Alice Man’s Crusade to Save Indigenous Languages Honoured With OAM

A RETIRED Alice Springs linguist who dedicated his career to preserving indigenous languages has today been recognised with a Medal of the Order of Australia.

Gavan Breen, who celebrated his 81st birthday last Friday, was recognised in the 2016 Australia Day honours list for his work, which spans almost 50 years.

“I’m a bit nervous about it,” he said.

“I hope people don’t expect me to act any differently.”

Despite being retired for 15 years, Mr Breen still toils away voluntarily in an office at the Institute of Aboriginal Development on South Tce.

His lifework includes preserving 49 Aboriginal languages through developing orthographies and teaching.

Originally a metallurgist, Mr Breen said his intrigue for indigenous languages accidentally flourished when he sat in a public lecture at the Melbourne University in 1967.

“The lecturer said a lot of languages were dying out and they were trying to get as much as possible recorded before it was too late,” he said.

“I thought, ‘that sounds like a good way to spend a holiday’.

“I had always been interested in languages and anthropology.”

Mr Breen was awarded a scholarship to do his Masters on a language and was given grants to travel regions of Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory for the next decade.

“It was quite good money they were giving – the equivalent of a university lecturer.”

The ’80s were spent training Aboriginal people to read and write their language to prepare for bilingual education.

“It is just so different,” he said. “You get groups that are closely related, descendant from one earlier language, then you get others where two neighbouring languages are very different.

“I worked with a lot of languages where it was just the last one or two people.

“A lot of cases you work on a language and might get 300 words or 500 words – really good cases I would get over 1000 words.”

Mr Breen admitted filling a dictionary had its drawbacks.

“It gets a bit tedious sometimes,” he said. “You’ve got to listen and work out how they are pronouncing things and find a suitable way of spelling the language.”

Indigenous language programs have faced government cuts in recent years, which Mr Breen said “wasn’t good”.

“I get the impression governments take the attitude that they won’t put anything into the language, wait until it is almost gone and on its last legs,” he said. “Then it is big news and ‘we are going to put X amount of dollars into this’.”

Last year Mr Breen worked with numerous Native Title cases in Western Queensland as an expert witness.