Wednesday Forum: your favourite food

It's been a little while since my last Wednesday Forum.

This week's column in the Armidale Express (it will come up next week) is on New England food. In this case not the broader New England, but the New England, the Northern Tablelands. The the is always added, in part to distinguish the Tablelands from the broader new state New England.

The post was triggered in part by Sophie Masson's The best French-style cheese outside of France, a hymn of praise for Tasmanian food. There Sophie said in part:

But what was also an unexpected revelation was the discovery of just how much good food there was in Tasmania, and how they've already developed a real regional sense of produce, much more than anywhere else in Australia. Tasmanians are actually developing that real understanding of 'terroir' which to my mind is what so characterises French food and makes it so exciting and distinctive and authentic. Even though it is something that is slowly growing in the rest of Australia, I think Tasmanians are way ahead when it comes to that, perhaps because of the very compactness of the state, they are much better able to co-ordinate efforts, so that from well set up farmgate sales to markets to specialist shops, you can try all kinds of regional specialities, from excellent charcuterie to gorgeous seafood, home-smoked fish and farm-fresh oysters to organic ciders and the best cheese outside of France.

The post made me say, well, what about New England? Now there is a problem here.

In my column I wrote of the foods that I had known as a child, all heavily influenced by local availability. This was cold climate food, very different from that found on the coast.

Since then, two things have happened.

Older dishes have dropped out of favour, replaced by new trends - that misnomer modern Australian cuisine effectively summarises the trend. This has created uniformity.

The second and more positive trend is the spread of new and speciality foods across New England. An example is pasta based on Western Slopes speciality wheat. Another is the spread of olive trees to the point that the phrase feral olive has entered the Australian vocabulary. I actually love the idea of a feral olive tree - it's sort of a base for a bad horror movie! While this trend is positive, it's yet to knit together into anything coherent on a regional basis.

I don't think that you can have a broad New England cuisine, the place is much to varied. But the different regions within New England do, had, their own varieties. 

All this got me thinking and made me ask the question that is the topic of this forum, what is your favourite food?

You needn't answer with broader New England specific examples, although I would love some of those for that we help me flesh out my thinking on New England food. I just think that it's a nice topic.  

New England Aboriginal life - Cultural connections, Bundjalung

Note to readers: This is the seventh in a continuing series introducing readers to past and present Aboriginal life in New England. Those who are interested can find a full list of posts by either clicking New England Aboriginal life or, if you want, to read in date order from one up, click on Introducing New England Aboriginal life.

In my last post I mentioned how Aboriginal sounds and music have had a great influence on the broader Australian ear. As an example, I used music inspired by the Bundjalung people from New England's Northern Rivers.

The following very short clip called cultural connections deals with the links between the Bundjalung people and their land. It starts with spoken Bundjalung. In New England Aboriginal life - sounds of Gamilaraay, I said in part:

To the untrained ear, Australia's Aboriginal languages sound much the same. It's a bit like French, Spanish and Italian and their myriad dialects.

If you listen to this and then Gamilaraay, you will see what I mean.

The clip was prepared for primary schools. The NSW Education Department actually does a a pretty good job in presenting Aboriginal material.

My complaint, call it prejudice if you like, is that too much Aboriginal material is jammed down kids' throats without context beyond that of the injustices done to the Aborigines. The Aborigines as people vanish.

 

New England Aboriginal life - Bundjalung by Aramis

Note to readers: This is the sixth in a continuing series introducing readers to past and present Aboriginal life in New England. Those who are interested can find a full list of posts by either clicking New England Aboriginal life or, if you want, to read in date order from one up, click on Introducing New England Aboriginal life.

New England's Aboriginal peoples love all sorts of music, although country and rap are especially deadly. Deadly means cool, great.

Aboriginal sounds and music have a great influence on the broader Australian ear. The sound of the didgerdoo are instantly recognisable to any Australian. This piece by Aramis is simply called Bundjalung.

The Bundjalung are the New England Aboriginal language group whose territory extended from the northern banks of the Clarence River into what is now called Southern Queensland. While many of the Bundjalung dialects collapsed through the process of language destruction that I described in New England Aboriginal life - process of language destruction, Bundjalung is still spoken today.

New England Aboriginal life - process of language destruction

Note to readers: This is the fifth in a continuing series introducing readers to past and present Aboriginal life in New England. Those who are interested can find a full list of posts by either clicking New England Aboriginal life or, if you want, to read in date order from one up, click on Introducing New England Aboriginal life.

This is the third post on Aboriginal language in my New England Aboriginal life series. The first post, New England Aboriginal life - introducing language, was as the name says. Then my next post, New England Aboriginal life - sounds of Gamilaraay, was included to allow you to hear one New England language brought back from the edge of extinction.

This post, an excerpt from a paper given in Armidale in July 2010, deals with the process of language destruction.  But first, a video tribute to the languages spoken for thousands of years by Australia's first people. From the CD 'Balance', by Bruce Watson, featuring Bruce with Tracey Roberts on piano and Gavan McCarthy on bass. See www.brucewatsonmusic.com.

Every language lost is a way of seeing the world lost. Many Aboriginal people refer to these languages not as lost but 'sleeping', and are working hard to maintain and re-awaken languages.

In considering the languages spoken at the time of European colonisation, we cannot assume that the languages spoken in 1788 were the same as those spoken earlier, nor can we assume that language distribution was the same in geographic terms. There have been substantial changes in language even in the last few hundred years, while we know that territorial boundaries shifted with time.

A key feature of the more recent shifts has been the collapse of languages marked by many dialects into a smaller number of dialects or even a single language. Some languages just vanished. The language revival movement of recent years, something that I will discuss a little later, has necessarily focused on broader commonalities.

The initial spread of European settlement in New England was quite slow. It took thirty six years for the edge of settlement to reach the Upper Hunter. However, the impact of colonisation spread beyond the frontier.

The smallpox epidemic of 1789-90 that began in Sydney, and probably also that of 1828, appears to have had a devastating effect on at least some populations, while other diseases such as venereal disease also spread beyond the frontier. Previously separate groups were forced together in order to survive.

European settlement exploded from 1824, driven by the potential returns on wool, a high value product that could support high transport costs. Within thirty years, all of New England had been at least thinly settled.

In the face of progressive white settlement, Aborigines withdrew from some parts of traditional territory to other less settled areas. Aborigines from different groups came to work together in things such as pastoral work.

These processes merged languages. Then later relocations of Aborigines by the Aboriginal Protection, later Welfare, Board created in 1888 forced people together from different language groups so that English became a common language. Further, the use of Aboriginal languages was effectively discouraged as time passed.

The work of Professor Peter Austin, an Australian linguist who played a major role in the description and documentation of the Gamilaraay language, provides a framework for further considering the way these various forces interacted upon New England’s Aboriginal languages.

In a 2006 lecture on the survival of languages, Professor Austin suggested that the strength or weakness of a language could be determined by a very small number of linked parameters[1]. I say linked because the variables interact, creating interacting causal patterns.

The intergenerational transfer of language, the extent to which children were learning the language from their parents, was the first variable. Once Aboriginal children stopped learning and using the language with their parents, language decline became inevitable. This explains why discouragement of language use was so important; it weakened generational transfer.

The second parameter was the percentage of speakers among the total population. No matter how small the group speaking the language, the language would survive if it was the dominant tongue. Again, we can see how the disruption created by colonisation worked against language survival; the arrival of new settlers speaking another language, the mixing of groups, progressively turned the Aboriginal languages in any area into minority tongues.

This fed into a third parameter in language survival, domains and functions of use, the contexts and situations in which the language is regularly used. At the time of colonisation, each language occupied the whole field other than communication with neighbours where both languages might be used. Further, there were also different varieties of language, ceremonial and religious, that survived because they were linked to social structures.

The arrival of the Europeans disrupted this. Aborigines and Europeans needed to communicate. To do this, they needed some form of common language.

As settlement spread, creoles (mixtures of Aboriginal and English) emerged as Aborigines and settlers learned to communicate with each other. European concepts and words were adopted into local languages to explain new things. Examples in Gamilaraay include wajiin, ‘white woman’, from “white gin” and ganijibal, ‘policeman’, from “constable”. In the Gamilaraay case, words were generally restructured to meet the forms of the local language[2].

Some Europeans did learn to speak the local Aboriginal languages. Edward Ogilvie, for example, was ten years old when his family settled in 1826 at Merton on what was then the edge of European settlement in the Upper Hunter[3] He learned to speak the local tongue, probably a variant of Gamilaraay, as a child. In 1840 he and his brother took up land along the Clarence River. Again Ogilvie learned to speak the language, the local Bandjalung dialect, and was apparently a fluent speaker.

Despite examples like Ogilvie, the great variety in Aboriginal languages worked against widespread adoption, as did speed of European settlement and the emergence of creoles.

Professor Austin’s fourth parameter in language survival, attitudes and language ideology, also played a role. The term “language ideology” is a modern one and needs to be used with care because current attitudes can blind. There was no language ideology as such in the early period. However, attitudes and language ideology were still important on both sides of the frontier and were to become more so later in the period.

To at least some Europeans[4], acquisition of English was central to the civilisation of the Aborigines. The complex changing attitudes towards the Aborigines and the way this played out in official policy is beyond the scope of this paper. The key point for our purposes is that the speaking of Aboriginal languages came to be effectively discouraged.

Somewhat similar attitudes played out in the Aboriginal communities themselves. The links between language and ceremonial and religious life, the importance of what came to be called in English the dreaming, meant that certain language was barred to outsiders. This meant that such language was generally not recorded by European observers. As traditional life was disrupted and inter-generational transfer reduced, much language was lost.

The pattern of loss varied greatly across New England. Aboriginal people themselves retained far more language, as well as knowledge of their own history, than European observers realised. In my own case, for example, I was as a member of Isabel McByde’s pioneering Australian pre-history group in 1966. I did not know that Bandalung had survived as a living language until I read Malcolm Calley’s 1959 PhD thesis on Banjalang social organisation as part of my work[5].

Language survival was greatest among the big population language groups on the North Coast. This was partly a matter of population size, but also links to the presence of what we might call refuge areas, places that allowed concentrations of Aboriginal people to live togther with relatively less disruption than occurred inland[6].

Concluding my discussion on the process of language destruction, the factors that Professor Austin pointed to in considering language decline are just as important in considering language revival. We cannot turn the clock back. If New England’s Aboriginal languages are to survive or re-appear as living languages, then it will be because they come back into use across domains and are then passed between generations.

I make this point for a number of reasons. The first is that there is a view that language re-generation is in some ways artificial. I do not accept that view: language is a key expression of culture. However, if it is to grow it cannot be treated as a museum piece, frozen into its past. It has to evolve to meet new needs.

There is nothing necessarily wrong in preserving a language for use on ceremonial occasions. However, it cannot then be counted as as a living language. A living language is a changing language, one learned by a variety of people for a variety of purposes.

In later posts I will talk in more detail about language survival, about those who recorded the languages and the emergence of the language revival movement seeking to bring languages back to the life.

---

[1] Peter K Austin, Survival of Languages, Lecture 3, 3 February 2006, Twenty First Annual Darwin College Lecture Serries 2005. Accessed on-line 21 August 2009

[2] Peter K Austin, Article MS5040, Languages of the World: Gamilaraay, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics Ell2, p4, accessed on-line 19 August 2009.

[3] George Farwell, Squatter's Castle: The saga of a pastoral dynasty (Angus & Robertson; Sydney 1983).

[4] This point needs to be checked for historical accuracy. See Jim Fletcher Clean, Clad and Courteous

[5] M J C Calley, Bandjalang Social Organisation. PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1959.

[6] Michael O’Rourke advised this conclusion is consistent with his own detailed study of the Kamilaroi. O’Rouke personal communication.

Around the New England media 15 - small town & independent focus

It is some time since I did a media round-up. In this one, I want to focus on small towns plus the independent media.

In the north west opal mining town of Lightning Ridge, the Ridge News reports that the Australian Opal Centre is rallying its supporters for an application for funding to construct the Australian Opal Centre building at Three Mile, Lightning Ridge.

The Australian Government’s Regional Development Australia Fund (RDAF) is a $1 billion national program to support regional infrastructure projects that will improve economic and social outcomes by building on unique regional capacity and potential. Applications for the first round of funding close on Friday May 13 so the heat is on AOC staff and committee to complete their application.

These types of proposals are very important because they build the infrastructure that can support future development.

Staying in Lightning Ridge, the News reports that the town has been abuzz with tourists. This includes the Namoi Valley Antique Vehicle Club who stayed overnight. "It was such a pleasure", the paper reports, "to see the various vintage cars around the street."

This photo shows David and Helen Revell in their 1906 Alldays.

I wanted to stay in Western New England and move to Walgett next. Sadly, the weekly Walgett Spectator does not have a web site! 

Moving east to a bigger centre, Armidale's independent local newspaper is, oddly, called The Independent.

I write for the Rural Press owned Armidale Express, the third oldest surviving newspaper in NSW. In fact, two of the three oldest papers in what is still NSW are in New England - the Express plus the Maitland Mercury.

The oldest is Granny Herald, still fulminating over its knitting at anything that threatens Sydney.

I grew up thinking of the SMH as the enemy because of its three stage approach. If it wasn't of interest to its predominantly Sydney readership, the paper ignored the matter. If it was of interest but had no impact on Sydney, the paper would report it, if often with a degree of condescension. If it threatened Sydney's power or economic interests, the paper would sneer and attempt to discredit.

I'm not sure that anything has changed. 

But I mustn't forget The Independent. Frankly, in terms of web sites it really puts the Express in the shade!

Under the banner TAS Headmaster to be hung with predecessors, the paper reports on the unveiling of a portrait of The Armidale School headmaster Murray Guest.

I am a TAS old boy, as are a number of others who write on New England interests such as Paul Barratt, so this story is of interest to us.  However, the Independent had another recent story that was of broader significance. Yet you wouldn't get this if you didn't have background knowledge.

Under the heading Local Aboriginal Land Council kicks goals, the paper reports that Deputy Chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Tom Briggs, has congratulated the Armidale Local Aboriginal Land Council (ALALC) for its way out of financial and governance issues that have plagued the organisation over a number of years.

Just a small story, but an interesting one.

The photo shows in the centre Annette McCarthy, CEO of the Land Council and on the right Tom Briggs, Deputy Chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Councils.

Annette is the daughter of Bill McCarthy, the former Labor member for Armidale in the NSW Parliament. She took up the job as CEO of ALALC last year, the first non-Aboriginal person to hold the position. My congratulations.

Moving north, The Southern Free Times is actually a Queensland newspaper. However, it covers the northern or Queensland end of the New England Tablelands, the area known as the Granite Belt. Here the state border actually bisects New England. There are quite close links between Northern New England and the Granite belt and southern Darling Downs.

The paper records that on 15 May there will be a heritage day at Stanthorpe Museum featuring a three-course camp oven dinner at lunchtime with freshly brewed billy tea and damper available all day long.

The admission price of $15 is all-inclusive.

Visitors can explore through the Ballandean Shepherds Hut, see a model tin miner’s sluice and experience many other exhibits which depict the lives, struggles and achievements of Stanthorpe people.

At 11.30am a special tree planting ceremony will honour former museum stalwart Owen Nielsen. The tree, to be planted at the front of the museum, will symbolise all that Owen cheerfully gave to his friends at the museum and to the community of the Granite Belt through his many years of service.

A three course camp oven dinner. I would love to try that!

South from Stanthorpe and back over the border, the Tenterfield Star reports on a Tenterfield Shire cane toad warning. 

I would have thought that the noxious cane toad would have found Tenterfield a tad too cold. That's true, but the Shire is worried. There are reports of cane toads, but these have proved to be the eastern banjo frog, also known as the eastern popplebonk.

What I hadn't realised is just how far south the pest had spread. I quote: 

Ms Lorang (National Parks and Wild Life) said it was possible for toads to “hitch a ride” in people’s vehicles when they returned from the coast, where cane toads had spread to Port Maquarie, with a colony in Sydney. Casino is declaring war on the pests, with a muster being held today to help eradicate the toad.

Mmm! I can't resist saying that the toad might feel at home in Sydney!

Staying on the New England Highway but moving south to Guyra, the Guyra Argus reports that 50 teams attended the annual Guyra polocrosse carnival held in April each year at the Richard White Memorial Grounds at Bald Blair.

Guyra itself fielded four senior teams with two extras. a junior section and two sub junior teams. I had no idea that polocrosse was so strong in Guyra.

The Argus also reports that members of Armidale based ABS Building Society (ABS) had voted overwhelmingly to merge with Greater Building Society at a special meeting at the Armidale Bowling Club. I had seen this report elsewhere, but should record it formally because it marks the end of a small piece of local history.

I really must do these reports more regularly, desirably once a fortnight as originally planned. I am out of time and have barely scratched the surface! 

New England & the death of a thousand semantic cuts

A post on Tuesday on my personal blog, Regional, rural & the whole damned policy mess, sets out my reaction to the ABC's Q&A program on regional development. The post included an excerpt from a seminar paper I gave in Armidale on the somewhat crazy  proliferation of terms - country, regional, rural, remote, coastal etc – that overlapped and were used in different combinations to describe parts of New England.

Another totally disconnected post, Cognitive bias and the practice of law, I looked at the way in which forms of thinking affected legal practice.

These two completely different posts dealing with apparently disconnected issues are in fact connected and relevant to New England. The unifying element in the two posts lies in what the economist Kenneth Boulding called images, what I have called mental mud maps, what are are also called frames. 

The world around us is complex. To manage and understand that world, we use frames, images, my mud maps, to simplify and interpret.

  In the case of law and indeed the other professions, training instils a particular way of looking at the world and of expressing things in language. But what happens when that way of thinking and the language involved actually creates a disconnect - a gap - between the real world and the perceived world?

I'm sure this this sounds abstract, but this is just what has happened to New England. The place has disappeared, emasculated by language and the forms of thought associated with language.

There was no recognition in the Q&A program of the history of regional policy in Australia. Consequently, there was no recognition of alternative solutions previously advanced including new states. While people recognised that problems facing Regional Australia did not just arise, it was as though the possible solutions were all newly minted.

Throughout the program, the words regional and rural were used all the time.

Those words joined together actually have no real meaning in the sense that they really don't describe anything. They are, in fact, a symbol of division, for regional really describes not an area but bigger country urban centres, while rural describes the rest. They are a typology, a form of thinking, an image of the world that has been established through usage. Further, they have come to be used to describe inland Australia. The coast is, apparently, neither regional nor rural. 

New England itself is an area on a map composed of a number of regions, each occupying a portion of New England. New England has an identity, and so do each of those regions. Concepts such as regional and rural divide not just New England, but the regions within it.

Just as in law, the language and forms of thinking associated with the new jargon create a real disconnect between language and thought and the real realities of New England.

The loss of history is both a cause and consequence of these ways of thinking and speaking. A cause because it removes challenges to the mental mud maps involved in the new jargon. A consequence because acceptance of new jargon actually destroys history. How can you study something that doesn't exist?

These ways of thinking also destroy the chances of doing anything meaningful in a policy or development sense. How can you create sensible policy for something that actually doesn't reflect anything other than a definition?

Sound extreme? Well, how would you prepare a development policy for regional and rural Australia? Is this the same as regional policy?

The old word country, a word rejected by the bigger urban regional centres, at least had the benefit of clarity. Noticeably, in the Q&A program Tony Windsor kept using that term whenever he referred to political action.

Even country is not perfect from a New England perspective because it puts a divide between Newcastle and the rest of New England. New England cannot and should not ignore Newcastle. Apart from anything else, it's impossible in historical terms. Yet country is still the best descriptor of non-metropolitan Australia.

New England is made up of a number of regions linked by history and geography. Each region has its own features and internal divisions. Policy needs to take into account both the linkages and the special features of each region. It also needs to take into account divisions within regions.

So long as we accept current jargon, New England will continue to suffer the death of a thousand semantic cuts.  

Belshaw's World - the changing face(book) of communication technology

Note to readers: This post appeared as a column in the Armidale Express on 27 April 2011. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because the Express columns are not on line. You can see all the columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011.

Over the last month, my two oldest blogs turned five.

In the five years since then, I have written 3,828 posts, over two million words. That’s a long time and a lot of words!

Looking back, it got me reflecting on some of the changes that I had seen over the period.

Some eighteen years ago, my then Armidale consulting group did a study for Australia Post on the substitution of electronic for physical communications.

Our immediate focus was on the impact on physical mail. However, one of our most interesting conclusions at the time was the likely death of the fax machine at the hands of email.

Email had yet to take-off properly, but it was clearly reaching critical mass in some of the large organisations we surveyed. The only thing holding it back was the unwillingness of many senior managers to learn how to use it.

Within three years, email usage exploded. It did kill the fax for other than niche uses, while also reducing telephone usage.

The death of the fax is a sign of one feature of successful new technologies, the way that they can devour their predecessors. At the same time, it can be very difficult to predict just what is likely to happen.

Take the mobile phone as an example.

When we did our first work in this area back in the late 1980s, it was quite clear that mobile usage was going to grow. However, what we did not properly understand at the time was the way in which mobiles would substitute for fixed lines in countries with poor fixed line services to become the dominant form of telecommunications.

The interesting thing about this is that a fair bit of the mobile technology that has exploded over the last five years has actually been driven in part by the needs of people for whom mobile communications was the only form of available telecommunications. It was then been picked up and extended in the developed countries, but consumers in those countries were not the original drivers.

When I began blogging, the blog or web log had been around for a while, but had just entered the explosive growth stage.

Like all major new technology applications, its dedicated exponents saw it as the wave of the future. It would become an important business tool, create fortunes and lead to a new era of citizen journalism. It didn’t quite work that way.

One reason is that existing website approaches incorporated some of the elements of blogs and blogging. The main stream media or MSM, for example, increasingly incorporated blogs and blogging features into their on-line coverage.

A simple example is the comments section at the end of on-line stories, allowing readers to provide instant responses. Suddenly, the blogging world found its readers being attracted back to the MSN. Many of the highest traffic blogs were now MSM blogs.

The ABC’s the Drum, Tim Blair or Andrew Bolt are current Australian examples.

Then came Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook had just entered the public space when I began blogging. Focused on the human desire for interaction, Facebook’s friend system and user friendly interface led to explosive growth.

Facebook stripped much of the weblog component from blogging. Blogging aged as younger users moved to a Facebook system that better met their needs. Older bloggers, too, started spending more time on Facebook.

Twitter continued the process because it took many bloggers away from blogging – there is only so much time – into tweeting. However, things are never as simple as this.

Just as Facebook effectively devoured earlier social networking tools such as Bebo and MySpace, now Twitter began to devour Facebook because it provided an alternative means for short self-expression to either blogs or Facebook. Its hash tag system also challenged Facebook’s special pages that had previously provided a vehicle for subject specific content.

Facebook is aging as blogging did before it. This has not been helped by changes to the Facebook user interface, changes that many users disliked.

Again, the mainstream media has incorporated Twitter as it did blogging.

The full flowering of this arrived with the Japanese earthquake and recent middle east troubles. There the MSM used tweets and YouTube posts to gain instant information that could not be acquired by normal reporting means, while blogs were used to provide continuous news updates.

I will continue this story in my next column.

New England Aboriginal life - sounds of Gamilaraay

Note to readers: This is the fourth in a continuing series introducing readers to past and present Aboriginal life in New England. Those who are interested can find a full list of posts by either clicking New England Aboriginal life or, if you want, to read in date order from one up, click on Introducing New England Aboriginal life.

My last post in this series, New England Aboriginal life - introducing language, provided a general introduction to Australia's Aboriginal languages using New England examples to illustrate.

To the untrained ear, Australia's Aboriginal languages sound much the same. It's a bit like French, Spanish and Italian and their myriad dialects. Further, the high number of consonants and the use of double consonants makes life difficult for English speakers. How do you pronounce ng or nd?

My own email address, ndarala, is an Aboriginal word from the Anaiwan language meaning medicine man or knowledge holder. It looks as though it should be pronounced n-da-rala, but in fact its n-dala. I won't attempt to give the full phonetics. Indeed, I couldn't! But you see what I mean.

I am personally very bad at languages. I have set myself the task of learning the basics of one language just to help me when I have to use Aboriginal words. But that's going to take time!

Very few Australians have actually heard an Aboriginal language spoken outside a few welcomes to country or the occasional media report. Very few New Englanders have any knowledge of New England's Aboriginal languages in general or of the language or languages spoken in their own area. I think that's a pity.

I thought that some of my readers might be interested to listen to a story told in an Aboriginal tongue. 

Gamilaraay or Kamilaroi to use another name, was spoken on New England's western slopes and plains. It is closely related to the adjoining language Yuwaalaraay.

The story of the loss and partial recovery of Gamilaraay is a story I will tell in another post. It is a sad story, but also a glad one.

For the moment, if you would like to hear both Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay spoken, please go to Guwaabal, stories. The main narrator is John Giacon, a person who played a major role in the recovery and revival of Gamilaraay.          

New England Aboriginal life - introducing language

Note to readers: This is the third in a continuing series introducing readers to past and present Aboriginal life in New England. Those who are interested can find a full list of posts by either clicking New England Aboriginal life or, if you want, to read in date order from one up, click on Introducing New England Aboriginal life.

My last post in this series, New England Aboriginal life - Collarenebri rap, was as the name says.

I wanted to follow that post with some other visual material. However, I have been having continuing and frustrating download problems. For that reason, some text.

Language is central to life. New England's Aboriginal languages were progressively destroyed by European intrusion and then re-emerged much later as a consequence of the language revival movement.

The following material introducing Aboriginal languages is taken from a paper I delivered in Armidale last year. I still have some editing to do on the paper to incorporate comments received, but the core is okay.

Please note that I am not a linguist. I still struggle with pronunciation!   

In 1788 there were perhaps 250 Aboriginal language groups in Australia incorporating perhaps 700 dialects[i]. The precise distinction between language and dialect can be a difficult one. In general, speakers of different dialects within a language group are likely to be able to understand each other or at least recognise that they speak different varieties of the same language.

The distinction between languages and dialects has become an issue among some Aboriginal people who object to their language being classified as a dialect of another. I will talk a little later about classification problems. From my perspective, the question of the relationship between languages and between languages and dialects should be seen as a technical one.

In considering languages, we also need to make a clear distinction between language and political or territorial boundaries[ii]. The broad language groups often covered substantial areas in geographic terms. There were a variety of shifting territorial and political boundaries within each language group. Just speaking the same or a related language did not make for everlasting friendship.

All Aboriginal languages share some common features. In grammatical terms, they have relatively free word order, allowing all possible ordering of subject, verb, object. Words show case, tense and mood by the addition of meaningful segments. Verbs and nouns have markers added to indicate who does what to whom, when and how. New words are formed by adding other meaningful segments. This can make for very long words, really sentences in themselves.

Most Aboriginal languages have only three vowels – i, a and u – although a few have four or more. As a New England example, the Bundjalung language group occupying territory stretching from the Clarence Valley into Southern Queensland uses four vowels – i, a,u and e - each of which can be pronounced as a longer vowel[iii]. There are also two semi-vowels in many languages, y and w

Words generally begin with a consonant, although Yaygirr (the Gumbainggiric language spoken around the mouth of the Clarence River) contains many words beginning with vowels such as aagal, sea[iv].

Within this language diversity, all the New England language groups now appear to belong to what has come to be called Pama-Nyungan, the dominant language grouping over much of Australia. I say now because one New England language, Anaiwan found on the southern New England Tablelands, was for a long while seen as distinct, not related to other Aboriginal languages. It took the pioneering work of linguist Terry Crowley to show that Anaiwan was in fact related to adjoining languages.[v]

Coined by the linguist Kenneth Hale from the words pama (person in Cape York) and nyunga (one in south western Australia), Pama-Nyungun languages have commonalities in the structure of words and the way words to relate to each other.

All the almost 190 Pama-Nyungan languages suffix their verbs and nouns to show grammatical relations. They are grouped into perhaps twenty major language groups.

It is clear is that with so many languages and dialects, only a few languages had many thousands of speakers, with numbers tailing away to hundreds in other cases. In some case, contiguous related languages or dialects covered large areas like links in a chain. People easily understood their neighbours because they shared vocabulary and could at least understand structure and pronunciation. As the chain lengthened, language difficulties increased; people at opposite ends might barely understand each other.

New England illustrates this pattern in an interesting way.

The Anaiwan or Nganyaywana Aboriginal peoples from the southern areas of the New England Tablelands appear to have been relatively homogeneous and limited in number although, as we shall see a little later, even here there is debate about the number of dialects. By contrast, the larger Bundjalung language group may have had as many as twenty separate dialects[vi].

To the west, the Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi), the peoples occupying a vast sweep of territory from the Upper Hunter through the western slopes and plains into what is now Queensland, may have had at least five major dialects, seven if the related languages of Yuwaalaraay and Yuwaaliyaay are included[vii]. Bigambul, the language group on the slopes and plains in Queensland to the north was also reported to be close to Gamilaraay[viii].

The following map drawn from Austin, Williams and Wurm 1980 and cited by Peter Austin (2006) shows one estimated distribution of Gamilaraay dialects[ix]. Note that the map terminates the Gamilaraay language at the Liverpool Ranges. In fact, it seems likely that Gamilaraay was spoken in the Upper Hunter.

Apart from any shared language features, communication among different languages was also made easier because most Aborigines were multi-lingual. Marriage partners were commonly exchanged with other groups, while groups mingled as well for social, ceremonial and trade occasions. This was to facilitate European expansion because many explorers and settlers made use of Aboriginal guides to bring them into new country.

With so many languages and dialects as well as the very different sounds, it is not surprising that the expression of things such as group names into English should lead to widely varied spellings and to subsequent confusion about the exact distribution of peoples and language.

If we take the Dainggatti or Dhanggati language group spoken in the Macleay Valley and its headwaters, alternative spellings given by the Austlang data base include (among others) Djaingadi, Dang-getti, Danghetti, Danggadi, Dhang-atty, Thangatti, Thangatty, Dangati, Dangadi, Dunghutti, Thungatti, Tangetti and Tang-gette[x].

This was further complicated by attachment of names reflecting location or particular groups rather than language.

Michael O’Rourke’s study of the Kamilaroi, draws this out very clearly[xi]. As an example, he points to the case of the Barradine area north of Coonabaraban which was assigned to both Burrigalu and Gamilaraay.

Burrigalu – burrie+galu: literally myall-tree + human plural – meant those who inhabit the myall country or myall dwellers. To O’Rourke’s mind, this was primarily a group or locality name. However, it could also mean the local variant or dialect of a larger language.

In contrast, the name Gamilaraay itself - gamil + array: literally no + having or having gamil for no – denoted a form of speech, the broader language spoken by the Kamilaroi as a whole. Even here, Gamilaraay could describe the language (that speech which has gamil for no) or, by implication, its speakers (those who use gamil for no).

The Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative points to the same issues with Bundjalung.[xii] It notes that it was thought that the term ‘Bandjalung’ was originally used to describe the dialect spoken around Bangawalbin Creek and was only later used used as a general term for the whole language, as well as as a term to refer to certain individual dialects. The Co-operative also notes that each dialect has a specific name of its own. Dialects include: Wahlubal (also known as Western Bandjalang), Yugambeh, Birrihn, the Barryugil dialect, Bandjalang, Wudjebal, Wiyabal, Wuhyabal, Minyangbal, Gidhabal, Galibal and Ngarrahngbal. Many of these names point to some characteristic peculiar to that dialect. For example, Gidhabal means ‘those who say gidha (alright)’, while Wiyabal means ‘those who say wiya (you)’.

Importantly, and as Tamsin Donaldson puts it, the Aborigines used several etymologically distinct naming systems, with different naming systems calling forth different names[xiii]. This way of classifying languages was not unique to the Australian Aborigines. All people have ways of drawing distinctions between us and them by distinguishing particular speech or territorial or political associations.

---

[i] The introductory overview material is drawn especial from John Mulvaney & Johan Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 1999 pp 69-75; and Peter K Austin, Article MS 1711 Countries and language – Australia, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics ELL2, pp 2-9,. accessed on line 19 August 2009

[ii] In using the term political boundaries I am not implying formal structures of the type associated with, for example, nation states. A closer analogy would be the type of relationships found in mediaeval Europe, in Scandinavia or indeed in Homer’s Greece. The 18^th century Kamilaroi war leader the Red Kangaroo provides an interesting case study. Having taken control from the previous elders, he had built the Gunnedah mob up into a strong force by absorbing other groups. Raids from the Bundarra mob on the Goonoo Goonoo and Manaella mobs led them to seek support from the Red Kangaroo. The Red Kangaroo argued that support should be provided because the power of the Bundarra mob posed a threat. A joint war party was formed that defeated the Bundarra group. The case shows how political alliances were formed and used in Aboriginal Australia. (Michael O’Rourke, “Sung for Generations”, published by the author, Canberra 2005, pp 306-311).

[iii] Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, Bundjalung, http://www.muurrbay.org.au/bundjalung.html, accessed on line 19 August 2009.

[iv] Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, Yaygirr, http://www.muurrbay.org.au/yaygirr.html, accessed on line 19 August 2009.

[v] W G Hoddinott, The languages and myths of the New England area, in Isabel McBryde (ed), Records of times past: Ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England tribes, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978, pp 52-64, pp 56-57.

[vi] Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, Bundjalung, http://www.muurrbay.org.au/bundjalung.html, accessed on line 19 August 2009.

[vii] The material on the Gamillaraay is drawn from Peter K Austin, The Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) Language, northern New South Wales — A Brief History of Research, SOAS, University of London, 2006, accessed on-line 17 December 2008.

[viii] Flick Isabel & Heather Goodall, Isabel Flick: the many lives of an extraordinary woman, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2004, p3.

[ix] Austin 2006 p 2

[x] Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Australian Indigenous Languages Data Base (Austlang), http://austlang.aiatsis.gov.au/main.php, accessed on line 6 May 2010.

[xi] Michael O’Rourke, The Kamilaroi Lands: North-central New South Wales in the early 19^th century, Michael O’Rourke, Griffith 1997 especially pp 26-32.

[xii] Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative, Bundjalung, http://www.muurrbay.org.au/bundjalung.html, accessed on line 19 August 2009

[xiii] O’Rourke, 1977, p 28

NEA blog performance April 2011

The graph on the right shows visits (yellow) plus page views (yellow plus red) to this blog over the period to end April.

During April, the most popular individual posts were:

• Margaret Olley's New England connection, 296 page views
• The Poetry of Judith Wright - South of My Days, 99 page views,
• Discussion on re-imagining Newcastle continues, 77 page views
• Wednesday Forum: Re-imagining Newcastle, 76 page views
• Results from Wednesday's forum on overcoming division, 73 page views
• Wednesday Forum: Overcoming division, 67 page views
• Wednesday Forum: Leveraging Newcastle's inclusion in the Lonely Planet global top ten cities, 55 page views
•  Wednesday Forum: improving public transport, 54 page views
• The Poetry of Judith Wright - Bora Ring, 52 page views

I am struggling at the moment to post and respond to emails and comments. I would like to see more comments with other people responding. Can you help me?