, the natural world and weather events.

Northern Territory vocabularies included those from Port Essington, Adelaide River, Darwin, Caledon Bay, Roper River, Charlotte Waters and Alice Springs.
 

Arrernte, the language spoken in and around Alice Springs, is one of the principal languages in Central Australia and is divided into several distinct dialects. The earliest published vocabulary of Arrernte was collected by Christopher Giles at the Charlotte Waters Telegraph Station in 1875. Further word lists from Charlotte Waters were collected by Francis Gillen and RE Warburton and published in Curr’s The Australian Race. 

Mounted Constable William Willshire, stationed at Alice Springs from 1882, recorded and published three books which included vocabularies of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs. Willshire’s reputation and work is fraught because of his violence and attitudes towards Aboriginal people.

Central Australian missionaries reported the extreme violence occurring in the region, fearing that this violence, along with disease and internal disputes, would result in Aboriginal peoples’ ‘probable entire extinction at a no very remote period’. 
 

Western and Southern Arrernte peoples first encountered missionaries in 1877 when Hermann Kempe and Wilhelm Schulze established the Hermannsburg Mission on their country along the Finke River.

The German Lutherans believed that the word of God should be taught in Aboriginal peoples’ own languages. Kempe was at Hermannsburg for nearly 15 years and during that time compiled the first dictionary and grammar in Arrernte language. Containing nearly 2,000 words, it was huge compared to Curr’s brief word lists. Bible stories, prayers and hymns were also translated and a number of school primers produced. 

Published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia in 1891, Kempe’s work on Arrernte grammar appeared alongside papers on fungal flora, the 1890 solar eclipse, and descriptions of new species of plants and animals.
 

Words from Larrakia, ‘Wulnarr’, ‘Awarra’ and ‘Aggrakundi’ speaking peoples from the Darwin region were collected by Thomas Parkhouse, accountant and paymaster with the South Australian Railways who came to Darwin in 1889.

Parkhouse was in Darwin for under three years. He doesn’t provide context to his language collecting but acknowledges the assistance given to him by Father O’Brien of the Jesuit Mission at Rapid Creek and also writes how ‘his boy’ – unnamed – corrected his work. 

‘Remarks on the native tongues in the neighborhood of Port Darwin’ was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia in 1894. It includes a short word list collected by EJ Kemp from ‘Natives of the Katherine’.

‘Awarra’ is today described as ‘Warray’. Wulnarr is Wuna/Woolner/Wulnar. Larrakia is Gulumoerrgin. Aggrakundi is Wulwulam.
 

‘Borroloola’ was one of the few colonial attempts to name a Northern Territory town after an Indigenous place name from the area.

WG Stretton was the customs officer, postmaster and harbour master at Borroloola from 1888 and one of the respondents to a questionnaire sent from the South Australian Museum trying to capture information about Aboriginal people in the 1890s.

Stretton made various ethnographic observations and included a 270-word-plus vocabulary in the ‘dialect’ or language he described as from the ‘Leeanuwa tribe’ (Yanyuwa). He included many phrases, such as “Have you seen white man? Arndara moonanga?” “You go away – bowitzee arcarra”, and he also recorded 69 personal names of all the ‘Leeanuwa’ people resident at Borroloola on 24 May 1893.
 

Baldwin Spencer first met the Alice Springs postmaster Frank Gillen during the 1894 Horn expedition to Central Australia. Mightily impressed with each other they began a long and detailed correspondence that culminated in the 1899 publication, The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Far removed from the simple word lists and conjectures about culture of the earlier works, Spencer and Gillen’s study received international acclaim and fostered a flurry of anthropological enquiry in the early 20th century.

Encouraged by Baldwin Spencer, the natural scientist Norman Tindale spent most of 1921 in the Groote Eylandt and Roper River areas collecting artefacts, languages and culture. It was here that he learnt through his main informant, a Ngandi man named Maroadunei, about the concept, rigour and significance of bounded ‘tribal’ territories. This knowledge led to Tindale's project of documenting and mapping more than 150 Indigenous language groups across Australia – debunking the concept of ‘nomadic’ Aboriginal people and providing the basis for all subsequent language mapping work.