Noongar Language Renaissance: Sharon Gregory

A good friend once asked me, “You can probably say hello in French, German and Spanish, but can you say it in an Australian language?”.

Language is something we use every day without really thinking about it, let alone where it comes from. Many languages, English particularly, often borrow (or steal) common expressions from other languages and plug them into everyday vernacular.

What would happen if this question were asked of every Australian?

Kylie Farmer recently posited this to a Manly audience in her TEDx talk “Keep Our Languages Alive” in March of this year. In her talk, she discusses the importance of keeping language alive in this age in order to keep first peoples and their culture alive. And there are others in Southwest Western Australia who are passionate for living Noongar culture.

Sharon Gregory is a Noongar woman who lives her desire to stoke the flame of language in everyone who is willing to learn; young and old, Aboriginal or otherwise. And the fire is spreading.

Even growing up as a child with an Aboriginal mother and English father in a ‘white’ lifestyle, Sharon cannot think of a time in her life that her love of language was not present. Though never discussed, she felt that something was there. She says, ‘you were better off to be white than black’ at that time, and it was only in her early twenties, after having her second child, that she finally discovered her Aboriginal heritage.

Not that it was an earth-shattering revelation. Rather, for Sharon it just made sense. Of language she says, “I feel it, my soul feels it. I love the flow of the words, I love the sound of the words. When I was growing up.. it just felt like me.” She married young to an Aboriginal man and embraced his family’s tendencies for yarning around the fire, going bush to “Meeka” (Meekatharra), eating food on country, the young bringing their take to old ways. Sharon recalls her son on a family bush outing, when sitting around the fire and listening to yarns told by the elders. He was sitting back, casually eating a piece of kangaroo tail and peeling the skin back like a banana.

“Bugger it, I’m going to go for it”.

But even during these times, Sharon was aware that much of the language is lost because of the impact of stolen generations and the prohibition of speaking language by those that ran foster homes, by the church, in schools and municipal authorities. She decided that in order to revitalise the roots of Aboriginal culture in the southwest of Western Australia, she should go to Murdoch University and get a state-recognised qualification to teach language to students.

Her opportunity came when Willagee Primary School were advertising for an AIEO (Australian/Islander Education Officer). At this stage, being a mother of four in her early thirties, she hadn’t ever been for a job interview and thought it would be a good experience for future prospects. But she got the job.

“I listened to elders, I researched”

In 2002, Sharon signed-up to the language program being run by Lois Spehn-Jackson and Lola Jones through the Department of Education. She began teaching language to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal primary school children, all the while teaching herself.

She says, “with Willagee, the reason the Noongar language came about was because our kids didn’t like learning Indonesian. They didn’t like learning any of the other languages. They would play up. So because we had a high population of Aboriginal kids, we got Coleen Sherratt, who had just graduated as a Noongar language teacher, to come in and teach the kids. And it just thrived. It just went beautifully with the kids. And they were so happy with it”

So why is language so important to Sharon? “Because it’s my culture”, she says. And if she could teach every Australian one Noongar phrase, it would be moorditj moort (good family)… or koort kwobakan (beautiful heart)… or noongar waangkaniny koort kwobakan (Noongar language makes my heart beautiful)… or kaya (hello)… or noonook morditj? (are you good/well?). These are the things that make all our hearts beautiful, and cannot be squashed together in one phrase only.

“It’s so important to teach the language to make people aware how important the language is, and also to give back to our elders and our families that language as well so they can embrace it, because some of the Aboriginal people don’t have language, you know, they had that taken away from them, they were never allowed to speak it, so now its slowly coming back.