How a Bible translation is preserving the Pitjantjatjara language

IN 1943, two Christian missionaries living in mud huts among the Western Desert people at the remote outpost of Ernabella, central Australia, set about translating the King James Bible into Pitjantjatjara, an ancient language that had never been written down.

It took a year, and many arguments, for Reverend Bob Love and Ronald Trudinger to produce their first draft of the New Testament’s Gospel of Mark, Tjukurpa Palja Markaku. Seventy years later, a 21st-century missionary named Paul Eckert sits at the dining-room table of a house in that same isolated community, still toiling away on the project his predecessors started. The world has passed into a new millennium and Ernabella has changed its name to Pukatja since the first words of the Pitjantjatjara Bible were written, and still it remains only half-complete.