Aboriginal words and Flinders Island

Words are powerful. Yesterday, at The Ian Potter Gallery, I looked at a video artwork by Julie Gough. I was so entranced by the words she used that I stood through two viewings of the seventeen minute presentation

The contrast of the words against the idyllic video clips made a strong impression on the viewer. Here are two sets of photos from the display:

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********************************************************************************** Other Aboriginal words featured in the artwork - for instance, the words for flour, tobacco, musket, sheep, blanket. (I've posted on my other blog about the word for 'kangaroo dog'.) However, the ones that made the most vivid impression on me were two concepts that must have been new to the indigenous inhabitants - flagellate and hang by rope. What terrible ideas the Europeans brought with them.

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I hope you get a chance to see this artwork. It will make an impression on you.

bilingualism for Aboriginal Australians

When I went to the Royal Melbourne Show today - great fun - I was given a free copy of the Herald Sun newspaper. When I read it, I was quite surprised to read an article by Andrew Bolt criticising the push to maintain indigenous languages through a bilingual approach to language education. He suggested that such a system would result in Aboriginal people who could speak only their 'native tongue'. Among other things, he said:

For them [young Aborigines out bush], no English means no future...[English is] the one language they need to save themselves from a life on welfare...

Firstly, it isn't self-evident that not speaking English means a person has no future. Secondly, bilingual education should result in people who speak two languages well.

It's strange, but Mr Bolt didn't seem to acknowledge the meaning of the prefix bi-. My understanding is that it means two. So an efficient education system would teach two languages, not just one.

The Macquarie Online Dictionary defines bilingual:

adjective 1. able to speak two languages with approximately equal facility.

Later in the article Bolt said:

In particular, the committee [the federal Parliament's standing committee on indigenous affairs] want bilingual education for Aboriginal children, in the teary-eyed hope that somehow finding competent teachers who can teach, say, maths in Pitjantjatjara or Pintupi will help children learn better English, too.
Just how such unusually qualified and effective teachers could be found, no one really knows.

This is a strange misunderstanding of how bilingual education works. It's not necessary that the speakers of each language teach every subject area. My sister worked in two different bilingual programs in suburban Melbourne. She doesn't speak either of the non-English languages. It was her job to teach in English, and she focused on certain subjects - for instance, one year she taught English, science, social studies and Physical Education. In other words, she taught half the curriculum.

Mr Bolt's not an educator, so perhaps he is unaware of the body of research that shows bilingual education usually results in more competence in both languages. One language is not learned at the expense of the other.

Narbethong - a cheerful place

Recently I walked with my dog on a track near Narbethong. As usual, I wondered about the origin of this place name.

Housenameheritage says the word means cheerful place, in one of the many indigenous languages of Australia, but unfortunately it doesn't say which Aboriginal language. I thought of looking at a map I have of indigenous groupings before European settlement, but there are so many language groups for Victoria that I didn't feel confident I could work it out.

A further search came up with the information that it said to be from  Woiwurrung (or Daungwurrung) language, but there is some uncertainty whether that is correct.

How good it would be to live in a place named for its cheerfulness. (Of course, we will always remember the tragedy of the 2009 bushfires).

At any rate, Penny and I had a cheerful time, even if she did get covered in mud.

Australian Aboriginal place names

I took a trip on the Smartbus yesterday, pretending to be a tourist in my own city, and it was most enjoyable. A friend and I boarded the bus at Heidelberg and went to Mordialloc, breaking our journey at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

When we were sitting on the beach at Mordialloc, enjoying the overcast but warm day, I was struck by the fact that Mordialloc sounds as if it might be an indigenous place-name and that it phonetically resembles Woori Yallock, the name of a town in the Upper Yarra Valley.

When I looked on the Dictionary of Aboriginal Placenames in Victoria, I found that the traditional name for the beach I was sitting on was Murdayaluk, with murda meaning low/short and yaluk meaning river or creek.

Woori Yallock means running creek.

There were other places in the database with Yallock in the placename.

As I sat there, I wondered who had rested on this beach in the past, and how they had lived. And I wondered when they had told the newly-arrived Europeans what they should call the place.

Given that before the nineteenth century place names were recorded orally rather than in written form, I guess it's not surprising that the written forms of names were not consistent.

At the Victorian Government's Land Channel, it says:

The widespread use of Indigenous names provides a strong connection to our Indigenous heritage and acknowledges Indigenous culture. However some names may not be strictly accurate because of unfamiliarity with Indigenous language and culture at the time they were originally recorded.

Most of the Indigenous languages did not have a written form when Victoria’s places and features were being named under European settlement (although some Indigenous communities used message sticks to convey information between groups).

The people who first recorded fragments of these languages were not linguists paying careful attention to subtleties of pronunciation they were generally surveyors and explorers, who were usually the first Europeans to travel through the land and record names in their maps, charts and fieldbooks.