Flinders’ Documents Reveal Yolngu Words

UNPUBLISHED documents from Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia in 1803 have been unearthed – providing the earliest known record of the Territory’s Yolngu language.

The 200 documents from the State Library of NSW included Yolngu words recorded from northeast Arnhem Land, from Larrakia around Darwin, Wuna around Adelaide River, and Arrernte in central Australia, as well as from across Australia.

The documents were presented for the first time at an international symposium at the State Library of NSW last week.

The Rediscovering Indigenous Languages project sought to identify as many word lists as possible in the library’s collection of unpublished manuscripts and make them available to relevant indigenous communities in culturally appropriate ways.

University of Sydney researcher and linguist Dr Michael Walsh spent the past two years sifting through hundreds of letters and diaries, and personal documents from the library’s collection.

Dr Walsh’s research has focused on the Top End of the Northern Territory.

He said they had unearthed 200 original papers significantly documenting 100 Aboriginal languages, many thought to be lost.

At the time of European settlement in 1788, there were about 250 known indigenous languages, but now only about 20 are spoken comprehensively.

“I found it quite exciting in the midst of a lot of drudgery, because some of the material was buried in boxes and boxes of papers, so you get two pages out of 2000,” he told the ABC.

“It’s the agony and the ecstasy, you might say.”

He said notes from Robert Brown, a botanist with Flinders, contained the Yolngu words.

While it was just a few pages, it was significant because it was the earliest recording that he knew of language in the Territory and, according to one expert on Yolngu, it would not be recorded again for another 150 years.

Also found were seven pages on the vocabulary of the dialects of the “natives tribe” of Ruffles Bay, written by Victorian surveyor Charles Tyers in 1837, when he was attempting to create a British settlement at Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula.

The pages have been taken back to the community.

Dr Walsh said they included names of people but were new material.

They hope to one day have the material on display on the internet in consultation with the speakers of the language.