ways of being, ways of talk

Ways of Being, Ways of Talk

TITLE: Ways of being, ways of talkSCIS NO. 1331503ISBN 978-0-7307-4248-7

© Department of Education 2002

Published by the Department of Education and Training 2007Reproduction of this work in whole or part for educational purposes, within an educational institution and oncondition that it is not offered for sale, is permitted by the Department of Education and Training.

This material is available on request in appropriate alternative formats including Braille, audio tape and computer disk.

Department of Education and Training151 Royal StreetEast Perth WA 6004Further information please contact: [OPTIONAL]

[name/branch]Telephone: +61 8 9264 [extension]Facsimile: +61 8 9264 [extension]Email: [name/branch]@det.wa.edu.auURL: http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/[branch]

These resource materials were made possible

through the ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning

project, funded jointly by the Department of

Education and Training, Western Australia and the

Commonwealth Department of Education,

Science and Training.

Ways of Being,Ways of Talk

For the past seven years, the Department of Education and Training, Western

Australia has supported a unique research effort by a collaborative team of

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers from the Department and from Edith

Cowan University.

The aim of this work has been to make education more appropriate and

effective for students who speak Aboriginal English, using an inclusive

approach that will benefit all students.

Through Language and Communication Enhancement for Two-Way Education,

Towards More User-Friendly Education for Speakers of Aboriginal English, Deadly

Ways to Learn and ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning, Aboriginal English has

been investigated on many levels, providing new insights into its linguistic,

cultural and conceptual features and their implications for Aboriginal students.

Central to the research process and to subsequent training have been efforts to

adopt a two-way approach, where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of

thinking, learning and communicating are given equal weight and respect.

On the basis of this research, team members have conducted training for over

two thousand education staff in Western Australia alone. Resource materials

such as Solid English, Two-Way English and the Deadly Ways to Learn kit have

assisted educators to begin finding ways to capitalise on the existing linguistic

and cultural strengths of Aboriginal English speaking students. Trainers have

used these resources and have focused on raising awareness about Aboriginal

English and its pedagogical implications.

Foreword

i

The increased understanding of the existence of Aboriginal English and its

significance is having a far-reaching impact on teachers and learners. It provides all

students with the opportunity to be exposed to a range of language systems and

assists teachers to differentiate dialect difference from language ‘mistakes’.

This ensures Aboriginal English speakers’ self-esteem is kept intact and promotes

bidialectal capacities. It enhances teachers’ capacity to assist students to broaden

their linguistic repertoires and to achieve full control of their language use for a

wide range of purposes.

It is my pleasure to commend to you Ways of Being, Ways of Talk, a video series

that offers a window into many of the ideas that have arisen in the course of this

work. I am confident that it will provide a valuable means of raising awareness of

the complexities of Aboriginal English, how it differs from Australian English and

what impact this has on communication.

PAUL ALBERT

DIRECTOR GENERAL

June 2002

Contents

1

Page No:

Acknowledgements...................................................................................................................................................2

SECTION 1

Users’ Guide to the Ways of Being, Ways of Talk videos .............................................................................................5

Glossary of terms....................................................................................................................................................10

Overview of content of the videos ...........................................................................................................................12

Other related resources and recommended readings...............................................................................................14

Related and recommended Websites.......................................................................................................................17

SECTION 2

Video Scripts

• A Shared World of Communication .....................................................................................................................20

• Now You See It, Now You Don’t .........................................................................................................................29

• Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power ........................................................................................................39

• Moving Into Other Worlds...................................................................................................................................48

SECTION 3

Background Papers

• A Shared World of Communication .....................................................................................................................61

• Now You See It, Now You Don’t..........................................................................................................................67

• Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power.......................................................................................................106

• Moving Into Other Worlds .................................................................................................................................125

Index.....................................................................................................................................................................139

2

Acknowledgements

Joint Project Coordination:Patricia Königsberg and Glenys Collard

We would like to especially acknowledge the following people:To Professor Ian Malcolm, without whose assistance, knowledge, expertise and

inspiration this work would not have been possible.

To Ken Wyatt, for his support of the Aboriginal English research and all related

educational initiatives.

To Kathy Melsom, for her continued professional support throughout this project.

We are thankful also to all those who have given furtherinput and support to this work:

Community:

Michael Aylward-Smith, Don Collard, Sylvia Collard, Bert Eades, Robert

Eggington, Dennis Eggington, Alan Mitchell, Scott Fatnowna, Marianne

McLaughlin, Ted Wilkes.

Aboriginal Education and Training Council

May O’Brien.

Researchers (Edith Cowan University)

Georgina Dodson, Glenys Hayes, Christine Heslington, Angela Kickett,

Kevin May, Alison Newell, Lloyd Riley, Allery Sandy, Alison Smith,

Fred Taylor and Tanya Dorizzi (nee Tucker).

Special thanks also:To Dr Judith Rochecouste, Alison Hill,

Dr Farzad Sharifian, Ellen Grote,

Eva Sahanna and Louella Eggington

for their assistance with the background

research to these videos.

To Dr Yvonne Haig for creating this line

of work within the Department of

Education and Training’s Central Office

and for her early vision and drive.

To Majella Stevens and Helen Tew for

their tremendous collegial support.

To Rosemary Cahill for her support and

contributions to the development of

related teacher resources.

This package would not have been possible withoutthe two-way commitment and input of Aboriginaland non-Aboriginal researchers and educators.

Aboriginal Education Coordinators and

Liaison Officers

Marion Baumgarten, Sue Beath, Zeta Binge,

Mark Bonshore, Maude Bonshore,

Ron Bradfield, Tracey Dhu, Wayne Coles,

Harley Coyne, Shane Cumming,

Charmaine Dershaw, Michelle Forrest,

Cathie Fraser, Cindy Garlett, Tanya Garlett,

Lyall Garlett, Corel Gillespie,

Maxine Gossland, George Hayden,

Geri Hayden, Aaron Hubert, Merv Kelly,

Donna Kickett, Jenny Kniveton, Alana Loo,

Sharon McGann, Erica McGuire,

Albert McNamara, Lois May,

Sharmaine Miles, Monti Mitchell,

Geralt Moody, Nicki Patterson, Albert Pianta,

Bernie Ryder, Jedda Trueman, Louise Ward,

Robyn Weston, Maxine Williams, Eric Wynne.

Curriculum Improvement and Student

Services Officers, Managers and

Coordinators

Lis Alden, Gail Barker, Anjie Brook,

Julie Buist, Suzanne Cooper, Chris Gostelow,

Liz Healy, Barb Horan, Penny James,

Sue Knight, Steve Milton, Rachel Monamy,

Yvette Moran, Gavin Morris,

Gordon Murdoch, Jenny Nunn, Frank Pansini,

Alan Plumb, Pam Pollard, Sherina Renton,

Linda Villanova, Lynne Whisson.

Department of Education and Training, Central Office

Margaret Banks, Glen Bennett, Liz Carter, Catheryn Curtin,

Fred Deshon, Sue Ellis, Aimy Faleiro, Carol Garlett,

Warren Grellier, John Gougoulis, Connie Hanscom,

Dawn Holland, Jayne Johnston, Dianne Kerr, Kevin O’Keefe,

Rosa Logan, Robin Lukosius, Neil Milligan, Pam Moss,

Linda Quartermaine, Lucy Reger, Celia Richards, Cam Rielly,

Grania Talemaitoga, Gwenda Steff, Nathalie Tarr,

Dianne Tomazos, Glenda Trainer, Verna Vos, Kim Ward,

Yvonne Wiffen, Dave Wood.

Schools

Beth Aitken, Ken Armstrong, Stephanie Armstrong, Kayleen

Arnold, Marion Cheedy, Nora Cooke, Delene Corunna, Lucina

Cross, Joanna Dagleish, Lucy Dann, Linda Dawson, Rachael

Dean, Linley Duboy, Merv Hammond, Ian Hastings, Patricia

Hewett, Neil Hunt, Eirlis Ingram, Linley Juboy, Justine Kickett,

Sue Knight, Bill Mann, John Masters, Anne Mead, Erica McKnight,

Amanda Payne, Denise Powdrill, Coleen Sariago, David Sharp,

Caroline Snook, Sue Sommerville, Edie Wright.

West Australian Department of Education and Training’s

District Directors

John Garnaut, Alby Huts, Rod Lowther, Barrie Wells.

Curriculum Council, WA

Aileen Hawkes, Penny McLaughlin, Nichola Davidson.

Catholic Education Office of Western Australia

Norman Brahim, Julie Hillin.

Association of Independent Schools of WA

Les Mack, Kate Mullin

Acknowledgements

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4

Many thanks also to staff and studentsat Dryandra Primary School andGirrawheen Senior High School and toall other education and non-educationpersonnel who have worked with usand supported us through this process.

Thanks also to:The staff and students at ABMUSIC, Yirra Yaakin Noongar Theatre, Dumbartung

Aboriginal Corporation, Mallee Aboriginal Corporation, The Australian Institute of

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Geoff Oliver, Compass Films, Kevin

Dolman, Indigenous Support Services, Survival Concert 2002 organisers.

We are grateful to members of the community who generously gave their time to

view and comment on the videos prior to the final edit.

ABC Television Production:

Videos Presented by: Michelle White and Narelle Thorne

Actors: Dereck Nannup and Kylie Farmer

Archives: Rachel Franklin

Graphics: Kym Skipworth

Additional Artwork: Ab Collard

Camera: Robert Koenig-Luck and Leigh Northcott

Editing and Sound: Gary Shepherd

Film Production Manager: Anne Dutton and Sally Harding

Director: Andrew McWhirter

Film Producer: Michelle White

National Manager ABC Productions: Stephanie Werrett

5

Users Guide to theWays of Being,

Ways of Talkvideos

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DESCRIPTIONWays of Being, Ways of Talk consists of a series of four, fifteen to

twenty-minute videos, supported by scripts and resource papers.

The individual videos are entitled:

• A Shared World of Communication• Moving into Other Worlds• Now You See it, Now You Don’t• Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power

Each video deals with a discrete topic, but also links to the others in the series.

The videos are designed to assist:

• teachers wishing to engage students in the critical analysis of language difference and literacy;

• presenters wishing to facilitate professional development in Aboriginal English;

• non-Aboriginal service providers who work with Aboriginal clients and Aboriginal service providers who work with

non-Aboriginal clients.

The videos are intended for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences. Each video is designed to stimulate a

curiosity about the whole series. The issues raised in the videos are developed and illustrated more fully in the

resource papers which have been indexed for convenience of reference.

WHY THESE MATERIALS WERE DEVELOPEDThe driving force behind the development of these videos came from feedback from over two thousand Western

Australian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal education personnel. Many of whom expressed a need for more immediate

access to research and information provided through ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project 1 professional

development workshops. Comments received from community people and members of other agencies further

shaped the content, the language, and the form of presentation used in these videos.

HOW THESE MATERIALS CAME ABOUTSince 1994, personnel from the Department of Education and Training, Western Australia have joined forces with

researchers from Edith Cowan University to collect and analyse data and to develop materials. Through the Language

and Communication Enhancement for Two-Way Education, the Towards More User-Friendly Education for Speakers of

Aboriginal English, and the ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning projects, the team has investigated Aboriginal

English in depth. It has gained new insights into the linguistic, cultural and conceptual features of Aboriginal English

and the implications for Aboriginal students’ success in an Anglo-Western education setting. While they have been

designed to have a broad appeal, the videos were specifically initiated to support district-based Aboriginal and non-

Aboriginal personnel who requested help with this new research-based knowledge. The videos strongly support the

implementation of the Western Australian Curriculum Framework and link directly to the Two-Way English, the Solid

English and the Deadly Ways to Learn teacher resource materials.

1 The project derives the ABC element of its title from the following foundation principles: A - accept Aboriginal English (AE); B - bridge to Standard Australian English (SAE); and C - cultivate Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge.

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The topics chosen for these videos were guided by the above research and by information received from Aboriginal

and non-Aboriginal participants in ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning workshops. Background papers were written

by members of the Aboriginal English research team based at the Centre for Applied Language and Literacy

Research, Edith Cowan University. Video scripts were developed from these background papers in collaboration with

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers and education personnel from Curriculum, Aboriginal Education and

Student Services sections from the Department of Education and Training’s Central Office, district offices and schools.

WHAT THESE MATERIALS ARE FORThe videos, scripts and background papers will provide viewers with vital information on Aboriginal English and its use

within the wider community and help to debunk the myth that Aboriginal English is a deficient way of speaking. They

will assist in providing a better understanding of how Aboriginal English and Australian English differ, on the basis of

their differing histories and associated underlying conceptualisations. It is intended that those viewing the tapes will

extend discussion of these implications according to their common interests and local needs. These discussions will

be enriched when both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants can exchange their views.

HOW THESE MATERIALS ARE TWO-WAYIt is significant that all projects related to this work have adhered to a two-way

principle, whereby Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators and researchers have

worked as equal partners in teams. This approach ensures that Aboriginal and

non-Aboriginal voices, perspectives, ways and expertise are jointly incorporated

into curriculum, pedagogy and professional development. It has attracted

international recognition and considerable interest among academics and

education systems in other States and overseas.

Great care has been taken to avoid stereotyping either Aboriginal or non-

Aboriginal people, although it has been necessary to be aware of the meanings of the differences which they have

brought to English. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people can only begin to learn the richness of their respective

dialects on the basis of mutual understanding through two-way communication.

At times, the viewer may feel that the content does not always follow a logical sequence, or indeed, that the

materials presented are irrelevant. Such interpretations are to be expected when operating two-way since the two

dialects may follow different ‘logics’ in ordering, interpreting, and foregrounding information. ‘Relevance’ is also a

notion which is constructed with reference to personal as well as cultural perspectives, and thus a particular scene

which appears relevant to an individual or people from a particular culture may appear irrelevant to others. For that

reason, speakers of both dialects may, on occasions, experience frustration and anxiety when operating in a two-way

mode. Those differences will be a discussion point when the videos are viewed by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal

people together.

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HOW TO GET THE BEST OUT OF THESE MATERIALSTwo-way processes have been central to all research and professional

development upon which these videos have been based. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of thinking, learning and

communicating have been given equal weight and respect throughout. We strongly recommend that these two-way

approaches also be adhered to in the delivery of professional development and when viewing the tapes. We

recommend that these tapes be viewed with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people present so that differing

interpretations of knowledge and experience can be shared and exchanged. Viewers in mixed groups will benefit

most if everyone has a chance to speak and be heard if they want to.

Education sectorThese videos will raise awareness in non-Aboriginal people about the complex situations most Aboriginal people

encounter in trying to negotiate life in a non-Aboriginal context. They will also help Aboriginal English speakers

become clearer about why non-Aboriginal people may not always understand what they are trying to say.

Such two-way awareness is essential for effective communication between speakers of the two dialects and for the

provision of an inclusive curriculum for the students with whom they work. It will not only change people’s

perceptions of each other, but also lead to improved educational outcomes for all students.

The videos are a rich resource for engaging students in critical analysis of language and cultural difference. Not only

are these understandings fundamental to key strands of the English learning area and development of critical

literacy, but also to strands and major learning outcomes of all other learning areas. To help teachers make these

understandings more salient for their students, they are encouraged to draw on explanations outlined in the Two-Way

English book and on ideas and suggested strategies as described in Solid English and the Deadly Ideas book of the

Deadly Ways to Learn package. These latter materials provide ideas for teachers about how they might teach about

language, teach through language and explicitly explore the conventions of Aboriginal and Australian English. All the

above resources are fundamentally about developing understandings of how language, culture, worldview and identity

are inextricably linked – understandings which are essential to the following Overarching Learning Outcomes from

the Western Australian Curriculum Framework (Curriculum Council of WA, 1998:pp18-19):

1. Students use language to understand, develop and communicate ideas and information and interact with others.

3. Students recognise when and what information is needed, locate and obtain it from a range of sources and

evaluate, use and share it with others.

7. Students understand and appreciate the physical, biological and technological world and have the knowledge and

skills to make decisions in relation to it.

8. Students understand their cultural, geographic and historical contexts and have the knowledge, skills and values

necessary for active participation in life in Australia.

9. Students interact with people and cultures, other than their own and are equipped to contribute to the global

community.

13. Students recognise that everyone has the right to feel valued and safe, and, in this regard, understand their rights

and obligations and behave responsibly.

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Other important links to the Curriculum Framework are as follows:

• the inclusivity principle (p 17);

• the recognition of language and dialect variations (pp 20, 83);

• valuing different world views (p 24);

• developing skills in cross cultural communication (p 24); and

• tolerance (pp 26, 35)

Issues addressed in these videos relate directly to the 21 goals of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Education policy and provide assistance with efforts relating to MCEETYA priorities which seek to address the needs

of Aboriginal people across Australia, namely:

1. To establish effective arrangements for the participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in

educational decision making;

2. To increase the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people employed in education and training;

3. To ensure equitable access of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to education and training services

4. To ensure participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in education and training;

5. To ensure equitable and appropriate educational achievement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students;

cultures and languages to all Indigenous and non-Indigenous students;

6. To promote, maintain and support the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies; and

7. To provide community development training services including proficiency in English literacy and numeracy for

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults.

Other service providersThe voices of Aboriginal people have, until recently, been largely unheard by non-Aboriginal people. The stigma

associated with Aboriginal English has often meant that what Aboriginal people have to say has only been listened to

when it has been expressed in Standard Australian English.

Most service provision is heavily dependent on spoken and written communication. Clients and service providers on

both sides of the cultural divide often find each other’s ways of communicating strange and alienating. This frequently

leads to judgements of the other group as uncommunicative, uncooperative, impolite, evasive, ignorant or even

devious. The Ways of Being, Ways of Talk materials will assist in raising awareness about the importance of knowledge

relating to cross-cultural communication. They will provide a research-based explanation of why the communicative

patterns of each group may not correspond to the expectations they have of the other.

Community groupsCommunity groups may find these materials useful in the process of reconciliation

between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

If you are using this resource in the community, please note that sensitivity must be

exercised to value and understand that different people have different experiences and

may view the world in different ways. What is seen as ‘right’ from one cultural point of

view, may be perceived as ‘wrong’ from another. Different issues and viewpoints affect

people in different ways. In order for two-way communication and understandings to take

place, people must develop an acceptance of difference without trying to convince the

other to become, to believe or to think like oneself.

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Glossary of TermsAboriginal English: A complex and rule-governed dialect of English spoken widely by Australian Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal English differs from many other dialects of English in systematic ways at all levels of language including

underlying conceptual systems and is associated with different patterns of interaction.

Accent: This refers solely to pronunciation. The way speakers of different dialects pronounce words.

Creole: A language which has evolved from a pidgin. A creole has native speakers.

Dialect: A regionally or socially distinctive variety of language, identified by a particular set of words and grammatical

structures. A dialect refers to every aspect of language. It is a subdivision of language and is determined by its user.

A dialect shows who the speaker relates to.

ESD: English as a Second Dialect. This is sometimes used to refer to the learning of standard English as a second

dialect or to the teaching of standard English to students whose first dialect is not a variety of the standard dialect.

The more accurate term is SESD (Standard English as a Second Dialect).

ESL: English as a Second Language. Commonly refers to the learning of English as a second language or to the

teaching of English to students who speak another language as their first language.

Idiolect: The linguistic system underlying an individual’s use of language in a given time and place.

Kriol: The creole spoken by Aboriginal people in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and in the northern

regions of the Northern Territory is called Kriol.

Language: A term used by linguists to refer to the shared linguistic variety/varieties of a community of speakers

viewed as autonomous or undefined.

Metaphor: A linguistic construction which is based on mapping from one domain to another. For instance, the expression

‘the prices are skyrocketing’ is a result of mapping from the domain of ‘space travel’ to the domain of ‘money’.

Pidgin: A new variety of language created for practical and immediate purposes of communication by people of

differing language backgrounds. It has no native speakers.

Register: The form of language as determined by its context of use. People chose a register appropriate to the

purpose, the subject matter, the means by which communication takes place and their relationship to the person(s)

they are interacting with. A register shows what the speaker is doing. For example, the speech of football

commentators, or the football commentary register, has a distinctive set of words, meanings, and even structures.

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Glossary of Terms (continued)Schema: Schemas are the building blocks of our knowledge. These are derived from our various experiences and

guide us in our interpretations and communication. For example, people may have a schema for ‘restaurant’ in their

mind, which is based on their various experiences of going to different restaurants. So, if a person says, ‘that’s a very

expensive restaurant’, we usually interpret that to mean the food is expensive and not the building. This

interpretation is facilitated by the schema we have of restaurant, as a place where food is served.

Sociolect (or social dialect): A variety of language marking its speakers’ membership of a particular class, gender

age, ethnic or other social group.

Standard variety of language: A standard dialect or language results from an elaborate process of direct and

deliberate intervention by society. The variety must be chosen and codified by an authoritive body so as to become

the agreed and institutionalised norm to be used for all societal functions, including bureaucratic, educational,

scientific and/or academic. It must have written dictionaries and grammar books to dictate a ‘correct’ form of use.

Varieties of a Language: Any one manifestation of communication, a set of linguistic items with similar social

distributions. This includes examples of languages, dialects and registers. This is a term which is used, collectively, to

refer to regional dialects, social dialects and other subsystems of a language spoken by various societies and sub-

societies.

Wadjella: Aboriginal English word. Any non-Aboriginal person.

PLEASE NOTE: These definitions are very much simplified in an attempt to provide a first, very basicexplanation. We advise readers to refer to the list of references in order to get a more thoroughunderstanding of what are often very complex linguistic notions.

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Overview of Content of VideosA Shared World of Communication1 An ecological view of communication

- a variety of inter-connecting communicative systems

- each system needs to be understood both in its own right and in relation to the whole.

2 How Australia’s communicative ecology has evolved from both Indigenous and introduced sources

- explanation of the concept of language

- how pidgins and creoles developed

- parallel development of Australian English and Aboriginal English

- understanding Aboriginal English in the light of its history.

3 How two cultures have been maintained in the shared world of communication

- the ambiguous world of Aboriginal Australians

- examples of Aboriginal cultural interruption and maintenance

- the relation of Aboriginal English, Aboriginal languages, culture and arts to the evolution of contemporary

Aboriginal culture.

4 How Aboriginal English and Australian English coexist in contemporary Aboriginal experience

- code switching

- Aboriginal use of contemporary media

- contemporary Aboriginal literature

- Aboriginal people in higher education and the professions.

Moving Into Other Worlds1 The Aboriginal world prior to European arrival

- an ancient culture, complex languages

- intergroup relationships, including Macassans

- union of language, land and worldview.

2 Two worlds collide: Europeans and Aboriginal people

- initial contact: both groups attempt incorporation of other

- communication and worldview clashes

- violent conflict, language death

- ‘Protection’ and ‘Assimilation’, Stolen Generations

- language suppression.

3 Aboriginal responses

- culture and language shift

- culture switching

- maintenance of Aboriginal culture and language through Aboriginal English.

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Overview of Content of Videos (continued)

Now You See It, Now You Don’t1 How Aboriginal English differs from Australian English

- lexical level

- grammatical level

- pragmatic level.

2 Why Aboriginal English is different from Australian English

3 How human beings use mental images to understand their world

- categories

- schemas

- metaphors.

4 How Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal users of English may miss one another’s meanings

5 How mental images affect the use of language

- lexical level

- grammatical level

- discourse level.

Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power1 The fact and effects of one-way learning

- Dominance of Anglo view of Australian history

- Dominance of Anglo knowledge

- Dominance of English and standard English modes of expression

- Effects of this in Aboriginal students’ experience of exclusion, devaluation.

2 The principles of two-way/both ways education

- relevance to bidialectal as well as bilingual education.

3 Two-way education and identity

- importance of learning by way of first language

- importance building from the known to the unknown

- importance of recognising existing knowledge and skills.

4 Two-way education and power

- the right of Aboriginal English speakers to access power in the wider world through standard English

- the equal right of Aboriginal people to recognise power in Aboriginal contexts

- the need for recognition of Aboriginal knowledge, skill and status by non-Aboriginal students and teachers.

5 Principles of the implementation of two-way bidialectal education

- receptive and productive competence in Standard Australian English for Aboriginal English speakers

- receptive competence in Aboriginal English for all students

- accommodation to Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge.

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Other Related Resources andRecommended ReadingsAboriginal Education and Training Council & Centre for Aboriginal Studies, Curtin University of Technology (1997).

Our Story: An Aboriginal Cross Cultural Awareness Training Program. Perth, WA: Department of Education Services.

Arthur, J. (1996). Aboriginal English: A Cultural Study. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [The closest thing available

to a dictionary of Aboriginal English, based on written sources.]

Australian Indigenous Languages Framework Project. (1996). Australia’s Indigenous Languages. Wayville, SA: Senior

Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia. [Includes a chapter on Aboriginal English and Australian creoles]

Berry, R.& Hudson, J.(1993). Fostering English in Kimberley Schools (FELIKS) Professional Development Package.

Broome, WA: Catholic Education Office of Western Australia.

Cahill, R. (1998). Solid English. Perth, WA: Education Department of Western Australia.

Cahill, R. (2000). Deadly Ways to Learn Package. Perth, WA: Education Department of Western Australia, Association

of Independent Schools of Western Australia and Catholic Education Office of Western Australia.

Clayton, J. (comp.) (1996). Desert Schools: An Investigation of English Language and Literacy Among Young People in

Seven Communities. Hectorville, S.A.: Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs & National

Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia.

Curriculum Framework for Kindergarten to Year 12 Education in Western Australia. Perth, WA: The Curriculum Council

of Western Australia (1998).

Aboriginal Perspectives Across the Curriculum (1995). Adelaide, SA: Department of Education and Children’s Services (1995)

Department of Education, Training and Employment. (2000). Aboriginal Voices: activities and resources. Perspectives

of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Curriculum Resources Unit, Seacombe Gardens, SA.

Eades, D.(1993) Aboriginal English, Pen Note 93, Newtown, NSW, Primary English Teaching Association.

Eades, D. (1992). Aboriginal English and the Law: Communicating with Aboriginal English Speaking Clients: Handbook

for Legal Practitioners. Brisbane: Queensland Law Society.

Eagleson, R. D., Kaldor, S. & Malcolm, I. G. (1982). English and the Aboriginal Child. Canberra: Curriculum

Development Centre.

Goulburn Valley Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (1998). Deadly eh, Cuz: Teaching Speakers of Koorie English.

Shepparton, Vic.: Goulburn Valley Aboriginal Education Consultative Group.

Haebich, A. (1988). For their own good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900-1940.

Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia Press.

Harkins, J. (1994). Bridging two Worlds: Aboriginal English and Cross-cultural Understanding. St Lucia, Qld: University

of Queensland Press.

Heath, S. B. & Mangiola, L. (1991). Children of Promise: Literate Activity in Linguistically and Culturally Diverse

Classrooms. Washington, DC: National Education Association.

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Keen, I. (ed.) Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in Settled Australia (pp. 97-115). Canberra: Aboriginal

Studies Press. [Includes Diana Eade’s insightful chapter on Aboriginal English, ‘They don’t speak an

Aboriginal language, or do they?’]

Lo Bianco, J., Liddicoat, A. J. & Crozet, C. (eds) (1999). Striving for the Third Place: Intercultural

Competence Through Language Education. Melbourne: Language Australia.

Malcolm, I. G. (1995). Language and Communication Enhancement for Two-Way Education. Report to

the Department of Employment, Education and Training. Perth: Centre for Applied Language Research,

Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, I.G. (2000). Aboriginal English research: an overview. Asian Englishes 3 (2), 9-31.

Malcolm, I.G. (2001). Two-way English and the bicultural experience. In B. Moore (ed.) Who’s Centric

Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 219-240.

Malcolm, I.G. (2001). Aboriginal English: adopted code of a surviving culture. In D. Blair and P. Collins

(eds.) English in Australia. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 202-222.

Malcolm, I.G. (2001). Aboriginal English Genres in Perth. Mount Lawley: Centre for Applied Language

and Literacy Research, Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, I.G. (2002) Fixed and flexible framing: literacy events across cultures. In C. Barron, N.

Bruce and D. Nunan (eds.) Knowledge and Discourse: Towards an Ecology of Language. London:

Longman, 267-283.

Malcolm, I.G. (2002). Aboriginal English: What you gotta know. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years,

10 (1), 9-27.

Malcolm, I. G., Haig, Y., Könisgberg, P., Rochecouste, J., Collard, G., Hill, A. & Cahill, R. (1999).

Towards More User-friendly Education for Speakers of Aboriginal English. Mount Lawley: Centre for

Applied Language and Literacy Research, Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, I. G., Haig, Y., Königsberg, P., Rochecouste, J., Collard, G., Hill, A., & Cahill, R. (1999).

Two-way English: Towards More User-friendly Education for Speakers of Aboriginal English. Perth, WA:

Education Department of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, I.G. and Königsberg, P.(1995). Some features of Australian Aboriginal English. In McRae D.,

Langwij comes to School: Promoting Literacy Among Speakers of Aboriginal English and Australian

Creoles. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training, 30-31.

Malcolm, I. G., & Koscielecki, M. M. (1997). Aboriginality and English: Report to the Australian

Research Council. Mt Lawley, WA: Centre for Applied Language Research, Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, I. G., & Rochecouste, J. (2001). Aboriginal English Genres in the Yamatji Lands of Western

Australia. Revised edition Mount Lawley: Centre for Applied Language and Literacy Research, Edith

Cowan University.

Malcolm, I.G. & Rochecouste, J. (2002). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literacy in higher

education. Commissioned paper for the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Australian Research

Consortium Workplan. Melbourne: Victoria University.

16

Malcolm, I.G. and Rochecouste, J. (2000). Event and story schemas in Australian Aboriginal English. English

World-Wide, 21 (2), 261-289.

Malcolm, I. G., & Sharifian, F. (2002). Aspects of Aboriginal English oral discourse: An application of cultural schema

theory. Discourse Studies, 4(2), 169-181.

Matwiejcyk, R. et al. (1993) ESL in the Mainstream Teacher Development Course. Adelaide, SA: Department of

Education and Children’s Services.

Nero, S. (2001) Englishes in Contact; Anglophone Carribean Students in an Urban College, Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press.

NSW Board of Studies (1995). Aboriginal Literacy Resource Kit. Sydney: NSW Board of Studies. [Includes a booklet on

Aboriginal English by Diana Eades].

Palaca, A. (2001) Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English. College English 63 (3), 326-352.

Reynolds, H. (1998). This Whispering In Our Hearts. St. Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin. [Stories of early settlers who

opposed injustices towards Aboriginal people]

Reynolds, H. (1999). Why Weren’t we Told?: Personal Search for the Truth about our History. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking. [An

engaging autobiography, covering the major issues which Reynold’s other books deal with in a more academic fashion].

Reynolds, H. (1990). The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European invasion of Australia (rev. ed.).

Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books. [Reynold’s ground-breaking book bringing key historical documents back to the public eye.]

Ryder, B., Rider, L. & Brandon-Stewart, G. (1996) Aboriginal Studies Curriculum: A Teachers Guide for Western

Australian Schools., Perth, WA: Education Department of Western Australia.

Sharifian, F. (2001). Schema-based processing in Australian speakers of Aboriginal English. Language and Intercultural

Communication. 1 (2), 120-134

Sharifian, F. (2001). Association-Interpretation: A research technique in cultural and cognitive linguistics, Applied

Language & Literacy Research (ALLR), 2 (1), Available:

http://www.cowan.edu.au/ses/research/CALLR/onlinejournal/2001/Sharifian01.htm

Wolfram, W., Christian, D. & Adger, C. (1999). Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [A book for

teachers based on long-term work in bidialectal education in the USA]

Wray, A. Trott, K., & Bloomer, A. (1998). Projects in Linguistics: A Practical Guide to Researching Language. London: Arnold.

17

Related andRecommended WebsitesThe Aboriginal English Website of the Centre for Applied Language and Literacy

Research at Edith Cowan University.

www.cowan.edu.au/ses/research/CALLR/AENG/entry.htm

University of New England Aboriginal English Website (part of a site on Language

Varieties)

www.une.edu.au/langnet/aboriginal.htm

Developing Two-Way Bidialectal Education – the Website of an ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning professional

development conference

members.iinet.net.au/~lingwa/ABC/menu.html

Center for Applied Linguistics (USA) site on Dialects and ‘Ebonics’ (African American Vernacular English)

www.cal.org/topics/dialects.html

Handbook of WA Languages South of the Kimberley

coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLPages/AborigPages/LANG/WA/wahbk.htm

Aboriginal Languages of Australia map – a sample provided on AboriginalAustralia.com

www.aboriginalaustralia.com/Culture/nations/horton.cfm

Aboriginal Languages of Australia, WWW Virtual Library

www.dnathan.com/VL/austLang.htm

Australian Aboriginal Writers

www.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/aborigwr.html

Aboriginal Studies Press

www.aiatsis.gov.au/archprod/aspc/aboriginal_studies_press.htm

Magabala Books – publishers of many books by Indigenous Australians, including a number in Aboriginal English.

www.magabala.com/

WWW Virtual Library – Aboriginal Studies

www.ciolek.com/WWWVL-Aboriginal.html

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

www.aiatsis.gov.au/index.htm

Reconciliation Australia

www.reconciliationaustralia.org.au

VideoScripts

20

MICHELLE WHITE – Journalist:Hi there, I’m Michelle White. I’m a Nyungar journalist here in Perth, in fact,

I was one of the first Aboriginal cadets taken on by the ABC.

As a journo it’s my job to write and present news stories in Standard

Australian English, but when I’m yarning with my family or with my mates, like

my colleague down in Bunbury, Narelle Thorne, I don’t talk like this. I use

Aboriginal English.

Imagine if we were able to read the news using home talk.

(Location: Radio Station – Narelle Thorne reporting in Aboriginal English.)

NARELLE THORNE – Journalist: “Ay ya you mob, big fire was in town t’day they called 35 firefighters to pud id out. After the big fire

there big storm. It’s comin in da town, you fellas bedder move out or ya get blown away!!!”

(Home scene showing stereo, non-Aboriginal person listens with pained, puzzled expression and turns back to

his newspaper.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:For those of you who aren’t familiar with Aboriginal English, that might’ve sounded ‘funny’ or ‘wrong’.

Some people even dismiss it as just an inferior way of speaking. But for us, it’s normal. It’s the way

we’ve grown up learning to speak. It’s not right or wrong, it’s just the way it is.

We hope this series of videos will help give you a greater understanding of how Aboriginal English has

evolved and why it’s so important to value and accept it as a language in its own right.

Let’s start by looking at how Australian English and Aboriginal English have developed.

(Overlay of non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal child)

(Graphic model of how Aboriginal and Australian English have evolved.)

Before colonisation, there were over 250 Aboriginal languages, with at least

as many dialects spoken in Australia.

(Scene depicting Ningale Lawford singing in traditional language.)

(Illustrations of first contact between Aboriginal people and non-

Aboriginal people.)

Video Scripts

A Shared World of Communication

21

Video Scripts


When the British colonised this country Aboriginal people used

their own pronounciation and rules when communicating with

English speakers. Out of this communication, in which neither

side knew the language of the other, developed a pidgin.

(Archival footage of non-Aboriginal man talking to a group of Aboriginal

stockmen in pidgin.)

In some settings, when pidgin was used more widely, children

grew up using it as their first language and so it expanded into

a new language – a ‘creole’.

In Australia, forms of creole spread right across the top of the continent. In WA it’s mainly spoken in

the Kimberley.

(Nigale Lawford speaking creole.)

But in regions where Aboriginal people have had more concentrated contact with the English speaking

settlers or where their traditional languages were forbidden, Aboriginal English developed instead.

(Scene of Don Collard at BBQ speaking Aboriginal English)

(Survival Concert scenes.)

Aboriginal people soon made English their own and maintained this new language to replace their

traditional languages they were often not permitted to use.

This language became the vehicle in which their identity and

culture could be maintained.

While the distinctiveness of Aboriginal English has made it a

carrier of identity for Aboriginal people, for other Australians it

may be just seem like a slang or a lazy way of speaking.

It’s important to note that Aboriginal English has evolved

separately but at the same time as Standard Australian

English which is now this country’s official accepted language

of education, literature and the media.

So, in Australia, we can say we have a language ecosystem: that is, a combination of languages which

exist along side each other.

22

(Location: ABMUSIC. Students present their points of view)

Each language system is –

SPEAKER 1 “a vehicle for carrying the culture and identity of it’s speakers”

SPEAKER 2 “a successful tool for communication”

SPEAKER 1 “a mother tongue and home language”

SPEAKER 2 “and it has its own ways of working”

SPEAKER 3 “each language changes according to the needs of those who use it”

SPEAKER 4 “each language represents the mind set of the people who use it”

SPEAKER 3 “but it maintains links with the parent language”

SPEAKER 4 “each language continues to change, only dead languages don’t evolve.”

(Scene of Aboriginal people at Survival Concert.)

(Scene of non-Aboriginal people in mall.)

In the case of Aboriginal people, at least when they speak to each other, they

use Aboriginal English.

Non-Aboriginal people use varieties of Australian English.

Over time, the gap between these two dialects has widened and the two

cultures and their two meaning systems have existed independently of each

other, rarely overlapping, but frequently colliding when miscommunication

leads to misunderstanding.

(Scene of the Collards and the research team at Wave Rock and Hippo’s

Yawn)

SYLVIA COLLARD:“To us it was very spiritual. We come here, we come and we meet our people, that was gone before us and it make

you very angry when you come here and there’s nothing left. Make me angry.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Sylvia and Don Collard have been camping at this cave in Hyden known as

Hippo’s Yawn for decades. Throughout that time they have continued to

watch over this place. They say it’s a tradition to leave your mark to let others

know that you’ve passed through.

GLENYS COLLARD:“All us kids left our names here, our names been here.”

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23

Video Scripts


SYLVIA COLLARD:“The two boys I lost from Sister Kate’s, their names’ were here. They were taken from here and they’re still gone off

here now. Nothing.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In recent times instead of leaving traditional marks like the hand prints at

nearby Mulka’s cave, visiting Aboriginal people wrote their names in English.

But the local council viewed these markings as graffiti and cleaned up the

cave for the tourists.

SYLVIA COLLARD:“I couldn’t explain how we feel inside. I cried when I come here and looked

here, not a thing here, there was nothing here for us.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:It’s ironic that while the Hippo’s Yawn names have been lost forever the

Collards claim many of the handprints at nearby Mulka’s Cave were put there more recently, yet they remain for the

tourists to enjoy.

PATRICIA KONIGSBERG – Educator/Linguist, Department of Education and Training:“Just like the graffiti’s been removed from the cave so Aboriginal English is being ignored. In schools and society in

general, people like to pretend it doesn’t exist and when it does exist they dismiss it as just some rubbish talk, just

as they dismissed the graffiti.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:For many Aboriginal people the destruction of the these markings at Hippo’s Yawn, Hyden is symbolic of the

constant struggle Aboriginal people face to be understood in their own country.

(Overlay illustration of the Warygul and of Aboriginal hunters.)

Of the 200 – 300 languages spoken before white contact,

only about 90 are still alive today and of these, less than

20 are in a relatively healthy state.

Aboriginal people are losing their traditional languages at

the rate of about 2 per year.

24

PATRICIA KONIGSBERG:“Aboriginal English is a dialect just as much as Singaporean English or

Black American English is a dialect of English. So also is Standard

Australian English a dialect of English. There is however a big difference

between Standard Australian English and Aboriginal English because of

conceptualisation. Aboriginal English carries a world view that is

significantly different to the Western world view that is carried by people

who speak Australian English.”

(Scene: Kevin Dolman, Indigenous Support Services, in office.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In order to try and survive in both worlds many Aboriginal people have

adopted a practice called code switching. They change the way they speak depending on whom they’re speaking to.

KEVIN DOLMAN – Lawyer:“Language is one of the strongest parts of your culture and so keeping Aboriginal English alive. It’s not a matter of

keeping it alive, it stays alive and it’s a way of communicating – it’s there all the time.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Law graduate Kevin Dolman will use ‘flash talk’ at work but when he’s at home or in the community he knows it’s

not appropriate.

KEVIN DOLMAN:“Absolutely. And if I say that word “absolutely” or... I remember one time I said “fantastic” over something and .... this

old bloke looks at me and goes “fantastic – what does that mean?” Yeah, you do become accountable for your

language and it does take time to warm up especially when I go home. I suppose it’s harder as well because I should

actually know my language, the Aranta language.”

(Scene: Kim Farmer introduces himself to Abmusic class.)

KIM FARMER:“Morning class, I’m Kim Farmer. I’m a trainee lecturer at Abmusic. I ‘ve

studied a course ‘ere for the three years, I’m in my second year of training.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Code switching is quite common amongst Aboriginal people, the way they

speak to each other, is different to the way they’d speak to a non-

Aboriginal person.

Abmusic College in Perth has Aboriginal students of all ages, from all over

Australia. They’re from a variety of language groups and country, yet they

all speak Aboriginal English.

Video Scripts


25

Video Scripts


(Scene: Kim Farmer talks to class.)

“Yeah, I feel if you’re gonna be shame, you’re not gonna get anywhere

I suppose. I mean, I’ve always sorda realised like nah, sorda, I don’ wanna do

this, it’s too much shame you know.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:The College encourages students to code switch all the time. They can use

hometalk or Standard Australian English to express themselves.

MARTIN SMITH – Director, Abmusic:“One of the courses we do run here is called “Public Speaking” and we use

Ernie Dingo as a classic example.”

(Scene – Ernie Dingo doing a television commercial promoting Western Australia)

“What makes Ernie so attractive in a sense is that Ernie’s Ernie and he talks like an Aboriginal person but he’s also

able to use the codes as well, very well and he’s a classic example.”

(Scene – Abmusic musicians)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:But it’s important to note that when an Aboriginal person code switches, it’s not just a matter of just changing

grammar or pronounciation, it requires a fundamental change in cultural perspective to be able to move successfully

in both worlds.

MARTIN SMITH

I recall when I was working in the school system, I remember that when I’d

worked throughout the term, now towards the end of term I’d start to talk a

lot like the teachers but during the holidays I would then start to talk a lot

like, you know, back to like how I normally talk, as a Nyungar person. But

then, when I came back to school from the holidays they’d be saying well,

you’re talking a lot like a Nyungar now. My family would say that to me too,

you have to be a bit careful about the way you talk. Because it’s not good to

try and put the talk on when you are in a Nyungar setting as they’d be saying

like “who does this bloke think he is?”. You know, those sorts of things.

(Scene – Abmusic singer)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Some people might think that Aboriginal English is just a slang or an accent. A non-Aboriginal person might even say

that they code switch too, that they speak more informally around their family and friends. But there is a difference...

26

KEN WYATT – Director of Aboriginal Education, Department of Education and Training:“It’s not just the words, it’s the body language that goes with it. So it’s the

combination that makes Aboriginal English powerful – and there are

expressions and terms that we use that have a very particular meaning.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:However, for some Aborginal people code switching is just too hard and that’s

why services which deal specifically with Aboriginal people are so important.

(Noongar Alcohol Substance Abuse Service [NASAS]/Aboriginal Legal

Service [ALS] overlay)

An Aboriginal person might not be able to get their message across to a non-

Aboriginal doctor or lawyer. So they go to the Aboriginal Legal Service or Medical Service because they know they’ll

be understood.

(Scene from play ‘One Day in ‘67’)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In recent years, Aboriginal English has gained more recognition. It’s even been used more often by Aboriginal writers.

But the extent to which Aboriginal English is used is really determined by the audience the author is trying to reach.

For instance, if the Aboriginal writer wants to push a message home to a non-Aboriginal audience, then they have to

write in a way that their audience can understand.

(Scene from play)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:This play, One Day in 67, was written by Mitch Torres and tells the story of the ‘67 referendum through the eyes of

three north-west Aboriginal women.

DAVID MILROY – Artistic Director, Yiira Yaakin:“Well I don’t think it was that difficult for audiences to understand what the

language was. I think they could follow the language. And it’s wonderful to sit

in an audience and hear the Aboriginal audience cracking up and laughing at

some of the jokes or the language in there and seeing how the non-

Indigenous audience is thinking ‘Should we laugh at this or should we keep

our mouths shut’. So it is empowering in that sense.”

Video Scripts


27

Video Scripts


(Scene from play.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:David Milroy believes it’s imperative Aboriginal stories be told by Aboriginal

people.

DAVID MILROY:“With Aboriginal writers, they’re going to go back to their families and make

sure what they’re telling should be aired publicly. If we’re talking about

cultural issues and social/political issues, it is often important that the writer

goes back and checks those with the families and communities first before it

gets put out onto the stage. Unfortunately, when we get non-Indigenous

writers doing that, they don’t have any need to do that, you know, there’s no sort of responsibility back towards the

community, so if it does go horribly wrong, it’s generally the community that suffers not the writer.”

(Scene from Survival Concert 2002.)

Aboriginal people hold all sorts of jobs and positions of power. When they’re dealing with issues such as Native Title,

cultural rights, state and national politics, health, education and housing, they’re often using their own personal

points of reference just as non-Aboriginal people do.

ROBERT EGGINGTON – Director, Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation“Some people would go as far as saying language is the most basic

foundation of culture and that without language culture doesn’t exist.

Language is also one of the very first aspects of our culture that they

destroyed in the sense of prohibiting Aboriginal people from speaking

language, thereforth breaking down those cultural foundations and, you

know, the spirtual core of our life.”

(Scene from Survival Concert 2002)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In summary, Aboriginal people would say that if you honour our culture you

must honour our language and you have to remember that it’s easier to learn

another language if your home language can also be used.

PRESENTOR – MICHELLE WHITE:“We hope this video has given you an insight into how Aboriginal English has evolved.

This video is one in a series of four. If you’d like to learn more about Aboriginal English have a look at our other programs.”

28

(Overlay of title: WAYS OF BEING, WAYS OF TALK


Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Moving Into Other Worlds)

END OF SCRIPT

Video Scripts


29

Video Scripts


NARELLE THORNE – Journalist/Newsreader:“Hello, I’m Narelle Thorne, I’m a journalist and newsreader

with the ABC in the south west of WA, but my mob isn’t

originally from here, we’re from up Cue way.

In this video we wanna tell you about how Aboriginal English

expresses the way we think and view the world; in other words

it’s about the conceptual dimensions of Aboriginal English.

(Scene from Surivial Concert 2002.)

You see, how my people see the world is reflected in the way we speak. We hope that by telling you a

little bit about how and why Aboriginal English has developed you’ll understand why it’s important to

us that others accept and value the way we talk.”

(Scene of river with overlay map of Australia.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Before European settlement, Australia was a rich

tapestry of different speech communities. It’s estimated

there were about 250 different languages and perhaps

the same number of dialects.

But as we know, most of those languages have been lost

and English is now the most common language spoken

by Indigenous Australians.

However, it’s not the same English as that used by most

other Australians. It’s a new English – Aboriginal English.

(Acting Scene, location – Perth, on a bench)

DERECK: “‘ow ya goin Siss, what you up to?”

KYLIE: “Naah – nothin much … I’m waitin for this girl da ‘urry

up …. she’s comin from de hospital dere she’s takin

‘er time.”

DERECK: “Yeh you know they drag their feet all de time.”

KYLIE: “True…”.

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Edith Cowan University Professor of Linguistics, Ian Malcolm, explains

to us how Aboriginal English has evolved separately to Australian English.

30

PROF. IAN MALCOLM – Edith Cowan University:“We have on the one side one formant of Aboriginal English and that’s

Aboriginal. On the other side we have – English. To start off with they were

both completely separate. Now the British came bringing many different

Englishes with them. The Aboriginal people were still on this side of the line,

but eventually the Aboriginal people started to use some of the English words

in order to communicate with the settlers.

(British Flag overlay.)

(Montage of stolen generation images, old photos of people in chains.)

What happened was, not that they changed their whole way of thinking to this

way of thinking, but that they clothed these thoughts with words from the

various Englishes that they were exposed to. Eventually however, things

stabilised into what we call a pre-pidgin.

Now around about that time was when the Aboriginal people needed a means

of communication with one another because more Aboriginal peoples were

coming from the lands they had been displaced from and they needed to have

a means of communication and they couldn’t communicate across the

Aboriginal languages. So English started to serve an Aboriginal purpose.

That was the fundamental thing that set Aboriginal English in motion.

Aboriginal English, I would say, still exists mainly on this side of the line and

has been maintained because it is useful for Aboriginal communication.”

(Scene of Aboriginal people walking in bush & standing under trees by car.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Some Indigeous Australians are bidialectal. They’ve learnt to use two different Englishes – the one

they use at home or with their community, and the one they use in school or in non-Aboriginal society.

(BBQ scene & children playing.)

A lot of people dismiss Aboriginal English as slang, or just a lazy way of speaking. They assume we all

speak the same English and that it’s just that some people are better educated and have a better

command of the language.

But when this assumption is made, Aboriginal people are greatly disadvantaged because they don’t

conform to what’s considered ‘normal’.

The way they speak is treated as inferior and they’re classed as non-achievers.

Video Scripts


31

Video Scripts


KEN WYATT – Director of Aboriginal Education, Departmentof Education and Training, WA

“I’ll tell you what one of the problems is and it’s a mind set

that’s developed that we can’t speak properly.

Aboriginal English today is as significant as it was when we

grew up as children. It hasn’t changed. It’s still dynamic.

The other thing, it keeps our identity as a people and I think

that’s very important and the other part too would be that

teachers need to be mindful that that’s our cultural identify

and it’s not just a home language, it’s a language we use in

the context of our interactions with our people and our families.”

(Survival concert scene.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:It’s not surprising many non-Indigenous Australians get confused by the English of Aboriginal

Australians because it basically sounds the same. In reality, though, it’s very different. In this series of

videos we want to show you just how different it really is.

On the surface it does sound the same as standard Australian English, but how much of this

conversation can you really understand?

(Acting Scene: Kylie meets Dereck walking down the street.)

KYLIE: “Hey, never seen ya for a long time broder,

where ya goin?”

DERECK “Where ya goin?”

KYLIE: “Hey, na, I’m just goin up ere to see one of my

aunnies. I just came down from there

…downtown.”

DERECK: “I’m just goin down to do some buskin.”

KYLIE: “Wherebout”

DERECK: “Well… I’ve got ma hole, broke.”

KYLIE: “Jeez, broke again.… every time I see you’re

broke again.”

DERECK: “Tell me aboud it.”

32

PROF. IAN MALCOLM – Edith Cowan University:“Well how much of that conversation did you really understand? The young

man was telling the young lady that he met, that he was broke and that he was

going to do some busking. But did you notice she called him brother? And that

is not what might have been understood by a non-Aboriginal speaker.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:When Aboriginal people use ‘home-talk’ – their own English dialect –

non-Aboriginal people constantly misinterpret what they’re saying...

Take this scenario for instance...

(Acting Scene, location: Office situation – continues to cafe.)

KYLIE: (Walks past desk and says) “I’m going to lunch now.”

MICHELLE: (Looks up from working at desk) “OK.”

KYLIE: “OK, bye.”

KYLIE: (eating lunch by herself)…

MICHELLE: (walks up and says)… “Hi Kylie.”

KYLIE: (eating lunch)… “Mm.”

MICHELLE: “I didn’t know you came here to this café.”

KYLIE: “Mm.”

MICHELLE: “Do you mind if I join you?”

KYLIE: (waves her hand) “No, that’s OK”.

MICHELLE: (takes seat) “Cool. I didn’t know you come here for lunch.”

KYLIE: “Yeah, yeah. I norrmally come in here for lunch.

I keep asking you to come with me but …..”

MICHELLE: “When did you ask me?”

KYLIE: “All the time. I say I’m going for lunch now.”

MICHELLE: “I didn’t realise you were asking me. I just

thought you were telling me that you were

going.”

KYLIE: “No….. Yeah……Ah… (wave of hand)

doesn’t matter.”

Video Scripts


33

Video Scripts


(Overlay grab of women playing cards.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Aboriginal English is something of a mixed blessing for

Indigenous people because it really has no currency beyond

their community.

That’s why people who speak standard Australian English

treat Aboriginal English speakers like they have a language

deficiency.

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Yes, well I think this is the irony of the situation. Aboriginal

people, in most cases, are managing two dialects in the course of their everyday living…and the

people very often, who criticise the way in which they use language, are themselves mono-dialectal,

so that actually, Aboriginal people are managing a more complex linguistic situation than those who

criticise them sometimes.”

(Acting Scene: Kylie, Dereck and Michelle (reading newspaper) sit at bus stop).

KYLIE: (Pointing to photo on paper/magazine) “Um, ‘cuse me, ‘ose that woman on the front

dere?”

MICHELLE: “Sorry?”

KYLIE: “‘ose that yorga on the front?”

MICHELLE: “Yorga? What’s a yorga?”

KYLIE: “Don ya know what I’m sayin? ‘ose that woman

on de front, ya know?”

DERECK: (pointing)… “‘ose this person ‘ere’”

MICHELLE: “Do you want it?” (paper)

DERECK: “Ah, no, no, no, no, no. I jus, we just wonered

‘ose on the front, tha’s all.”

(Michelle scuttles away from bus stop)

KYLIE: “Hey right, aaaahhh….”

DERECK: “We’re not gonna bite ya!”

DERECK: “Wadda wadda.”

KYLIE: “They take off straighd away ‘ay’.”

DERECK: (smelling under both arms)… “Must be me ‘ay’.” (both laugh)

KYLIE: “You got no sense.”

DERECK: “Never mind.”

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PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“This kind of stigma that is attached to the way Aboriginal people speak is

something that they have to endure very often in public situations.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Through decades of research both here and overseas we know that

conceptualisation, the way people interpret the world, forms and transforms

language rather than the reverse. This breakthrough offers us a new way of

thinking when it comes to understanding Aboriginal English.

(Scene of people cooking bardies on BBQ.)

(Montage of stolen generation images, old photos of people in chains.)

Aborginal people have been displaced, abused, used and treated as second-class citizens in their own

country. They’ve suffered immensely and struggle constantly to maintain their culture and identity.

But even though the majority of their traditional languages are now extinct, they’ve created a new

dialect, one that expresses a distinctly Aboriginal view of the world.

(Archival footage of Aboriginal children singing in educational setting.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Language is a living, breathing thing – it’s constantly evolving – it’s not controlled by books, linguists,

community leaders or even the Government. As a language community, our way of speaking is our life –

language is controlled and driven by how we use it. This has been shown by recent cognitive research.

DR FARZAD SHARIFIAN:“It’s a new approach to the study of language which looks at language as

reflecting and expressing deeper conceptualisations. So we found it quite

insightful and we applied it to the study of Aboriginal English and it really has

shown, it has really worked quite well in sort of, helping us understand the

conceptual levels of Aboriginal language.”

(Archival footage of beach scene followed by contemporary city mall scene.)

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NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Language reflects the way we see and structure our world; in

other words, our language reflects our worldview.

So by looking at the language, we can relate to the lived

experiences of the speakers, to try and understand the

reason why people speak the way they do.

People from different cultures may conceptualise the world

differently and over time, they map the way they see the

world onto the way they speak.

(Scene of Don Collard with grannies.)

(Categories, Schemas and Metaphors overlay.)

DR FARZAD SHARIFIAN:“By conceptualisation we mean the way we categorise experiences. Also, the way we visualise and

package reality and also the way we make blends from different domains and sort of, come up with

metaphors. So different processes are also included in the conceptualisation.”

(Overlay of Aboriginal boy and non-Aboriginal girl smiling.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Take for instance categories. We need to categorise things in order to understand them but the

categories an Aboriginal person uses might be totally different

to a non-Aboriginal person.

What image does the word kangaroo conjure up?

(Overlay of kangaroo being cooked.)

Research has shown many Aboriginal children categorise the

kangaroo as food while non-Aboriginal children see it as

something cute and fluffy.

Another tool of conceptualisation is by using schemas.

DR FARZAD SHARIFIAN:“Schemas are mental pictures or templates, that we use in order to organise or package our view of

the world.”

36

(Scene of non-Aboriginal home.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:What about the word home?

Does it conjure up an image of where you live... your house and yard ?

(Scene of Aboriginal home situation.)

Or does it make you think of the people around you – your family?

GLENYS COLLARD:“The home’s everywhere where your family is. So that even that concept

doesn’t fit in with the house and the bed. You know, it doesn’t matter if

there’s three or four kids in the bed and ya get the Wadjella teachers sayin’

it’s really, really sad the kids can’t even do their homework because there’s so many people at the

house and, ya know, there’s so much noise and we’re born into that.”

(Overlay of Wave Rock)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:The way a non-Aboriginal and an Aboriginal person perceive this famous Western Australian landmark

would depend on what schema they’re using.

(Scene of Wave Rock.)

(Glenys Collard and Dr Farzad Sharifian, near campfire.)

FARZAD: “Yeah they said, you know, it’s an overhanging curve which has been caused by water

erosion and weathering over many centuries.”

GLENYS: “The Wadjellas reckon?”

FARZAD “Yeah.”

GLENYS: “No, that’s not, not our mob though.”

FARZAD: “Ooh, what do you reckon then?”

GLENYS: “That’s the Wargyl, ya know, come from the

Swan River, come right through.”

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(Overlay of Wargyl drawing.)

(Grass tree overlay.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:We could use these two grass trees, or balga bushes as

another example.

What do you see?

FARZAD: “I can see two er, balga trees, they’re called

balga trees, they’re just two trees.”

GLENYS: “Well they’re trees but they’re people. This eh

big tall one is a Nyungar man and the smaller

the Nyungar woman.”

(Metaphors overlay.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Finally, we use metaphors in conceptualisation.

But again, the way Aboriginal people use metaphors is different to the way someone who speaks

Australian English. For example, in Aboriginal English the boundary between animal, human and land

is less clear than in Australian English.

(Professor Ian Malcolm and Glenys Collard sit around talking by camp fire.)

IAN: “So when are the boys coming, Glenys?”

GLENYS: “They’ll be here drekly when the moon jumps

up a bit more.”

IAN: “Oh, you means when it rises higher in the

sky?”

GLENYS: “Yeah, in a minute, drekly they’re comin’, but

then, ya know, it jumps righd up, but that’s

lader on.”

IAN: “Ahh.”

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Aboriginal language works in different categories and you

often find that the categories that seem to fit in standard English just don’t correspond to the way in

which Aboriginal people picture things. Another obvious example would be the case of the term ‘he’,

or ‘she’ or ‘it’ which we use to refer to a subject whether its male or female or non-aminate or, or

perhaps non-human. In Aboriginal English very often these merge so that just one term (‘he’) can

suffice for all of them.”

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(Categories, Schemas and Metaphors overlay.)

(A walk in the bush: Alison Hill, non-Aboriginal person.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Categories, schemas and metaphors are the three main ways language and

thought work together, for example, researchers have found that the

Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people visualise a walk in the bush is

very different.

(Aboriginal family walking through the bush.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:What we’ve tried to show you in this video is that even though the two

dialects often sound the same, Aborginal English and Standard Australian

English are very different and that the greatest differences between these two languages is at the

conceptualisation level, the “unseen” level.

NARELLE THORNE – Journalist:“The way our mob has formed language is the way we see the world and the way we see the world is

not likley to change.”

(Scenes of Aboriginal children playing, laughing and sitting at a table.)

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn to recognise and respect each other’s ways of thinking. If we

help all children take into account these differing world views, they’ll be better able to communicate

with people of all different cultures and they’ll gain a

richer experience of the world. Aboriginal children will

find it easier to learn Standard Australian English and

non-Aboriginal children will have valuable experience in

understanding different ways of thinking and talking.

If you want to learn more about Aboriginal English

there are three more titles that you might want to

check out.

See you later fellas.”

(Overlay of title: WAYS OF BEING, WAYS OF TALK



Moving Into Other Worlds)

END OF SCRIPT

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NARELLE THORNE – Journalist:“Hello, I’m Narelle Thorne, I’m a journalist and newsreader

with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation here in Bunbury.

I’m not local but my mob are from the Murchison area.

But if you’ve seen any of the other videos in this series,

you’ll probably know me from there.

The video you’re about to watch is one of four in a series

about Aboriginal English.

We’re going to give you an insight into how and why

Aboriginal English has evolved and what can be done to

develop and foster both-ways learning.”

(Archival video of land rights march – ’70s.)

JENNY NUNN – Coordinator, Student Services, Department of Education and Training:“So Ron, I didn’t do any Aboriginal studies when I was at primary school or university actually and I’ve

been working in education now for 20 years. So what do you see in some of the books that are being

used in schools to teach kids?”

RON BRADFORD – A/Corordinator, Aboriginal Education:“I don’t see very much in our textbooks at all.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:You only have to look in the history section of your local

library to understand why Aboriginal people believe many of

these books are offensive. It might also explain why so many

people hold such strange ideas.

(Scene of Jenny and Ron in library.)

RON BRADFORD: “This is talking about the battle of Pinjarra and from an

European point of view it’s being presented as battle of

Pinjarra whereas from an Aboriginal point of view, Nyungar,

from around the area would present it as a massacre.”

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PATRICIA KONIGSBERG, Educator/Linguist, Department of Education and Training:“In the material today used within schools most of the materials were written

by non-Aboriginal people taking a Western world view, and a western point of

view about the events that have happened. So this is insulting to Aboriginal

people because it never takes into account their feelings or their real

experiences that have happened.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Even today there are many examples of how Aboriginal history is still being

misrepresented from an Anglo-Australian viewpoint.

(Classroom scene.)

Is it any wonder Aboriginal students may feel alienated in the classroom? To expect Aboriginal

students to learn from textbooks and a school curriculum that comes solely from the dominant Anglo

culture is to ask them to accept their own irrelevance.

(Scene from Girrawheen Senior High School: boy reading Standard Australian English.)

“Grandmother asked, ‘Where are all you children going?’ The children replied, ‘Grandma, Lana’s found

a new place where we can play and it’s not very far away. She’s going to take us all to this new place

so we can all play.’”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:How often do you hear or see Aboriginal English used in the media or literature? How often is it used

in class?

(Scene from Girrawheen Senior High School: girl reading Aboriginal English.)

“Where all you liddle fullahs goin?” “We jus goin over ere cause Lana wonna show us somethink.

It’s not a long way away Nan hits jus ere.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Aboriginal English texts, whether written or oral, contain rich traditions and

values. They’re often told jointly by a few people. They’re not linear and the

experience is more important than the form. These texts are often multi-

layered and cyclical.

Basing an education system only around the written word is unfair as

Aboriginal people pass on their history orally and books written by non-

Aboriginal peole can’t give the core meaning of Aboriginal culture – Aboriginal

yarning does.

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GLENYS COLLARD – Consultant, Aboriginal English, EdithCowan University:

“I did the spiral to try and represent how the past is the

present and the present is the future by using the spiral.

(Overlay of spiral)

It’s family, it’s time, it’s knowledge. It’s the rules, a lot of rules

come from that. Telling us what we can and what we can’t do.”

(Classroom scene)

PATRICIA KONIGSBERG:“The onus has always been on Aboriginal people to learn standard Australian English. Society has

never tried to work the other way to take into account and accommodate different ways of speaking.

So basically, there was a real true shut off instead of trying to have a flow of real communication

going, there’s usually a real shut off of ‘You don’t speak my way so therefore I won’t listen to you.’”

(Classroom at Dryandra.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:From the moment an Aboriginal child enters the classroom he or she may feel left out, the entire

structure is different.

The langage that is used in school is an issue, it’s linked to

middle-class Anglo culture. It’s more familiar to the non-

Aboriginal students in the classroom because it’s more likely

that’s how they speak at home.

But the Aboriginal student has grown up speaking another

type of English – Aboriginal English. It’s the way they’ve heard

family and friends talk all their lives. It’s an important part of

their culture and identity.

(Scene of Aboriginal kids at home in Kondinin.)

The misinterpretation of words is another example of how

messages in one dialect often take on a totally different meaning in the other.

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GLENYS COLLARD:“All the kids were sitting down while this teacher’s reading this story from

the book and then he, he was listening but, the little fella he got up and

started hopping around there a bit and she’s saying ‘sit down, sit down’ and

then he got up again and he started hopping towards the doorway and she

said: ‘Hey, where you going?’ And he said: ‘I’m goin da have a piss Miss.’

And she said: ‘Oh! I beg your pardon – and you keep going, you go and see

Mr ‘such-and-such’.”

(School grounds scene.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Because the teacher didn’t tell him using this word in this way in the

classroom was inappropriate he didn’t know why he was being punished.

(School classroom scene.)

TEACHER: “Can you think of a good word beginning with ‘m’? Jasmine, would you be able to think

of something that you could tell me?”

(Jasmine shakes head.)

TEACHER: “Can’t think of anything”?

(Jasmine shakes head.)

TEACHER: “OK, who can help Jasmine? Antony?”

ANTONY: “Marshmellows?”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:This is a classic example of shame. Aboriginal people often don’t like being

singled out to answer a question. From an Aboriginal point of view it’s too direct

and confrontational. A group discussion works better for Aboriginal students

because they’re used to yarning – telling stories together, not individually.

West Australian Deptartment of Education statistics show that in 2001 62.8%

of non-Indigenous students completed high school in government schools but

in the same year only 18% of their Aboriginal peers did.

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MICHELLE WHITE: “Did you feel like you were getting

singled out?”

ABMUSIC STUDENT 1: “Yeah, in a way yeah, and I felt lonely

and I didn’t like it, so ......”

MICHELLE WHITE: “Did it make you not want to go?”

ABMUSIC STUDENT 1: “In a way, yeah, it did, but I just

thought ‘stuff em’, this is me, I am

Aboriginal, I don’t care what yous

think . We’re all equal.”

ABMUSIC STUDENT 2: “For a while I went to Senior High

School and, like, I had to change my

tone a bit, sort of like talk differently...”

ABMUSIC STUDENT 3: “You wanna express yourself and the only way you can express yourself is the

way you know how, and it’s just a matter of people trying to understand and

accepting the fact you are what you are and they can’t make you into

something you’re not.”

KEN WYATT – Director of Aboriginal Education, Department of Education and Training:“I think it’s critical if we want children to progress and acquire the Australian Standard English

standards that we seek as education providers then it’s important too that the teachers understand

Aboriginal English, Aboriginal languages and then how that fits in context with language and literacy

development. Because if we don’t understand that we will lose our way forward in education.

But another thing I think that’s important, when we go

through teacher training we’re told to start teaching from the

point of where a child is at and if our children speak

Aboriginal English, then that two-way process must

incorporate that understanding and be taken forward from

there.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:(Scene from ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning Workshops.)

Western Australia is leading the nation in the development of

two way learning strategies. The West Australian Department

of Education and Training and Edith Cowan University have

joined forces to create the ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project.

Since 1995, experts in the field have been holding workshops around the State working with

Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal education personnel and offering educators the chance to learn more

about two-way learning.

44

(Scene from ABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning workshops.)

NON-ABORIGINAL GIRL: I hope that this conference will help you in your work with teachers so they

can help us learn from each other.

ABORIGINAL GIRL: I’d like ta welcome everyone here t’day to our country, Nyungar country…”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:It’s much harder to learn in a language you do not understand than it is in your own language, but

that’s exactly what we expect from Aboriginal students.

PATRICIA KONIGSBERG:“What is happening now is that in schools the Aboriginal speakers won’t use

Aboriginal English so they’re not showing the wealth of experience and

knowledge that they have. Their speech is getting cut off and they are not

being enabled to express themselves with feeling, with the language that

comes from their very heart.”

(Scene: Patsy Königsberg and Glenys Collard at Wave Rock.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Patricia Königsberg and Glenys Collard are two of the key people behind

the Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project. They’re a living example of how a both-ways approach

can be effective.

(Patricia and Glenys draw two-way learning diagram in the sand.)

PATRICIA: “......we see two layers, two people learning both ways so that this person learns from

this person, this person learns from this person. While this is happening this person is

learning about themselves and this person is learning about themselves and they’re

learning to communicate with each other, to communicate together.”

GLENYS: “For me it’s like – I’ve got to learn this way here and these fellas, it doesn’t matter –

they don’t need to learn about me. That’s

the way it is at the moment.”

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(Dryandra class and Girrawheen class overlay.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:When an Aboriginal child comes to school, he or she has

already acquired a whole language in its own right that meets

their needs and serves them well. It’s important to

acknowledge that by spending time to better get to know

each other. It’s a two-way learning and two-way teaching

situation that ensures a positive learning and teaching

relationship.

AMANDA PAYNE – Teacher, Dyandra Primary School:“I think that Delene’s been invaluable in the fact that she has a lot of background on the children I’m

working with. But also, I think, my main problem has been assumptions that I’ve made about the

home life of many of the children. Such things…I was speaking to a child the other day and

mentioned to him about doing something in his bedroom to which he replied that he didn’t have a

bedroom, he slept in the lounge and I thought well – that’s really my, I suppose, values being placed

upon them where I’m assuming that all these children go home, you know, and have a nice bedroom

to work in or whatever, so things like that you have keep check of.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Teachers Delene Corunna and Amanda Payne work in a two-way fashion to make sure their

classrooms are inclusive of all students.

DELENE CORUNNA – Teacher, Dyandra Primary School:“I think another thing to make aware many families have

issues outside of the school that may impact on the child’s

attendance and learning and education may not be a priority

for them so we have to work with that.”

(Scene of lineup of kids outside classroom.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:We’ve got to remember that when most Aboriginal students

start school they assume everyone speaks the same as them

and if teachers are not familiar with Aboriginal English, it’s

likely they’ll assume the Aboriginal student has a language deficiency.

MICHELLE: “Can you see the value there in using how they speak at home to build?”

AMANDA: “Absolutely, I can. I think, you know, it’s essential you tune in to your children and so I

think, you know, this is an obvious way of doing it.”

46

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:You have to remember that language is the carrier of culture and identify. If we don’t recognise and

value this, it can undermine a child’s self esteem, self concept and ultimately affect reconciliation.

By giving Aboriginal English due recognition, Indigenous people have a far

greater chance of developing higher competency in Standard Australian

English as they no longer see it as a threat to their cultural maintenance.

(Scene of imposing looking office and bank buildings.)

Aboriginal people want their children to learn Standard English so they can

use it as a ‘tool’ to access Western institutions, such as health, education,

finance and politics in a more powerful way so they can take control of their

own lives within the non-Aboriginal system.

KEN WYATT:“Our communities and our families operate on a survival basis and you adapt, but you don’t have to

surrender your culture and your way of speaking in totality.

I think what we have got to do as educators is be astute enough to allow both to co-exist because if

you want work within Australian society you’ve got to have Standard Australian English but it doesn’t

mean to say we diminish the importance of Aboriginal English.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:If students look at the grammatical features of Aboriginal English and then compare it to other

dialects they can start to challenge the belief that one is inferior to another.

(Scene: students in class.)

(Scene of Aboriginal homelife.)

By learning to accommodate Aboriginal English and Aborginal ways of learning

and experiencing the world not only do the Indigenous students reap the

benefits, so do all the other students. It’s not sink or swim any more,

it’s all-inclusive.

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NARELLE THORNE – Journalist:“Well, there you go. Something that starts in the classroom

can spread from there. We can change the misconceptions

and attitudes about my people and help bring our worlds

together.

If you want to learn more about Aboriginal English there are

three more titles you may want to check out.

See you later fellas.”

(Overlay of: WAYS OF BEING, WAYS OF TALK


Now You See it Now You Don’t

Moving Into Other Worlds.)

END OF SCRIPT

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MICHELLE WHITE – Journalist:“Hi there, I’m Michelle White. I’m a journalist here in Perth, in fact, I was one

of the first Nyungar cadets taken on by the ABC.

The video you’re about to see is one in a series of four on Aboriginal English.

In this program, we’re going to have a look at what’s happened to my people

in the past and see how those events have shaped the way that we talk.

By looking back in history, you’ll be able to see how two dialects of English

have evolved in Australia – they are standard Australian English and Aboriginal

English. Both dialects have evolved side-by-side, but separately of each other.

We hope it’ll help you understand that by respecting the way we talk you’ll

also be respecting us and our culture. Let’s have a look.”

(Archival sketches.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:To try and understand how Aboriginal English has evolved we need to look at how the events that

have shaped history have also given rise to this dialect. Aboriginal English is what it is today because

of what its speakers have been through.

GLENYS COLLARD – Consultant, Aboriginal English, Edith Cowan University:“Every Aboriginal family has been affected in some way, whether it’s been from removal of children

(the Stolen Generations) or movement from their traditional country.”

(Mungo Man – file story.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In 1968, the remains of an Aboriginal woman were discovered in a dried up

lake bed in New South Wales: she was to be known as Mungo 1.

Scientists believe that Mungo 1 was cremated about 26,000 years ago.

It’s the earliest example of a ritualised cremation ever found on this planet.

A man now known as Mungo 3 was also found a short distance away.

Fireplaces found near him prove the existence of a living community even

older than Mungo 1, at least 31,000 years ago. This discovery proved

something that Aboriginal people have always known – they have one of the

world’s most ancient, rich and diverse cultures.

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Moving Into Other Worlds

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What’s more, scientists discovered the ochre in Mungo Man’s

burial was from hundreds of kilometres away in the Flinders

Ranges, so it’s also evidence of the world’s first trading

system. It’s no longer possible to argue that the Aboriginal

people were simply a disorganised and primitive race. The

truth is Aboriginal people have always had a rich and complex

social system and culture.

Far from being isolated, prior to British colonisation they had

contact with Asian and European seafarers. This included

many years of cohabitation with the Baiini and at least 400

years of sustained trading with the Macassans.

(Overlay of map of Australia with trading routes.)

There was also a vast network of trade routes that criss-crossed the country. Tools, weapons, food

and information flowed freely along these trade routes.

(Archival film of preparation for a corroboree.)

Aboriginal people had an interwoven system of relationships between people and their environment.

The two are indelibly linked and this is reflected in their language. At the time Aboriginal people spoke

more than 250 languages with complex systems that expressed concepts important to them, such as

families, spirituality and land.

(Montage of different images.)

PROF. IAN MALCOLM – Edith Cowan University:“And so over many hundreds of years the Aboriginal people

had developed ways in which they could express the

relationships that existed between one and other, and

relations between them and the environment. Their system

involved a union of language, land and worldview, the

understanding of the meaning of life.”

50

(Earliest pictures available of Aborginal people trading, hunting and other archival footage.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In many parts of Australia, husbands and wives came from different regions

speaking different languages, so their children grew up automatically being

multi-lingual and multi-dialectal.

From the moment Captain Cook pushed his flag in the sand and claimed

possession of this country, these two worlds have been set on a collision

course. Aboriginal people have been placed under immense pressure to

adopt, conform and assimilate to the ideology of the white supremacy the

colonisers brought with them. The new settlers regarded the original

inhabitors of this land as a primitive race that would eventually disappear.

Aboriginal people initially tried to fit the trespassers into their own system of

law. They started using gestures and their own language to try and trade and communicate the rules.

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Well, it is reported that in 1829, when Captain Fremantle sailed up the Swan River there were

Aboriginal people standing on the banks of the river and they were calling out ‘warra warra’.

This appears to correspond to a Nyungar word that is still used today meaning bad and probably was

correctly interpreted, just meaning ‘go away’.”

(Archival footage.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:After some initial unsuccessful attempts to communicate with the Aboriginal people, the early settlers

of Port Jackson in New South Wales resorted to abducting Aboriginal people to force them to learn

English. The idea was that these people could then act as translators and interpreters and pass on

their newly acquired language. But even those who did learn English under

duress and survived the European diseases to which they had no immunity,

they didn’t understand the thinking patterns of the new arrivals. So they

applied their own broad view to this new language and changed the meanings

of many words.

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“I think the assumption was, from the beginning, that all you need to do to get

a person to learn another language, is to get them to learn different words

and so they thought that by exposing the Aboriginal people to these

differerent words they would turn them into English speakers.

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Yet a language is intimately related to your human relations

and to all of the conceptualisations that you’ve grown up with.

So taking people away from their context where they have

grown up, expecting them to be able to switch to English was

quite unrealistic.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:During the early years of settlement Aboriginal people kept

their traditional languages and tried to build bridges of

communication with a new contact variety, a pidgin. In some

areas this evolved into a creole, in others it gave way to

Aboriginal English. This is explained in more detail in the video

“Shared World of Communication.”

Right from the start there were clashes in communication and culture. The British settlers quickly

rendered traditional food resources inaccessible and replaced them with European plants and stock.

When Aboriginal people exercised their rights as landowners by using these new resources, the

settlers saw them as stealing British property. These misunderstandings often ended in tragedy.

(Scene of Aboriginal men in chains.)

(Scenes from “Fire Fire Burning Bright”.)

“Fire Fire Burning Bright” is a corroboree that tells the Aboriginal story of the massacres in the Fitzroy

Crossing region. A group of Aboriginal men were accused of

stealing a bullock. They were given tickets to wear around

their necks which, unbeknown to them, marked them for

execution. They were then taken into the bush to cut wood to

what would eventually be their own funeral pyre.

Over time it’s become obvious that the reason why Aboriginal

English didn’t disappear and why Aboriginal people didn’t

learn Standard Australian English, is because they weren’t

fully integrated into British society.

52

DIANNE TOMAZOS – First Steps in Maths Project, Department of Education and Training:“In my first few years I never met an Aboriginal person at all. I grew up in a

small farming community. I remember one time travelling out of town and

asking what (there were a whole lot of sheds, groups of sheds next to the

rubbish tip), and I remember asking ‘What’s that?’ and someone told me

that’s where the Aboriginal people lived.

Interesting probably, is that I actually thought that they actually wanted to live

there. I was under the impression that’s where they chose to live. I remember

feeling sorry for the children, thinking how on earth can they do their

homework and come to school with a clean nice uniform, etc., while living in a

place like that, but I still pretty much thought that it was their parents’ choice.”

(Scenes from reserve and labour site.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:In 1905, the Aborigines’ Act was drawn up to protect the so-called dying race of Aborigines.

They were sent to live on reserves or they were used as controlled labour.

Many Aboriginal English words used commonly today can be traced back to that era.

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“I think Aboriginal English is a very interesting record of the experience of Aboriginal people. It’s not

often with a language that we can trace it back to where it began. With Aboriginal English we can

trace it back to where it began and in the repertoire of Aboriginal English that exists today there are

certain forms that we can relate to different stages in the experience of Aboriginal people.

(Overlay of Aboriginal English words.)

Looking into Aboriginal English is a little like an archaeologial tell, where you

can go back and find different layers of experience. So there are some words

that are in present day Aboriginal English that have been kept from the pre-

contact languages. In Western Australia for instance, in the South West

people will use the term ‘yorga’ for woman, ‘mudich’ for something very good

and many other terms. So there are these terms that go back that far.”

Video Scripts


53

Video Scripts


(Scenes from mission.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:By the ’30s and ’40s when it became obvious to the

Government that Aboriginal people weren’t dying out, it

adopted its next disastrous approach. An attempt to ‘breed

them out’, as Chief Protector A. O. Neville put it.

For generations many Aboriginal people were taken from their

homelands, their families were split up and their children were

institutionalised. Some were fostered to white families, others

trained to be domestics. The aim was to cut all ties with their

culture and language and integrate them into white society.

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Aboriginal people were discouraged from using their languages and they did get to the stage where

adults didn’t want to use their own language before their own children because of the shame that

they thought was involved in using the language. However, the conceptualisations that lay behind that

language were not going to go away.”

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:For some people this assimilation worked and they hold no bitterness. For many others though,

particularly those who suffered abuse, they’ll never recover. It’s not only ruined their lives, but their

children’s too.

(Scenes of men singing and playing guitars, women with children.)

(Interview of Glenys Collard by Michelle White.)

GLENYS COLLARD:“We got all taken away in 1961, nine of us.”

MICHELLE WHITE: “Do you think your Mother’s ever recovered from the fact that

you were all being taken away?”

GLENYS COLLARD:“No, they (mum and dad) can’t recover because they still

have no book or yarn that I can tell them from the Wadjellas

that gives them any understanding of why they still took them.”

(Scene of Referendum voting with the following voice over.)

“Although this doesn’t look like it, but this is a revolution. On the 27th of May 1967 white Australians

were voting in a referendum to change the Constitution.”

54

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:It’s almost unbelievable to think that it took untill 1967 for Aboriginals to be

classed as citizens. That’s when Australia held a referendum to decide if

Aboriginal people should be included in the census.

Even more noteworthy was the fact that in 1992 the High Court ruled to

change the lie that this country was founded on – that it was terra nullius:

vacant land.

During this time significant differences became evident in the way that

Aboriginal people spoke, as Professor Ian Malcolm explains.

(Scene of freedom ride/ tent embassy/campaign for rights.)

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“If I picked on one thing that is central to Australian English and to Standard Australian English which

Aboriginal English has dispensed with, it would be the way in which we use auxiliaries and copulas,

that is, we use the verb ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ to link things together.”

(Examples of Standard Aborigal English and Aboriginal English read out by Kylie and Dereck using a few

examples to demonstrate how ‘have’ and ‘be’ are left out.)

DERECK : “We are working.”

KYLIE: “We working.”

DERECK: “They have gone.”

KYLIE: “They gone.”

DERECK: “There are birds over there.”

KYLIE: “They got bird over there.”

DERECK: “It was big.”

KYLIE: “It big one ‘ay.”

DERECK: “It got smashed, it was made of wood.”

KYLIE: “It got smashed, made of wood.”

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Most people would just say that they are dropping words out.

What they are doing is not dropping words out, they are

systematically changing the whole way in which English is bolted

together. ‘Be’ and ‘have’ are like the nuts and bolts of Standard

English, Aboriginal English has dispensed with them and found

other ways to make the same meanings come across.”

Video Scripts


55

Video Scripts


(Aboriginal paintins and hunting file.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Aboriginal culture has evolved like all cultures do. Acrylics

might be used for painting instead of ochres and guns might

be used for hunting instead of spears, but the underlying

values remain the same. Aboriginal English is another example

of how culture has evolved.

PATRICIA KONIGSBERG – Educator/Linguist, Department of Education:

“Aboriginal English is a very rich dialect that holds a lot of

information and conceptualisations that are very important for us and inaccessible to a non-Aboriginal

person. There is a wealth of knowledge and experience within that language and it’s a carrier of an

entire culture.”

(Scene from ’70s of young people walking down street.)

(Overlay of book “English and the Aboriginal Child”.)

NARRATOR – MICHELLE WHITE:Aboriginal English was first recognised by Queensland researchers back in the ’60s. In 1973, the work

was picked up in Western Australia with Dr Susan Kaldor and Professor Ian Malcolm pioneering most

of the work in this field. In fact, it was this publication that led to the Government finally

acknowledging it as a dialect.

(Overlay of BBQ bardies)

Even today, many people still don’t realise that Aboriginal

English exists. So how do we best describe it?

Let’s look at this example.

(Acting Scene – location: BBQ at Kondinin.)

GLENYS: “Dey got too much bardie over dere.”

PROF. IAN MALCOLM:“Now, a comment like that might seem to be almost the same as in Standard Australian English and

yet when you look at it there’s a lot that is different. It’s different at all of levels of linguistic analysis.

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(Overlay of “Dey got too much bardie over dere”.)

Notice for example the way in which the ‘th’ tends to be pronounced as a ‘d’

in ‘dey got’ rather than ‘they got’ and then at the level of word form, ‘too

much bardi.’ Now ‘bardi’ isn’t pluralised and yet we know it’s plural because

the Aboriginal English system allows optional marking of the plural.

When you look at the vocabulary, “too much bardi” actually doesn’t mean

what to a Standard Australian English speaker it would mean – it means a lot

of bardies. Also, at the discourse level, you notice the way that it’s introduced

– ‘Ay they got too much bardi dere’. The ‘ay’ is clearly performing a discourse

function to direct the listener’s attention to something new that’s being

stated and that’s reinforced with ‘dere’ at the end. Another thing is the

change in the grammatical form which makes it ‘dey got’ instead of ‘there

are’ because Aboriginal English doesn’t tend to use the verb ‘to be’.

In summary, I would say that we have learnt an enormous amount as we have worked together and

we have shared our Englishes. The more honestly we have simply expressed our misunderstanding of

one another, the deeper we have gone in understanding that there are two different conceptual

systems that are operating through English.”

(Overlay of BBQ with bardies being cooked and eaten by various people.)

PRESENTER – MICHELLE WHITE:Now that you know a little about the history of Aboriginal English and how it differs from Standard

Australian English. The challenge is to recognise and value it in its own right.

There are three other titles in this series. If you’d like to learn more about Aboriginal English, check

out these programs too.

(Overlay of: WAYS OF BEING, WAYS OF TALK


Now You See it, Now You Don’t

Two-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power)

END OF SCRIPT

Video Scripts


BackgroundPapers

Compiled by members of theCentre for Applied Language and Literacy ResearchEdith Cowan University

for theABC of Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project,Department of Education, Western Australia2002

59

SHARED WORLD OF COMMUNICATION ......................................................................................61

An ecological view of communication....................................................................................................................61

How Australia’s communicative ecology has evolved from both Indigenous and introduced sources.........63

Language and dialect.............................................................................................................................................63

Creole languages ...................................................................................................................................................63

Aboriginal languages..............................................................................................................................................64

The broader language ecology of Australia...........................................................................................................64

How two cultures have been maintained in the shared world of communication...........................................64

Aboriginal cultural interruption and maintenance ...................................................................................................64

Code-switching......................................................................................................................................................65

The contemporary Aboriginal experience ...............................................................................................................65

References ................................................................................................................................................................66

MOVING INTO OTHER WORLDS....................................................................................................67

Summary guide to ‘Moving Into Other Worlds’.....................................................................................................67

Introduction ..............................................................................................................................................................72

Two worlds apart......................................................................................................................................................72

Europe...................................................................................................................................................................72

Australia ................................................................................................................................................................73

Two worlds collide....................................................................................................................................................74

Contact and attempts at incorporation...................................................................................................................74

What was happening linguistically during the contact phase? .............................................................................76

Conflict and disruption...........................................................................................................................................77

What linguistic effects have conflict and disruption had? ....................................................................................79

‘Protection’ and ‘assimilation’ ................................................................................................................................80

Linguistic effects of protection and assimilation .................................................................................................82

Living in two worlds: Aboriginal Australian responses to change .....................................................................84

Adapting lifestyles..................................................................................................................................................84

Adapting language: the rise of Aboriginal English ...................................................................................................90

Overview............................................................................................................................................................90

Some examples of Aboriginal English texts.........................................................................................................92

Getting below the surface: more on semantics and pragmatics ..........................................................................98

Aboriginal English, identity, and communication in two worlds ..........................................................................101

Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................................................102

References...............................................................................................................................................................102

Background PapersContents

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON’T: CONCEPTUAL DIMENSIONS OF ABORIGINAL ENGLISH.........................................................106Two Englishes: the same yet different.................................................................................................................106

Same language, different conceptualization .......................................................................................................108

How Language can be understood in terms of its conceptualization ..............................................................109

Categories ...........................................................................................................................................................109

Schemas ..............................................................................................................................................................110

Metaphor .............................................................................................................................................................111

How Aboriginal English reflects Aboriginal conceptualization ..........................................................................112

Categories............................................................................................................................................................112

Schemas ..............................................................................................................................................................116

Metaphor .............................................................................................................................................................122

Now You See It Now You Don’t .............................................................................................................................123

References ...............................................................................................................................................................124

TWO-WAY LEARNING AND TWO KINDS OF POWER ................................................................125

The fact and effects of one-way learning.............................................................................................................125

Dominance of Anglo view of Australian history .....................................................................................................125

Dominance of Anglo knowledge ...........................................................................................................................126

Dominance of English and standard English modes of expression.........................................................................127

Effects of this in Aboriginal students’ experience of exclusion and devaluation .....................................................128

The principles of two-way/both ways education................................................................................................128

Origins .................................................................................................................................................................128

International counterparts ....................................................................................................................................129

Relevance to bidialectal as well as bilingual education..........................................................................................130

Two-way education and identity ...........................................................................................................................130

Importance of learning by way of first language ....................................................................................................130

Importance of building from known to unknown....................................................................................................131

Importance of recognizing existing knowledge and skills.......................................................................................132

Two-way education and power..............................................................................................................................132

The right of Aboriginal English speakers to access power in the wider world through standard English..................132

The equal right of Aboriginal people to recognize power in Aboriginal contexts which is maintained throughAboriginal English.................................................................................................................................................133

The need for recognition of Aboriginal knowledge, skill and status by non-Aboriginal students and teachers.........133

Principles of the implementation of two-way bidialectal education ................................................................134

Receptive and productive competence in Standard Australian English for Aboriginal English speakers ..................134

Receptive competence in Aboriginal English for all students .................................................................................134

Accommodation to Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge ....................................................134

References ...............................................................................................................................................................135

Index.........................................................................................................................................................................139

Background PapersContents

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An ecological view of communicationLanguages exist in environments (ecosystems) which affect them. The components of these ecosystems are thespeakers of the language themselves, neighbouring languages, invading peoples, etc. all of which have an impact on thelanguage, causing it to change. Sometimes this change is consistent and will occur, in time, right across the language;at other times, it affects just the language as it is spoken in one area or by one cultural group, causing the formation ofa new dialect of the language.

An overview of the development of Australian English and Aboriginal English

Video 1 Background PapersShared World of Communication

Dr Judith Rochecouste

Dutch

• Influence of French1

• Influence of Greek and Latin2

• Influence of originalinhabitants (Celts)3

• Need to communicate with non-Aboriginalinvaders – development of pidgins andcreole languages

• White assimilation policy – Aboriginal peoplenot allowed to speak their traditionallanguages

• Need to have a language to maintain cultureand identity after the loss of Aboriginallanguages

• Aboriginal languages originally or currentlyspoken in the area causing regionaldifferences

• People came from different countries,and spoke different languages andother dialects of English

• Contact with Aboriginal languages

• New names for new flora and fauna

1 The French invasion and rule of England for hundreds of years caused many words of French to come into the language2 Because much learning occurred in monasteries during the Middle Ages in Greek and Latin, this too was absorbed

into the language.3 The original inhabitants of the island of Britain were Celtic and spoke a different language, so this too influenced the

Germanic language brought into England.

(becomes accepted language ofeducation, literature and media)

Australian English

StandardAustralian English

Aboriginal English

English (British dialects)

English spoken in Australia

Germanic languages

German etc.

Non-standardAustralian English

Each language system (whether called a language or a dialect) needs to be understood in its own right:

• as a vehicle for carrying the culture and identity of its speakers;• as a mother tongue and home language of its speakers;• as a successful communicative system for its speakers;• as having its own conventions for sentence structure, semantics and pragmatics (the behaviours that accompany

languages).

Each language system (whether called a language or a dialect) needs to be understood in relation to the whole:

• as having evolved from a parent language through the influences of its particular environment or ecology (otherlanguages, meaning systems, cultures);

• as maintaining similarities with its parent language;• as continuing to change just as the parent language continues to change with more influences, such as the influence

of Black American culture on Aboriginal English and the influence of more recent immigrant groups on SAE;• as representative of a proportion of the people within the whole English speaking world.

Two worlds/dialects sharing the same space – Language ecosystem


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These two worlds have enabled SAE and AE to develop independently of each other. Interesting, however, is the factthat the tenuous links between the two worlds have also allowed for considerable transfer of linguistic expressions(words, phrases, structures, such as ‘wicked’, ‘deadly’). Thus, described in terms of Mühlhäusler’s ‘salient components’of a ‘language ecology’, the above model represents a language ecosystem where:

1. the system is inhabited by a diversity of dialects (AE and AustE);

2. the system represents the relationship between such dialects as dynamic and changing and such changes may begradual or catastrophic (catastrophic initial effect with white invasion and rapid loss of many Aboriginal languages,now gradual loss and recognition of Aboriginal languages and gradual recognition of Aboriginal English over time);

3. the system is sustained by functional links between the dialects (currently the functionality of links betweenAboriginal and non-Aboriginal people most often results in code-switching to conform to the dominant dialect);

4. it is not the absolute number of diverse dialects but the links between them which are important;

5. the lack of links leads to conflict and potential collapse of the language ecosystem (misunderstanding betweenspeakers of different dialects and lack of recognition of minority dialects);

6. the links create a mutually supportive linguistic ecosystem (the ideal for students/classrooms to achieve in theeducation system) (Mühlhäusler 1997, pp. 4-5).

In a sense two-way bidialectal education is trying to establish a language ecology in schools where there is ‘a dynamicsystem consisting of a number of inhabitants [or dialects] and meaningful interconnections [or explicitly explainedsimilarities and differences] between them’ (Ibid.).

Intermittent andtenuous links betweenthe two worlds/dialects

• TV and Radio, e.g. rap music

• School

• Newspapers

• Sport and work

• Encounters with govtagencies e.g. police,health, welfare

Aboriginal world/Aboriginal English

Non-Aboriginal world/Australian English

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How Australia’s communicative ecology has evolved from both Indigenousand introduced sourcesLanguage and dialectWe all speak a language; we all speak a dialect of a language:

1. some dialects are mutually intelligible (speakers can understand each other although there may be some differentwords, meanings or pronunciations); whereas

2. other dialects might be mutually unintelligible (speakers don’t understand each other because there are just toomany different words or too many words with different meanings or too many different pronunciations).

We usually consider languages to be mutually unintelligible in that the differences are so great that speakers of onelanguage cannot understand speakers of another language.

Generally, languages have different names so we know that they are different languages (French, Thai, English) whiledialects are identified with the people who speak them or the place where they are spoken, e.g. Aboriginal English, USEnglish, Australian English. But, just to make things difficult:

1 sometimes, for political reasons, dialects are given separate names (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) when they arereally mutually intelligible (the speakers may be able to understand each other, e.g. husen ‘house’ (Sw), huset‘house’ (Nor), hus ‘house’ (Dan));

2 on the other hand, sometimes different languages are called dialects of each other so that some idea of politicalcohesion can be maintained, even though they may not be mutually intelligible, that is, the speakers cannotunderstand each other (Chinese dialects).

So the distinction between language and dialect is not a very clear-cut one.

The difference between Aboriginal English and Australian English also varies:

1 Often it is possible for a speaker of Australian English to understand a speaker of Aboriginal English. Most of thewords might sound the same but with different pronunciation and the sentences might be slightly different butunderstandable.

2 However when the words have different meanings, misunderstanding might occur between speakers of the twodialects which causes a break down in communication.

3 Misunderstandings also occur if the rules of two dialects don’t coincide, e.g. listening behaviours, expression ofgratitude, appropriate reply to an invitation.

4 At other times, the speaker of Aboriginal English might use more words from their local Aboriginal language, makingit harder for a speaker of Australian English to understand,

5 The speaker of Aboriginal English might also use a different intonation pattern or pronounce the words with adifferent accent which might be the influence of an Aboriginal language spoken in the region.

Creole languagesCreole languages develop from situations of stressed language contact where communication has been made necessarybetween speakers of different languages because of trade and/or colonisation. In many ways these speakers improvisewith a simplified form of their languages. The speakers of each language will modify their talk to find some way tocommunicate in a limited capacity and what results is called a pidgin. Given time this pidgin communication will be usedin many more situations than originally intended (for example, trade) and in the process it will get more vocabulary, anddevelop rules for its structure (grammatical rules). When this new way of communicating becomes so widespread that itbecomes the first language or mother tongue of a generation of speakers, we call it a creole language:

A creole is a pidgin which has expanded on structure and vocabulary to express the range of meanings and toserve the range of functions required of a first language (Holm 1988)

There are several creole languages in Australia. In the north-west of Western Australia there is Kriol, and in the north ofQueensland there is Cape York Creole and in the Torres Strait there is Torres Strait Creole English. Creole languageshave their own grammatical structure which reflects the features of those languages involved in their development. They also have their own vocabulary which reflects elements of both these languages, but very often the language of the coloniser, e.g. English, will contribute more heavily to the vocabulary.


Aboriginal languagesOf the estimated 200-300 languages spoken in Australia at the time of white contact, only about 90 are still spokentoday. Of these about 70 are in severe threat of extinction and at least 80 of the surviving 90 Australian Aboriginallanguages will be extinct within 30-40 years, which is an average of two languages per year (Henderson & Nash 1997).This happens because:

• speakers shift to a variety of English e.g. Aboriginal English, or to a creole or to another Aboriginal language;

• speakers are lost through violence, illness or old age;

• the language is not learned by the next generation so it dies out;

• the languages are suppressed by missions and other authorities.

Education programs for Aboriginal languages are of three types:

• bilingual programs, where students speak the language relatively well and where a range of subjects is taught in thelanguage. Many such programs were established in the Northern Territory but have been discontinued by the NTgovernment;

• language maintenance programs, where there are speakers of the language and the focus is on continuing thetradition of speaking the language in the next generation; and

• language revival programs where there are fewer speakers of the language and the focus is on maintaining whatknowledge of it exists.

The broader language ecology of AustraliaIf we consider the whole of Australia, then, the language ecosystem would have to include Aboriginal languages, creolelanguages and ethnic languages as well as Aboriginal English and Australian English, so the big picture might look like this:

The language ecosystem of Australia


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Aboriginal English Ethnic languages

Creole languages Australian English

Aboriginal languages Introduced languages

How two cultures have been maintained in the shared world ofcommunication Aboriginal cultural interruption and maintenanceWhite invasion brought disruption to the expression of the cultural and spiritual dimensions of Aboriginal society. Many ofthese concepts began to be expressed, albeit inadequately, with English words. The ‘Dreaming’ is a typical example of theinaccurate and inappropriate translation into English of a concept in Aboriginal spirituality. But when English was usedmore and more as a vehicle for the continuation of Aboriginal culture and spirituality, the meanings of many words had tochange to accommodate these ways of describing the world. English was used to describe concepts not previously

65

known or understood by English speakers and very often the Aboriginal words for these concepts were also lost. SoEnglish words were given different meanings, thus extending English to accommodate Aboriginal meaning systems.Furthermore, because Aboriginal English was used more for communication between Aboriginal people than betweenAboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, where the dominant dialect (standard English) would and still generally prevails,these meaning systems did not always come to be understood by non-Aboriginal people. Over time, this has caused agap in communication where speakers of the two dialects use variants of the same language to describe differentmeaning systems. The two cultures and their two meaning systems therefore have tended to co-exist in the same space,rarely overlapping but frequently colliding when miscommunication leads to the misunderstanding of behaviours.

Code-switchingThe current language ecosystem in Australia can cause considerable difficulties for speakers of more than one dialect ormore than one language. Taking speakers of Aboriginal English as an example, moving to and from the two worlds, that is, toand from the Anglo-Australian world of work, education and other health and housing services and the Aboriginal world ofextensive family structures and related responsibilities and commitments, can be like living in an ambiguous world. The speaker of Aboriginal English will often use Standard Australian English at work and when interacting within the broadercommunity and Aboriginal English as soon as he/she is at home or within an Aboriginal community. This is called code-switching. But for the speaker of Aboriginal English, this requires not just the changing of one’s speech (pronunciation andgrammar) but also requires reference to a completely different set of meaning systems for each dialect situation. This isbecause languages and dialects are, to a great extent, products of the societies which speak them and will have self-contained (culturally specific) meanings which are not necessarily shared by other societies. This is particularly complexwhen dialects of the same language represent different meaning systems and the same words are used to describe thesedifferent systems. Cross-cultural communication is then difficult if speakers across dialects are not aware of theseconflicting meanings. Also the action of code-switching becomes more than just a matter of ‘tweaking’ the language a little– it requires a fundamental change in cultural perspective to be able to move successfully in both worlds.

Most people switch between the codes which they speak. This can happen if a speaker of English and Italian choses toswitch from English to Italian, or vice versa, depending on their audience. Similarly, as above, speakers of one dialect, e.g.Aboriginal English, can switch to another dialect e.g. Standard Australian English, depending on the audience. People canalso vary their speech within their dialect. In Standard English we might have more formal words for some occasions, so wecode-switch within our dialect depending on our audience. (Code-switching at this level is often called a change in ‘register’).Similarly, speakers of Aboriginal English can change their use of that dialect depending on the audience. For example, theirspeech might be quite different if some non-Aboriginal people are present or if family from other country is present.

The contemporary Aboriginal experienceWe might say that Aboriginal people have used English resourcefully to maintain their culture in the light of their post-invasion experience. Not only has the English language been adapted to express their own cultural and spiritualdimensions or Aboriginality, but more recently contemporary forms of media have been adopted to strengthen what hasbeen done with the English language to express Aboriginality. Aboriginal authors and playwrights have vividly describedthe Aboriginal experience. Aboriginal film makers and TV personalities are also raising the awareness of Aboriginalissues and Aboriginal vocalists and sports stars are raising the profile of Aboriginal people in the media.

In many ways, however, these art forms have been compromised. Aboriginal stories are now constructed as writtentexts not as oral narratives, although the play might be seen as something in between these two genres. Recordingvocalists are using modern media such as video and sound equipment and Aboriginal artists are using acrylic paints andcanvases instead of their traditional media. However, Aboriginal artists continue to maintain their links with the land andthe strong cultural tradition. One example is Yothu Yindi:

Yothu Yindi is a band which combines traditional Australian Aboriginal music with modern westerninstrumentation. The indigenous members of Yothu Yindi are among the traditional owners of North East ArnhemLand, a region of Australia’s Northern Territory in which Yolngu (Aboriginal) people have lived in relative isolationfor thousands of years. Yolngu people deal, as an intrinsic part of their daily lives, with cultural responsibilitieshanded down from generation to generation. By attributing human qualities to all natural species and elements,Yolngu people live in spiritual harmony with nature. This is communicated in ceremonial song and dance. TodayYothu Yindi also seeks to unite Australians and all peoples of the world in peace.

(Yothu Yindi, 2002)


Aboriginal authors and playwrights also have the advantage of representing their dialect and their way of life in theirwriting. In recent years Aboriginal English has been used more and more in published writing by Aboriginal authors. For Aboriginal writers many of the ways of constructing reality can only be expressed using Aboriginal English (Malcolm1994, p. 13). However, the degree to which Aboriginal English is included in this literature is primarily governed byconsiderations of who the audience might be. For many Aboriginal writers it is important to educate the white Australianpublic to the grievances of Aboriginal Australians, and in these cases, it is important not to alienate readers byproducing texts that they will not understand. This requires modification of the dialect which other Indigenous writersmight consider assimilationist (Narogin 1990, p. 2). Others acknowledge that ‘quite clearly. Black Australian culture isdifferent and distinctive and that, while it is not inaccessible to non-Aborigines, some effort is required in order to reachan understanding of it’ through the use of Aboriginal English in literature (Muecke, Davis & Shoemaker 1988, p. 43).Frequently authors will take a ‘middle of the road’ approach, ‘adapting largely western genres and integrating them withsufficient Aboriginal English to produce a discernible and distinct Aboriginal flavour’ (Gibbs 1995, p. 37).

Co-existence in Australian society means that Indigenous men and women in high profile positions have the additionalburden of being ambassadors for Aboriginal people (in their own country!). The pressures of this burden were evident inCathy Freeman’s carrying of the Aboriginal flag at the Commonwealth Games in 1994, when she stated that ‘I justwanted to show people that I am proud of who I am and where I come from’ (Jeffery, 1996).

Aboriginal people are lecturers in universities, politicians and have influential positions in other professions. This leadsmany non-Aboriginal people to believe that these professionals only think and speak as the Anglo-Australians do, that is,they use political rhetoric, academic English, etc. Aboriginal leaders have seen the need to bring Indigenousperspectives into Australian social, political and economic arenas. They take part in a ‘multitude of diverse issuesranging from negotiating native title; access to land and mining rights; protection of cultural rights; shaping andresponding to state and national policy, legislation and program development in areas such as education, health andhousing; and more general issues such as self determination, equity and race relations’ (Australian Indigenous LeadersCentre, 2001). In doing so, they use both Aboriginal English and the discourse practices of Standard Australian Englishto talk about Aboriginal issues. Aboriginal English is important for consultation with the Aboriginal community andStandard Australian English is important for presenting information for political debate.

Thus, Aboriginal people maintain their Aboriginality and their links to the Aboriginal world. For Aboriginal people comingto work, competing in a sports event or performing in front of the broader Australian public means moving out of thefamily and community and into another world, adopting another way of talking (code-switching) and other ways ofthinking, but keeping that which is Aboriginal.

ReferencesAustralian Indigenous Leadership Centre (2001). About the AILC. www.aiatsis.gov.au/ailc/whatIs.htm (13/05/2002).

Gibbs, G. (1995). How Aboriginal Authors use Aboriginal English in their Writings. Perth WA: NLLIA Child Literacy and ESLResearch Network Node.

Henderson, J. & Nash, D. (1997). Culture and Heritage: Indigenous Languages. Rockhampton, Qld: Central QueenslandUniversity Publishing Unit.

Holm. J. (1988) Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jeffery, N. (1996). Cathy home free for two-flags run. The Australian, 8 May. [Electronic version].www.ausflag.com.au/debate/nma/aus960508.html.

Malcolm, I. (1994) Aboriginal English and Standard English: Making Connections. In G. Steff (ed.) TESOL: MakingConnections. Proceedings of the 1994 ACTA-WATESOL National Conference. Perth ACTA/WATESOL.

Muecke, S., Davis, J. & Schumaker, A. (1988). Aboriginal literature. In Australian Literary Studies. St Lucia, Qld.:Queensland University Press.

Mühlhäusler, P. (1997) Language ecology – contact without conflict. In Putz, M. (ed.). Language Choices: Conditions,Constraints and Consequences. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Narogin, M. (1990). Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature. South Yarra, Vic.: Hyland House.

Yothu Yindi (2002) Welcome to Yothu Yindi on the Web. www.yothuyindi.com/home.html (13/05/2002).


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Summary guide to Moving Into Other Worlds

Video 2 Background PapersMoving Into Other Worlds

Alison M. Hill

Two worlds apart

Life in general Language and interaction

• Diversity

• English varieties

• Ideology of progress

• Land as a possession

• Regarded hunters and gatherersas ‘primitive’, either

• ‘noble savage’ or

• brutish lives – later backed upwith Darwinian concepts

• Overall view of British/whitesupremacy, Civilization, etc. as result of conquering peoples allover the world

• Diversity of Aboriginal cultures –lifestyles in varying geography.

• Trading and social relationshipsbetween Aboriginal groups

• Aboriginal people interacted withnon-Aboriginal people(Macassans, Baiini).

• The Dreaming

• Complexity of social systems andphilosophies

• Aboriginal people had aninterwoven system ofrelationships and responsibilitiesbetween people and theirenvironment

• Prior to colonisation, some limitedcontact with European seafarers,information from Macassansabout ‘Balandas’ (Hollanders).Information passed along traderoutes. Evidence in rock paintings,oral history.

• WA contact with Europeans –Dampier, French, etc.

• Connection between language,Dreaming and land – need toknow appropriate language forinteracting with land and spirits.

• diversity of Aboriginal languages –as different as English andRussian or Hindi.

• Aboriginal society was multilingual

• several different languages wereoften spoken by family members

• linguistic virtuosity was valued

• There are still significant numbersof Aboriginal people who speakseveral languages

• Skilled use of signlanguages/gestures

• Like all languages, Aboriginallanguages have complex systemsdeveloped to express conceptswhich are important to them.

• Aboriginal languages stress theimportance of kinship in complexterminologies and relationshipstructures.

• Grammatical complexity: manylanguages are highly inflected likeLatin, etc.

European perspective Aboriginal perspective and responses What was happening linguistically


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Two worlds collide

Contact and attempts at incorporation

• European views of Australianterritory

• By planting flag, etc. thoughtthey acquired exclusivepossession

• negotiate possession of land ifa ‘sovereign nation’ in control;seen as terra nullius, sounilateral declaration of Britishpossession and sovereignty.

• Ownership to be proven bymaking ‘improvements’, i.e. building things on it,changing the landscape.

• Europeans attempted toincorporate Aboriginal people intotheir universe, where ethnicgroups were located on ahierarchy of superiority.

• attempts to incorporateAboriginal people into Europeanpolitical and economic system:

• trade with Aboriginal people,get them to desire non-Aboriginal goods

• acquire Aboriginal labour

• abduction of adults

• taking of children – includingsome successes (GovernorMacquarie’s Native Institutionin Parramatta).

• creation of missions,settlements e.g. New Norcia

• Attempts to ‘civilise’ Aboriginalpeople, getting Aboriginalpeople to adopt Europeanclothing, adopt Europeanmanners and religion.

• Some attempts to make use ofAboriginal knowledge:

• some use made of Aboriginalknowledge of natural resourcesfor food, raw materials.

• Explorers’ use of Aboriginaltracks etc.

• First contacts: many Aboriginalpeople initially attempted toignore Europeans in the hope thatthey would go away.

• attempts to incorporateEuropeans into the Aboriginalworld:

• assignment of ‘returnedrelative’/ghost role tonewcomers

• Little interest shown at first inEuropeans and their goods,then attempted extension ofAboriginal trade relations toEuropeans and adaptation toEuropean goods

• Land ownership was immutable,determined by birth. ThereforeEuropeans guilty of trespassaccording to Aboriginal law.

• Initial use of sign language.

• Naming: Europeans gaveAboriginal people English names,and Aboriginal people gaveEuropean people Aboriginalnames.

• European approach to Language:

• With few exceptions, Europeansconsidered Aboriginallanguages to be primitive.

• Few initial attempts to learnAboriginal languages.

• Aboriginal words borrowed intoEnglish

• otherwise, Europeans largelyexpected Aboriginal people tolearn English

• Initially, Aboriginal people did notwant to interact with Europeans.

• Aboriginal people learned Englishthrough variety of sources, wereperceived by some Europeans tohave a language-learning facilitysuperior to that of the British.

• development of pidgin English totrade in.

European perspective Aboriginal perspective and responses What was happening linguistically

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Two worlds collide

Conflict and disruption

• Impact on natural environment:

• destruction of native plants andanimals

• introduction of European plantsand animals ‘owned’ by thesettlers.

• Because of their philosophy ofprivate ownership of naturalresources, Europeans regardedAboriginal use of these resourcesas ‘stealing’.

• introduction of European diseases

• desecration of sacred sites

• stealing of Aboriginal tools andsacred objects.

• Disease

• Armed conflict and violentdisplacement and ‘dispersal’policies

• Europeans saw Aboriginal peopleas aimless wanderers who couldgo somewhere else.

• Terror tactics and attemptedgenocide.

• Swan River – Pinjarra

• Kimberley – Jandamarra

• Forrest River massacre

• In sum, destruction of majority ofAboriginal population due toviolence, deprivation and disease.

• Europeans have little knowledgedue to editing of history atbeginning of 20th century. Now new historians going back tooriginal documents, e.g. HenryReynolds.

• Attempts to use Europeanresources in payment for produceof land

• Attempted withdrawal

• Displacement from land affectedAboriginal people spiritually,economically, socially andphysically

• lack of access to most fertileland and to water.

• spiritual connection with theland disrupted

• conflict with other Aboriginalpeople because they were nowstaying on their land instead ofjust being periodic guests.

• Armed resistance.

• Reaction to European violenceresulting from Aboriginal attemptsto use resources

• Upon realising that Europeansintended to stay permanently,armed conflict aimed atpreventing further Europeanincursions into Aboriginal land,e.g.. Pigeon/Jandamarra.

• Enshrined in memories passeddown to children andgrandchildren – now beingpublished in Aboriginalautobiographies and otherliterature.

• Death of languages due to loss ofspeakers, loss of ceremonies,cultural activities, due to culturesuppression, removal of children,kidnapping, etc.

• Most well-known example theTasmanian languages (NBsurvival of the present-dayTasmanian Aboriginalpopulation).

• Yaburara dialect of Ngarluma inthe Pilbara

• Loss of languages due tomovement: people moving toother areas of country in somecases adopted the language ofthe country to which they hadmoved, e.g. Jaru

• Over time, with large numbers ofpeople displaced from theircountry and thrown together, lackof a shared Aboriginal languageled to use of pidgin English as alingua franca and in the north, thedevelopment of creoles

• History enshrined in narrativespassed down through Aboriginalfamilies.

• e.g. ‘Oral History’, relating whatTom Bennell’s grandfather saw.

European impact Aboriginal responses What was happening linguistically


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Two worlds collide

‘Protection’ and ‘Assimilation’

• Aboriginal population so depletedthat assumed dying out. Therefore‘Protection’ policy – banishmentto reserves or controlled use aslabour

• Effects of 1905 Act andsuccessors

• Segregation and division ofpeople on basis of physicalappearance.

• Strict controls over all aspectsof Aboriginal people’s lives,including movement,employment, marriage

• All Aboriginal children legalwards of the ‘Protector ofAborigines’

• Police assigned both punitiveand ‘protection’ roles.

• Suppression of culture

• In ’30s and ’40s it becameapparent Aboriginal people weren’tdying out. Assimilation policy,Stolen Generations. Yet exclusionfrom non-Aboriginal society.

• Europeans largely ignorant of thishistory.

• Key point: Most people attemptedto maintain their Aboriginalculture and identity as much aspossible within the limitationsthey faced.

• Many faced a choice: remain onreserves practising culture andlanguage as much as possible andface losing children OR attempt toblend into non-Aboriginalpopulation and possibly keepchildren.

• Aboriginal memory of life underthe Act

• Language suppression –punishment for using language.

• Further decline in Aboriginallanguages due to break intransmission betweengenerations, contact with otherlanguages, recent pressure ofEnglish

• Now only 90 languages left, and70 of these are nearly extinct.The remainder are still beingpassed onto children, but all areendangered.

• Further rise of Aboriginal English(see below)

• Again, continuing record in oralhistories passed down, e.g.‘Tom’s Story’ (Kura). Publishedaccounts, autobiographies.

• words in Aboriginal Englishwhich originated in this era.

Over time as the Europeans dispossessed the different Aboriginal peoples, the balance shifted from armed conflict todealing with the remaining Aboriginal people.

European actions and attitudes Aboriginal actions and attitudes

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Two worlds collide

Living in two worlds: life for Aboriginal Australians

• Early incorporation of European culture, then forcedadaptation• Keeping up appearances: Necessity for external

conformity to European norms to avoid negativeconsequences

• Internal conflict due to Europeans drawingconclusions based on appearances

• Ongoing values• importance of family, kin relationships: extended

family living, attachments to country maintained byvisiting family in different parts of their country.

• continued sense of continuity between human andnon-human world – the natural world is full of signswith meaning, e.g. Yindjibarndi

• priority of place over time in viewing history;measuring of time by events rather than byquantifiable units.

• material culture and way of life: faced with newmaterial culture, adapted so that Aboriginal valuesand concepts could be utilised in new environment,e.g. transport, hunting weapons, but maintainingconnections with ancestral places. Preoccupationwith bush activities.

• money incorporated into Aboriginal systems ofvalue/obligation

• the arts: change in subjects of artwork toincorporate European themes; use of art market tomaintain cultural community; cooperative paintingaccording to roles

• Because of language death, most Aboriginal peoplenow do not have linguistic resources of originalAboriginal languages.

• Still value what remain of Indigenous languages, alsoremnants in English

• Therefore they have adapted English to express theirculture and worldview – hence Aboriginal English

• Development of Aboriginal English• NSW pidgin English spread• creolisation in north• restructuring to become more like Standard

Australian English• Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English:

two dialects of English among many• Social and regional status of Aboriginal English – Pan-

Aboriginal.• What is Aboriginal English like?

• iceberg model – levels of linguistic analysis: sounds,word forms, sentence structure, genres, meaning,rules for use, underlying values, beliefs and attitudes

• sample texts analysed: Narrogin children,Oombulgurri child, Geraldton adult

• More on semantics (meaning)• More on pragmatics (rules for communication):

conversational organisation (and adaptation to newmedia), manners, assumed knowledge and specificity;questions and answers.

• Aboriginal English and Identity: growing acceptance,use in publications, public media.

Changes in life in general up to today Adapting language: rise of Aboriginal English

• Conflicts between Aboriginal values and Europeanstructures

• Culture-switching to accomplish tasks and maintainrelationships with outsiders.

• Relation to Wadjela systems and organisations: stillaccommodating as far as have to, but often still livingin ‘separate worlds’. Not high proportion today ofAboriginal people employed in non-Aboriginal settings.CDEP. But need to interact with healthcare providers,government departments who still have big influenceon lives. Shopping, public transport.

• Interaction with members of other non-Europeangroups

• Unfamiliarity with aspects of Anglo-Australianculture, even in urban living.

• Linguistically, need to code-switch: be bilingual andbidialectal

IntroductionWhen an Aboriginal Australian and a non-Aboriginal Australian meet and interact, there’s a lot more happening than themeeting of two individuals with different families and life experiences. In many ways, it’s part of a long history of themeeting of two worlds – an indigenous world and a non-indigenous world, each of which is embodied in its ownlanguage. Each world has its own assumptions and history, and people living in it have to negotiate relations with peoplewhose basic experience is in the other world.

Of course, we are committing a huge simplification here by talking only of two worlds and languages: there is enormousdiversity both on the Aboriginal side and the non-Aboriginal side – worlds within worlds, if you like – and each side hasinteracted with and been influenced by the other since Europeans first arrived in Australia. But we can make somegeneralisations about the two worlds, especially from the time they met, where the historical experiences of people ineach world took a different turn.

In this paper, we will take a historical look at how people from each world moved into the other world and howAboriginal people have coped with domination by a non-indigenous world which has threatened to obliterate their own altogether. We will see how the languages of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians have influenced andbeen affected by this history of interaction. In particular, we will see how Aboriginal people have adapted to the loss ofmost Australian languages and developed a new variety of English, Aboriginal English, to meet their needs in negotiatingthe two worlds. The latter part of the paper will present an overview of Aboriginal English and some of the key areaswhere Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English differ from each other as a result of their different historiesand worldviews.

Two worlds apartEuropeWe look first at the two worlds prior to contact, touching very briefly on relevant aspects of European culture at thetime. Europe, of course, was a continent made up of diverse peoples of many cultures and languages – both betweenand within the shifting boundaries of nations. Linguistically, Britain in the 18th century was in the process of developinga standard language based mainly on the dialect of English spoken in the region of London, Oxford and Cambridge (thecentres of power, education and trade), but many other dialects of English had also developed throughout the BritishIsles as the English language emerged from the interaction of Scandinavian, West Germanic, Celtic, classical languagesand French (Burridge & Mulder, 1998). Added to this, the British Isles were also home to a number of other languages,such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish.

Europeans shared long histories of interaction in peace and war, and they thus shared many assumptions about life andthe natural order, including the nature of government and societal organisation, their predominantly Christian religion,the rise of rationalism and the scientific paradigm, the historical idea of ‘progress’, the idea of land as something to bepossessed, ‘developed’ and competed for, and so on. In the couple of centuries prior to the establishment of apermanent British settlement at Port Jackson, Europeans broadened their explorations and conquests, coming intocontact with a wide range of world societies. In the process of conquering indigenous peoples all over the world, theyacquired a belief in their natural superiority over all other peoples (Markus, 1994).

Initially, there were two main European views of hunters and gatherers such as Aboriginal Australians (Yarwood &Knowling 1982). On the one hand, the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw the life of people in their ‘natural’state as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, and his contemporary John Locke expounded on the view that huntersand gatherers did not ‘till the earth and make it fruitful’ – thus failing to keep a Biblical command which Europeans wereseen to excel in observing and propagating through colonisation.

On the other hand, French writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century idealised the life of the ‘noblesavage’. This was a somewhat more positive outlook, but one which still saw Aboriginal people as primitive savagesgoverned by instinct, rather than as ordinary human beings with their own ethical and political systems and rights overtheir land. Captain James Cook saw fit to claim New South Wales for the English crown in spite of leaning towardsRousseau’s views.


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During the 19th century, the philosophy of superiority acquired new ‘scientific’ backing with the development of themyth of biological ‘race’ (Markus, 1994, p. 10). While the idea of race has no scientific basis (modern genetics showsthat there are no separate groups within humanity: variations within ‘races’ are just as significant as those between;Malik, 1996), it was boosted by the application of Charles Darwin’s concept of natural selection to societies. The ‘whiterace’ was seen to be intellectually and morally superior to all other races, which were graded on a scale downwardsfrom brown Indians to the ‘yellow race’ (Chinese) to the ‘black race’ – Africans, and Aboriginal people at the bottom.Evolutionists like Alfred Wallace talked about the ‘inevitable extinction’ of non-European races as they came intocontact with Europeans (Markus, 1994, p. 15).

AustraliaLike Europe, Australia was home to great cultural diversity, like the Australian landscape itself. The lifestyles ofAboriginal people varied greatly, from the relatively Spartan existence of people in the desert regions to the ‘affluent’societies of the rich coastal areas of north-east Arnhemland and north Queensland, to the stone huts and fishing weirsin the colder south east. People in the desert regions followed an annual timetable of movement between their familysites many kilometres apart (Tonkinson, 1991); coastal peoples in parts of Cape York hardly moved camp at all, living interritories of only a few kilometres of beachfront and immediate hinterland (Chase & Sutton, 1998).

Before European invasion, Aboriginal Australians contacted and traded with each other along routes which criss-crossedthe whole of Australia (Reynolds, 1990a, p. 7). This interaction was not limited to people on the Australian continent,however: from the 16th century until early in the 20th century, Aboriginal people in the north of Australia traded with theMacassan people who travelled from the Indonesian islands to collect trepang. Some of them even intermarried with orsojourned in the islands of the Macassans (Macknight, 1976; Urry & Walsh, 1981). Some Yolngu stories tell of peoplecalled ‘Baiini’ who spent time in Yolngu country before the Macassans (Berndt, 1964; Macknight, 1976). Like therelationships between Aboriginal groups, these cross-cultural interactions involved relations between equal partnerswhere each respected the ownership of land, language and culture of the other, and the life of Aboriginal peoplechanged relatively little (Trudgen, 2000).

The central basis for Aboriginal life all over Australia, which was largely unaltered by these contacts with other non-European people, was the overriding worldview often referred to in English as ‘The Dreaming’. This complex of Aboriginalbeliefs took in every aspect of the world, describing how the world came to be as it is and providing a guide to howhumans and others in the world should behave. The Dreaming set out a framework in which every aspect of the worldwas related through an extension of the human kinship system to all other living things, spirit beings and features of theenvironment. Each part of the world had a complex set of reciprocal rights and responsibilities to other parts of theworld (Rose, 1987; Stanner, 1956/1998). The Law of the Dreaming was (and in many places still is) held in the stories,songs, dances and artworks owned by particular groups (Morphy, 1991). Ties to land were immutable, a relationship intowhich people were born or married, and people other than the traditional custodians of a territory were required to askpermission to use the natural resources managed by the custodians (Myers, 1980/1998).

Language was an integral part of this cultural complex, since each language was linked to a particular territory throughthe Dreaming: as the Dreaming Beings criss-crossed the land, they spoke the languages belonging to each part of theland. People spoke the language of the territory they belonged to (Rumsey, 1993), and they needed to know theappropriate language to speak to the spiritual beings inhabiting the land (see ‘Following the Rules’, Bennell & Collard,1991, p. 17). Like most knowledge in Aboriginal society, a language was therefore not simply something in the ‘publicdomain’ available for use by anyone, but something that was ‘owned’ by particular groups of people (Sansom, 1980).

There was tremendous linguistic diversity in Aboriginal Australia prior to colonisation: it is estimated that at least 250languages and many more dialects of those languages were spoken at the time Europeans arrived (Schmidt, 1991, p. 1)4 .Many languages were as different as English is from Russian and Hindi. In many parts of Australia wives and husbandsspoke different languages since they came from different countries, and so their children automatically grew up knowingat least two languages or dialects. Then as now, Aboriginal people valued linguistic diversity and multilingualism (Brandl& Walsh, 1982), and they were skilled at inter-group communication and negotiation.


4 The complete spread of these language groups throughout Australia can be grasped from the excellent map by DavidHorton (Horton, 1994a). A sample can be viewed at www.aboriginalaustralia.com/Culture/nations/horton.cfm

Like all languages, Aboriginal languages had complex systems designed to express concepts which were important tothem. They stressed the importance of kinship in complex terminologies and relationship structures. Kin relations andcontext determined the styles of talk used, and sometimes required different languages or even the use of a fully-developed sign language (Edwards, 1998). Languages were extremely complex grammatically, some highly inflected likeLatin and some, like Bardi, able to express whole sentences in a single long complex word (Dixon, 1980; Walsh & Yallop,1993). This complexity could not be in greater contrast to the assumptions of 18th century Europeans, who assumedthe superiority of English and its values, and expected Aboriginal languages to be ‘primitive’. They were confused by thediversity of Aboriginal languages; when the British arrived at Port Jackson, they attempted to communicate with thelocal Eora people – who were largely speakers of Dharuk – using words Captain Cook had collected from GuuguYimidhirr, which was spoken around what is now Cooktown in Northern Queensland (Malcolm & Koscielecki, 1997).

Prior to colonisation, Aboriginal groups had some warning of the arrival of Europeans, and such news travelled quicklyover vast distances (Reynolds, 1990a). The Macassans brought news of the ‘Balanda’ (that is, Hollanders) – a namewhich remains the term for Europeans in languages of Arnhemland. There were also isolated contacts with Europeanseafarers from the 17th century. In Western Australia, the Englishman William Dampier passed by in 1688 and 1699. Helanded in Bardi country (north of present-day Broome) and observed Bardi stone fish-traps and other technology butdespite attempts to communicate in sign language he did not establish friendly relations, and he published ratherunfavourable accounts of their ‘miserable’ life, as he termed it (Dampier, 1981; Mulvaney, 1989, p. 21). French explorersand others made contact with Aboriginal people in the south of Western Australia, while it has been suggested thatDutch castaways interacted with Aboriginal people in the Mid West during the 17th and 18th centuries (Gerritsen, 1994).Contacts with Europeans were only fleeting, however, and it was not until the start of colonisation that the tremendousdisjunction between the two worlds had a serious impact upon Aboriginal society.

Two worlds collideContact and attempts at incorporationWhen Captain James Cook arrived in Australian waters in the late 18th century, he was one participant in a global raceby European nations to beat each other in finding and claiming possession of new territory around the world. Hisinstructions regarding any Australian ‘natives’ were clear:

You are likewise to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any andendeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, making them presents of suchTrifles as they may Value inviting them to Traffick, and Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard; taking Carehowever not to suffer yourself to be surprized by them, but to be always upon your guard against any Accidents.

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in theName of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty bysetting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.

(Secret Instructions for Lieutenant James Cook Appointed to Command His Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour 30 July1768, 1768/2000)

Captain Cook did encounter Australian ‘natives’, but he decided to ‘take possession’ anyway. in 1788. Since Aboriginalpeople had neither ceded sovereignty of their land nor allowed it to be taken as spoils of a military conquest, theanomalous position of the land under European law was dealt with by the legal fiction of ‘Terra Nullius’ (‘Empty Land’),whereby Aboriginal people were held not to exist (Mabo and Others v. Queensland (No.2), 1992).

The British at the time believed that planting a flag on the land and saying ‘I take possession of this land in the Name ofHis Majesty King George the Third’ enabled them to acquire exclusive possession of first the land they called New SouthWales (in the case of Cook) and then later the rest of Australia (Captain Fremantle and Captain Stirling in the SwanRiver Colony). As we have seen, Aboriginal people believed that land ownership was immutable and could not conceiveof another group of people invading and claiming sole ownership of their land. (None of them actually heard Cook makehis declaration anyway – or at least understood what he was saying!). It was not until the arrival and actions ofEuropean ‘settlers’ that they became aware of a radical disturbance to the ‘natural order’ of the Dreaming.


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This began in 1788 with the arrival of the British First Fleet at Port Jackson, led by Governor Arthur Phillip. Phillipattempted to deal with the local Eora people in a humane manner while carrying out his instructions to establish acolony on their land and thus incorporate the Eora into the British world (Reynolds, 1996). From this beginning,Europeans gradually invaded the entire continent, faster in some parts than others. There are many stories of ‘firstcontact’ throughout the 19th century (Reynolds, 1990a), and there are still people living today who remember the arrivalof Europeans in their territory in the 20th century.

In Western Australia, the European invasion did not begin until 1826, when a military garrison was established in KingGeorge’s Sound (Albany), although various Europeans had visited Western Australia prior to this (Green, 1984). The garrison had little impact on the local Nyungar people (who identified themselves as Meananger), and friendlyrelations prevailed between them and the Europeans (Green, 1979). Captain Fremantle encountered mixed reactionswhen he rowed up the Swan River in 1829, however. At one point his way was blocked by a local man yelling ‘Warra!Warra!’ – a Nyungar word, still used today, which means ‘bad’, or in this case, ‘Go away!’ (Cottesloe, 1979). The Britishdid not go away, however, and later that year Captain Stirling and his soldiers used their guns to drive the localNyungars away from their long-established camp, Goonininup, in its prime location at the springs at the base of Mt Eliza(Kings Park) (Austen, 1998).

The reactions of the Europeans and Aboriginal people in these early stages of contact reveal the attempts of each groupto incorporate the other into its own world. For example, Aboriginal people in initial contact situations across Australiaoften incorporated Europeans into their own cosmology by deciding that logically these people must have previouslybelonged to their country and were now returning there from the dead. So they welcomed the Europeans as long-lostrelatives, calling them by the names of those relatives and describing them using their terms for ‘ghost’, ‘spirit’, etc.(Reynolds, 1990a, pp.30-31).

The Europeans, for their part, attempted to coopt the Aboriginal people into their established hierarchy – slotted intothe landless social class allotted to them. They gave the people English names, encouraged them to adopt Europeanclothing and manners, and aimed to get them to desire European goods which could be exchanged for their labour andlocal artefacts (Troy, 1990). They attempted to train Aboriginal people to act as servants and farm workers for rations,and as time went on, many Aboriginal people were thus employed. In a few cases, Aboriginal children were adopted ortaken into institutions to be raised with a European education – sometimes quite successfully: in 1819, a 14 year old girlat Governor Macquarie’s Native Institution in Parramatta topped the New South Wales public examinations (Harris,1994, p. 47). The majority of these children were trained and sent out for domestic work. Aboriginal women began along history of subjection to sexual exploitation (Broome, 1994, p. 41).

European missionaries endeavoured to bring Christianity to Aboriginal people. Like other Europeans, these peopledemonstrated a variety of attitudes and behaviour towards them. On the one hand, they professed to be concerned withthe welfare of Aboriginal people, and many expressed dismay at the racial violence which soon dominated the treatmentof Aboriginal people (see below). But by and large, their attitudes still reflected the assumed superiority of theEuropeans and the assumption that Aboriginal people had to be induced to lead a ‘settled, civilized’ lifestyle (Harris,1994). This was put into practice in Western Australia in the founding of New Norcia in 1845 by the Benedictine BishopSalvado, who was also attempting to segregate the people from hostile settlers and their ‘corrupting’ influence.Compared with many other missionary groups, the Benedictines at New Norcia were relatively enlightened in the earlyyears: they respected many Aboriginal customs and had the children live with their parents (later missions separatedchildren into dormitories and under the Protection Acts prohibited contact with their parents). Their leader, BishopSalvado, allocated plots of land to Aboriginal men to farm and paid them wages, with the promise of houses as thecommunity progressed. The Aboriginal people, for their part, saw the mission as a guarantee that they could remain onsome of their land. The mission became a highly successful farming operation, but its success made the land a targetfor surrounding European farmers and the Aboriginal farmers never gained legal title to it.

The use of Aboriginal people by European settlers was not restricted to the incorporation of Aboriginal people into theBritish system. The Europeans also relied on Aboriginal knowledge of the local environment to make use of indigenousfoods and learn the uses of raw materials, such as plant fibres for making rope. Except where news of their behaviourpreceded them, European explorers were frequently guided and aided in the earlier years by friendly Aboriginal peoplewho extended their traditional trading relationships to the newcomers. The explorers often followed Aboriginal trackslinking the various water sources and avoiding geographical obstacles (Reynolds, 1990a ; 1990b). Aboriginal peoplewere also coopted unwillingly to assist explorers like Alfred Canning, who in 1906 forced Aboriginal people to guide hisparty up the Canning Stock Route at the point of a gun and chained by the neck to camels (Austen, 1998, p. 48).


What was happening linguistically during the contact phase?From their arrival, and with the failure of attempts to use words from Guugu Yimidhirr, the British attempted tocommunicate with the Eora through sign language (Troy, 1994). Their initial attempts at establishing ongoingcommunication were frustrated, though, by the fact that the local Aboriginal people avoided the Europeans for manymonths after the initial contacts. In desperation, Governor Phillip initiated the abduction of a number of Aboriginalpeople, including the famous Bennelong, who were forcibly taught English language and culture (Troy, 1994, pp.40-54).

A few of the colonists made an effort to learn the local languages, especially in the first few years of the Port Jacksoncolony. Lancelot Threlkeld was exceptional in learning the Awabakal language of Lake Macquarie well enough totranslate a book of the Bible by 1830 (Harris, 1994). Unfortunately, all the Awabakal people he worked with had died orbeen killed by the 1840s (Broome, 1994, p. 33). The Swan River Colony also had its share of early enthusiasts whomade an effort to learn Aboriginal languages, such as R.M. Lyon, who brought out a wordlist of ‘Aboriginal inhabitants ofWestern Australia’ in the early 1830s, F.F. Armstrong, who was appointed official interpreter for the Aboriginal languagesof the South West, and George Fletcher Moore, a lawyer who lived in the Swan River Colony in the 1830s (Green, 1984;Thieberger, 1996). Many Aboriginal words, mainly referring to plants, animals and the Aboriginal world, have beenincorporated into Australian English (Dixon, Ramson & Thomas, 1990; Knight, 1988; See Table 1).

Table 1: Some Australian Aboriginal words borrowed into Australian English (Source: Dixon et al., 1990)


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Source Language Sample words

Nyungar numbat, quokka, dugite, gilgie, koonac, marron, marri, karri, jarrah tree,mallet tree, gidgee (‘spear’), mia-mia

Yindjibarndi (Pilbara) willy-willy, yandy

Nhanta (Geraldton region) weelo bird

Dharuk (Sydney) boomerang, dingo, waddy (club), waratah, corroboree, gibber plain,cooee (from guuu-wii ‘come here’)

Yuwaalaraay (NSW) galah, mulga

Wiradjuri (NSW) quandong, billabong

Yagara (Brisbane) humpy, bung (Yagara meaning was ‘dead’), yakka

Wemba-Wemba (Vic) yabby, bunyip

In spite of these efforts by some Europeans, it was usually the Aboriginal people who were expected to pick up English,or at least enough bits of it to work and trade in. Most of the settlers maintained a low view of the local languages,referring to them as ‘yabber’ or ‘gibberish’ (Malcolm & Koscielecki, 1997, p. 20). A number of observers did claim thatthe Aboriginal people were more skilled in acquiring English than the Europeans were at acquiring Aboriginal languages(Malcolm & Koscielecki, 1997). Few of them, though, were actively taught English, and what they heard spoken by thenewcomers covered a diverse range of languages and dialects. Among the Englishes they heard from people on theFirst Fleet were Cockney, Billingsgate slang, Irish English, other regional Englishes and a stereotypical simplified‘foreigner talk’ (Malcolm, 2001). They would also have been exposed to the maritime jargon used by English seafarers toconduct trade with speakers of other languages.

One important consequence of this complex mix of English varieties and local Aboriginal languages was thedevelopment of a contact code, called a pidgin.

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Pidgins are very simplified codes constructed by speakers of two mutually unintelligible languagesto communicate with each other on a limited basis when they have no language in common. Theyare not real languages, since they are only used in very restricted contexts, usually that of trade,and they are not developed enough to express all the complex meanings that people need toexpress in all the domains of communication. They have a small vocabulary drawn mostly from thedominant language involved (usually, but not always, that of European colonisers such as theBritish) and very limited grammatical structure which is often influenced by the language(s) of theother speakers. While pidgins are shared by groups of people who engage in this limited cross-cultural communication, and they may last for many years, they are not anyone’s native language.

The pidgin which developed in early NSW (and later in adjoining states) is known today as NSW Pidgin English. While itdeveloped at first to bridge the gap between the British settlers and Aboriginal people, it was soon used by Aboriginalpeople to communicate with each other as the dislocation brought about by colonisation began to bring them intocontact with speakers of other Aboriginal languages with whom they had previously had little or no contact (Malcolm,2001). This pidgin was one of the key contributing factors in the development of Aboriginal English, and we will comeback to it later in this paper.

Conflict and disruptionSo far, we have looked at the ways in which members of each culture tried to engage positively with each other duringthe early stage of the British invasion. We have seen that Aboriginal people were initially cautious and then welcomingas they attempted to assimilate the colonists into their own worldview. But when they became aware that theEuropeans were overstaying their welcome, doing the unthinkable and asserting sole ownership over their land, thesituation rapidly became one of violent conflict as Aboriginal people attempted to defend their land. Under Aboriginallaw, the Europeans were guilty of trespass when they failed to ask permission to camp on other people’s land and useits resources, and the local landowners were soon suffering the effects of being pushed off their land.

Not only denied access to their best camping grounds, Aboriginal people found that important sacred sites weredesecrated (often by Europeans who were unaware of the nature of the sites), and ceremonial gatherings weredisturbed by Europeans who were anxious about any large groups of ‘natives’ (Austen, 1998, p. 5; Reynolds, 1990a, p.66). Europeans purloined tools and sacred objects for sale to the overseas market (Troy, 1994). Some shot deadAboriginal people without provocation. The Europeans gradually appropriated large areas of land in the regions mostheavily populated by Aboriginal people, since these were of course the most fertile areas for growing crops and grazinglivestock. The new farmers eliminated indigenous plant foods and disrupted the local food-sharing relationships, leavingthe displaced land owners in unpayable debt to people who had previously come to use their resources in exchange forothers (Austen, 1998, p. 20). The settlers were largely unaware of these consequences, since they perceived Aboriginalpeople as aimless wanderers who could simply move somewhere else. The truth was that displacement onto otherpeople’s land caused further conflict and added to the massive social disruption of epidemics of new diseases such assmallpox, which spread rapidly through the Aboriginal population in advance of the line of British settlement.

Deprived of their traditional food sources, Aboriginal people attempted to use the replacement food sources, such assheep and cattle, and demanded or raided grain stocks. From their point of view, animals and plants produced by theirland flourished as a result of their responsible stewardship of the land, so to demand a share in the produce – native ornew – was their right as custodians (or to use the European concept, ‘land owners’). Because of their philosophy ofprivate ownership, the Europeans regarded Aboriginal people’s use of these resources as ‘stealing’, with predictableconsequences.

In April of 1834, 30 Bibbulmun men from the Murray River area of WA besieged a grain mill (now reconstructed besidethe Narrows Bridge in South Perth) and made off with 444 kilograms of wheat and flour. The leader of the raid, Calyute,was later captured and publicly flogged, but escaped execution. His people continued to carry on a campaign ofresistance – a source of anxiety and frustration to settlers such as Thomas Peel, who coveted for their cattle the lushgrasslands of the Murray River District. (These grasslands had, unbeknownst to them, been created by the Nyungars’practice over thousands of years of systematically firing the land to encourage the growth of feed for kangaroos andemus; Fletcher, 1984).

The Swan River settlers, for their part, went about with guns close at hand, as on all the other frontiers in Australia, andlived on the edge of panic over potential Aboriginal offensives. As one settler declared, ‘We are at war with the originalowners, we have never known them in any capacity but as enemies’ (Reynolds, 1996, p. 5).


Stirling, now Governor, was determined to terrify the people into submission by the use of extreme force, so on 27October 1834, he and his troops surrounded a large group of the Murray River people camped on the Murray at Pinjarraand shot them. Around half of the men, women and children survived. While Stirling reported that only 15 men had beenkilled, settler Joseph Hardey reported that it was ‘a shocking slaughter’ where up to 30 were killed, including womenand children (Harris, 1994, p. 256), and later research based on their mass graves has suggested that up to 80 mayhave died (Austen, 1998, p. 21). Stirling rounded up the survivors and told them that if they attempted any retaliation,‘four times the present number of men would proceed amongst them and destroy every man, woman and child’ (PerthGazette, 1 Nov 1834, quoted in Fletcher, 1984). Thomas Peel got his title deed to 250 000 acres of the land and wasnegotiating the sale of 100 000 acres by mid-December (Fletcher, 1984).

With the Pinjarra massacre, the fiercest resistance around the Swan River was broken, but now that Aboriginal peoplewere aware of the expansionist intentions of the Europeans and their violent propensities, resistance to the invasion grewincreasingly fierce and incidents like that at Pinjarra were multiplied throughout Western Australian history. In someregions, Aboriginal resistance was very successful for some time, especially in the far north inland, in spite of the use oftactics such as the drafting of Aboriginal police assistants in the frontier regions to assist in the control or destruction ofother Aboriginal groups (Austen, 1998, p. 48). Sixty years after Pinjarra, Kimberley Bunuba hero Jandamarra led a group ofhis people who stalled European invasion into their territory for several years until 1897 (Pedersen & Woorunmurra, 1995).

While armed resistance ceased early in the 20th century, the last reported massacre in Western Australia was in 1926at Forrest River in the Kimberley (the truth of the matter was never resolved since the bodies were burned and thereappears to have been a conspiracy of silence; Austen, 1998; Harris, 1994). These incidents are engraved in theconsciousness of Aboriginal children and grandchildren of those involved, and make an important contribution to theoutlook of Aboriginal people in Australia today. Even the beginnings of European settlement in Western Australia are notmany generations removed in his ‘Oral History’, Tom Bennell recounts stories he was told by his grandfather, who sawthe first Europeans on the Swan River in 1836 (Bennell and Collard, 1991, pp.23-27).

While these experiences of the past relations between Europeans and Aboriginal people are very much alive in thememory of Aboriginal people, few non-Aboriginal people today have any detailed knowledge of them. There are goodreasons for this. Newspapers and other documents from settlement until the end of the 19th century are full of frankreports of frontier violence and Aboriginal dispossession. For example, the Rockhampton Bulletin in 1865:

[It is ] well known that the frequent use of firearms is indispensable to the outside settlers. Hundreds of blacks areshot down in the Colony every year.

(quoted in Reynolds, 1996, p. 49)

They also record the unpopular, but constant protests from those Europeans who were appalled by the treatment ofAboriginal people. Victorian Aboriginal Protector James Dredge did not know how to:

repress the struggling fire in my bones – while a witness of the awful tragedy in course of performance around me. . . the widespread devastation, heartless cruelties, wholesale robberies, and endless murder.

(Letter, 10 May 1841, quoted in Reynolds, 1996, p. 84)

West Australian David Carly protested for years over the brutality, rape, kidnapping and murders that he observed intowns in the north-west, and wrote a thundering letter to Lord Knutsford, the Secretary of State for the Colonies:

Again I write to you… from this land of murder and slavery and fraud. You have upheld and protected those in thiscolony that have committed far worse crimes than any done in Russia. You have done this with the full knowledgeof the terrible acts done to the Native slaves of Western Australia. . . The same atrocities are still sanctioned byyou Lord Knutsford and your Governors of this infamous Colony West Australia.

(quoted in Reynolds, 1996, p. 88)

But as Federation dawned, most European writers made a conscious effort to eliminate the memory of these experiences:

They said things like ‘it is well to draw a veil over the dark side of the picture’ or ‘there one would willingly draw aveil over the sad picture’ .

(quoted in Reynolds, 1999, p. 114).


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It is only in the last forty years or so that historians have begun to return to the original documents to remove this veil(Reynolds, 1984), and 15 years or so that the information has become more widely known outside academia. Aboriginalpeople themselves are also publishing their personal, family and community histories in increasing numbers (Sutton &Hercus, 1986; see also below).

What linguistic effects have conflict and disruption had?The most catastrophic effect has been the death of over a hundred Aboriginal languages and many more dialects. Theloss of languages occurs for many reasons, more of which will be mentioned in the next section. But there are manyexamples in Australia of languages which disappeared simply because of the loss of entire populations of speakers. Themost well-known example is that of the eight languages of Tasmania – although what is less well-known is that anumber of Tasmanian Aboriginal people did in fact survive on islands in the eastern Bass Strait, leading to the present-day Tasmanian Aboriginal population (Horton, 1994b, p. 1051). An example from Western Australia is the Yaburaradialect of Ngarluma in the Pilbara, which disappeared due to the loss of the Yaburara population through disease and an1868 massacre (Gribble, 1905/1987; Rijavec, 1995).

There were also many linguistic consequences of displacement of people to different country, either as refugees or as aconsequence of forced removal into missions and reserves, a development which we will look at below. Large groups ofpeople from several different language groups found themselves living together. In some cases, people would adopt thelocal language, either because of the language-country link or because of the need for a lingua franca, or commonlanguage (Schmidt, 1991, p. 9). For example, McKay (1995, p. 58) reports that Warlpiri people who now live at Yarumanin Jaru country in the Kimberley speak Jaru now instead of Warlpiri. In this case, Warlpiri is still strong elsewhere, butother languages have lost out altogether. Movements like these are amply illustrated in a map of ‘Traditional Locationsof Kimberley Languages’, produced by The Kimberley Language Resource Centre.

Another very significant development was the emergence of new languages, called creoles.

A creole is a new language which develops out of a pidgin when children begin speaking the pidginas their first language. This comes about in cases of extreme dislocation where speakers ofmutually unintelligible languages are brought together with no common language and the onlyavailable means of communication is the pidgin. Speakers – particularly the children – begin toexpand and elaborate on the pidgin so that it takes on all the complexity and functions of a fullydeveloped language.

Two creoles developed in Northern Australia, one based in the Torres Strait and northern Queensland known as TorresStrait Creole (Shnukal, 1988), and one covering most of the rest of northern Australia, known as Kriol. Each of theselanguages has a vocabulary based mainly on English (with some Aboriginal language words or original contributions), butthe grammar and the meanings behind it have substantial contributions from the original Aboriginal languages.

One of the main places where Kriol developed was at Roper River in the Northern Territory, where an Anglican missionwas set up in 1908 to save the remnants of eight language groups of the region. These peoples had resisted theincursions of the graziers since the 1870s, but from 1903 the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company determined toexterminate them and employed gangs of ten to fourteen men to hunt out and shoot all the people – adults or children– on sight. Describing those years, Warndarang woman Dinah Garadji said, ‘They just regarded us Aboriginal people asanimals’ (Harris, 1994, p. 697). Compared with the horrors of life on the run, the regimen of life on the mission waswelcomed by the Aboriginal people, but here as elsewhere the mission had an assimilatory agenda. Most of the childrenwere housed separately from the adults (although not by force, as in many other places), which contributed to their lackof access to traditional languages, and so they developed the existing northern Australian pidgin into what becameknown initially as Roper River Creole (Sharpe & Sandefur, 1977). From here and from other centres, Kriol developed andspread across the north, meeting up with and merging with Kimberley varieties (Mühlhäusler, 1991; Sandefur, 1981).Today, altogether, there are around 20 000 speakers of Kriol.


‘Protection’ and ‘Assimilation’As the European frontier spread further out from the settlements and Aboriginal resistance was broken, dispossessedAboriginal people left in the colonised territories became dependent on European rations for much of their food. Tosurvive, it became necessary for these people to juggle the two worlds in which they now had to live, adopting theexternals of European culture where necessary (and in some cases by choice). Many became employed on stations indomestic labour, land clearing, shepherding and hunting possums and dingos – some as permanent workers, but mostas seasonal labourers. By 1900 some Nyungar people in the south west had even purchased their own blocks of land forfarming and lived much as their European neighbours did (Haebich, 1988). Through all this, many managed stay on theirtraditional lands (now occupied by the pastoral stations), keeping up regular visits to relatives and to sites on their‘runs’, keeping their surviving families together (Baines, 1988, p. 231).

The lives of these colonised Aboriginal people took a definite turn for the worse at the close of the 19th century.Suddenly, after some Aboriginal success in coping with the occupation, the experiences of the two worlds divergedeven further. Since these events happened to people who are still alive, or whose children are still alive, they are evenmore vivid for Aboriginal people today than the events we have just described.

When Western Australia gained its independence from Britain in 1889, two things happened. One was that therestraining influence of liberal humanitarians back in Britain was removed, and so settlers in the less civilized north feltable to carry out violent acts with even less fear of retribution. The other was that Western Australia was able to followQueensland in formulating draconian ‘Protection’ Acts which would impose severe controls on all Western AustralianAboriginal people and remove them from sight to missions and reservations wherever possible (Haebich, 1988). At thetime, the prevailing European view was that Australian Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. Even the mostcharitable Europeans saw their task as ‘to smooth the dying pillow of the Aboriginal race’ (Harris, 1994), and theProtection Acts were justified on this basis.

Leading up to the Protection Acts, an amendment was passed in 1893 to exclude all Aboriginal people of full and partdescent in Western Australia from voting (previously some had actually been able to vote since the British haddesignated Aboriginal people ‘British citizens’ from the time they claimed possession of Australia). Other reductions inrights followed, culminating in the 1905 ‘Native Administration Act’ and its even more draconian successors, the 1936and 1944 Acts5.

The Protection Acts were based on the European ideology of ‘race’, where people were assigned to categories on thebasis of appearance. There were constant revisions of guidelines for classifying Aboriginal people by titles such as ‘half-caste’, ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon’ according to how much Aboriginal ‘blood’ they were supposed to have. Whileclassification was purportedly on the basis of ancestry, in practice Protectors and other officials decided who was whatsimply on the basis of skin colour (Read, 1983). Depending on how people were classified, provisions of the Actsapplied differently to them – and forced the segregation of many from members of their own families. People convictedof offences under the Act could be fined, jailed (‘with or without hard labour’; Section 58, 1905 Act), and permanentlyexiled from their country.

Europeans appointed as ‘Protectors’ under the Act (often policemen, who were thus required both to ‘protect’ and toenforce) had powers to disperse Aboriginal camps and remove people to other areas or detain them permanently instrictly regimented native ‘settlements’. Life in places like Moore River Native Settlement from the 1920s to the 1940shas been likened to life in a concentration camp, with a highly controlled routine, lining up for roll calls, inadequatefood, clothing and medical care, separation of children from adults by fences and locked dormitories. Brutalpunishments were common, including solitary confinement for up to a fortnight for both adults and children in a tinywooden shack known as the ‘Boob’(Haebich, 1988, Ch 6). Detention in such settlements was a shock both for thoseNyungars who were accustomed to living free lives in their own comfortable European-style homes and for people whohad previously lived a more ‘traditional’ lifestyle, particularly in the north.

‘Non-natives’ who attempted to visit their families in settlements and reserves committed offences under the Act.Aboriginal people were not allowed to move from one town to another without a permit. Many towns imposed curfewson Aboriginal people, who had to be out of town by dark, and other towns ‘banned’ Aboriginal people altogether. Travelfrom the north to the south was almost impossible (except of course for those being exiled to southern settlements),and travel outside the state was illegal.


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5 The provisions and effects of the Acts are summed up in the helpful video, ‘The 1905 Act’ (Graham and Haebich,1996), produced by Edith Cowan University and based on Anna Haebich’s research.

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The Acts vigorously pursued a policy of racial segregation and control over sexual relations. Aboriginal people could notmarry without a permit, and ‘Natives’ were not permitted to marry ‘non-Natives’. Interracial couples were separated,and their children were particularly vulnerable to being removed to institutions. Every Aboriginal child under 21 years ofage was automatically a ward of the Commissioner of Native Welfare, regardless of the fitness and economic state ofthe parents, and could be taken into custody at any time. Any ‘Native’ could be ordered to submit to medicalexaminations at any time, and none was permitted to possess or supply alcohol.

Aboriginal people could no longer work as independent contractors, and potential employers had to get permits toemploy Aboriginal workers – who were then bonded to their assigned employers in a fashion little removed from slavery.They were excluded from other workers’ rights such as workers compensation and paid much lower wages. They couldno longer own property (those who still retained farms lost them); any things they owned and most wages they earned,aside from a small amount of ‘pocket money’, were taken into ‘trust’ by the Native Welfare Department. Spending ofthese funds was strictly controlled by the Department, and people were forced to apply in writing to the department fortrivial items of clothing. Much of the money disappeared, and families did not often inherit the earnings of theirdeceased relatives. Of course, Europeans still continued to employ Aboriginal people since cheap or unpaid Aboriginallabour was indispensable, especially on the pastoral stations of the north, which would not otherwise have beencommercially viable (Reynolds, 1990b).

In many Western Australian towns, Aboriginal children were barred from attending school. But when they were able togain access, it was at the expense of their cultural and linguistic identity. As for achieving a European education,children in the native settlements received a vastly inferior education aimed at fitting them for menial labour. At theMoore River Settlement in the 1920s, one untrained teacher was responsible for teaching 100 children in the youngerprimary years, and the recommended curriculum included how to build a shack, laundry techniques and use of cutlery.Play activities were strongly discouraged (Haebich, 1988).

The stamping out of Aboriginal culture and identity was bolstered in the 1930s by the growth in popularity of eugenics. The Chief Protector in Western Australia, A.O. Neville, explicitly propagated a policy of ‘breeding out’ the ‘coloured race’– a policy based on the myth that the ‘black’ could be bred out by the ‘white’ over a few generations with no possibilityof ‘throw-backs’. White Australians were convinced that ‘half-castes’ inherited ‘the worst of both sides’ (Haebich, 1988,p. 318), and they were alarmed by the growth in the 1930s and 1940s of numbers of people of mixed descent. As aresult, policy changed at this point. While those people who were designated ‘full-blood’ were left on reserves (theywere of course expected to die out anyway), light-coloured children were taken away to institutions from wherever theywere found, to be biologically absorbed into white society. The aim of absorption was rather thwarted by the attitudes ofthe wider society, most of which regarded the presence of ‘half-castes’ with hostility, but the policy certainly succeededin breaking up Aboriginal families until the 1970s. While most of the most draconian provisions of the Acts wererepealed in 1954, those concerning the removal of children remained in force until much later, whereupon the ChildWelfare Act took over and perpetuated child removals under alternative justifications.

After the 1944 Act was passed, some ‘half-castes’ could apply for citizenship papers to exempt them from the Act, afterbeing assessed for their health and degree of ‘civilization’ (including non-participation in Aboriginal ceremonies andother cultural practices) (Rijavec, 1995, p. 14). Those who were eligible were faced with the unenviable choice ofremaining on the reserves, maintaining their community life and practising their culture and language as much aspossible but risking child removal; or getting citizenship papers, promising to cut all contact with their ‘native’ familymembers, attempting to ‘pass as white’ and hopefully being able to keep their children from being taken away .

The past 50 years have seen a succession of bureaucracies take the place of the Department for Native Welfare, but thehistory of government and police interaction has left West Australian Aboriginal people with an abiding distrust of bothinstitutions. When the protection legislation was dismantled, it was replaced by a policy of ‘assimilation’ whichattempted to force Aboriginal people to merge indistinguishably into the general population (Rowley, 1972). Some thingsimproved in the 1970s with official recognition of some rights of Aboriginal people to ‘self-determination’, but the vastmajority of organisations ‘for’ Aboriginal people are still government-controlled. It is only since legal recognition wasgiven to the fact that Aboriginal people did not surrender their traditional land titles that Aboriginal people have gainedlegal grounds for being treated as land owners with rights rather than ‘charity cases’.


Linguistic effects of ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’Not surprisingly, ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’ had further catastrophic effects on the maintenance of Aboriginallanguages. Aboriginal languages and culture were vigorously suppressed to aid in the wiping out of Aboriginal identity.The Minister in charge of the Acts’ administration had the power to prohibit any ‘tribal practice’ considered ‘injurious’ tothe natives, and those who had power locally over Aboriginal people were often zealous in stamping out Aboriginallanguage. As the Bringing Them Home report (Wilson, 1997, Ch14) puts it, ‘The significance of Indigenous languages tothe maintenance of family relations and the preservation and transmission of cultures was not lost on missionaries andprotectors’. The report quotes a submission from the Kimberley Language Resource Centre:

People were also punished for speaking language. In many places language became something that had to behidden; we were taught to be ashamed if we spoke anything other than English.

(Kimberley Language Resource Centre submission, quoted in Wilson, 1997, p. 299)

An Aboriginal Queenslander who endured the same conditions under Queensland’s Protection Act has this to say:

[The old people] didn’t like you listening in and wouldn’t explain things to you, what it was about ... Then againthey were frightened of white-fellas, Superintendents, they were very very frightened. If he said you jump, youdon’t know how high you going to jump. If old people tried to teach the younger people, they were sent to PalmIsland, at the pleasure of the Superintendent in those days. It was a crime to teach us languages, that’s why wewere going backwards... The old people were frightened of getting sent away ... That’s why a lot of our peoplewere frightened to teach us our language. It was fear.

(Allan Douglas, in Aird, 1996, p. 14)

This policy carried through into the schools: until the late 20th century, teachers were prohibited from using Aboriginallanguages in Western Australian state schools. Many teachers punished and ridiculed Aboriginal students for speakingtheir language or their own variety of English. The superiority of English was constantly reinforced (Schmidt, 1991).

The removal of children from their parents and other Aboriginal people also made language transmission impossible,apart from the limited sharing of knowledge the children had with each other, again under threat of caning or othersanctions. Since much transmission of Aboriginal knowledge, including linguistic terms, happens in ceremonies andactivities at specific locations and times, families who had been transported far from their homelands often lacked thecontexts for learning in any case. Adults were often sent off to work in European contexts where they had noopportunity to share their language with other speakers of the language, and people married spouses from otherAboriginal groups who now lived in the same settlements.

While the official policy of assimilation was shelved some years ago, Aboriginal people are still subject to manypressures to conform to the English norm of non-Aboriginal society, especially in urban situations where they are incloser contact with non-Aboriginal people. The media promote English and rarely include Aboriginal languages (althoughthis is changing in some areas with Aboriginal radio or television stations) and the new economy and its values linksEnglish with status and material success. Most reading material is in English, and most Aboriginal language literature islimited to religious, linguistic or school material. As a result, language death is continuing to take place. In 1991 (themost recent survey) there were only 90 languages left, and 70 of these were nearly extinct. The remaining 20 languagesare still being passed on to children, but even these are endangered (Schmidt, 1991). Their role in encapsulating anAboriginal worldview is being taken over by the creoles described above and by Aboriginal English, a new variety ofEnglish which we will talk about in the next section.

Aboriginal families abound with stories of people living under the Acts. Tom Bennell’s story (Bennell and Collard, 1991) isone which has been published in Nyungar and Aboriginal English (the version here is transcribed straight from theoriginal tape of his conversations with Glenys Collard). In this text, he introduces himself and tells the story of his life:


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Tom’s StoryWell now this is ‘bout Nyungars talk

h’Aboriginal’s words

h’its nidja ngany

no hold jus’ wait on

now my name is ol’ Tom Bennell

I bin brought up with the h’Aboriginals

from when I was three years of age

my mother

she was a white woman

h’an’ ‘er gran- um, ‘er mother was a ‘alfcaste woman

h’an’ ‘er grandpa – our father – grandfather was a hIndian

We don’t know what part a’ India ‘e cum from

but I was only a little boy about three years of age

h’an’ I remember tha’ man quite well

Well when they took me over

out in the bush

the Bennells boys used to say to me

send that wadjela boy ‘ere – means he’s a white boy

Ngala wangka

learn ‘im to talk Nyungar words mean

das mean to talk h’Aboriginals word see

so tha’ my mother say well h’alright so

an’ they used to take me over h’an’ talk ‘n

learn the ole Nyungar talk

Kaya nyunak

nidja nyininy

djorin yayi. see

I say ohh yeah

ok

‘ow long you gonna stop there

Well I said I don’t know

I might be bula nyininy for years h’an’ years

might’e burda mila wort kurliny

thas mean go away behind bars

well

I stayed with ‘em j- prac’ally all me life

h’anyhow they learn me to

talk all Nyungar words.


Tom’s story is a fine example of a multi-layered Aboriginal English yarn. Even though he is translating his Nyungar intoAboriginal English for his grand-niece, Glenys, most non-Aboriginal readers find the tale quite opaque due to the lack ofknowledge of the Aboriginal world of experience. Here is a very limited introduction to what it is about (in fact itscontent is far more complex than this):

Tom Bennell was a fair-skinned Nyungar child born to his Nyungar mother and adopted by his Nyungar father in 1908.He describes his ancestry and relationships to relevant family, and how his Nyungar relatives hid him away deep in thebush for years to keep him from being taken away. In the process he learned his Nyungar culture and language.

As can be seen in ‘Tom’s Story’, the ‘Protection’ and ‘Assimilation’ eras have left their mark in the vocabularies ofAboriginal people today. Many words in Aboriginal English have their roots in the experiences of those times, e.g.

put behind bars put into an institution such as a mission or orphanage(not necessarily jail, and usually not for wrong-doing)

taken away forcibly removed as a child from parents and put into an institution or adopted

dog licence/tag Certificate of Citizenship (Arthur, 1996; Rijavec, 1995, p. 14)

munatj ‘policeman’ (from the Nyungar word for ‘White Cockatoo’, probably referring tothe badge on the policeman’s helmet; may also have been conflated with the‘monarch’ whom the policeman represented.)

There are special words for policeman in Aboriginal languages all around Australia, reflecting the high profile the policehad, and still have, in the lives of Aboriginal people. People from around Roebourne call a policeman munda-maranga,meaning ‘chain-hand’ (Rijavec, 1995, p. 7).

Many other Aboriginal people are now publishing their histories, and only a few examples can be given here. Linden Girl(Rajkowski, 1995) tells the story of Lallie Matbar, a young Aboriginal woman, and Jack Akbar, an Afghan cameleer, whowere repeatedly refused permission to marry, were interned, escaped to South Australia, were extradited, and so on. Thelate Jack Davis (1982; 1986) summed up the experiences of Nyungars and the attitudes of those in power in many plays,books and poems, and Broome musician Jimmy Chi (1991) stirred audiences with his hilarious musical Bran Nue Day, whichtells the story of a Broome boy trying to find his way home from the mission where he had been taken. Glenyse Ward (1991;1995) and Alice Nannup (1992) have told of their experiences of institutionalisation followed by slavery as domestics. JackMcPhee tells the story of his life from adoption by a non-Aboriginal father at an early age and work on stations and mines.He describes the effects of the different Acts on people in North West towns. Morndi Munro (1996) tells how he worked foryears on a station carved out of his own land, and then was dumped when he grew too old: ‘I didn’t know the manager wasjust trying to get all the sweat out of me, just like a motorcar or an engine or something like that’.

Living in two worlds: Aboriginal Australian responses to changeThe story so far has been largely from the point of view of European history, showing how Europeans moved into theAboriginal world and expected Aboriginal people to move into the European world, under particular conditions. But howhave Aboriginal people responded to this dislocation of their world? While in many cases their room to make choiceshas been severely circumscribed, Aboriginal people have been far from passive recipients of a new culture and law.

Adapting lifestylesWe’ve seen how Aboriginal people attempted to incorporate Europeans into their own world initially by identifying themas lost relations and attempting to deal with them according to their existing norms of reciprocity and relationship. Theyalso made use of many of the new things brought into their world, on their own terms. Within a few years of the arrivalof Europeans, European artefacts were criss-crossing Australia along the traditional trade routes, just as Macassar steelhad circulated in the centuries before (Trudgen, 2000). European explorers often found evidence of European items andpidgin English or new Aboriginal words referring to them which had come to regions over immense distances severaldecades before they themselves entered the territory (Reynolds, 1990a).

Europeans, their animals, and their material culture were incorporated into Aboriginal rock art and bark paintings from the earliest sightings. Paintings of ships, feral cats, horses and bullocks and their tracks appear in the midst ofmore traditional art subjects (Reynolds, 1990a, pp.42-43; Sutton, 1989). Reynolds (1990a, p. 43) reports that Europeantunes, words and themes were incorporated into Aboriginal songs and dances. As with their traditional subjects, theaccuracy of drawings and the imitations of European animals in dances were evidence of acute observation.


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As Aboriginal territory was progressively overrun by Europeans, however, the world of the Europeans became somethingwhich could not just be selected from to add to Aboriginal culture: Aboriginal people faced a new situation where theywere forced to adapt to the new world while striving to maintain the integrity of their own culture as far as possible.

In many cases, it’s a matter of ‘keeping up appearances’. Even today, when protection and assimilation are officially athing of the past, many Aboriginal people in Western Australia put on the externals of European lifestyles primarily out offear of non-Aboriginal evaluations or because ‘the Welfare will get you’ or ‘wadjela might come’ (wadjela is NyungarAboriginal English for non-Aboriginal people), or simply feelings of shame. (Aboriginal English shame is a complex andimportant concept in Aboriginal society all over Australia, difficult to translate into standard English but meaning roughlya sense of social appropriateness and embarrassment at being singled out). Glenys Collard gives two present-dayexamples of trying to appear ‘normal’:

Looking like a ‘normal’ Australian household

Nyungar families value living together and looking after one another, so Anglo-Australian expectations about nuclearfamily households cause many problems:

AH: what about um sometimes ah like Nyungars worry when they got too much family in the in the house that-the Wadjelas are gonna complain?

GC: but that’s what I’m talking about inspection times you actually say to them all go down the shop because..usually they say um between 9 and 12.. and it’s not just cleanup, it means clean OUT

AH: mhm [clean OUT

GC: [you fellas all go

AH: right it’s not just tidying up the house

GC: no.. you fellas all go down there an sit an come back after dinnertime.. or I’ll come that way.. when they go..cause that’s what ‘appens you ave ta.. get everyone out cause you know that they.. you know they’ll say theynot alloweda stop there.. so they don’t be there.. or- there’s the three things: they send people away, they tryan clean up, or they just.. um.. have to send half the- or more than half the mob away from the house.

The fears about inspections underlying these efforts are not just related to the fear of losing the house. One youngNyungar woman talks of how obsessively her mother kept their house hyper-clean and tidy out of fear of having her ownchildren taken away as she was (anonymous, personal communication).

Visiting and Socialising with Non-Aboriginal People

Glenys’ granny ‘Janine’ (not her real name) was ‘stopping’ with Glenys when Glenys’ close non-Aboriginal friend Patsyinvited Janine to stay with her family for the weekend. Nyungar families don’t usually carry lots of luggage with them whenthey move somewhere, and they are used to sharing clothes with other family members (people just pick up whateverthey want to wear). Most Nyungars have low incomes too, so goods are only bought at the time they are needed.

GC: Janine went to Patsy’s one time my granny, an Patsy said could she stop the weekend. So an I ony ad a littlebit of money an I ad to go down the shop an buy er some pyjamas and shorts and undies and tops becauseit didn’t matter (when J was at GC’s house) cause she could wear- she had a coupla old pairs- she didn’tbring anythink with er which was okay cause she could just put pop’s t-shirt on an have er shower an jumpinto bed but- because she ad to go to the Wadjela’s – Patsy- I ad to go an get er all these things .. an packher little bag to go cause it was- it would’ve been shame.. but.. that’s what happens then or a lot- orotherwise they don’t go . . . I woulda had to say ‘well.. she does- well we’re actually takin er over here outPatsy’ or something else making up (pretending, making an excuse) you know.. but ‘er pop said ‘how muchyou got there?’ an we adda shuffle around until we could get ‘er a nice pair of shorts an a nice t-shirt eventhough it was only the couple of nights and a nightie an a couple of pairs of.. new undies cause it would’vebeen shame.. oh an a pair of sandals.. they were only cheap ones but as long as they were clean and neatcause – you know the Wadjelas wanna go – where’d they take er down to the markets an stuff an.. I meanwe don’t care we wouldn’t go.. if she doesn’t- if you don’t have the clothes you don’t go.. so.. was no good‘er going to Patsy’s if she couldn’t go nowhere.. where.. we don’t- if we aven’t got em we don’t go. Or wecan go but you sit in the car and someone just goes in if you only gonna go to get something.. so it doesn’tmatter. but- yeah I spent all my money

AH: so that’s even Patsy, an she understands everything


GC: yeah an that’s my Wadjela cobber who doesn’t- you know who would have found something of [herdaughter’s] probably but I was still shame cos it’s still my granny or it would ave made her shame too..cause she did say ‘Nan?’ – ‘yeah yeah’ I aksed her did she wanta go – but she said ‘um oh what clothes I’mgonna wear Nan?’ So Pop said ‘yeah well we’ll just have to get some’.

Unfortunately because most non-Aboriginal people see only these external appearances, and are excluded from theAboriginal world which continues to exist out of view in their own cities, they are unaware of the depth of values andlifestyle that continue to govern Aboriginal lives. This ignorance causes more problems and tensions for Aboriginalpeople. As one Aboriginal woman said to researchers in Sydney, ‘A lot of people don’t understand that just becausethey put us on missions and put clothes on us doesn’t mean that, what was in our make-up and in our systems and inour society immediately went away’ (Munns, 2000, p. 32).

There are many ways in which Aboriginal people have found ways to maintain their own worldview and lifestyle whileadapting to the presence of European culture. First, family relationships (i.e. kinship relations) are still of centralimportance in defining the world. Important family events like funerals (all too common in contemporary Aboriginalsociety), or looking after younger relatives, often have a higher priority than school, even when school is also importantto people. Much more frequently than Anglo-Australians, Aboriginal people will call others by their kin term rather than apersonal name. Reciprocal kin names are still used in most places: for example, an uncle may refer to his nephew asunc, or uncle, grandchildren are referred to as liddle pop or nan; when ‘Joanne’ saw her new-born daughter for the firsttime, she exclaimed ‘Oh, my liddle mummy!’, to the confusion of the attending Anglo-Australian doctor. Generationalseniority can be more important than age, as Eva Sahanna explains:

When an aunty is the same age or younger than niece or nephew, same respect goes as if they were an older, orsomebody who has kids. So respect for generations overrides age. I got a cousin who’s only 2 and my daughter is17 months – an thas ‘uncle’. You go to your normal auny you gotta shake her hand an give er a kiss. An like if youdon’t, Pop’ll say ‘Gloria in there’ – you gotta go in an say hello to her – she only [13] – an she goes along with itshe says ‘Hello Lyn, hello Harry’ (to Eva’s parents) – because they’re her cousins – and they respond normally –that’s the spinout.. and she gets to sit at the table an talk with them.. most of the time she talks to Carol (Eva’ssister) cause they’re about the same age, but she can sit there and talk if she wants to. Mum can’t say ‘Can yougo up there with the kids’. You know how all your aunties sit together and all your uncles sit together – Gloria getsto sit with them and she’s only 13 – and we gotta sit out with the kids.

(Eva Sahanna, personal communication; names have been changed)

From the time that the European world began to impinge on the Aboriginal world, Aboriginal people have maintainedtheir connections with ancestral country wherever possible, and generally live relatively mobile lives, visiting family indifferent parts of their country. The most ‘urbanised’ people in the south-west still often demonstrate a preoccupationwith bush-related activities, such as hunting. They have simply replaced spears with guns. In some areas, ceremoniessuch as initiation are still carried out in their appropriate sites, as recorded for example in the film Exile and the Kingdom(1993) by the people of Roebourne. The Roebourne people show how they always introduce themselves to the spirits ofthe sites they visit (Rijavec, 1995, p. 2). But this practice is not restricted to the north of Western Australia; it is stillfollowed in the south in Nyungar (Baines, 1988) and Yamatji country:


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The Pool Snake1 Fred: You ever been to the Mullewa waterfall?

2 Alan: I been dere eaps of times.

3 Eva: Is that a swimmin spot or jus?

4 Alan: Yeah swimmin spot,

5 oh you gotta throw sand in before you jump in

6 Eva: Why’s that?

7 Alan: I dunno jus what my Mum tell me,

8 throw sand in before you jump in,

9 she don’t tell me dat much.

10 Eva: She didn’t tell you why,

11 she just told you to do it?

12 Alan: Yeah.

13 Fred: You know why Alan:?

14 I’ll tell ya.

15 Alan: (Inaudible)

16 Fred: Cos where youse go swimming

17 is a place where a snake is, ya know

18 Eva: (Inaudible)

19 Fred: that belongs to that pool, a big snake.

20 You gotta throw sand in dere

21 to let im know when who you are.

22 Same when you swim in the Murchison River

23 Shaun: Yeah yeah the big ting comes an it’s like (Inaudible)

24 Fred: So you gotta throw sand in

25 so that means you don’t get sick

26 and you’re from that country

27 or if you’re a stranger,

28 if I went down to Perth somewhere

29 or (Inaudible) I’d throw sand in it.

There is a strong sense of the continuity between the human and non-human world of spiritual entities, landscape,animals and plants. The natural world is full of signs with meaning, as a Nyungar 11-year-old (V) and her aunty (A)explain:

V: [Nyungars] think . . . somebody’s die there if a wirlo bird but ... um like Wedjalas don’t know what ...what wirlobird mean.. Christine was tellin us for news [but] teacher didn’t even know what she was talkin bout.. an ifthey (i.e. wirlos) go whistlin too an in Nyungar thas means like someone dyin or somethin like... in Nyungar.

A: . . . I had to help her [explain to the teacher] because I knew a lot about that wirlo bird too, it’s a death bird orwhen someone very sick an on their last . . .

Aboriginal people usually prioritise place over time in viewing history and measure time by events rather than byquantifiable units, e.g. ‘when gran’s gran was a little girl’. This applies when talking about the recent past too, as in thefollowing exchange which took place over the telephone:

Niece: Mary’s gone to hospital. Her heart was beating rreeal fast and she couldn’t get her breathAunt: When was this, aunt?Niece: Just after Home an Away. She’s got pneumonia.

(Malcolm et al., 1999)


Non-Aboriginal Australians often assume that using European tools and materials is not ‘Aboriginal’, but Aboriginalculture like any other changes and adapts to new circumstances while maintaining a basic Aboriginal identity. Peoplehave adapted to horses and camels and then Toyotas (in Aboriginal English, ‘toyota’ can mean any four-wheel drivevehicle) yet use them to maintain the same mobile lifestyle visiting kin and significant places. Basil Sansom (1988) hasshown how Aboriginal people have adapted to the use of money as a trade item, but incorporated it into ‘traditional’systems too, where money, like any other item of exchange, is bound up in relational systems of value and obligation.

It is in the arts that contemporary Aboriginal culture has the highest profile for non-Aboriginal people, and even here,Aboriginal people have adapted European materials and techniques to express ‘traditional’ themes. The renaissance ofWestern Desert art from the mid-1970s owes a lot to the use of canvas and acrylic paints to produce art works whichwere formerly produced in the sand as part of ceremonies and storytelling (Anderson & Dussart, 1988). In the process,Western Desert people have had to negotiate many issues which are analogous to those which arise in the transfer ofcommunication to English and written media. For example, acrylic paintings (like writing) are enduring objects, unlikethe transitory art of sand paintings, which belonged only to the particular event in which they played a part. When theyare sold to outsiders, the knowledge encoded in them becomes public, something which can conflict with the Aboriginalconcept of the ownership of knowledge, where people must own the right to paint a design or to view it, and so on(Morphy, 1991).

But in spite of these issues, Aboriginal ‘artists’ (the concept of an élite ‘artist’ is itself a European imposition) maintainmany of their ‘traditional’ ways of doing art. For example, resisting the Western idea of ‘star’ performers, it is verycommon for Western Desert artists to paint paintings cooperatively, according to the ceremonial roles of the peopleinvolved (Anderson & Dussart, 1988, pp.101-106). In urban centres, contemporary Aboriginal artists like BronwynBancroft, Fiona Foley, Sally Morgan, Shane Pickett and a wealth of others express their Aboriginal identity andexperiences of contemporary life in new and innovative ways. Yet ‘country’ (that is, homeland) retains its foundationalimportance in their work.

Other Aboriginal artists use performance art to express their heritage, in dance, drama and cinema. Tracey Moffatt is anexample of an internationally successful Murri film writer/director who uses Aboriginal English where appropriate, whileWestern Australian directors are producing films like Confessions of a Headhunter and Blackfellas. We’ve already notedthe plays and musicals of Jack Davis and Jimmy Chi, and local Aboriginal actors like the Yirra Yarkin theatre arecontinuing to develop new ways of combining European media and distinctively Aboriginal ways of doing things.

There are other more subtle – and often deeply rooted – ways in which Aboriginal culture influences experience today.One which often comes into conflict with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of Western society is thetendency to see things as a whole and interrelated. Glenys Collard talks about the conflicts this causes for Aboriginalpeople working in Australian bureaucracies:

You’ve got the Aboriginal health worker, Aboriginal education worker, Aboriginal police aide, you’ve got theAboriginal project officers in ATSIC, you got Aboriginal court officers, not lawyers…. One is not allowed to go overto the other. One could be a health worker, but she can’t go into the school to say oh that food the kids had theyreally got sick. Because she’s not a health expert. . . . The Aboriginal Liaison Officer from housing who knows thatthere’s 18-25 people living in that house. And that they really need the support and that, but they can’t write thaton the paper – they can’t assist the family.

(Glenys Collard, personal communication)

Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon (1983, Ch 13) report on a number of cases where Aboriginal groups came up withinnovative plans to address multi-faceted needs in their communities, but they failed to get funding because ofbureaucratic compartmentalisation. For example, members of Belyuen community applied for funding for a truck thatpeople could use to improve nutrition by gathering their traditional foods, instruct the children in their cultural andgeographic heritage, and enable a craft business using bush resources. They failed to gain funding since such multi-purpose (and efficient) uses of the resource did not fall under the funding guidelines of any single department. Glenyscomments that the same happens in communities throughout Western Australia, for example in projects which aim toaddress economic disadvantage:

Like from Kondinin if they were to get a bus for one project that ATSIC has given, they not allowed to use that bus totake five mums to Narrogin for shopping where it’s four times cheaper. You’re not allowed to because it doesn’t fitthe mileage. So the solution is that they have five buses and can’t afford it. So how many tires is that to replace?


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What it is is that because we think in the whole, that worldview that’s logic to us – well if we had that then we cando this this and this, but the society rules that you actually have to go this by this by this – they actually cut it up.That’s why people can’t achieve.


Even when they keep within the confines of their department’s agenda, of course Aboriginal staff still face conflicts dueto the lack of recognition of their cultural knowledge:

Welfare officers FACS who [are] aksed to give an assessment on a family but then their assessment can still beoverridden by the psychologist and the team leader because they have the paper where the Aboriginal personagain even though there’s 25 people in that house them fellas still know how to look over that baby. ‘Neglectneglect’ from the Wadjelas.


On the other hand, Aboriginal staff are often caught in the middle of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal expectations. Forexample, programs which bypass Aboriginal protocol on seniority of leadership:

They put on programs and delegate a young person because they say they have more skills and that’s why they fail. It’s the protocol of giving it to the 3rd youngest brother who tells it to the eldest (...) So it’s already set up to fail.


Aboriginal employees also face many linguistic conflicts as a result of accommodating to the Standard AustralianEnglish expected in the workplace and then alienating their own people by talking ‘flash’:

GC: in jobs okay you get a lotta um.. Nyungars or blackfellas in work have different jobs it could be from you knowthe counter person at CES an they talking sort of flash way

(. . .)

AH: just cause there’s Wadjelas around or?

GC: yeah because they’re in this Wadjela environment an they dress like the Wadjelas an that’s when you getother blackfellas say to them they use the terminologies that are used in that setting only in that workplace..an then.. the other blackfellas rip em up cruel . . . because they say oo you think you talkin to?

This dilemma is one manifestation of a general requirement that most Aboriginal people live with: they need to cultureswitch to accomplish tasks and maintain relationships with people outside the Aboriginal world. The proportion ofAboriginal people today working in non-Aboriginal settings is still fairly low. Even where they are working in Westerninstitutions, their roles are often directed towards interacting with other Aboriginal people, as we have seen above.Those people who do not work in non-Aboriginal settings often interact with non-Aboriginal people in limited contexts,mainly to do with official functions such as health care, education, the police and social security. On the other hand,those Aboriginal people who do interact with outsiders in less formal settings often find themselves in contact withmultiple ethnic groups from Malays and Afghans to Italians and Pacific Islanders – as in fact they have during much ofthe last two hundred years. As a result their exposure to the dominant Anglo-Australian experience can be surprisinglylimited, leading to further potential for communication breakdowns:

GC: Rod – when he was working doing planting the trees out at (town).. regrowth.. place.. and e ad is Christmas..picnic party thing

AH: oh yeah

GC: like a picnic thing.. and him an liddle Rod and Sonia an I ad to buy them new things to go new shorts and..sandals and.. whatever and.. um a hat because it was hot an they don’t.. they just wear their caps but..anyway e- he said choo you better dress em up cause other than like all them Wadjela kids will be there so(...) let them two go.. (...) an [the organisers] told Rod to take a plate an so I put three plates in there.. an I didsay to im ‘you gotta take a feed?’ an e just said ‘no.. we just gotta take a plate... and.. so yeah them thingshappen all the time

AH: so e got there an he didn’t have any food?

GC: but they said it was all- they still gave em plenty of feed

AH: mm.. but they thought oh these Nyungars yeah they never bring anything

GC: they probably did but they never said anythink(Source: Glenys Collard. Names have been changed)


Adapting language: The rise of Aboriginal EnglishOverviewHand in hand with the changes in general lifestyle which we have just discussed have been further changes in language.As we have seen, colonisation has led to the death of many languages so that few are still spoken in full, and mostAboriginal people today speak either a creole (10%) or a form of English (80% – mostly Aboriginal English) as their firstlanguage (Schmidt, 1991). This does not mean that Aboriginal languages have lost their value to Aboriginal people –many words and phrases have been preserved in the English spoken by them. But without the full resources of theiroriginal languages, Aboriginal people have had to turn English into a language capable of expressing an Aboriginalworldview. Hence, the rise of Aboriginal English.

Aboriginal English has developed through several different paths. The key development was that of NSW Pidgin English.By 1870 a pidgin based on it had become the lingua franca of much of Queensland, continuing north and west andeventually creolising in the north, as we have seen. It probably also disseminated south to Victoria and South Australiaand could have been transported to Western Australia by sea routes, if not through the inland (Malcolm & Koscielecki,1997). More sustained contact with the dominant lexifier language, English (in many varieties, as we saw earlier), led tothe restructuring of the pidgin or creole to become more like standard English. A new variety of English thus emergedwhich was mutually intelligible with the English spoken by other Australians but was still distinctively Aboriginal.

Aboriginal English is often compared with Standard Australian English (SAE) – the variety of English which is taken to bethe norm in Australian institutions of power, whose spoken form is the first language of higher status groups inAustralian society, and which provides the standard in education. Peoples’ idea of SAE is based mainly on its writtenform, which nobody really speaks, but they have strong views on what is ‘proper’ standard English and what is not. SAEand Aboriginal English are both ‘dialects’ (varieties) of English, like British ‘RP’ (‘Received Pronunciation’ – the Britishprestige variety), American English, Scottish English, Indian English, etc.

Aboriginal English is a ‘social’ dialect, in that it is social group membership which determines its speakers, and ratherthan being limited to one region it is spoken all over Australia in the same range as Australian English. There are actuallya range of varieties to which we give the cover term ‘Aboriginal English’, which range from ‘heavy’ pronunciation in Kriol-influenced varieties to ‘light’ in the south. There is also some overlap with non-standard English spoken by many non-Aboriginal Australians (due to influence both ways). Regional varieties of Aboriginal English have their own lexicalvariants such as words which have remained from the local Aboriginal languages. But they have much more in commonwith each other so that we can talk about a pan-Australian Aboriginal English which marks Aboriginal identity. Weshowed ‘Steve’, a 12 year-old Wongi (Goldfields) boy, an Aboriginal English dialogue with some distinctive Nyungarfeatures and asked if he knew who spoke like that: ‘Yeah, us mob!’ he replied.

Aboriginal English expresses an Aboriginal worldview. It differs from Standard Australian English at every level, from thisworldview to the rules for using language (that is, ‘pragmatics’), to the meanings of words and the structures of texts, toits grammar and sound system. Patricia Königsberg uses the analogy of an iceberg (see Figure 1):

[The iceberg analogy draws attention to] what we call the three crucial parts of language difference: the parts thatare exposed and obvious, the parts that are very hard to get at and the parts that are hidden under the water.

Like the parts of an iceberg that are exposed to the air, some language features are very obvious; they are easilyobserved in speech and writing. Some aspects of language are almost irretrievable – like the part of the icebergvisible just under the water. Lastly, there are aspects of a language which cannot be understood without being deeplysubmerged in the culture.

The obvious exposed features include those features that teachers are often most concerned with. They are:

1. the prosodics of the language: features such as stress and intonation;

2. the phonology: the sounds that a language employs;

3. the morphology: the form of the words;

4. the syntax: the way sentences are put together; and

5. the genres or text structures.

Looking at the part of the iceberg just visible under water, we describe those features that are harder to get at.They include:

6 aspects of semantics: the meanings employed in Aboriginal English and

7 the pragmatics: the language’s rules of usage within different contexts and for different functions.


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Figure 1: The Language Iceberg

Lastly, deep under water, we find:

8 the values,

9 the beliefs and

10 the attitudes that underpin everything within a particular language or dialect, the worldview.

(Königsberg & Collard, 2000)


Stress/Intonation�(prosodics)

Sounds�(phonology)

Words�(morphology)

Sentences�(syntax)

Textform/Structure�(genres)

Meaning�(semantics)

The way language is used�(pragmatics)

Values

Beliefs

Attitudes

Some examples of Aboriginal English textsWe will now look at some texts and pick out some of the features which illustrate these aspects of Aboriginal English.

[NB: All texts are available on audiotape]

Text 1. Narrogin‘Robert’, Nyungar boy in Year 2. A is Robert’s cousin ‘Annie’; I is Kezia Cruttenden, a non-Aboriginal teacher, who kindlyprovided this recording from 14.5.97 (Tape #063).

1. I: what did you do on the weekend Robert?

2. R: I went to my Nan’s… Shirley’s…

3. I: mhm.. tell me all about it

4. R: an I went huntin wiv er…

5. I: mm

6. R: [an I-

7. I: [mm did you catch anything?

8. R: yep caught um ten boomers an ten choo-s um kangaroos yeah…boomers still kangaroos…they shot tenkangaroos and ten…boomers

9. I: mhm…and what did you with them?

10. R: um we skunned em…an put em in our fridge…

11. A: and did you cook em?

12. R: yep

13. I: mhm…and did you go- did you go hunting for them too?

14. A: yeah

15. I: you tell us about how you caught some of them

16. R: um we caught one by our slingers… we ad it in the bush… an I wa(s) in the bush dere (h)idin with my um bowand arrows what I made… I was jus lookin at a boomer I jus got it right dere in the ‘eart ssmash

17. I: mm

18. R: went wobbly way like that an

19. A: (sneeze)

20. R: went straight in

21. I: mm… and did you… how many did your dad catch?

22. R: Dad e caught… bout nine of em

23. I: mm… how did he catch his?

24. R: with a gun… an e’d use a… coz um Uncle Shane used a… um a shotgun and. e [used

25. A: [Shane is your Uncle

26. R: yeah e’s our Uncle… Uncle Shane li’l boy… an Annie’s cousins… uncles

27. A: those aren(‘t) my uncles thas my cousins…

28. R: well… well e’s my… mum’s brother… and. den um Nan Shirley shot um two… wiv only with one pistol gun ande shootin blue bullets out… shot em two at the same. place boom boom boom… i’ was like a machine gun i’wouldn’ stop shootin.. ‘ad a hundred bullets in it…

29. I: mmmm

30. R: she taught him up. like Dad??

31. I: mm… and did you have a cook up in the bush?

32. R: yep… yeah bu’ mum… mum sat down with her Shirley eatin her feed…

33. I: mm


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34. R: an Mum’d.. Mum just got a... d- Mum just caught a boomer. when we was.. when we was. r-runnin when wewere under this shotgun?? an dus (-just?) hit it in the head with a stick.

35. I: … mmm… and what did you have to eat at the cook up?

36. R: ah I had vegies and.. some kangaroo meat…an…an tomatoes…an rabbit bones. an rabbit meat…

37. I: mm

38. R: cause I shot a rabbit…an I made my liddle campfire an we stayed dere for two nights

39. I: mmm

40. R: thas how come we got ten boomers…

41. I: mm

42. R: cause we was drying?? them up it woulda been. like nearly eighdy… coz me an Tommy got two

43. I: and Annie… have you been out kangaroo hunting lately?

44. A: [my dad did

45. R: [yeah… she’s dad

46. A: when my brother went with im… my brother went for a ride with im

47. R: yeah but Uncle Gary goes with them sometimes unna

48. A: mhuh

Values, beliefs and attitudes

Lines 27-28: Sorting out how people are related is of prime importance if any yarn is to be told, so Annie initiates adigression to clarify how she relates to the people in Robbie’s yarn.

Line 38: Robbie was being given an opportunity to learn by doing in creating his own little campfire in imitation of themain campfire and cooking his catch on it.

Pragmatics

Line 8: ‘ten kangaroos and ten boomers’. Aboriginal English does not usually require precision in terms of specificnumbers, so Robert has probably included these numbers for the benefit of the non-Aboriginal interviewer; the numbersare not intended to be a precise count, simply to convey a large number in each case.

Line 47: Unna is an invariant question tag frequently used by Nyungar speakers of Aboriginal English to gainconfirmation or agreement from a listener or fellow narrator, or involve them in the yarn. In this case, its equivalent inSAE would be ‘doesn’t he?’. Aboriginal English in other regions uses different tags with the same pragmatic purpose,such as ‘ini’?, ‘inna’?, etc.

Semantics

Line 8: Robbie deliberately uses the term ‘boomers’, which specifies an older male kangaroo, as opposed to the smaller,female ‘roos’ which have more tender meat. This semantic distinction may be attributed to the fact that in the originalNyungar language, there were at least two words for kangaroo: yongka and warru (Malcolm et al., 1999, quoting AlanDench).

Line 32: Feed is a word which has undergone a semantic extension in Aboriginal English, from ‘what is fed to animals’ to‘what people eat’, ie. ‘food’. We speculate that this extension may have its origins in the pastoral context in which manyAboriginal people originally learned English (and where many Aboriginal people did indeed experience the indignity ofbeing thrown rations on the woodpile rather than eating in a more ‘civilised’ fashion with the other human workers).

Syntax

Line 22: ‘Dad e caught...’ The subject noun ‘Dad’ is often followed by its pronoun, ‘e’, as is common in Aboriginal English.

Line 26: ‘Uncle Shane li’l boy’: Possession may be marked in a variety of ways in Aboriginal English such as byjuxtaposing the ‘possessor’ and the ‘object’; using ‘s is not obligatory.

Line 28: ‘E shootin blue bullets out’ Aboriginal English often omits the auxiliary verb ‘to be’ (ie. ‘was’, in this case). The context provides any necessary information on whether past or present tense is involved.


Line 34: ‘We was runnin’: When the auxiliary is used, it is usually regularised, so that ‘is/was’ is used as the auxiliaryverb for each subject (‘I was’, ‘you was’, ‘he was’, etc.). Notice that Robert code-switches to the SAE form ‘we were’ forthe benefit of the non-Aboriginal teacher.

Morphology and lexis

Line 10: Skunned is a commonly used past tense form of ‘to skin’.

Line 16: ‘What’ is used as a relative pronoun in Aboriginal English where SAE would use ‘which’ (this use of ‘what’ is alsocommon in some other non-standard dialects of English).

Line 18: -way is frequently used to create adverb compounds in Aboriginal English, such as wobbly-way, quick-way,straight-way etc.

Phonology

Lines 16, 28: ‘Dere’, ‘den’: Very few Aboriginal languages have fricatives (sounds created by the friction of air passingthrough a constricted space, such as ‘s’, ‘f’, ‘th’), so ‘th’ as in ‘there’ is often replaced by ‘d’.

Lines 16, 24, 28: ‘(H)e’d, (h)e’s, (h)eart’ etc: English is one of the few languages in the world to include an ‘h’ sound,and Aboriginal languages do not, so it is often omitted. Many of the non-standard dialects of English which Aboriginalpeople heard modelled (e.g. Cockney, rural Australian English) often omit initial ‘h’ too, so it would not have been verysalient to the original Aboriginal learners of English. Some speakers of Aboriginal English over-correct by pronouncing ‘h’in front of words where it is not pronounced in SAE, eg. ‘haunty’ (‘aunty’). Other English dialects also differ over whichwords are pronounced with initial-h:, e.g. the high-status form for ‘herb’ in American English is ‘erb’.

Line 40: ‘Thas’: Aboriginal English has different rules from SAE as to how sounds can be grouped together. It tends notto tolerate clusters of consonants, so these are often modified by deleting a consonant or putting in an extra vowel.

Lines 4, 34: ‘Huntin’, ‘runnin’: Aboriginal English generally pronounces ‘-ing’ at the ends of words by replacing the [ng]sound with [n]. (On the other hand, many Aboriginal languages have the [ng] sound at the beginnings of words (eg. ngun‘brother’ in Nyungar).

Text 2. OombulgurriThis text comes from an Aboriginal community north of Kununurra, in the Kimberley. Trina Jones kindly provided us withthis recording of her interview with ‘Jack’ on 11.6.96. (Tape #117). This speaker has a number of Kriol-influenced formsin his Aboriginal English.

1. Teacher What can you see in this picture?

2. Student All da ba- ball... na balloon... na – yeah ball.. the ball an all the kids

3. Teacher But not just one ball, is there? there’s...

4. Student Too many...

5. Teacher There is isn’t there?

6. Student And all the kids play.. an dat ting can nearly suffocate you.. when you are underneath it

7. Teacher It might

8. Student And and and e got dat ting dat cubbyhouse

9. Teacher mhm

10. Student Dey dey slide down

11. Teacher Mhm.. yes slide over there

12. Student And

13. Teacher What’s this?

14. Student And.. dis

15. Teacher What’s he doing?

16. Student Grabbing a ball... an e got a.. an e got all dat ting... um whatnow (pause) all dat pattern dere... dere look

17. Teacher Can you see anything else in that picture?

18. Student Yeah wall


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19. Teacher Mmm, anything else? No. Do you think you’d like to be in room filled with balls?

20. Student Yeah

21. Teacher Be good fun wouldn’t it

22. Student An all da balloon dropping down.

23. Teacher (laughing) I’ve seen a place like this before

24. Student You bin go in dere?

25. Teacher No, only little kids are allowed in there and I was too big. What about this picture. [What things can you see?

26. Student [all the persons.. Buying something... an all da all da healthy stuff an some silly stuff... (inaudible)

27. Teacher All right

28. Student An big shop an some people dere buying something an ... an all da ting blocks and every... an... ball balldis ball... yeah... and some feed dere

29. Teacher What’s that?

30. Student Meat... an butter

31. Teacher Anything else in that picture?

32. Student Nah... yeah ting... dat ting

33. Teacher That’s a slicer. Jack if you went into this shop and you wanted to buy something, what would you say tothat man there?

34. Student Can I have something please?

35. Teacher That’s right wouldn’t you. What kind of things do you think you might buy if you went in there?

36. Student All da meat... an some bread for my home.

37. Teacher And what would you make with that?

38. Student Um... (sandwich)?

39. Teacher Anything else? (Pause) No? Have you ever been to a shop like that (pause)

40. Teacher No? We don’t have those shops that sell lots of cheese and bread and meat and things do we?

(Child nodding head)

41. Teacher In Kununurra?

42. Student Mmm yeah

43. Teacher We do?

44. Student Yeah dey got em dere (inaudible)

45. Teacher They have haven’t they. So who cut you hair?

46. Student Um... my Uncle Shane...

47. Teacher Did he shave it?

48. Student Yeah

49. Teacher Why?

50. Student Cos... Shane tell me to shave it e go too many hair on my... too many hair das why e shave it

51. Teacher I think it looks fantastic. Especially with your scarf around your head too it looks really good. What didyou do on the weekend Jack?

52. Student Us mob when we go flying fox Samson... get no turkey an webin go webin go fly-... um flying fox side ...from from Oombie webin go w-i-i-i-ight aroun... eberywhere like dat hill eberywhere an and an we goallway la flying fox an after I bin say I bin say ‘you mob anchor dat boat dere’ an dat boat im dere... andat Sid an I bin say ‘Sid boat comin in’ an Sid boat bin come in

53. Teacher Wow, how did you know? Just lucky was it?

54. Student I bin hear it from long way


55. Teacher Oh did you.

56. Student Not anybody else... only me

57. Teacher Just you. You must have been listening very carefully then

58. Student I bin say ‘you mob shhsh now.’ They couldn’t hear it and Jerry ‘no boat coming’ I bin say ‘Shhsh’ afterwhen e get dere Sid boat come in. An an an an an Uncle Gerald say ‘Ah Sid come back here where yougoin us mob here’ Dem go straight past us.

59. Teacher Did they?

60. Student Mmm

61. Teacher Why were you guys hiding or something?

62. Student Nah, us mob bin dere. Dey couldn’t see us and e watching liddle television

63. Teacher Oh.

64. Student and so where you going

65. Teacher Have you been fishing lately?

66. Student an e bin take us drivin for dat boat.

67. Teacher You went for a ride in it?

68. Student Us mob bin drive it.

69. Teacher You’re too young to drive Jack.

70. Student Uncle Gerald e bin let us


Lines 68-70: Aboriginal society does not draw such strong distinctions between adulthood and childhood as Anglo-Australian society in many domains. Children are expected to learn by observing adults, to show initiative and exercisecomplex skills from an early age. Therefore it is common for Aboriginal children to learn to drive vehicles and boatsmuch younger than most non-Aboriginal children.

Pragmatics and discourse markers

Liness 6, 16, 28: ‘ting’ (in some areas, also ‘sing’) is commonly used as a hesitation filler.

Semantics

Line 4: ‘too many’ = ‘lots’ (SAE): Aboriginal English sometimes expresses superlatives using forms which SAE uses toexpress excess.

Line 52: ‘side’ refers to ‘location/place’ rather than SAE ‘on this side of X’ (See also the examples in Arthur, 1996)

Line 52: ‘la’ is a Kriol preposition here meaning ‘to/for’.

Syntax

Line 8: ‘e got...’ is an existential construction whose SAE equivalent is ‘there is’.

Line 24: ‘You bin go in dere?’ Yes/No questions in Aboriginal English are often marked just by intonation rather than byputting an auxiliary such as ‘did’ at the front and changing the verb form.

Lines 62, 64, etc.: ‘where you goin’, ‘e watching’: auxiliary ‘to be’ (‘are’/’was’) is optional.

Morphology and lexis

Line 2: ‘all da ball’ = ‘the balls’ (SAE): all da, or alla is a plural marker, used where SAE would use -’s, or sometimes usedin combination with -’s, as in ‘all the kids’.

Lines 62, 68, 70 etc.: ‘bin’ is a past tense marker carried through from Kriol. It is used where SAE would use an ‘-ed’suffix on the verb instead.

Lines 52-70: In narratives, marking the distinction between past and present is not important, since it can be gatheredfrom the context. In this case, ‘Jack’ tells his story in a mixture of present and past tense forms. SAE also has this useof ‘narrative present’ in some informal storytelling, to make the action more immediate and exciting.

Line 66: ‘for dat boat’, meaning ‘on’ it (SAE). Aboriginal English prepositions often vary in use from those used in SAE.‘For’ is a multipurpose preposition whose wide range of uses probably mirrors those of the Kriol preposition, ‘longa’.


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Line 68: ‘Us mob’ is a common first person plural subject (meaning ‘we, more than two’) in Aboriginal English all overWestern Australia.

Phonology

Line 62, etc.: ‘dere’, ‘dey’: Substitution of ‘d’ (a ‘stop’) for ‘th’ ( a ‘fricative’), as in Text 1.

Line 52: ‘eberywhere’: Again, a stop ‘b’ substituted in Aboriginal English for a fricative ‘v’.

Line 52: ‘an’, etc.: Consonant cluster reduction: final ‘d’ sound is rarely sounded in Aboriginal English.

Prosody

Line 52: ‘webin go w-i-i-i-ight aroun... eberywhere’ Aboriginal English often uses sound lengthening for expressiveeffect, as here where Jack emphasises the great extent of their journey. The oral performance of a yarn is an importantskill to be mastered in Aboriginal society.

Text 3. Geraldton This text is a yarn told by a Yamatji man, ‘T’ to a couple of high school boys, a young Nyungar woman, ‘S’, and an Anglo-Australian woman, ‘R’. (Yamatji Text 97, #158-9).

1-2 T: Thas what happened to me once.. I was out bush.. I went to this hill.. and this ole fella said ‘Oh don’t gonear that ill’.. but me nah.. I went up the ‘ill.. when I was mustering sheep.. and I went in lookin in aroun..

3-5 T: An these little fellas lived.. an that night they come out an tormented me.. got me an chucked me outamy bed.. chucked the bed on me an all.. I had to go back to that hill because I took somethin from the hillwhat I shouldn’ta taken an I took it back

6 S: Put it back

7 T: An those little (Inaudible) didn’t come no more

8 R: So they knew

9 T: Oh yeah I took a little a grinding rock

10 ?: ?

11-12 T: I’ll take it back I-I’ll take that thing back.. but they jumped all over me.. chucked me out o my bed didn’te.. this was out Wiluna..


This yarn has its background in a complex set of beliefs about ‘little fellas’ connected to sites, the inviolability of sites,the knowledge of elders (‘this ole fella’, otherwise not introduced at all), knowledge of the geography of Wiluna, thecommon experience of supernatural (in non-Aboriginal thinking) ‘tormenting’, and the night as a time when ‘scarythings’ happen.

Genre and text structure

The text illustrates how the structure of Aboriginal English narratives can be quite different from the norms of SAE,particularly in the way segments are ordered. This yarn belongs to a genre where the actor violates some traditionalcustoms or site. It begins like most Aboriginal English narratives with an orientation to participants and place (but not aspecific time), followed by a caution about a threat, the disregarding of the caution and the consequences/punishmentand the solution. But then it goes back and fills in the detail of the specific misdemeanour, with a recap of thepunishment and more detail on the precise location. Other Aboriginal English yarns follow a similar strategy of‘skimming’, where the framework of the narrative is laid out and then the details are filled in later. In contrast, SAEproblem-solution narratives tend to have a linear order where problems are detailed and then followed by solutions.

Pragmatics and discourse markers:

Like most narratives in Aboriginal English, the narrative is economical, assuming much background on the part of thelisteners (and if there had not been a Wadjela6 present, it would probably have been even more so). Many details whichwould be required in an SAE narrative are considered unnecessary because the listener should know or infer themthemselves. For example, that he ‘went in’ to a cave (line 2), where exactly the little fellas lived (line 3), where exactlyhe was sleeping that night and what kind of bed it was (a swag?) (line 4).


6 Wadjela: non-Aboriginal person (term used by Nyungar and Yamatji speakers of Aboriginal English)

Line 11: makes use of direct speech ‘I’ll take it back...’ without an introductory identification of who is speaking.Aboriginal English frequently uses this strategy; oral performance enables intonation and vocal tone to indicate who isspeaking if the listener is not likely to be able to infer this.

Line 11: ‘didn’t e’ is a discourse marker which involves the audience although they did not participate in the originalevent.

Semantics

Line 3 etc.: ‘little fellas’ are well known to Aboriginal people in Yamatji country, the south-west and elsewhere. Thereare expectations about what they look like, the way they come and take children, and so on.

Syntax

Line 7: ‘didn’t come no more’: ‘Multiple negation’ is a feature which Aboriginal English shares with other non-standarddialects of English. It is also very common in other languages in the world, including French. Interestingly, it was alsothe usual way to negate in the prestige dialect of English until Bishop Robert Lowth invented a rule proscribing it in the18th century.

Phonology

There are a lot of reduced sounds (‘outa’, ‘ole’ etc) which are found in the fast colloquial speech of any speakers ofEnglish; otherwise the phonology is relatively standard. This is a good example of the fact that a narrative can soundrelatively standard yet be strongly influenced in its less noticeable levels (‘in the water’ and ‘deep under it’ bydistinctively Aboriginal worldview and structure.

Getting below the surface: more on semantics and pragmaticsThe texts we have just viewed have provided a very brief introduction to the way in which Aboriginal people haveadapted English to express their own culture and experience. We will make a few more general points to illustrate waysin which Aboriginal English expresses the Aboriginal worldview.

In the semantic realm, one of the most obvious expressions of Aboriginality is the number of words borrowed from‘traditional’ Indigenous languages. Even in the south-west, where Nyungar language was virtually stamped out byoppressive practices, people still value their remaining words and phrases, and many Nyungar words have beenincorporated into Aboriginal English. Words like kulungka ‘child’, moorditj ‘terrific’, yongka ‘grey kangaroo’, goona‘excrement’, winyarn ‘poor, pathetic’, nyorn ‘embarrassment/pity’, budjari ‘pregnant’ and many others are used on adaily basis among Nyungar people. A similar use of ‘language’ words applies in the English of Aboriginal people all overthe state, from gaga ‘grandfather’ at Bidyadanga and jarnkurna ‘emu’ in Roebourne, to bungarra ‘racehorse goanna’ inthe Yamatji lands and mimi ‘milk’/’breast’ in Kalgoorlie.

As Aboriginal English has developed, it has taken this incorporation even further, with the adoption of new meanings for oldwords, such as kepa, formerly Nyungar for ‘water’, now used for ‘alcohol’, or the addition of English affixes (yorga ‘woman’ +English plural marker –s =yorgas) and the translation of old concepts into new words, e.g. choo – a Nyungar concept – nowgenerally expressed by shame or combined with it; the classificatory relationship between first cousins in cousin-brother; olegirl as a term of respect, and reciprocal kin terms such as aunty/aunt meaning either ‘aunt’ or ‘niece’.

In addition to these words, there are many other words in Aboriginal English which have the same form, but a differentmeaning from words in Standard Australian English (Arthur, 1996; Harkins, 1994; Malcolm et al., 1999. pp.45-46). Forexample, for liar ‘not serious/just pretending’ (used more in the north); camp ‘home’; cheekin ‘teasing/telling off’; open‘empty’ (and by extension ‘penniless’, ‘pathetic’ and many more meanings depending on the context; this meaning isused more in the south); muddy ‘afraid’. Some meanings are the exact opposite of SAE: wicked and deadly both mean‘terrific’ (as does solid). English words may be given suffixes from Aboriginal language, e.g. ‘We been see Megan-watha’(Megan’s mob/family; the addition is from Yindjibarndi).

As well as words having a different set of meanings in themselves, they also differ in their connotations in the twodialects. For example, the associations which the word ‘kangaroo’ brings up for Aboriginal English speakers aregenerally much more detailed and cover different areas of experience from those of most non-Aboriginal speakers:


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In an investigation of word association relating to ‘kangaroo’ carried out by Anne Mead of the Narrogin DistrictEducation Office Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal respondents differed noticeably in their responses. The initial twelveAboriginal associations included the following:

kangaroo Ü taste Ü food Ü onions, tomatoes Ü head in ashes Ü tail in ashes Ü kangaroo dip Ü sitting in theshade Ü fire Ü family, brothers and sisters Ü night time hunting Ü daytime hunting Ü hides, pegging in the sun

while the initial twelve non-Aboriginal responses included:

kangaroo Ü national emblem Ü dangerous Ü long Ü tail Ü pouch Ü tourists Ü coins Ü graziers Ü joey Üclever Ü hops Ü beautiful Ü soft

In fact, out of the 73 associations provided for ‘kangaroo’ by each group, only four concepts were shared (grey,red, pet and furry). These data demonstrate how dialects can contain contrasts in meaning which are notalways evident at the surface level.

(Malcolm et al., 1999, p. 36).

Another area in which we see pervasive, but often subtle, reflections of the Aboriginal world of communication is that ofpragmatics, the rules for communication (see Eades, 1982, 1984, 1988; Harris, 1980, 1987). For example, the defaultmode of conversation for Aboriginal English speakers is communal and continuous (everyone talks and listens at once)as opposed to the dyadic (one-to-one, one at a time) default for Anglo-Australian speakers (Walsh, 1991). This basicphenomenon leads to many consequences. For example, turn-taking rules are obviously very different. AboriginalEnglish speakers often have to remind themselves to ‘wait their turn’ in Anglo-Australian conversations and find itdifficult to judge when the appropriate entry points are.

Non-Aboriginal people in communal Aboriginal conversations face a dilemma of who to focus on, make eye contact withand give feedback to. Speakers of Standard Australian English are used to giving many overt indications of theirattention to a speaker such as eye contact, nodding and saying things like ‘yes’, ‘mhm’, etc. They find it difficult tofollow all the threads of the conversation and often miss the connections between what is being said and whatpreceded it. They are perplexed or offended when Aboriginal listeners fail to respond to their utterances (listeners’verbal and even non-verbal responses are optional in many more cases in Aboriginal English).

Aboriginal speakers on the other hand give more subtle non-verbal indications of attention, often do not need to makeeye contact and feel free to tune in and out or make contributions to several conversational threads almostsimultaneously. From early childhood they have been accustomed to this mode of communication. Conversely, theyfind it difficult to follow the structure of non-Aboriginal conversations, particularly when speakers of SAE use ‘bigwords’ – that is, words which are not normally used in Aboriginal English (while they often are longer, length is not theissue, merely unfamiliarity).

With such fundamental differences in communication norms, Aboriginal people have had to make further adjustmentsin relation to communications technology. While telephones and two-way radio generally impose the dyadic norm ofSAE, radio phones and conference telephones are being used to enable non-dyadic communication. Although radiosand televisions are of course one-way communication, they tend to be used continuously (sometimes ‘speaking’ to anempty room until someone comes back in), and they’re not seen as any impediment to any other communicationgoing on in the same room. In some places, Aboriginal people are producing their own television to fulfil the publicbroadcasting functions formerly served by signal fires and the network of messengers who travelled continuallybetween groups (Michaels, 1986).

Many broader assumptions about communication also cause frequent problems of miscommunication. ‘Manners’ are veryimportant in both worlds, but the rules in each world can differ significantly. Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ is veryimportant in Anglo-Australian society but not part of being polite for most speakers of Aboriginal English: rather than theseverbal expressions, Aboriginal people expect others to demonstrate their recognition of mutually-helping relationship bydoing something in return at a later date (Harris, 1987). For example, Hamilton (1981, p. 65) notes that the Anbarra ofnorth-central Arnhemland have no words for ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ and in any case children are expected to helpthemselves to what is available, being independent and resourceful. Aboriginal children are taught ‘please and thank you’routines in order to interact with European Australians. Politeness in an Aboriginal context is also expressed through theway things are said, what tone of voice is being used, body language, and so on.


Aboriginal English and Standard Australian English differ in what kinds of knowledge are presupposed – that is, whereknowledge is assumed to be shared by a speaker and listener and therefore doesn’t require spelling out. They also differin the responsibilities of speakers and listeners in ensuring understanding:

In Aboriginal English a speaker is under no obligation to provide all the information required for understanding.Aboriginal English values economy of words so a short phrase can be used to express a lot of meaning. Theresponsibility for understanding lies with the listener. The listener should already be familiar with the contextand be able to work out what is being said. By contrast, in Standard Australian English, and especially in morepublic settings, the responsibility lies with the speaker to ensure that he/she is understood. The speakertherefore will use a lot of words to fill in the details in case the listener is unaware of them. To a speaker ofAboriginal English non-Aboriginal speech appears repetitive and unnecessarily detailed and an Aboriginal personcan get very frustrated with a non-Aboriginal person who seems to require lengthy explanations to understand asimple statement, as explained by AIEWs Tanya Tucker and Bonnie Sansbury:

Tanya: When a person, like Aboriginal person says something, they just say it, like ‘I’m going to theshop’. And a white person says ‘Well, why’re you goin’ to the shop?’, ‘Oh, well what are yougonna buy?’ Like, if I said, ‘yeah, I’m goina go shop’, then you (BS) don’t have to ask me whatI’m goina do – you- ‘oh I just goin to shop’, but if someone else, like they wanna... get intomore detail, that sort of example ... or, ‘we goin’ t’Perth’, like, ‘How you gointa Perth’ or, youknow – wanna know – everything! ....

Bonnie: Well like, lunchtime, I say to you (TT) ‘I’m goin’ shopping’... An’ thas it.

Tanya: But all of youse (Wadjelas) might wanta know more.(Malcolm et al., 1999, pp.32-33)

There are some fundamental differences between Aboriginal and Western ways of viewing knowledge which bear on thisprocess. Knowledge in Western society is seen as something which belongs to the public domain: it is put into librariesand on the Internet where everyone can access it. Interestingly, in practice there has always been knowledge which hasbeen hoarded by the few, such as technological developments which might advantage one group over another, and even‘harmless’ knowledge is becoming more and more subject to copyright restrictions as knowledge becomes increasingly acommodity. But the idea of public knowledge remains the Western ideal.

In Aboriginal society, by contrast, knowledge is prototypically private property. Knowledge owners have the right todetermine who can acquire their knowledge, and those who know the knowledge do not necessarily have the right tospeak it (Coombs et al., 1983; Morphy, 1991). As a result, there are many social rules for acquiring and passing oninformation. Diana Eades (1982, 1988) has found that information-seeking in Aboriginal society in south-EastQueensland, for example, is typically indirect: rather than asking direct questions, enquirers share some of their ownrelated knowledge to signal their interest in further information which the information holder has the right to give orwithhold. Direct questions can violate privacy and will often not result in an answer, except in initial orientationquestions where people are sorting out how they relate to each other. People do not pass on information gained fromanother source without attributing it to a source who gave it to them.

Direct questions are also often inappropriate for gaining agreement or commitments to action in Aboriginal English. Thisfrequently leads to cross-cultural conflicts and let-downs. For example, this very common scenario:

Anglo-Australian: Are you coming to my barbecue tonight?

Aboriginal friend: Yes

(Aboriginal friend does not turn up; Anglo-Australian friend is disappointed because she expected her friend to come)

The two pragmatic rules operating here are very different. In SAE the answer to the question must be seen to begenuine, but in AE there is no such expectation. In AE it would be rude to decline. There could be many reasons for theAboriginal friend’s actions. She may have had another commitment or not wanted to attend, but avoided giving a direct‘no’, to be polite. A long history of dominance by Europeans has also led to the tendency of Aboriginal people to say‘yes’ to any question from them to keep them happy – a phenomenon known as ‘gratuitous concurrence’ which hasdisastrous consequences in legal situations (Eades, 1992). It is also possible that the Aboriginal friend may have hadevery intention of turning up, but on the night other things were more important or something happened whichprevented her. A verbal commitment is often not considered binding, and it is not considered necessary to phone andexplain the changed circumstances, since the other person should know that they might change. In the Aboriginal worldtoday, the future is often not predictable, due to the upheavals experienced during colonial history and the lack ofcontrol which most Aboriginal people still experience in colonised society.


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Invitations in Aboriginal English, in contrast to the example above, are often indirect. Rosemary Cahill in Solid Englishcites the following experience of teacher Sue-Ellen Murray in the east Kimberley region:

When Sue-Ellen was first posted to Wangkatjungka Remote Community School in Australia’s north-west, shenoticed that a few of the Aboriginal women she had befriended often went fishing in the late afternoon. Sue-Ellenmentioned that she’d done a bit of fishing in her time and would like to go with them some time. One womanacknowledged what she’d said by making a habit of passing her house on the way to the river to say ‘I go fishinnow’. Not wishing to impose, Sue-Ellen felt she should wait for an invitation to join the woman – but weekspassed, and the invitation she wanted was not forthcoming. Eventually after having been in the community forsome time, it dawned on Sue-Ellen that each time the Aboriginal woman had come to tell her she was goingfishing, she was actually inviting Sue-Ellen to join her! The invitation Sue-Ellen had been waiting for had beenextended on numerous occasions but she had not recognised it for what it was.

(Cahill, 1998, p. 26)

Patricia Königsberg related this example at a professional development workshop for the Cannington District, in thePerth metropolitan area. A local Australian Indigenous Education Officer (AIEO) said to the teachers who were with her:‘Woah – that’s why you fellas never come out to lunch with me! Every lunchtime I say I’m goin out get some lunch now,and nobody ever comes with me’. Her companions were amazed, saying ‘We didn’t know that was an invitation for us tocome with you’.

There are many other cross-cultural differences in expected behaviour for which there is not scope in the present paper.

Aboriginal English, identity and communication in two worldsMost Aboriginal people are not aware that linguists have come up with a name for the way they talk; most just seethemselves as speaking English, or, if they are conscious of speaking in a different way to other Australians, they mayrefer to Aboriginal English as ‘pidgin’ or ‘broken English’. Nevertheless, Aboriginal English remains, whatever its name, akey marker of Aboriginal identity. As we saw above, people who use more standard English, or ‘flash talk’ are oftenchastised and ridiculed by their Aboriginal family and peers because to use it outside non-Aboriginal contexts implies arejection of Aboriginal identity and denigration of fellow Aboriginal people.

Since there is a tradition of non-standard dialects of English (that is, dialects which have less prestige and have notbeen codified in dictionaries and grammar books) being denigrated by speakers of dialects such as Standard AustralianEnglish, many Aboriginal people are made to feel ashamed of the way they talk (Hampton, 1990). In spite of this,Aboriginal English is increasingly being used by those contemporary writers, film producers and the like who wementioned above, and it can also be heard on radio and television to a limited extent. It provides one of the bases ofpan-Aboriginal identity while allowing for the expression of regional identities in its local variations.

One positive development countering the denigration of Aboriginal English in wider Australian society is the growingnumber of materials referring to or being written in Aboriginal English which are being used in schools (Gibbs, 1995,1998). The Australian Indigenous Languages Framework (Australian Indigenous Languages Framework Project, 1994a,1994b, 1996a) includes Aboriginal English, and the accompanying textbook has an excellent chapter about the dialect(Australian Indigenous Languages Framework Project, 1996b).

To cope with the requirements of both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal worlds, most Aboriginal people have acquiredthe ability to ‘code-switch’ between their home language – whether that is a ‘traditional’ Aboriginal language orAboriginal English – and that of the dominant society. They speak SAE when non-Aboriginal people are present andAboriginal English (or ‘language’) when only Aboriginal people are present. In other words, they are bilingual and/orbidialectal (Malcolm, 1997).

As we noted at the beginning of this paper, Aboriginal people have always had multilingualism and multidialectalism, sothat in itself is not new. What is different is that the new code, Standard Australian English, represents a world which isso different from that of the Aboriginal code that much more is involved in becoming completely proficient in it. ManyAboriginal people have a repertoire which spans a continuum from their ‘heaviest’ Aboriginal English to a form which isclose to SAE but often still has noticeable Aboriginal features. And as we have seen, it is rare for someone to be soimmersed in both worlds as to be equally proficient in both dialects due to the complex understandings encoded inthem. As a result, when speakers of the two dialects come together, they need to be aware of potentialmisunderstandings and be prepared to negotiate with each other to develop common understandings.


ConclusionIn this paper, we have tried to show how language, and specifically Aboriginal English, reflects the history and culture ofits speakers. Aboriginal culture, like all cultures, changes to adapt to new circumstances, but Aboriginal people havefound ways to maintain continuity with the past in order to live creatively in the present. Aboriginal people have beenforced to adapt to the imposition of a foreign world and the suppression of many expressions of their culture by findingnew ways to express that culture using the resources available to them today. Aboriginal English is one of the mostimportant of these resources, and it continues to develop to express the unique identity of Australian Aboriginal people.

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Two Englishes: the same yet differentAustralia was once the home of a rich variety of Indigenous languages. The Australian continent was a patchwork ofspeech communities, hundreds of them, each community unified by a common way of speaking and identifying with acommon inheritance of land in which, in a literal and metaphorical sense, they mapped out their lives. Generations offorebears were intimately linked to each speech community through the linguistic inheritance they had had bequeathedto them: a linguistic framework in which were embedded a communal response to the environment and a template forthe management of human relations.

Today, by far the most common language spoken by Indigenous Australians is English, and the second most commonlanguage is Kriol, a new language which draws largely on an English base for its vocabulary. To the uninformed observer,it might be thought that Aboriginal people had largely, under the force of the traumatic circumstances of the last twohundred years, abandoned their Australian-based languages for a foreign import, adopting a way of verbalizingexperience which derives from the experience of white people on the other side of the world, and accepting aEuropean-based redefinition of their physical and social environment.

Such an observer would, however, be ignoring a significant fact about the life of contemporary Indigenous Australians:they have not, as a speech community, adopted the English which is used by other Australians. The English used inIndigenous contexts is a new English, a unique and subtle variety which weds an Aboriginal inheritance to an adoptedlinguistic framework.

This means that, for many Indigenous Australians, using English means managing two different Englishes: one which islearned and used in home and community contexts and another which is used in school and in other contexts controlledby non-Indigenous Australians. In linguistic terms, we would describe most Aboriginal English speakers as bidialectal.

Many non-Indigenous Australians are unaware of the bidialectalism of their Indigenous compatriots. They assume that, ifan Australian speaks English, they speak essentially the same English. Some may speak it better than others; some maycommand a bigger vocabulary or a use more acceptable grammar than others, but the language they’re all trying to useis the same. When this is the assumption, Aboriginal people are always disadvantaged because the norms by whichacceptable English is judged always come from the economically and politically dominant members of society and it isassumed that, if Aboriginal people don’t conform to these norms, then they are non-achievers, either because ofcircumstances or because of their inability.

It is understandable that many non-Indigenous Australians should be confused about the English of IndigenousAustralians because, in some ways, their English and the English of other Australians seem remarkably similar. After all,both dialects use the same basic alphabet, sound system, vocabulary and rules for forming sentences. Speakers of onedialect generally have a good idea of the surface meaning of what speakers of the other dialect are saying to them. Butwould most non-Indigenous Australians interpret the following Aboriginal English expressions correctly?

Video 3 Background PapersNow You See It Now You Don’tProfessor Ian G. Malcolm

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(examples 1-2 from Malcolm 2001; examples 3-5 from Rochecouste & Malcolm 2000; examples 6-10 from Sharpe1977; examples 11-20 from Kaldor and Malcolm 1982).

Examples like these are but the tip of the iceberg. Aboriginal English operates differently from standard English not onlyin the meanings it attaches to words, but in the ways in which it forms and combines words, the ways in which it makesreference between words, the ways in which it constructs interactions and stories, the ways it foregrounds some thingsand backgrounds others; it differs in where it draws the line between literal and ironic meanings, between offensivenessand inclusiveness, between saying too much and not saying enough. Aboriginal English derives from and evokes a worldwhich most non-Aboriginal Australians understand only vaguely if at all, or, sadly, a world which they think theyunderstand but actually misinterpret and misjudge.

English is, then, a mixed blessing for Indigenous Australians. They see themselves, in most cases, as native Englishspeakers, but the English in which they are fluent has no currency beyond their own community and they are judged bysome other English speakers as having some kind of language deficiency. Ironically, those who judge them this way areusually monodialectal English speakers and have little understanding of the complexity of the bidialectal communicativemilieu in which Indigenous speakers operate.

The stigma carried by Aboriginal English speakers is parallelled by the stigma attached to other speakers of minorityEnglish dialects in different parts of the world. In Singapore, ‘Singlish’ has been outlawed by the authorities and is evenexcluded from being used in television entertainment; in Hawaii, Hawaiian Creole English has to fight for recognition;native English speaking students coming from Guyana to the U.S.A. for university study have been known to beclassified as learners of English as a second language on account of their dialect (Nero 2000, p. 485); speakers ofEbonics (African American Vernacular English) have long been discriminated against within a school system whichconsiders their dialect an obstacle to learning.

Video 3 Background PapersNow You See It Now You Don’t

1. I jarred him I scolded him

2. That would’ve been solid, ay That would’ve been great, wouldn’t it

3. Louise had a smash with her Louise had a fight with her

4. …inside the church next to the bells In the church yard near the belfry

5. we just camp then on the bus Then we just slept on the bus

6. onna table on the table

7. alla people (a lot of) people

8. I’s goin I was going

9. I got seven families I’ve got seven in my family

10. They got lots of irons They’ve got lots of pieces of iron

11. …bigges mob of blood comin out …a lot of blood was coming out

12. we lie- don’t look we pretended not to look

13. I drop him I hit it (referring to prey aimed at)

14. dinner time dinner

15. tough go mishap

16. we bin get im cook we cooked it

17. we get five sheeps fat one we got five fat sheep

18. dey bin race to dey teacher they raced to their teacher

19. e got plenty Stephen around here there are many boys named Stephen around here

20. my cousin bike my cousin’s bike

All such groups (and there are many more of them) struggle against the fact that one dialect (or more precisely, onegroup of dialects) of English has been favoured because it is the vehicle of communication of those who have mostcontrol over the economies and education systems of nations. Of course, it is generally agreed that there needs to be aglobally-accessible English and it is understood that the English of the most powerful will prevail. However this shouldnot mean that other Englishes have to be denigrated and treated as if they have no function to perform in the educationof their speakers.

Some non-English speaking groups have argued against the dominance of English on the grounds that it favours a‘Eurocentric structuring of thought’ (Mazrui and Mazrui 2000). Some spokesmen of an ‘Africanist’ point of view haveclaimed that English favours:

certain conceptual tendencies, including, for example, dichotomization (e.g. reason versus emotion or mind versusbody), objectification and abstractification (where a concept is isolated from its context, its place and time, andrendered linguistically as an abstract).

(Mazrui & Mazrui 2000, p. 148)

However, even those who argue against the dominance of English recognize the need to use English in order tocommunicate those arguments (Mazrui & Mazrui 2000, p. 148). In fact, what has happened on the Australian scenesuggests that the Africanist arguments represent an unwarranted extreme form of Whorfianism (that is, the view that alanguage, by virtue of its structure, compels its speakers to think in a certain way). What we have discovered is that it isconceptualization that forms and transforms language, rather than the reverse, and Indigenous Australians, in the faceof the death of their original languages, have shown that they have the capacity to forge from English a new dialect toexpress their way of viewing the world.

Same language different conceptualizationThere is a growing body of evidence that languages not only allow themselves to be modified to express conceptualprocesses and innovations but that this is the means by which they normally operate, as living expressions of thecollective mind of a speech community. ‘Language,’ as Einar Haugen (2001, p. 57) put it, ‘exists only in the minds of itsspeakers’. So the growth and development of varieties of English is not controlled by grammar books and dictionaries-indeed, they are constantly going out of date. Nor is it controlled by linguists, language planners, business leaders oreven governments. For each speech community, our native way of speaking is our life. In the words of Eve Sweetser(1990, p. 6), ‘our linguistic system is inextricably interwoven with the rest of our physical and cognitive selves’. The users of language control its development as they use it in framing their experience.

If we accept that this is the case, this brings with it the opportunity to examine language in a new way: not in terms of itsstructures, but in terms of the conceptualizations it represents. Doing this brings us closer to the lived experience of thespeakers and the reasons why they speak the way they do. It also enables us to see that there are many ways in whichthe speakers of the same language can make it a resource for different ways of thinking about themselves and the world.

George Lakoff has pointed out (in Pires de Oliveira 2001, p. 32) that, from our emergence into the world as babies, weimitate our parents, and that, in order to do this, we must have the capacity to project our own bodies onto our parents’bodies and control them the way we see our parents controlling theirs. He sees a similar capacity operating inconceptualization and language: we project our conceptualizations onto objects from our surrounding experience,including linguistic objects. So, for example, we have a concept of getting up in the morning and we project this ontothe sun by saying that it ‘gets up’; we have a concept of our own head in relation to our body and we project this onto,say, a bed, or a household, or a page of print, each of which we see as having a ‘head’; we use numbers, always putting‘one’ first, and we project this onto a selfish person, saying they only care about ‘number one’.

What we have referred to above as ‘projecting’ from ourselves and our experience to our environment is one case ofwhat linguists have called ‘cognitive mapping’. One way of explaining how language works is to see it largely in terms ofthe way we make mappings between the images of experience- both actual and imagined- and the set of symbols weare provided with by our language. Anthropologist Gary Palmer has argued that:


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language is the play of verbal symbols that are based in imagery. Imagery is what we see in our mind’s eye…Our imaginations dwell on experiences obtained through all the sensory modes, and then we talk.…I believe that words are…fleeting vocalizations, symbolically linked to conceptual shades that inhabit theparallel world of our imaginations. This imagined world sometimes closely represents what we apprehend fromdirect daily experience, …much of the time it presents us with alternative realities and fantasy worlds based onmythology, or soap opera, or unproven theories, Nevertheless, in world views we find those stable representationsand fleeting images that are the conventional meanings of linguistic expressions.

(Palmer 1996, p. 3).

The various images that comprise our conceptualization are enabled, through language, to interact with one another incomplex ways. To take one everyday example, think of how we can talk about time: it can pass, stand still, fly, run out,drag on, go by, elapse. Generally speaking, we can’t say time waits (indeed we can say it doesn’t wait), or goesbackwards, although we can go back in time, either metaphorically or fictionally. We seem to find it appropriate to thinkof time in terms of space, and, for the most part, time is progressing through that space. This is one example of a verywidespread process in language, called conceptual blending. Sometimes the movement of time seems to be related tosome viewing point. If so, time seems to leave the viewing point behind as it proceeds (as in ‘go by’). Normally, weimagine going forward to the future and leaving the past behind (though some languages see it the other way round),but it can make sense to us, within the context of science fiction, to think of going ‘back to the future’.

These things that we assume about time, when we verbalize it, constitute what Palmer (above) calls the ‘conventionalmeanings of linguistic expressions’. Certain forms of imagery have become fairly stable in our language, or at least inour variety of the language, and we accept them as ‘normal’. Yet another speech community may use the samelanguage in a way which takes a different form of imagery for granted.

How language can be understood in terms of its conceptualizationHuman beings seem to approach experience in three ways in order to talk about it: we categorize it, we envisage it andwe analogize it.

CategoriesExperience is complex and interrelated. It is, in a sense, indivisible, in that time and space are limitless and the thingsour senses convey to us are multidimensional. Yet, because of our human limitations, we cannot understand andrespond to everything at once, so we categorize. We cut time up into years, seasons, months, weeks, days and so on.We divide space up into districts and towns and numbered house lots. We classify the animate and inanimate thingsaround us, and the things that humans do, like having meals and going to work and engaging in recreation and carryingout all manner of interaction. We need to categorize experience because only so can we understand and control it. Also,we need to categorize experience so that we can talk about it. For language to work properly we need to have wordswhich enable us to name the objects of our experience (nouns and pronouns) and words which express the differentways in which we, or others, or things, may act on the objects of experience (verbs). It has been said that ‘languagetranslates meaning into sound through the categorization of reality into discrete units and sets of units’ (Taylor 1995, p. 1). Another way of putting this is to say that language is essentially concerned with associating sounds with thought,and it does this by doing three things:

a) organising sound

b) organising thought

c) providing ways of associating the sounds with the thought. (Chafe 1998)

People from different cultures, as illustrated in their languages, differ in the ways in which they categorize reality,although they may often not be aware of the categories they are using.

The members of a speech community usually show a high level of agreement with respect to what items belong in whatcategories. Not only this, but they tend to agree on what is the best example of a particular category. One can verifythis experimentally by giving people a limited amount of time (say 30 seconds) to list the best examples of a set of (say50) concepts (vegetables, birds, animals, items of furniture, etc.). In American studies cited by Hatch and Brown (1995),robin is seen by the respondents as the best example of a bird and carrot the best example of a vegetable. Suchexamples are known as prototypes, and it has been claimed items like these, which are named first when a concept issuggested, are those which speakers of a language use as cognitive reference points.


Prototype research has several implications. One is that people respond to the meanings of words by summoning up theimage of an example rather than by putting together the various components of the meaning. That is, the word dog isnot conceptualized by an English speaking listener as canine mammal with four legs, a tail and a propensity for barking;it is conceptualized as a ‘best example’, which might, perhaps, be a kelpie. Another important implication is thatcategories usually have ‘fuzzy’ (Sweetser 1990, p. 17) borders. That is, just as we can think of a best example, we canthink of examples we are much less certain about. For example, a robin may be the prototypic bird, but few peoplewould think that an emu or a penguin fitted the ‘bird’ category quite as well. This is further supported by asking aquestion: ‘Can a bird sit on a telegraph line?’ Most people would answer ‘yes’, because the prototypic bird they wouldhave in mind would not be, for example, a kiwi, an eagle or a turkey.

Relationships among the meanings of words may also be investigated by looking at associative networks. Terms whichare considered close in meaning summon up one another by way of what have been called associative chains. Theremay be different principles on which such chaining occurs. The terms may be linked together because of their commonassociation with a certain kind of activity, like fishing or school or danger, etc. Clearly, associations which may linkterms together may be very localized, e.g. having been in the same class at school. They may simply exist within aparticular relationship or a family, or they may distinguish a culture.

Just as groups of words may be linked in associative networks, individual words may extend over a range of differentcategories and associate with quite different fields of discourse. Words to which this applies are said to be polysemous.The network of meanings surrounding a particular word is called a radial network. Radial networks may differconsiderably across languages. Dirven and Verspoor (1998, p. 271) have described the radial network of the concept tocount in English as shown below (slightly simplified):


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They point out that this radial network is not shared by any equivalent term in German, which requires both zählen andrechnen to cover these senses of ‘count’.

SchemasA second way in which we bring experience into conceptualization is by envisaging, or using schemas. Schemas areimagistic cognitive models (Palmer 1996, p. 59) which people depend on to give them a ready-made way of interpretingexperience. Schemas help us to conceptualize many things, including propositions, events, stories, objects and patternsof cultural behaviour.

A proposition schema is a presumption about the relations between concepts. For example, Watson-Gegeo and Watson(1999, pp. 230, 235) illustrate this by the schema which they attribute to Americans: ‘ARGUMENT IS WAR’ (and, hence,when one argues, one attacks one’s opponent, etc.) and by several schemas which they attribute to Solomon Islanders,including: ‘FAMILIES SHARE FOOD WITHOUT EXPECTATION OF RETURN’, ‘WORDS ARE POWERFUL’ and ‘WORDS CAN KILL’.

An event schema (also referred to as a script) refers to an expectation about an event - where, and in what situation itwill take place, how the elements of the event will be ordered and what the various participant roles are. Thus, living inmainstream Australian culture, one knows what to expect when one goes into a shop to make a transaction, or receivesa telephone call or attends a wedding or a funeral or a football match.

a. count things d1. count somebody as a friend

d. count as a child(classify)

f. count on somebody(trust)

c. counting the puppies(including)

e. count little (be worth)

b. count to ten

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The term story schema (also called a scenario) has been used to refer to the expected pattern in the unfolding of astory. A pattern that occurs, with various modifications, in many cultures is described by Chafe (1998) as follows:

1. Orientation – establishes time frame, space frame, participants and background activity

2. Complication – something happens against the background

3. Climax – an event that is unexpected (the reason for the topic)

4. Dénouement – the new situation that results from the climax

5. Coda – a meta-comment, e.g. ‘that was really weird’.

We also use schemas to conceptualize elements in our physical environment. Certain aspects of an object or setting aretaken to help us to characterize it, in a process called schematization (Palmer 1996, p. 64). Thus, as Palmer (1996, p. 66)puts it,

A word must be defined relative to its schema. For example, while ground and land may be used to describe apiece of dry earth, ground belongs to a vertical schema that divides sky from ground, whereas land belongs to a horizontal schema that divides land from sea.

When we consider the relationship of one element in the environment to another, we schematically regard one(sometimes called the base, or the landmark) as the reference point and the other (sometimes called the profile or thetrajectory) as the point which shows the relationship. This relationship is seen, for example, between eaves and bird,respectively, in The bird was under the eaves.

It has even been suggested (Palmer 1996) that schemas can relate to the smallest units of language: phonemes, ordistinctive sounds. One way in which this may be seen is in the way in which we tend to use words with a particularsound to represent certain meanings. For example, the /sl/ combination seems to unite words with a common senseof slipperiness and negativity: slimy, slithering, sloppy, slippery, slide, sleazy, slut, sloth, etc.

Schemas are also invoked by the grammatical expressions we employ. For example, as soon as we say ‘a’ before anoun, the expectation is aroused that something which can be counted will follow (Palmer 1996, p. 53).

According to this understanding of language, then, we tend to be guided by imagistic patterns of expectation andprojection in all of our language use. This suggests that language operates fundamentally in response toconceptualization, rather than in accordance with rules relating to its formal structures. This is view is further supportedwhen we look at the role of metaphor in language.

Metaphor It has been claimed by George Lakoff (in Pires de Oliveira 2001, p. 24) that ‘ordinary everyday thought and language,and especially everyday thought, is structured metaphorically’. Further, it has been argued by Eve Sweetser (1990, p. 19) that ‘metaphor is a major structuring force in semantic change.’ Gary Palmer (1996, p. 6) states that:

…discourse invokes conventional imagery and provokes the construction of new imagery. At the same time,imagery structures discourse; they are mutually constitutive. Through time and incessant patter, speakers inlanguage communities collaborate and negotiate over the imagery of evolving world views. Old or new, unwantedideas are filtered out. New imagery and language emerge together.

In other words, it is being suggested that the process of thinking metaphorically, which many people might think relatesonly to poetic or colourful language, actually underlies basic language use and helps to drive linguistic change.

Many of the metaphorical uses of language are so basic that we hardly realize they are metaphorical. For example,when we want to say we know something we typically say I see. Thus, there is a non-random relationship (Sweetser1990, p. 5 calls it a ‘motivated relationship’) between seeing with the eyes and seeing with the mind. Clearly, themetaphor with vision helps us to conceptualize what it means to understand, but when we say I see we don’t imagineourselves to be using a metaphor.

There are many metaphorical relationships of this kind, where we habitually map ‘one domain onto another’ (Sweetser1990, p. 25). One fundamental metaphor, which underlies the ‘see/know’ connection, is the ‘mind-as-body metaphor’(Sweetser 1990, p. 28). This also generates such expressions as I grasp/catch onto/get what you say (holding =understanding); watching/surveillance (from French ‘over look’)/oversight/regard (visual monitoring = control)(Sweetser 1990, p. 32-33).


Another is the so-called ‘conduit metaphor’ (Reddy 1979, in Sweetser 1990, p. 20), whereby we bring together the ideaof language with that of a container or pipeline (empty words; get your meaning across to the reader; what did you getout of that talk?).

We have a number of pervasive images of the concept of life (Hatch and Brown 1995, pp. 102-103): life is a journey(Don’t let yourself get sidedtracked; I’ve lost my way; Keep right on to the end of the road; That was an importantmilestone, etc.); life is a day (in the twilight years, etc.); life is a year (autumn centre, etc.); life is a plant (the young neednurture; root out the troublemakers, etc.).

We talk about the stock market being bullish, the traffic piling up, prices skyrocketing, the authorities stonewalling,demand receding and our team slaughtering the opposition. We understand much of what is going on around us byconceptual mapping between apparently unrelated entities. Some metaphors enter the language and leave it in thecourse of one conversation; others are adopted by a speech community as a part of a collective worldview and help todefine the way in which those speakers perceive themselves and their experience.

One particular kind of conceptual mapping is that which takes place between one aspect of an object and the whole.Thus we can say Canberra to mean the Australian Government which is to be found in Canberra, silk to refer to aQueen’s Counsel who is robed in a silk gown, or bums on seats to refer (colloquially) to people attending a performance.Such a process is called metonymy.

We have shown three major ways in which language and thought work together: in using categories, schemas andmetaphors. We have also given some illustration of the fact that these processes may work differently across languages.What we will now go on to argue is that they may also work differently across different dialects of the same language,namely Australian English and Aboriginal English.

How Aboriginal English reflects Aboriginal conceptualizationFrom the time of their earliest encounters with English, Aboriginal speakers modified English words and expressions toreflect their own conceptualization. For example, the sea was described as corbon water, combining an Aboriginal wordfor ‘large’ with English ‘water’; the word moon was used for ‘month’ and sit down was used for ‘stay’ or ‘dwell’; towsanwas used for any number over a dozen; the sun was said to jump up (rise), and the words tumble down were used for to‘kill’. English terms were also used with original metaphorical meanings, for example, white bread meant a non-Aboriginal person and a big wheelbarrow was a carriage (Malcolm and Koscielecki 1997). The process of adapting theresources of the English vocabulary and grammar to meet the requirements of the expression of Aboriginal meaningshas continued since the early 19th century, and may be observed if we consider the ways in which Aboriginalcategories, schemas and metaphors are represented in contemporary Aboriginal English.

Categories Aboriginal English could be said to be less time-oriented and more space-oriented than Australian English. One way inwhich English categorizes time is through tense marking on verbs. Where the marking of verb tense is a requirement ofstandard Australian English grammar, it is optional in Aboriginal English. The Aboriginal boy in the following extract isaware of the standard English need to mark tense, as we see by the way he corrects himself, but no sooner has hedone this than he leaves the next verb unmarked for tense:

At home we got a flying fox.We t’ we tie it we tied it hiiiigh up on a big treean we go fast down… by a wire.

For the Aboriginal English speaker time is not perceived as being so strictly segmented into past, present and future asit is for the Australian English speaker. The present relevance of the past is constantly reinforced in Aboriginal culturethrough the strong sense of continuity with the events of the Dreamtime. Of course, Aboriginal speakers understand thedifference between past and present but they relax the English requirement for this to be constantly encoded, since tothem it is not central to their meaning. Often, in talking about the past, a speaker may use the past tense early in thenarrative and leave the successive verbs unmarked for tense.

Australian English speakers often mark the time reference of what they are saying by relating it to an understood timescale, e.g. Last year…; Back in the sixties…; in 1998…, etc. Aboriginal speakers are more likely to mark such timereferences by referring to events or places where they have been, as in:


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When we was down Geraldton…When I was out on Williams Station…When we was at Maureen’s house…,

or they may use a time reference which is deliberately vague, as in

One day, um, I was laying on the bed dere…

Couple o months back…(not to be interpreted as literally two months back)

Um one time my uncle dropped is um wife off…

The perception of time reflected in Aboriginal English is less chronological than event-based. The suffix –time may beadded to a variety of words in order to indicate that they are being used as time references in this sense, e.g. darktime,alltime, everytime, morningtime, dinnertime (translated ‘dinner’). The typical Australian English way of referring to a timein the past (A long time ago…) is modified in Aboriginal English to become Long time…and the expression Not long agois modified to become Not long…The effect is, as with the non-marking of past tense on verbs, to convey a conceptionof time in which the division between past and present is less strong.

Place, by contrast, is strongly marked in Aboriginal English discourse. When talking about their experience, Aboriginalspeakers very often begin by saying where they were. Children recounting their travels will often go into great detail asto who was with them, reflecting the need to let the interlocutor know that, if they were out of their own territory, theywere accompanied by somebody who had a right to be there.

The sense of place (both of persons and objects in a particular setting) will often be reflected in the frequentoccurrence of there, or dere at the ends of clauses:

An then after we camped out there…

where there was bushes up to dere.

There was another bushy part dereAn dere was um.. (inaudible) dis tree an some.. kangaroos all layin under there.

There are many subtle ways in which Aboriginal English demonstrates a different way of categorizing the environment,both physical and social. The physical environment tends to be regarded as a place where one is constantly on themove. One of the most important verbs in standard English is be, in that the language expresses states andcharacteristics in terms of ‘being’. Aboriginal English de-emphasizes the verb be, removing this ‘being’-semantic fromthe expression of states (He tired for ‘he is tired’; E got big mob cat for ‘there are a lot of cats’) and actions (They singingfor ‘they are/were singing’). The verb go, on the other hand, tends to be used more often and in a greater variety ofways than in Australian English, as, for example, in:

i. Dad and us saidOkay let’s go in the shop [‘go’ = movement into]Go and buy a feed [‘go’ = initiate action]

ii. forty-five minutes drive um goin towards Gascoyne Junction [‘goin’ = on the way]

iii. they used to jus see im floatin along, goin along [‘goin’ = reinforcement of sense of ongoing motion]

iv. A: they go there chargin on don’t theyB: yeah yeah go drinkin dere

[‘go’ = begin doing something rash]

v. we used to go for cockies[‘go’ = travel with the purpose of hunting]

With the third meaning above, the salience of go is reinforced with a characteristic rise in pitch and elongation of thesecond vowel in along.

Often objects in the environment which are expressed in a simple noun in Australian English are expressed in acompound noun in Aboriginal English, as in fire-smoke, eye-glasses, finger-ring. In some cases, environmental featuresare referred to in Aboriginal English in a way which shows they are being perceived according to a different schemafrom Australian English. For example, under the ground is contrasted with on top of the ground, where Australian Englishwould use on the ground. Climbing a hill is described as We went right up to the hill, implying that one hasn’t gone up toa hill until one has reached the top.


There are major differences between Aboriginal English and Australian English when it comes to quantification. Thefeatures of extent and excess tend to come together in the way in which Aboriginal English speakers use too much tomean ‘very much’ and bigges to mean ‘very big’. The term mob in Aboriginal English does not imply the large and unrulycrowd that it invokes in Australian English. A mob may be just a few people who are regarded as a group. It may also referto animals and (by contrast with Australian English) to uncountable objects, such as water. Most forms of quantificationare approximative rather than precise. For example, half means less than the whole but not necessarily exactly half.

When it comes to the social environment, there are also significant differences in categorization. An Aboriginal Englishspeaker may refer to my mum mum, thus distinguishing a maternal grandmother. The term cousin brother is widely usedto refer to male parallel cousins. It is recognized that not all who claim to be cousins may be accepted as such. Hencethe pejorative term claimin cousins. The term claimin may also be attributed in this sense to a partner with whom one nolonger acknowledges a relationship. The relationship of a pregnancy to the male partner may be expressed in thecomment I’m pregnant for you. A grandmother or grandfather, or grandchildren may be referred to as grannies and ayoung person may refer with affection and respect to an older woman with the term ole girl. The relevance of obligationswithin the extended family is emphasized with the Aboriginal English term ownlation (‘own relation’).

The use of prototypes differs between Aboriginal English and standard English, thus supporting the view that the use ofthe same language may be accompanied by contrasting conceptualizations. Investigations among Aboriginal people ofthe south-west of Western Australia suggest that the prototypic bird is the crow, the prototypic dinner is a meal awayfrom home (supper or a feed is eaten at home) and the prototypic roast is a traditionally cooked bush meal.

The conceptual distinctiveness of Aboriginal English is further revealed by the study of associative chains. The termkangaroo associates strongly with hunting and eating in the bush; ashes also associates with cooking in the ground.Aboriginal English has varying levels of association for different speakers, since the language is the repository ofsuccessive cultural accretions. There is, for some speakers, much which evokes the pre-contact past of Aboriginalpeople. Some words from traditional languages are in common use within English, even in the south-west. Nyungarpeople refer to themselves as Nyungars; they describe good things as moorditj, women as yorgas, foolish people as katwara, and they describe many native birds and animals by their Aboriginal names. There are some traditional wordswhich have acquired two meanings because they are used to refer to aspects of post-contact culture. Hence the wordmanatj, or monach refers to a policeman as well as to a White Cockatoo. The word bridaya refers to the boss, in anAboriginal or a non-Aboriginal context. The term boss consequently has two meanings, both its standard Englishmeaning and an Aboriginal English meaning of ‘excellent’.

Many Aboriginal English words derive from a colonial history in which Aboriginal people have been subjected toinhumane and insulting treatment, called by demeaning names and sworn at. The negative associations of some ofthese words may be accessed more by some than by other present day speakers. In many cases words which wouldhave been used in a negative way by the oppressors of Aboriginal people in the past are used in an ironic or positiveway, among themselves, by present day Aboriginal speakers. Thus, Aboriginal people will refer to one another asblackfellas or even niggers (though this is highly offensive when used by a non-Aboriginal person); Aboriginal boys willthreaten to flog or drop one another; Aboriginal people will use wicked, deadly and other negative terms with highlypositive denotation. By contrast, some words which represent positive qualities in Australian English, such as open, areused very negatively in Aboriginal English.

Swearing has been taken into Aboriginal English as a form of in-group rough talk which, while offensive, does notconvey the literal meaning it might convey to non-Aboriginal speakers.

The memories of the stolen generations also show themselves in certain linguistic usages. The term take over refers tothe adoption of Aboriginal children to prevent them from becoming wards of the state under the 1905 act. To placesomeone behind bars means to institutionalize, not simply imprison, them. Aboriginal parents and children may still behaunted by the thought of strange people coming for the children, just as Aboriginal hunters go for game (a fear thatmay associate both with the period of the stolen generations and with more traditional ideas of vulnerability to avengingAboriginal visitants).

The various levels of association lead to patterns of polysemy in Aboriginal English which are quite different fromthose in Australian English. The radial networks of three common Aboriginal English words are represented (at leastin part) overleaf:


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The above representations of radial networks link the present discussion of categories to the discussion that is to comeon schemas. It will be noted that, with respect to the core concept camp, there are at least three associated meanings.To take the left alternative, one may camp out in the bush, either away from habitation, or in the vicinity of a homestead.This means sleeping in the outdoors. It is most likely that this meaning of camp will be invoked when the discourse isfollowing the hunting schema. If we take the right alternative, one can camp at home, that is, at the home of any familymember. In this case, camping will normally mean sleeping inside the house, perhaps in a particular bedroom orperhaps in makeshift accommodation. This meaning of camp will be the most likely one when the discourse is informedby the family schema. Thirdly, it is possible to camp in some place where one needs to bed down without it being anormal dwelling place. For example, Marcia, telling Eva about an occasion when she had to get up early to catch a busfor a long trip, said:

an then Mum- my Mum got us up an, cos everything was packed up next to the door, an then we just grabbed our bags and just tooked off out to the taxi, an then um we just camp then on the bus.

It can be seen (though we will not expand on it here) that the radial networks for stop and singing also can be related tothe alternative meanings evoked by use of the terms in association with diverse schemas.

We referred earlier to the fact that the language requires the categorization of certain words according to theirgrammatical function. Aboriginal English sometimes dictates a change of grammatical category for a word. Sometimeswhere Australian English tends to nominalize in describing an event, Aboriginal English prefers to verbalize. Thus:


stay with family (family schema)

stay in the bush(hunting schema) camp = dwelling

bed down

spirit communication(scary things schema)

entertainment (popularmedia schema) singing

choruses, hymns(Christian worship

schema)

taunting (smash schema)

ritual(traditional law schema)

stay overnight orlonger (family schema)

interrupt travel (travel schema)

stop = cease movement


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schooled (Aboriginal English) for ‘went to school’ (Australian English)

I versed against Y for ‘I played against Y’

(This innovation is apparently becoming widespread in non-standard Australian English, in Western Australia at least)

she blackeye someone. for ‘she gives someone a black eye’

Another grammaticalized difference is between a transitive and an intransitive use of a verb:

I growl (= scold) him for ‘I growl at him’

Aboriginal English also sometimes forms adverbs in a different way from Australian English:

went wobbly-way for ‘went wobbly’

got up quick-way for ‘got up quickly’

Full-way! (Well done!)

Occasionally an Aboriginal word may be Anglicized through an English suffix:

the winyarnest (saddest) thing

The distribution of the particle up differs in Aboriginal English from Australian English; it sometimes occurs in Aboriginal English where it would not be expected to appear in Australian English. This is particularly likely after theobject pronoun it:

‘bounce’ becomes bounce it up

‘learn’ becomes learn it up

‘bake’ becomes bake it up

SchemasIt is possible to infer proposition schemas from behaviours which are approved and not approved within Aboriginalcommunity contexts. Some of these are:

1. Respect is due to the people whose land you occupy.

It follows from this schema that Aboriginal people (as noted above) do not enter the territory of others without being inthe company of people who belong there, or having the agreement of the traditional owners. It also follows that whenone pays a visit to a person, one waits before being invited to speak. It is also expected that when a public function isheld the traditional owners of the land where it is held will be acknowledged or given the opportunity to speak.

2. It is not appropriate to speak for others without authorization.

This schema leads to the expectation that, when asked for information, one will defer to the authority of theappropriate person if the information asked for belongs to them or is under their control, even if one knows theinformation being sought.

3. It is good to know only what one is supposed to know.

According to this schema, one exercises restraint, rather than curiosity, with respect to knowledge that one has notbeen given.

4. People who are related look after one another.

This schema is similar to that referred to earlier which was identified among Solomon Islanders (‘Families share foodwithout expectation of return’), but it goes beyond sharing food to sharing shelter and protection. Awareness of thisschema is reflected in the way in which Aboriginal children take careful note of who is accompanying them when theygo out into the bush, often verbalizing their names, so that nobody will be lost. The schema also lies behind the greatpains Aboriginal people tend to take in going over and remembering the kinship network of which they are a part.

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Speakers of Aboriginal English share many event schemas with speakers of Australian English, in that they participate inmany of the same public events. However some events belong especially to the Aboriginal community. More remoteAboriginal people will be familiar with various seasonal meetings of Aboriginal people, some of which may involve men’sbusiness or women’s business. Those in metropolitan locations may often spend periods in the country to attendspecial Aboriginal events, most commonly funerals. Aboriginal English differs from Australian English in the way it refersto a funeral. Nana’s funeral does not necessarily mean the funeral after Nana has died but may mean the funeral whereone goes to comfort Nana in her bereavement. Aboriginal English speakers are familiar with an event called a smash,which is a verbal and often physical confrontation between individuals or groups which may take place on the flat, anarea designated for this purpose. The smash takes place before onlookers who need to know under what conditionsthey may intervene. Even some events which are shared by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants may not involve afully shared schema. For example, there is some evidence that suggests that going to the football may be, to Aboriginalpeople, more of a family participation event whereas it is more of a spectator event among non-Aboriginal people.

Study of Aboriginal oral narratives (Malcolm 2001) shows that the story schema which we referred to on page 111 is notoften followed when Aboriginal people are talking with one another about real experience. Aboriginal listeners do notnecessarily expect the speaker to develop a theme to a climax leading to some kind of resolution. They may not, likemany non-Aboriginal listeners, be waiting to hear the punch line. Rather, they may be attending to features whichbelong to quite different schemas. Perhaps for this reason, even the word ‘story’ may feel a bit foreign to AboriginalEnglish speakers, who may refer to the narrations which follow their own schemas as yarns.

Although Aboriginal English speakers may be guided by many different schemas in telling stories, including many thatare shared with non-Aboriginal people, five schemas have shown up more frequently than any others among speakerssurveyed in the south-west.

The commonest is the Scary Things schema, which is evidenced in a story which involves some encounter with strangepowers, in which ordinary people experience strange visitations, or see unfamiliar figures (human or animal) whichappear or disappear, maybe taking somebody with them. Often the happenings occur at night, and in the morning, orwhenever an investigation is made, there is no trace of the intruders. A story influenced by the Scary Things schema isthe following told by an eleven year old boy from a country town:

Little Man Story:

1 Um.. when I ‘as asleep at ‘ome (…)

2 When I ‘as asleep at ‘ome ..

3 One.. one little man was dere.

4 I was.. I was I went under the rug

5 An.. it it come right up to me..

6 An’ pricked me.

7 E fight me all over the place (…)

8 Oh… and he went then.

The Scary Things schema is often associated with certain story elements, like open doors or windows, unexplainedsounds, singing, animals with strange features like red eyes or strange lights in the rear vision mirror when one is driving.

The Observing schema is the second commonest found. It generates discourse which is concerned with the reporting ofexperience, usually shared experience, giving details of the natural or social phenomena observed. When the observingschema is dominant, the discourse may seem to the non-Aboriginal listener to be over-concerned with ‘irrelevant’ detail.This is because there is an attempt to be inclusive in the reporting, not allowing one aspect of what has been observedto take attention from the rest. Aboriginal people come from a long tradition of survival in circumstances where closeobservation of the environment is essential. Observing is, then, a functional skill, and its practice in discourse can beseen a time-honoured way of learning. The following extract illustrates the use of the Observing schema:


Rocky Pool/Hunting

C: We shoot kangaroos.

A: We don’t. (?)

I: Where was that?

C: At um Rocky Pool.

I: At Rocky Pool.

A: I saw I saw—

C: Yeah, my uh-- my unc— my unc—my brother-in-law—my brother-in-law—my brother-in-law he pick a bobtail, dead one.

A: I saw- I saw- I saw- I saw bobtail in the bushes.

I: Did he, C? What did you see, A?

A: I saw a kangaroo dead bobtail.

D: Bobtail and my (Inaudible).

A: Dad keeps goin’ in the shop o’ some butcher.

D: Dat’s a very (Inaudible)

I: What else have you seen in the bush?

D: I see-e-e lizard.

I: Yes.

D: One lizard. And I sa-a-a-w snake.

C: Why are we not allowed ‘o talk ‘n this(?)?

D: Cattle(?) snake. And I saw I saw (Inaudible).

I: Why?

C: Why are we allow allowed ‘o talk into this(?)? [tapping]

B: And I saw I saw a dead chicken.

C: (Inaudible)

I: Did you? Where-- where’s that A?

A: At the bushes at Rocky Pool.

B: No my dad um my dad um took-- cooked that for dinner.

I: Did he?

B: We had duck (?).

I: Where’d he come from A?

A: The bushes.

D: And it came from the—came from the swamp.

I: From the swamp.

D: Yes.

I: Mm-m.

D: We catch emu.

A: (Inaudible)

D: And my uncle he got a gun

I: Has he?

D: Some real bullets…and some real gun and we go hunting me and my pop and ‘im and my fr- my friend

A: I’m goin’ to lunch now. I’m hungry.

D: an’ my uncle my friend and in Adobe (?) (Inaudible) emu emu.

That’s- that’s where we catch emu in the bush.


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The Hunting schema is the next commonest, and it occurs among metropolitan as well as rural speakers. The schemainvolves the activity of known participants who, having arrived at a location, are concerned with the observation, pursuitand capture of prey. Typically, the prey are not captured easily and there is need for persistence. If the hunt issuccessful it is often followed with eating what has been caught. The essential features of the hunting schema showthat it is closely associated with the Observing schema. It also relates to other schemas which involve pursuit, effort andpersistence, including fishing, sporting and other events. An example is as follows:

Hunting (1)

1 Trevor Bonner At the station

2 Me and my dad and my mother and my brother

3 We went we went camping out

4 And um we went bush and

5 Uh we walking along

6 And I saw a s- I saw I sawra sawra emu

7 And ‘e was a cheeky emu

8 And I went and I went to um get de eggs

9 And my dad ‘e was gonna shoot da wild emu

10 And I ran back to get da bullets

11 And d’emu was under da um under the er Land Rover

12 And I got…

13 And ‘e was under the Land Rover

14 And I’s walkin along

15 Get the bullets and

16 I got the bullets

17 And um, and I ran

18 U saw de emu under da um Land Rover

19 And I ran

20 Jumped the fence

21 Hit a – um jumped over a the r um um spinifect

22 And and a… snake came out

23 I got up, got the bullets and

24 And ran an told Dad

25 And I got the gun

26 And Dad wasn’t dere

27 So I got the gun and shot the emu

28 and got the eggs

29 and got in the Land Rover

30 and roared around the c- um

31 roared around the corner

32 then a

33 and that’s the end of the story.


The Travel schema is extremely pervasive, and often occurs in association with another schema, like Hunting. It involvesknown participants departing and travelling with intermittent stops when they do things before travelling on. An optionalelement in this schema is a return to the starting point. The Travel schema underlies the following account:

Tracking

1 On the weekend…

2 we went to a um river with my family

3 and we had a swim…

4 and… and dere we went-..

5 we caught some fish…

6 and… and we were swimming us kids in another part of the pool

7 and.. we saw a snake

8 so we got out

9 an we went to a…nother spot

10 when our um..

11 we made a raft

12 and we left it there..

13 an we was playing on dat…

14 and.. we nearly fell off

15 so we um.. cam back

16 an then we-…went back home…

17 and we saw some kangaroos on the way back.

The Family schema represents experience in relation to the immediate or extended family network of the speaker. Anexample is below. The speaker, Darren aged 6 is talking with a non-Aboriginal interviewer:

Morning

1 A: Um my (Inaudible) and my poppy- popeye.

2 I: And then what happens?

3 A: My- my brothe’ makes a fire- fire

4 and and he makes a fire all the time my mum tellin’ ‘im.

5 My mummy mum and dad and the little baby well they sleep in bed all the time.

6 I: Yeah

7 A: When when when when the sun comes- the sun ri- sun come right up

8 they get up.

9 I: When the sun comes right up.

10 A; Yeah.

11 I: Yeah.

12 A: And my mum- when we go to school

13 my mum goes out.

14 Sometimes my mum—my dad goes out by hisself

15 and my mum stays home.

16 I: Yeah.

17 C: When they gets (Inaudible).

18 A: (Inaudible) my dad had a bottle of beer in the back.


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19 It was out of the box.

20 And- and he come back home

21 and he went out—

22 I: Andy I’m wanna ask you in a minute.

23 A: He come back home—

24 he come back home and he—and he- he come back home

25 and he went out again.

With respect to the schematization of the environment, Aboriginal English speakers position themselves moredeliberately as observers than do Australian English speakers. This is done both by discoursal and grammatical means.We have referred to the discoursal means already when discussing the Observing schema (see p.117). We noted that thespeaker may relate to a scene less in terms of profiling one element against the rest than in terms of providing a fullyinclusive observation. I have called this discourse strategy ‘surveying’. In the following extract we see this kind ofinclusive observation, where no detail of itself (drinking the creek water, chasing the kangaroo, finding the goanna underthe stone, pulling it out, cooking it, seeking the workers in the shearing shed, having ice creams) constitutes the focus.Everything is equally in focus.

an, an we went to dis big big creek with the water,

an we sittin down drinkin it,

an we bin get (Inaudible)

an we chased a kangaroo

n kill im,

an so we went.. an we bin go to um Chris..

an we bin go to the other windmill up,

so we’s getting..

an we, we got dis other big fat goanna,

it was under piece of stone

n we came n pulled im out,

so we left im,

so ‘e ‘s gone back home,

an e cooked im

an dey’s workin at the shearin shed

an dey .. um and dey, and.. and Kimmy’s mother bin seeing,

an ‘e ‘s workin up the house

an den (Inaudible) icecreams.

But there is also a grammatical way in which the observer stance can be encoded. This is a procedure I have called‘embedded observing’, whereby the activities described are made into a complex subordinate clause governed by theverb representing the observing. It is illustrated below from some students’ writing:

I saw him was running behind me

I saw (((horse) running) behind me)

We saw Murphy’s camp had a big hoe

We saw ((camp) with a big hoe)


The effect of this pattern is to reinforce all that the writer observed:

the horse

the horse running

the horse running behind him, etc.

Some objects in the environment are conceptualized according to schemas which contrast with standard English. Forexample, a person can be described as ‘long’, thus showing the operation of a vertical rather than a horizontal schemafor this attribute.

There is also an interesting schema which associates the land immediately around a site as relevant to that site. Thus, achild may say:

we always…from school…there we play marbles most times,

where the expression from school means in the vicinity of the school but not actually in the school. This seems toassociate with the sense of territoriality which we have referred to elsewhere (pp.113, 115).

With respect to phonology, Aboriginal English makes a greater link than Australian English between the length of a sound andthe magnitude of what is being talked about. There is, then, a schema which associates sound duration with magnitude.Thus, it is common for Aboriginal speakers to extend the pronunciation of vowels in words like loooong and biiiiig.

MetaphorIn Aboriginal English, as in other Englishes, metaphor plays in important role in the structuring of conceptualization andexpression. However the metaphorical processes often contrast with those in Australian English.

One area of contrast is in the expression of animacy with respect to environmental objects. Aboriginal English speakersare more likely than Australian English speakers to treat non-human objects in the same way as human objects – for example:

something could jump (= spill) on your shirt

e flew (describing a truck)

did that rain catch you (c.f. did you get caught in the rain)

Many expressions in Aboriginal English represent conceptual blends, where one domain has been mapped onto another,as in:

cattle snake (a snake with markings like cattle)

boomer starts bootin im (the boomer starts kicking him)

playing for liar (playing for fun/pretending)

reckon (may include saying as well as thinking)

talk us a story.

It has been pointed out by Mühlhäusler (1996) and others that Aboriginal people in the north of Australia have usedcertain metaphors from natural phenomena to refer to learning and literacy. One such example is ganma, which is ‘theturbulence and foam which arise where the downstream flow of fresh water in a river meets the tidal flow of salt waterfrom the sea’ (Mühlhäusler 1996, p. 172). This is seen metaphorically to represent different things which need to bereconciled, and has been applied to the bringing together of traditional and Western learning.

Often the metaphorical usages in Aboriginal English represent an extension or grammaticalization of metaphors whichare also accessible in Australian English, as in:

stiffened out (c.f. ‘scared stiff’)

chargin on (drinking, c.f. ‘charged’ = drunk).

I’ll be real soft (quiet, c.f. ‘to do something softly’)

big mob times (many times)


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Many standard English words are polysemous in Aboriginal English because they are taken to have metaphoricalreference to the spirit world by Aboriginal speakers, as in:

clear ‘free from any negative or undesirable spiritual associations’

clever ‘spiritually powerful’

dangerous ‘hazardous because of possible effect of spiritual powers’

hold ‘spiritually own, look after and be responsible for’(examples from Arthur 1996).

As a living, contemporary language, Aboriginal English continues to use processes of metaphor in everyday expression.For example:

they’re putting us to the back of the bus ‘they’re neglecting us’

A: Ay brother, horse and cart!

B: Sausages and baked beans and eggs on top! (positive evaluations).

There is also evidence of metonymy in expressions like

doing kickit ‘informal football play’.

Now You See It Now You Don’tThe evidence provided here is in support of the claim that Aboriginal English and Australian English, thoughintercomprehensible to a degree, are two different systems and that the differences are greatest at the ‘unseen’ level ofconceptualization. In communication between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians the problem is often that bothsides think they are getting the meaning of what the other side is saying but the reality is rather that ‘now you see it,now you don’t’. Some aspects of Aboriginal English are transparent to the non-Aboriginal interpreter but many are not.This to be expected in view of the fact that the speech community which has given birth to Aboriginal English is verydifferent from that which has given birth to Australian English. The differences of world view are profound, and they arefurther added to by differences of present lifestyle, even where Aboriginal people dwell in the suburbs. For the mostpart, Aboriginal people spend a much greater proportion of their time than do non-Aboriginal people dealing withtrauma, illness and bereavement. The uppermost concern is often for survival. Even if Aboriginal people wanted to moveaway from existing patterns of personal and social organization (and, for reasons of world view, they usually do not), theopportunity to plan things out and adopt the lifestyle patterns of people who are a part of the majority culture is oftennot available.

Given that Aboriginal people have established ways of conceptualizing the world and expressing this through language,and that these are not going to change, it follows that education, if it is going to meet their needs, needs to come tothem on their own terms, not only presenting them with another cultural alternative but providing the means to achieveit while not surrendering that which they have. Such education, I would argue, must be two-way and bidialectal.


ReferencesArthur, Jay (1996). Aboriginal English: A Cultural Study. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Chafe, Wallace (1994). Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience inSpeaking and Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chafe, Wallace (1998). Notes from Lectures to the Australian Linguistics Institute, Brisbane.

Chawla, Saroj (2001). Linguistic and philosophical roots and our environmental crisis. In Fill, Alwin and Mühlhäusler,Peter (eds) The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. (pp. 115-123). London and New York:Continuum.

Dirven, René & Verspoor, Marjolijn (1998). Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:John Benjamins.

Dirven, René, Hawkins, Bruce & Sandikcioglu, Esra (eds) (2001). Language and Ideology. Volume 1: Theoretical CognitiveApproaches. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Fauconnier, Gilles & Turner, Mark (1991). Blending as a central process of grammar. In Adele E. Goldberg (ed.)Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Hatch, Evelyn & Brown, Cheryl (1995). Vocabulary, Semantics, and Language Education. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Haugen, Einar (2001). The ecology of language. In Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler (eds) The Ecolinguistics Reader:Language, Ecology and Environment. (pp. 57-66). London and New York: Continuum.

Kaldor, Susan & Malcolm, Ian G. (1982) Aboriginal English in country and remote areas. A Western Australianperspective. (pp. 75-112). In Eagleson, Robert, Kaldor, Susan & Malcolm, Ian G. English and the Aboriginal Child.Canberra: Curriculum Development Centre.

Malcolm, Ian G. (2001). Aboriginal English Genres in Perth. Mount Lawley: Centre for Applied Language and LiteracyResearch, Edith Cowan University.

Malcolm, Ian G. and Koscielecki, Marek M. (1997). Aboriginality and English. Mount Lawley: Centre for Applied LanguageResearch, Edith Cowan University.

Mazrui, Ali A. & Mazrui, Alamin M. (2001). Linguistic dilemmas of Afrocentricity: the diaspora experience. In RenéDirven, Bruce Hawkins & Esra Sandikcioglu (eds) (2001). Language and Ideology. Volume 1: Theoretical CognitiveApproaches. (pp. 141-164). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Mühlhäusler, P. (1996). English language and literacy within remote and isolated desert communities. Desert SchoolsVolume 2 Research Report. J. Clayton, et al. Canberra, Department of Employment, Education, Training and YouthAffairs: 151-177.

Nero, Shondel J. (2000). The changing faces of English: a Caribbean perspective. TESOL Quarterly 34, 3:483-510.

Palmer, Gary (1996). Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Pires de Oliveira, R. (2001). Language and ideology: an interview with George Lakoff. In René Dirven, Bruce Hawkins &Esra Sandikcioglu (eds) (2001). Language and Ideology. Volume 1: Theoretical Cognitive Approaches. (pp. 23-47).Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Rochecouste, Judith & Malcolm, Ian G. (2001). Aboriginal English Genres in the Yamatji Lands of Western Australia.(Rev. ed). Mount Lawley: Centre for Applied Language and Literacy Research.

Sharpe, Margaret C. (1977). Alice Springs Aboriginal English. In Ed Brumby & Eric Vaszolyi (eds) Language Problems andAboriginal Education. (pp. 45-50). Mount Lawley: Aboriginal Teacher Education Program, Mount Lawley College ofAdvanced Education.

Sweetser, Eve E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphoric and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, J. (1995). Linguistic Categorisation: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Watson-Gegeo, Karen Ann & Gegeo, David Welchman (1999). (Re)modeling culture in Kwara’ae: the role of discourse inchildren’s cognitive development. Discourse Studies 1, 2:227-244.


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The fact and effects of one-way learningDominance of Anglo view of Australian historyAfter the Second World War, approximately one million Australian school children learned history using a textbook calledMan Makes History. In this volume it was stated that

[t]here are still living today in Arnhem Land people who know almost no history. They are Aboriginal tribesmanwho live in practically the same way as their forefathers and ours did, tens of thousands of years ago. Like themthey have not only no accurate knowledge of past events, but no aeroplanes, motor- cars or picture shows; noteven any books, houses or clothes. Apart from the fact that they use weapons of stone and wood to hunt for theirfood, their lives are almost as hard and dangerous as those of the animals who also hunt to live… We are civilizedtoday and they are not. History helps us to understand why this is so (Ward, 1952, in Cope, 1988, p. 16).

This text represents the way in which history was taught and the cultural identities of white Australians and AboriginalAustralians were constructed in the 1950s. A careful examination of the language of more contemporary social sciencetextbooks shows how these texts continue to tell the story of Australia from an Anglo perspective. Take, for example,the Year 6 Social Studies teachers’ resource book, Social Studies 6 (Harrold & Bartley, 1990). In an introductorypassage entitled ‘Aboriginal Settlement’ of ‘Discovery and Settlement of Australia, [Part] 1’ the authors note that:

It is believed that Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for about 40,000 years. Scientists and Aboriginesthemselves have different theories about where and when they [i.e., Aboriginal people] originated. Two Aboriginallegends state that their people were either created here or they arrived in the Dreamtime from across the sea.Many scientists believe that during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lowered, the Aborigines crossed fromAsia to Australia.

Two authorities are contrasted in this passage in an unbalanced manner: that of ‘two Aboriginal legends’ representingthe Aboriginal view and that of ‘many scientists’ representing the Anglo-Australian view. A more accurate term for‘legends’ in this context would be ‘oral histories’. The textbook writers fail to mention that these oral histories wereonce told by elders who were highly skilled in the arts of oral history telling, and that these histories remain only infragments as a result of the European invasion. The value of these oral texts is minimized by the authority vested in the‘many scientists’ because of their knowledge which is based on sophisticated modern technology, highly valued byWestern culture . The authors continue in the subsequent pages to discuss the ‘European discoveries’ of Australia madeby the Dutch and British, and the ‘exploration’ of the interior regions. Although the authors acknowledge the earlieroccupation of the land by Aboriginal people, their use of the terms ‘discoveries’ and ‘explorations’ fails to recognize this.No further mention is made of Aboriginal people in the subsequent pages in reference to the roles they may have playedin assisting the Europeans to locate water holes or passages to the interior lands. The use of the more accurate term‘invasion’ now used by contemporary Australian historians, is avoided in schools because of its ‘controversial’ nature(Land, 1994).

Another aspect of the presentation of Australian history which Aboriginal children find confusing is the linear frameworkwithin which it is presented. The conception of time held by Australian Aboriginal cultures, like other Indigenous oralcultures around the world, is cyclical in nature, rather than linear (Mühlhäusler, 1996). It has been described by GlenysCollard, a member of the Nyungar community in Western Australia and a researcher at Edith Cowan University, as acontinuous spiral connecting past historical events to more recent past and present events (Malcolm et al., 1999, p. 28). This perspective is reflected in the worldview that Aboriginal children have been enculturated into throughlanguage and oral histories. While this is just one of the ways Aboriginal children are confused and alienated by therepresentation of knowledge in Australian classrooms, it is one that is rarely addressed by school texts or considered byteachers in the classroom.

It is now widely accepted by contemporary social scientists that one of the main functions of a public educationinstitution is the transmission of culture (Everhart, 1983; Gearing & Epstein, 1982; Spindler, 1963; Spindler & Spindler,1982; Waller, 1965; Wilcox, 1982a, 1982b; Willis, 1977). In this view, the purpose of schooling is ‘to recruit newmembers into the community (usually its own offspring) and maintain the cultural system’; however, it is not surprising,that this view is not ‘held by most educators, administrators, and politicians’ (Spindler, 1982, p, 16). Contrarily, thisgroup sees ‘schools as agents of equal opportunity, teaching children from all backgrounds what they need to besuccessful, if only the children will learn what is taught’ (Wilcox, 1982b, p. 465).

Video 4 Background PapersTwo-Way Learning and Two Kinds of Power

Ellen Grote

The cultural knowledge and values are, therefore, passed on to schoolchildren in order that they may becomeproductive, contributing members of that society (See ‘Values’ listed under ‘4. Social and Civic Responsibility’, insideback cover of Curriculum Framework, 1999). The ‘core shared values’ in the Curriculum Framework have been agreed tothrough a ‘process of consensus and wide consultation’ and are set out by the Curriculum Council of Western Australiaas fundamental (Curriculum Council of Western Australia, 1998). The purpose of the document itself is to establish‘…the knowledge, understandings, skills, values and attitudes that students are expected to acquire’ in accordance withSection 4(b) of the 1997 Curriculum Council Act (op. cit., p. 9). But whose cultural knowledge and values are these?

The process of education is never neutral (Shaull, 1970). A curriculum reflects ‘the ways in which the dominantmeanings of society expressed in education policies, sourcebooks, syllabi, frameworks and textbooks render theperspectives of the disadvantaged groups invisible at the same time as these groups are stereotyped’ (Young, 1990,cited by Singh, 1994, p. 27). This practice is referred to as ‘curriculum imperialism’ (op. cit., p. 27). And while theemphasis on critical reading skills is emphasized in contemporary Australian curricula, it has been argued by TorresStrait Islander Martin Nakata and his colleague Sandy Muspratt, who are specialists in literacy and pedagogy research,that these critical learning models need to be scrutinized for Western bias. Although these models are introduced toencourage school children to critically analyze historical (and other) representations in the school curriculum, they oftenturn out to be culturally biased because they use Western frameworks to organize information (Nakata & Muspratt,1994). Nakata and Muspratt argue that the use of such frameworks ensures that mainstream children will continue tosucceed while Indigenous do not.

Dominance of Anglo knowledge A cursory glance through school textbooks and the curriculum will show that the knowledge schoolchildren areexpected to master and the strategies taught to master them are those of the dominant culture. An examination of thelearning areas identified in the Curriculum Framework – the Arts, English , Health & Physical Education, LOTE,Mathematics, Science, Society & Environment, Technology & Enterprise –all reflect a dominance of Anglo knowledge.Even the languages offered in most urban LOTE programs are dominated by European languages or Asian languagesseen as important from a white Australian economic perspective.

When Aboriginal knowledge is presented, it is most often through materials and resources written by non-Aboriginalauthors. In the early years of schooling, Aboriginal culture , and other non-Anglo cultures, are trivialized by Anglo-Australian writers as they are represented through symbolic imagery of the culturally exotic: traditional foods, dress,ceremonies, celebrations, dance, and traditional gender roles (Cope, 1988). In the later years, Aboriginal cultures areoften reduced to numerical representations in order to develop analytical skills for interpreting graphs and charts inorder to understand and classify Australian social trends.

Aboriginal people have long been skeptical about the ways in which their culture and history have been represented bynon-Aboriginal researchers. Many Aboriginal people have sought to tell their own stories in order to present theirperspective. Aboriginal author Ruby Langford Ginibi sees her role as an educator of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people. In an interview, she noted the lack of Aboriginal perspectives in the literature: ‘I reckon about 80% ofwriting done on Aboriginal people is done by white academics and anthropologists…I wonder if the tables were reversedwhether they would let us write their stories’ (Ginibi & Guy, 1997). Rarely do the writings of Indigenous people make itinto the school classroom, except perhaps some poetry or a play by Jack Davis in TEE English Literature courses.

The sentiments expressed by Ruby Langford Ginibi have also been observed by Aboriginal students in tertiaryinstitutions. In a recent study investigating the attitudes of the Aboriginal community toward university practices,students expressed their concern ‘that the views of white anthropologists were not always correct or appropriate’(Rochecouste, Hayes, Eggington, & Collard, 2001, p. 5). They said there was a need for oral traditions to be recognizedand valued equally along side of written knowledge. They were well aware of the practice of non-Aboriginal academicsreceiving credit for Aboriginal knowledge that had been passed on to them orally by members of their community whilethose who shared this knowledge received little or no recognition.

While the knowledge that is valued in school is based on print sources, the knowledge that is valued by Aboriginalpeople is that which has been acquired through observation and experience and shared in the form of oralcommunication, often as narratives. In an analysis of 100 oral texts collected in the Yamatji Lands of Western Australia,it was found that narratives serve a variety of functions in contemporary Aboriginal communities (Rochecouste &Malcolm, 2001). In addition to providing entertainment, recount narratives may serve to share knowledge of life skillsand experiences, to control behaviour, to reinforce values of the group, as well as to describe what happens when group


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norms are violated. Report narratives may serve to represent history from an Aboriginal perspective, to relate‘procedural knowledge’, to ‘reinforce cultural practices’, share learning from reading or observation, and like the recountnarrative it may be used to regulate behavioural norms and discuss life skills. Most of these functions of the narrativeserve the community members in maintaining Aboriginal culture (Malcolm, 2000a, p. 9-10).

Dominance of English and standard English modes of expressionSocial scientists view the school as embedded within a community; the community in turn is embedded in the state andnation. Hence, the language, activities and social relationships of the school reflect the language, activities and socialrelationships of the dominant culture. In this way the school becomes a place where the ‘discourse, practice, andorganisation’ of the dominant culture are institutionalized (McTaggart, 1988, p. 91).

The discourse of the school, or patterns of language use, thinking and acting (Gee, 1991), reflects those patterns usedby speakers of the standardized language. It also reflects the modes of expression favoured by standard Englishspeakers in educational settings. The use of language in the classroom for speaking and writing gets closer to thelanguage of print as students move up to higher levels in school. The standard dialect, linked to educated middle-classAnglo-Australian culture, is often familiar to middle-class Anglo-Australian children because it is used in their homes (op. cit.). But it is used less often in the homes of working class non-Aboriginal or Aboriginal families whose dialecttends to reflect that of the local region and/or culture.

Standard English and standard English modes of expression often seem to be neutral to those who use them becausethey have been exposed to them for so long and because they do not reflect any particular geographical region. But thelanguage and modes of expression are far from neutral. For the Aboriginal child, standard English is the language of the‘outsider’. It is different from the way English is used by the Aboriginal English speaking community and is seen bysociolinguists to be closely linked to Aboriginal identity (Malcolm, 1998, p. 131).

A common practice in a typical classroom is for the (non-Aboriginal) teacher to use Standard Australian English tomanage learning activities that make up her lesson plan. One common practice in Western classrooms (and in schooltextbooks) is to evaluate the comprehension of students after a reading activity. The teacher usually asks a question (thatshe knows the answers to), and then calls on one child to answer. When that child responds, the teacher then confirmswhether this is correct or not, and gives an evaluation of the child’s performance, saying, ‘Good’ or ‘Good try’. For themiddle-class Anglo children whose parents read them bedtime stories, this is a familiar practice. For the Aboriginalchildren who may not experience ‘bedtime stories’ at home in this manner, and where the adults do not regulate who canspeak and when they can speak, this practice is very unfamiliar. Often the response is silence (Malcolm, 1998).

Another common practice in schools at all levels is to have students present what they have learned, either in writtenform or in an oral presentation. The expectations of the ways in which these presentations are organized, whetherwritten or oral, also reflect Western ways of organizing and sharing information. Again, the language expected isStandard Australian English and the structure of the presentation will depend on the function. These are referred to asgeneric structures or genres. Again, like the word standard, the word generic suggests neutrality. But these modes andstructures of presentation are far from neutral. They reflect the preferences of the dominant white (Western) culture andsociety of the school.

In a recent investigation into differences between the genres of school and the genres used by Aboriginal people,sociolinguist Ian Malcolm analyzed the discourse (or patterns of language use) of sample texts which are provided toWestern Australian teachers as guides. These sample texts were compared to the oral texts of Aboriginal Englishspeaking children. (‘Oral texts’ in this case are the stories told by Aboriginal English speaking children which are firstaudiotaped and then transcribed into written form so that they can be analyzed more carefully.) ‘Work samples’ weretaken from teacher resource materials in three curriculum areas of Science, Technology & Enterprise, and Society &Environment which make up part of the Curriculum Framework (Curriculum Council of Western Australia, 1998) on therationale that these texts use observation and reporting skills. The findings revealed significant differences between theAnglo and Aboriginal modes of describing experience, i.e. interpreting and constructing ‘reality’ through discourse. Theschool texts focus on and value the identification of generic subjects, abstractions, categories and classifications. Theyare taken from secondary sources and ordered chronologically and categorically. In contrast, the out-of-schoolAboriginal English oral texts focus on and value ‘particularized subjects’ based on knowledge gained from personalobservation. Another difference is their use of associations to organize material (Malcolm, 2000b, p. 15). It was notedthat using associations to organize material is not uncommon in oral cultures. It has been found in the discourse ofAfrican American children in U.S. classrooms (Gee, 1991).


Western modes of expression reflect Western values in that they are direct and follow a linear structural pattern with aclear beginning, middle and end. The values reflected in Western modes are not the values reflected in AboriginalEnglish modes of expression. When children’s essays are criticized in school for lacking clear structure i.e. structureother than linear, for wandering and not sticking to the main topic (using associations to organize material) and notclearly expressing their point of view (being indirect to avoid conflict), it is because their writing reflects cultural valuesof their Aboriginal discourse community rather than those held by the teacher. These cultural values are more importantto the child because they are the values of the speech community in which the child is raised, nurtured and cared for,and with whom the child shares identity.

The organisation of the school curriculum and the rules that govern the organisation and operation of the school areoften in conflict with Aboriginal cultural values and seen as a destructive force in undermining Aboriginal society. Forexample, one of the basic requirements of a school system is regular attendance. But when an Aboriginal child is absentfrom school because of a funeral, Western teachers express their concern for the loss of time spent learning in school.Yet these messages imply that the significance of the funeral as a medium of social and family bonding is minimized bythe school (Harris, 1990). They ignore the centrality of the family/kinship ties in Aboriginal culture (Coombs, Brandl, & Snowdon, 1983).

Effects of this on Aboriginal students’ experience of exclusion and devaluationRecent studies indicate that the limited knowledge that teachers have about Aboriginal English and Aboriginal Englishdiscourse interacts with a number of other complex factors which contribute to the exclusion of Aboriginal studentsfrom schools and the devaluation of their lived experiences. These factors include the limitations of teacher knowledgeof Indigenous history and culture and the ways they relate to their Indigenous students. The irrelevance and inflexiblenature of the curriculum structure, issues of fairness, the influence of peers in terms of expectations and behaviours aswell as the extent of involvement of Indigenous community members in the education process are all factors whichinteract with one another to contribute to the problem (Aboriginal Education and Training Council, 1997; Harslett,Harrison, Godfrey, Partington, & Richer, 1997; Partington, Richer, Godfrey, Harslett, & Harrison, 1999).

These complex interrelated issues are seen to contribute to student attendance and the ability of schools to keepAboriginal students in the education system. They have received much attention by the Commonwealth and WesternAustralian governments in the last decade. Statistics gathered in WA indicate that while approximately 60% of non-Indigenous students who commenced Year 8 in 1996 completed Year 12 in 2000, only 22.3% of their Indigenous peersdid so. (Education Department of Western Australia Annual Report 2001, unpublished).

The principles of two-way/both ways educationOriginsBicultural approaches to finding solutions to address the complexity of cross-cultural situations have been used in arange of legal and religious, as well as educational, institutions (McTaggart, 1988) and have been referred to in a varietyof ways: ‘two laws’(Maddock, 1977 cited by McTaggart, 1988), ‘two-way’ education (Harris, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993;Hooley, 2000; McConvell, 1982; McConvell, 1991; McConvell, 1994; McTaggart, 1988; Malcolm, 1995a, 1995b;Malcolm, 2000a; Malcolm, forthcoming; Malcolm et al., 1999), ‘both ways’ (Bepuka et al., 1993; Malcolm, 1995b;Yunupingu, 1990) and ‘the old and the new ways’ (Bell & Ditton, 1984, cited by McTaggart, 1988). The term ‘two-way’ or‘both ways’ has been used in a variety of educational contexts in Australia and abroad with a range of related butdifferent meanings in both bilingual and bidialectal settings.

Bilingual education was first introduced to the Northern Territory in selected schools in 1972 (Eggington, 1992). Beforebilingual education had been introduced in the Gurinji community at Daguragu on Wattie Creek, elder PincherNyurrmiyarri expressed the desire for a ‘two-way’ system which would involve ‘an exchange between Europeans andAborigines’ (McConvell, 1982). The Gurinji people were disenchanted at the way their children were being educated in a‘one-way’ European-based system. This ‘two-way’ approach would involve the use of their language and culture as partof a program in which community members would be consulted and involved in making curriculum decisions.

The Yirrkala community in the Northern Territory was selected by the Federal government in 1974 as a site for one of thefirst bilingual schools to be set up (Yunupingu, 1990). Under this bilingual system, the local Yolngu teachers wereemployed to teach some classes, including some Yolngu traditions such as dance, art and hunting. Although the localcommunity was now involved inside the classroom, the non-Aboriginal administration gave the Yolngu community


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members very little opportunity to be involved in the running of the school itself. Ten years later in1984 the communitymembers set up the Yolngu Action Committee and by 1986 they began to develop a ‘both-ways curriculum’ (p. 5). This‘both-ways’ design involved both balanda (or European) content as well as Yolngu content, but the balanda content, i.e.,culture and history, would be presented from the Yolngu perspective and structured to meet the needs of the community.

A third use of the ‘two-way’ or ‘both ways’ concept developed by Aboriginal people was identified by Jean Harkins at theYipirinya school in the multilingual context of Alice Springs. The concept was applied this time to the English languageitself. The desire was expressed by the Yipirinya School Council to see their competence in English expanded so that itcould work as a means of explaining their Aboriginal culture and values to non-Aboriginal people, while at the same timeadvantaging themselves by accessing non-Aboriginal opportunities (1994).

In discussions about the bilingual/bicultural school context, a debate arose regarding the compatibility betweenAboriginal culture and non-Aboriginal culture and the need for a separation of ‘cultural domains’. Stephen Harris arguedthat for small cultural groups like that of Aboriginal people, to achieve true biculturalism in the sense of having twocultural identities, schools need to compartmentalize the learning contexts in order to reduce the pressures of Westerninfluences and help preserve Aboriginal cultural identity (1988). This would mean that Western teachers would beteaching Western content in Western ways (adapted to Aboriginal learning styles) in classrooms separate from whereAboriginal teachers taught Aboriginal cultural studies. But he acknowledged that there would be some overlap (1990,1991). Patrick McConvell opposed this notion of compartmentalizing the school because it would foregroundincompatibilities, contribute to further stereotyping of Aboriginal people, and focus on issues of worldviews rather thanthe more significant Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal sociocultural conflicts regarding land and Aboriginal families (1991).

While the issues of this debate may seem only to relate to bilingual school contexts in rural areas, it does highlight thedilemma of the majority of Aboriginal children in Australia who attend monolingual urban schools. Ian Malcolm haspointed out that for these Aboriginal English speaking children, there is no practical option of compartmentalization ofcultural domains (Malcolm, 1995a). For the urban Aboriginal child in particular, these cultural domains overlap in a rangeof contexts, namely school, and at a very young age, children are expected to make sense of and deal with theseconflicting worldviews. Robin McTaggart has pointed out that in relation to differences in cultural worldviews ‘[w]hatchildren find “confusing” is exactly where education ought to direct its efforts. In the psychology of learning the term“cognitive dissonance” is used to describe a crucial trigger to learning – an incongruity between what is already known(including correspondences) and some immediate experience’ (1988, p. 86). McTaggart argues for the need of localAboriginal community involvement in the schools so that they can offer suggestions on how these ‘dissonances’ can beresolved for the Aboriginal child in a collaborative, negotiated manner.

To address the problems faced by Aboriginal English speaking children attending monolingual schools, a ‘two-way’bidialectal approach to education is being developed in Western Australia through the ABC of Two-way Literacy andLearning Project. It connects with a number of research projects and teacher development programs through thecollaborative efforts of the Education Department and the Centre for Applied Language and Literacy Research at EdithCowan University. One such project was undertaken in response to the needs expressed by teachers of Aboriginalchildren. This teacher development project, called Language and Communication Enhancement for Two-way Education,was undertaken at Edith Cowan University through support provided by DEET National Priority Reserve Fund (Malcolm,1995a). Eighteen teachers who taught in English-medium schools from across the state trained as action researchers,collecting linguistic data in their own classrooms. The development of bidialectal education training packages availablefor external study offering university credit followed. This research project and other collaborative efforts have alsocontributed to the ongoing professional development program, resulting in the further development and implementationof a range of two-way bidialectal education strategies and initiatives.

International counterpartsThe ‘two-way’ bilingual programs in the U.S. are different from the bilingual and bidialectal programs in Australia. In theU.S. model language instruction usually involves two language groups having instruction and interaction in twolanguages: for example, Spanish and English. Such programs are designed to integrate language minority speakers withtheir native English speaking peers so that both groups receive content and language instruction together with an aim topromote academic achievement and language skills in two languages and improved community relations for both groups(Cazabon, Lambert, & Hall, 1993; Christian, 1994; Groesbeck, 1984).

In the bidialectal context, a ‘two-way’ approach to education was advocated by Gail Chermak, but she used the term‘bilingual’ rather than ‘bidialectal’ in order to call attention to the systematic differences between the language used by


African American children and Standard American English speaking children. Chermak recognized that the educationsystem did not take into account the distinctiveness of African American English which made it difficult for these childrento succeed in school. She maintained that the ‘one-way’ model under which the education system operated assumed thatchildren could easily switch from one dialect to another. She also argued that both White and Black children needed to beeducated together about the similarities and differences between the two dialectal systems (1976).

Other bidialectal programs have been operating in U.S. schools but not using a ‘two-way’ approach. Some successfulprograms have been operating in the schools in De Kalb County, Georgia (Harris-Wright, 1987) and in northeastern Utahamong the American Indian English speaking Ute school children (Leap, 1992). Both programs approach bidialectaleducation from a ‘difference’ rather than ‘deficit’ perspective, accepting and valuing the home language and culture.

Relevance to bidialectal as well as bilingual educationThe two-way approach to education continues to receive support for both bilingual and bidialectal contexts in a range ofsettings. The implementation of the two-way or both-ways approach continues to be used effectively in BachelorCollege in the Northern Territory, one of the first places where it was trialled (Eggington, 1992). It has been found to bea practical way of effectively addressing the needs of Aboriginal children in a variety of school situations in WesternAustralia (Rankin & Ramsey, 1991; Richards, 1984). For example, professional development packages have beendeveloped to provide support for two-way education programs for Kriol-speaking students in the Kimberley: FosteringEnglish Language in Kimberley Schools (FELIKS) (Hudson, 1992) and Making the Jump (Hudson & Berry, 1997). The two-way approach has been used in government as well as non-government schools such as the Catholic school system inthe Kimberley (Catholic Education Office Kimberley Region, 1987; Kimberley Catholic Education Language Team, 1988).

More recently the principles of two-way education have been implemented at the tertiary level. The principles are beingtaught in teacher education programs at Edith Cowan University (Malcolm, 1995a) and in a new program called theCUTSD program where university academic staff members learn about two-way approaches to use with universitystudents (www.ecu.edu.au/ses/research/CALLR/NEWSCUTSD/entry.htm). Also within a two-way bicultural educationframework, Nyerna Studies, a Bachelor of Education program at Victoria University of Technology, has ‘redrafted’ two-way learning into what it calls ‘two-way enquiry learning’ which uses two-way participatory learning and action researchstrategies (Hooley, 2000, p. 11). While not specifically a bidialectal program, it implements a bicultural approach toeducation in a range of areas in the program.

Two-way education and identityImportance of learning by way of first languageWhile some have argued that children cannot learn a language unless they are exposed to it, others have argued thatchildren can only learn in a language that they can understand. For many years school programs have operated alongthe lines of the first (maximum-exposure) assumption. But the success of this ‘sink or swim’ approach is neithersupported by statistics nor by research from a wide range of cultural contexts (McCarty, 1993). In bidialectal contexts, itis recognized that when the language of the classroom is an unfamiliar dialect, it can obstruct comprehension andinterfere with learning (Wolfram & Christian, 1989).

While the medium of instruction is important, Jim Cummins, a researcher who specializes in bilingual education, hasargued that the issue of learning through a second dialect or language is much more complex because some language-minority children have been able to succeed in contexts where the language or dialect of the classroom is not that oftheir home (1986). This is illustrated by research in sociology and anthropology which has shown that issues of statusand power contribute significantly to the failure of schools to promote academic success in minority-language students(Fishman, 1976; Ogbu, 1978; Paulston, 1980, all cited by Cummins, 1986). In studies of minority-language studentsaround the globe --including African American, Hispanic, and Indigenous American students in the U.S.; Franco-Ontarian students in Canada, Finnish students in Sweden, and Indigenous Burakumin students in Japan – the socialstatus of the languages spoken by these populations is seen to be an important factor in the disempowerment ofstudents, contributing significantly to their academic failure. In cases where these same language groups hadimmigrated to different countries, a change in the status of their language resulted and the students achieved academic success. This was the case of Finnish children coming to Australia and Indigenous Burakumin students goingto America where their achievements equalled that of their Japanese immigrant peers (Troike, 1978; Ogbu, 1978, citedby Cummins, 1986).


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The status of the minority-language speakers and their language or dialect is determined by the attitudes held bymembers of the dominant society. In societies where equal access to education is legislated and written into publicdocuments, individuals are often held responsible for their own failure because of their inability or unwillingness toaccess the benefits of public education (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1984, cited by Cummins, 1989). The issue of ownership ofthe problem was reflected in an investigation into teacher attitudes toward Aboriginal English conducted in WesternAustralia (Malcolm, 1996). Four different types of teacher responses were noted: (1) that students must learn toconform to the standard; (2) that students’ use of the non-standard is a ‘disability’; (3) that the language of thesestudents indicated that they were in the process of acquiring standard English; and (4) that the students’ dialect was animportant part of the students’ lives, particularly outside the classroom. In all but the last response, students are heldresponsible for the problem; the fourth response recognizes the complex speech ecology of Australia and the need for abidialectal educational approach to addressing the needs of Aboriginal English speakers.

Because schools are institutions embedded in society, the societal attitudes, values, and practices of the dominantculture are reflected in the attitudes, values and practices of teachers, principals and other administrators in theschools. Therefore, the academic success of language-minority students rests on the degree to which the interactionalpatterns in the wider society can be reversed within the context of the school (Cummins, 1986). It is important forteachers of Aboriginal English speaking students to seize the opportunity to address these issues inside the classroomsthrough their own interactions and practices.

Importance of building from known to unknownThe concept of building from known to unknown is fundamental to what effective teachers do on a regular basis whenplanning lessons which involve the meaningful presentation of new material. Teachers review what the students alreadyknow about the topic and then relate new material in the context of what is known. This practice is based on a theory oflearning developed by American psychologist David Ausubel called ‘Subsumption Theory’. In this model learnerssubsume or integrate new knowledge into their existing framework of knowledge. It applies to what Ausubel referred toas ‘meaningful reception learning’ (1963, p. 20) or the learning of new material through verbal or written presentations inschool settings. It does not apply to rote learning, experiential discovery learning or problem solving.

This kind of learning can involve a number of cognitive processes, including: (1) ‘cataloguing’ new information in terms ofwhere it fits into what is already known; (2) reconciling it with what is known, which may involve resolving ‘discrepanciesand inconsistencies’; (3) relating it to one’s personal experience, ideas, and language; and then (4) integrating the newinformation into what is known, which may require reorganizing the existing concepts (Ausubel, 1963, p. 20). Thistheoretical model shares common elements with other learning models such as Gestalt theories, schema theory(Bartlett, 1932 and others) and Bruner’s (1966) constructivist ‘spiral learning model’. This approach to learning isrecognized in a range of learning areas such as science (Campbell, 1993), mathematics (Cooper & Williams, 1997), andliteracy (Clay, 1986).

In terms of literacy, American psycholinguist Kenneth Goodman maintained that learning to read and write follows thepattern of natural language learning: a child progresses ‘from whole to part, from general to specific, from familiar tounfamiliar’ (Goodman, 1982a, p. 58). It is also the basis of the language experience approach to literacy, advocated byGoodman and adopted in some bidialectal contexts (Bachelor, 1976). It involves assisting children to write down theirspoken language, using their own grammar and vocabulary and then teaching them to read what they have written.Children are motivated to learn to read and write because it is purposeful, inherently meaningful and relevant to their lives.

In Aboriginal education ‘“[m]oving from the known to the unknown” is one of the most widely quoted maxims, and inAboriginal classrooms is one of the most widely underused principles of sound teaching’ (Harris, 1982a, p. 142). Oftenthe teacher assumes that a concept is familiar to her class, which may be true for her non-Aboriginal students, but notfor her Aboriginal students. Aboriginal English speaking students often construct a very different reality through theircultural lens, making it very difficult for them to make connections with what is presented in class. This applies not justto content, but also to learning strategies, processes and behaviours, ‘expectations, motivations, [and] interests’ (Harris,1982a, p. 142).

For example, the ‘unknown’ may include common classroom practices that teachers employ unconsciously includingthe use of ‘verbal instruction’, comprehension checks through teacher questions and student responses, and theapplication of ‘context-free principles’ in daily classroom learning activities (Harris, 1982a, p. 142). The use of ‘context-free principles’ is particularly true of teaching literacy or using text-based resources on topics far removed from thestudents’ cultural knowledge and experience.


Importance of recognizing existing knowledge and skillsWhen children come to school they have already developed a sophisticated communication system which has servedthem well in meeting their physical and emotional needs. The children adapt this language and ways of speakingaccording to the norms of the family and community (Goodman, 1982b; Heath, 1983). The language not only serves thechildren to operate within their community of speakers, but also within their own minds as they learn to understand andmake sense of their world (Goodman, 1982b; Vygotsky, 1986). Goodman advised educators that they should ‘capitalizeon this medium of thought and learning’ (Goodman, 1982b, p. 34) but cautioned them on the need to ‘help the learnerto build on a base of pride and confidence instead of negating his language competence in a cloud of shame andconfusion’ (Goodman, 1982c, p. 177). It is important to remember that the interconnectedness of one’s culturalknowledge, language and ways of knowing and doing things is very much tied to one’s identity. If these are notrecognized and valued, it can undermine the child’s self-esteem, self-concept and expectations of achievement.

Two-way education and powerThe right of Aboriginal English speakers to access power in the wider world throughstandard EnglishMost Australian Indigenous parents today want their children to learn Standard Australian English for a variety ofreasons (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1994), but mostly because they see it as a way to accesspower not only in the Australian context but globally (Nakata, 1999). Torres Strait Islander Martin Nakata, a researcherin literacy and pedagogy, maintains that this is not a new sentiment, but one that has been expressed by AustralianIndigenous peoples since colonization began (op. cit.).

As an advocate of English education, particularly for Indigenous language speakers, Nakata maintains that since theearly days of colonization when his people learnt about the educational standards of non-Indigenous Australians, theymade repeated demands that the government provide better educational opportunities for them. At times when this wasdenied them, they built their own schools; and when English teachers were not supplied, they hired their own. Nakataargues that it was not until recent international pressure, through the discourse of human rights, that theCommonwealth Government began to put pressure on state governments to improve access to education forIndigenous Australians (1999).

Nakata emphasized the need for Indigenous people to learn English so that it could be used as a ‘tool’ for accessingthe ‘political knowledge of Western institutions’ –health, education, finance, and politics – in order to take control oftheir own lives and futures (1999, p. 18). He asserted that Indigenous peoples need “a proper grounding in thelanguage of knowledges, and an education that can provide…a full understanding of how… Indigenous peoples arepositioned in/by them” (p.19).

In the bilingual context, Nakata minimized the concern for language death or assimilation, maintaining the view that oralIndigenous languages and culture will continue to be maintained without support and ‘coexist’ along side of English(1999, p. 14). This view is contested by other Indigenous educators such as Mandawuy Yunupingu who argues on behalfof the ‘double power’ that is available by maintaining both English and one’s own Indigenous language and culture.Yunupingu was the principal of the Yirrkala community school in Arnhemland until 1991 when ‘both ways’ bilingualeducation was implemented there. He is now more well known for his involvement with Indigenous band Yothu Yindi,but continues to support the concept of both-ways education. Yunupingu told the story of the Yirrkala school as anexample of how it was necessary to present the ideas of the elders in his community in a format that the Westerneducation system would recognize, i.e., using Western genres and Standard Australian English (1999). Another accountof the same events observed that it was not until the Yolngu staff action group of the Yirrkala group submitted and madepublic ‘well written’ documents that the white principal finally responded to the demands of the community because hesensed that there was ‘white involvement’ (Eggington, 1992, p. 89). Up until that point, the demands of the communitywere ignored.

Members of other communities, for example, the Aboriginal communities in the Yipirinya School near Alice Springs(Harkins, 1994) as well as the Aboriginal people in desert communities in South Australia (Clayton, 1996), haveexpressed a similar awareness of the effectiveness of using Standard Australian English as the language of power toaccess the benefits of an improved standard of living and to defend their rights.


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The equal right of Aboriginal people to recognize power in Aboriginal contexts which ismaintained through Aboriginal EnglishAlthough Standard Australian English is perceived to be the way to empowerment in the wider society, AboriginalEnglish remains the language of power in the Aboriginal English speaking communities. While Aboriginal English variesacross Australia in terms of some grammatical features and vocabulary, since the 1900s it has served as a linguafranca, or language of communication, when Aboriginal people from different parts of Australia have come together for avariety of reasons (Malcolm, 1995a). Since the 1950s it has also been recognized as an identity marker amongAboriginal people, and as such, a medium to promote solidarity and unity among different Aboriginal communities aswell as within a single community. In the U.S., African American Vernacular English is also recognized as an identitymarker (Rickford, 1999), and like African American Vernacular English, Aboriginal English maintains its link to identity byresisting attempts to conform to standard English (Malcolm, 1995a, 2000; Rickford, 1999).

Aboriginal English also provides the medium through which Aboriginal English speaking parents enculturate or socializetheir children and pass on Aboriginal knowledge and worldview (Malcolm, 1995a). Since the 1960s Aboriginal Englishhas also become a medium of literary expressions in both oral and written forms (Eagleson, 1982; Kaldor & Malcolm,1991; Malcolm, 1995a). There is now a growing body of vernacular literature in a range of genres written by Aboriginalwriters using Aboriginal English as the medium of expression.

Within the home and other domains in Aboriginal community contexts, the use of Standard Australian English is‘marked’, that is, it stands out as not conforming to the norms of the community. Sociolinguists recognize that aspeaker will instinctively choose a language or dialect according to the situation. This is referred to as situational code-switching (Wardhaugh, 1998). Code-switching is ‘a conversational strategy used to establish, cross or destroy groupboundaries; to create, evoke or change interpersonal relations with their rights and obligations’ (Gal, 1988, cited byWardhaugh, 1998). When speakers of Aboriginal English are together they use Aboriginal English as the preferredlanguage code. When they do not, it is noticed. Community members who attempt to use Standard Australian Englishwill often be challenged or teased for trying to talk ‘flash’ (Eagleson, 1982). As discussed earlier, Aboriginal English is abearer of Aboriginal identity and signals shared histories and values. Aboriginal English speakers are aware that to beincluded as a part of the group, receive the benefits of the association, and have the option of exerting influence orpower within that group, they need to use Aboriginal English to signal solidarity with the group.

The need for recognition of Aboriginal knowledge, skills and status by non-Aboriginalstudents and teachersCentral to the principles of two-way education is the need for there to be a ‘two-way exchange of knowledge’ withteachers learning to understand about Aboriginal ways of knowing and learning and vice versa (Malcolm, 1995a;McConvell, 1982). Until now it has only been Aboriginal children having to learn, in a ‘sink or swim’ approach, about onlyWestern knowledge using Western learning practices. The starting point here is for teachers to begin to recognizeAboriginal knowledge and skills, and understand the status that Aboriginal English has historically been ascribed in theschool by mainstream society. As noted by sociolinguist Peter Trudgill ‘the scientific study of language has convincedscholars that all languages, and correspondingly all dialects, are equally “good” as linguistic systems…[and that] anyapparent inferiority is due only to their association with speakers from under-privileged, low-status group’ (1995, p. 8).It is therefore important for the teacher not only to make an effort to learn as much as possible about Aboriginal English,Aboriginal knowledge and traditional ways of learning, but also to teach both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students(many of whom speak other non-standard dialects themselves) that the status of non-standard dialects is determinedby society, not by any inherent qualities of the dialect itself or those who speak it.


Principles of the implementation of two-way bidialectal educationReceptive and productive competence in Standard Australian English for AboriginalEnglish speakersWhile it is important for teachers to recognize and foster the valuing of Aboriginal English as the language ofenculturation for Aboriginal children, it is equally important to remember that Aboriginal parents want their children tolearn Standard Australian English as a means of accessing power in mainstream society. The goal of two-way bidialectaleducation is therefore to develop both receptive competence in Standard Australian English (listening and reading skills)as well as productive competence (speaking and writing), while continuing to value Aboriginal English as the language ofthe home and community. When developing receptive and productive skills it is important to recognize that linguisticinterference from the child’s first dialect will influence both comprehension and production ability (Malcolm, 1982).Nonetheless, it has been argued by some that teachers have a ‘moral obligation’ to teach the standard language, not toreplace the language of their home, but to add to it. If students are motivated with positive experiences to use standardEnglish, they will be able to make their own decisions about choosing to use it. But if they are not taught it, they do nothave the choice. It has been said that ‘we owe our students that choice, or we will have essentially cut them out of theconversation’ (Heller, 1994, p. 17).

Receptive competence in Aboriginal English for all studentsBoth Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students need to be educated about the reality of the relationships between socialdialects, standard dialects and power. Teachers need to explain to all students that Standard Australian English is thedialect of power in Australia because it is the language spoken by those in power, and as such serves as a vehicle toaccess power and economic opportunities. Students should learn that social dialects such as Aboriginal English andother non-standard varieties of English ‘are structured, complex, rule-governed systems which are wholly adequate forthe needs of the speakers’ (Trudgill, 1995, p. 8).

One way to accomplish this is to have teachers and students openly discuss these language and power issues in theclassrooms and analyze some Aboriginal English texts. Discussions of Aboriginal English words that have unique anddeeply historical meanings would enhance cross-cultural understanding. Analyzing the grammatical features ofAboriginal English and comparing it to other non-standard dialects as well as Standard Australian English would enablestudents to challenge the commonly held belief that Aboriginal English as well as other non-standard varieties of Englishare broken or incomplete forms of the standard. American sociolinguist Walt Wolfram, who specializes in non-standardAmerican dialects, has developed such a program in the U.S. to teach students about the grammar of non-standardAmerican dialects including African American Vernacular English and the non-standard English spoken in theAppalachian Mountains. The aim was to facilitate an understanding about American dialects and how non-standarddialects are not incomplete or broken language systems, but complex, systematic, rule-governed languages (Wolfram,1993). This kind of program can be challenging and fun for students. They become aware of the knowledge that theyhave already unconsciously internalized about the non-standard dialect, and try to articulate rules about the grammarsystem, and then test these rules on new data. It not only teaches them about language systems but encourages themto question the foundation which supports their attitude toward a non-standard dialect (and its speakers). By starting inthe classroom, teachers can begin to make changes in society’s attitudes and misconceptions.

Accommodation of Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledgeEffective teachers are already aware that different children have different learning style preferences and tend toapproach short-term objectives and long-term outcomes through range of strategies to accommodate all students intheir class. Learning to accommodate Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge is just an extension ofthis teaching methodology and can benefit not only Aboriginal children, but non-Aboriginal children as well.

For example, Stephen Harris has identified a number of traditional Aboriginal learning strategies that, with someconscious planning, can be adapted to the bicultural/bidialectal classroom. These include learning by observation, bydoing, by imitation, by personal trial-and-error, by real life performance, and by persistence and repetition. A teachercan capitalize on good personal relationships within the classroom through cooperative group tasks which cansignificantly motivate the Aboriginal children in her class. Aboriginal children learn more effectively if they canunderstand how the task they are working on relates to the whole end-product (Harris, 1982b, p. 137). This holisticlearning strategy enables children to see why they are learning something, or what they will be able to do with what they


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are in the process of learning. Many non-Aboriginal children also question why they are learning something. When allchildren can see the ‘big picture’, they are often more willing to participate. Accommodating Aboriginal ways of learningand knowing in the classroom context will not just benefit Aboriginal members of the class, but all children.

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Nakata, M. (1999). History, cultural diversity, and English language teaching. In P. Wignell (ed.), Double Power: EnglishLiteracy and Indigenous Education (pp. 5-22). Melbourne: Language Australia.

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138

139

Aboriginality, 65, 98

African Americans, 127, 130

alla (plural determiner), 96, 107

Anderson, Christopher, 88, 102

animacy, 122

Armstrong, F. F., 76

Arthur, Jay, 84, 96, 98, 102, 123, 124

ashes, 114

Assimilation (policy), 81, 82, 84

Austen, Tom, 75, 77, 78, 102

auxiliary (verbal), 93, 94, 96

Baines, Patricia, 80, 86, 102

Balanda (Europeans), 74

Bancroft, Bronwyn, 88

Bardi, 74

be (verb), 93, 96, 113

behind bars, 83, 84, 114

Bennell, Tom, 73, 78, 82, 84, 102

Bennelong, 76

Bepuka, D., 128, 135

Berndt, Ronald M., 73, 102

Berry, Rosalind, 130, 136

bidialectal education, 62, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137

bidialectalism, 101, 106, 129

big mob, 113

big wheelbarrow, 112

big words, 99

bigges mob, 107

bilingual education, 128, 129, 130, 135

billabong, 76

bin (past tense marker), 83, 95, 96, 107, 121

blackfellas, 89, 114

Blackfellas (film), 88

blending, conceptual, 109

boomerang, 76

boomers, 92, 93

boss, 114

both ways (education), 128, 129, 132, 135. See alsotwo-way education

Bran Nue Day, 84, 102

Brandl, Maria M., 73, 88, 102, 128, 135

bridaya, 114

Broome, Richard, 75, 76, 102

Brown, Cheryl, 109, 112, 124

budjari (Nyungar), 98

bung (Yagara for ‘dead’), 76

bungarra, 98

bunyip, 76

Cahill, Rosemary, 101, 102, 104, 137

camp (noun), 98, 107, 115, 121

camp (verb), 115

Canning, Alfred, 75

Carly, David, 78

categorization, 109, 110, 112-115, 127

cattle snake, 122

Cazabon, M., 129, 135

Chafe, Wallace, 109, 111, 124

chains, associative, 110, 114

chargin on, 113, 122

Chase, Athol K., 73, 102

Chawla, Saroj, 124

cheekin, 98

Chermak, Gail, 129, 135

Chi, Jimmy, 84, 88, 102

choo (interjection), 89, 98

Christian, Donna, 129, 130, 135, 138

claimin cousin, 114

Clayton, Jean, 124, 132, 135

clear, 123

clever, 123

code-switching, 62, 65, 66, 101, 133

example, 94

Collard, Glenys, 73, 82, 85, 88, 89, 91, 102, 104, 125, 126,137

communal (conversation mode), 99

conceptualization, 108, 111, 114

Confessions of a Headhunter (film), 88

consonant clusters, 94

Cook, Captain James, 72, 74, 105

Coombs, H. C. (‘Nugget’), 88, 102, 128, 135

corbon water, 112

corroboree, 76

cousin-brother, 98, 114

creole, 63, 90, 104creole defined, 79

Cruttenden, Kezia, 92

culture

adaptation, 84-88

continuity of, 88

oral, 64, 65, 84, 125, 135

Background PapersIndex

representation of, 126

suppression of, 81, 82

transmission of, 62, 64, 65, 82, 84, 125, 126, 129, 132, 138

Cummins, Jim, 130, 131, 135

Curriculum Framework, 126, 127, 135

Dampier, William, 74, 102

dangerous, 123

Darwin, Charles, 73

Davis, Jack, 66, 84, 88, 102, 126

De Kalb (County, Georgia), 130

deadly, 62, 98, 114

deficit (perspective), 130

Dhurrkay, G., 135

dialect, 61, 62, 63, 65,

dialect vs language, 63

non-standard dialects, 101, 133

social dialect, 90

difference (perspective), 130

dingo, 76

dinner, 114

dinner time, 107, 113

direct speech, 98

Dirven, René, 110, 124

discourse, 96, 97, 127

displacement, 77, 79

dissonance, cognitive, 129

Dixon, R. M. W., 74, 76, 102

Douglas, Allan, 82

Dreaming, 64, 73, 74, 105

Dredge, James, 78

drop, 107, 114

dugite, 76

Dussart, Françoise., 88, 102

e (personal pronoun), 89, 92-97, 119, 121, 122

Eades, Diana, 99, 100, 103

Eagleson, Robert, 124, 133, 135

Ebonics, 107

ecology (speech/language), 61-64, 124, 137

ecosystem, 62, 64

Edwards, William H., 74, 102, 103, 105

Eggington, William, 103, 128, 130, 132, 135, 138

English, Englishes, 61-66, 76, 77, 90, 94, 106-108

Aboriginal English (AE), 61-66, 77, 82, 84, 85, 88, 90-101, 106, 107, 111-123, 124, 127, 133, 136, 137

attitudes towards, 101, 107, 131

development of, 61, 90

text structure, 97

texts, 82, 86, 92, 94, 97, 117, 118-121

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), 107, 130,133, 134, 137

American Indian English, 130, 136

Australian English (AustE), 61, 63, 64, 76, 90, 94, 112,113, 114

British English, 72, 76

Hawaiian Creole English, 107

non-standard dialects of English, 76, 94, 98, 101, 133,134

Singapore English (‘Singlish’), 107

Standard Australian English (SAE), 61, 65, 66, 89, 90,93, 99, 127, 133

attitudes towards, 101, 107, 132, 133

Eora, 74, 75, 76

Everhart, R.B., 125, 136

exclusion, 128

Exile and the Kingdom (film), 86

existential (construction), 96

eye contact, 99

eye-glasses, 113

Fauconnier, Gilles, 124

feed (noun), 89, 92, 93, 95, 113, 114

FELIKS, 130

finger-ring, 113

fire-smoke, 113

Fishman, Joshua, 130

flash (talk), 89, 101, 133

flat, 117

Fletcher, C., 77, 78, 103

flog, 114

Foley, Fiona, 88

for (Kriol-influenced), 96

for liar (adv), 98, 122

Forrest River (massacre site), 78

Freeman, Cathy, 66

Fremantle, Captain, 75, 102

fricatives, 94

from, 62, 122

gaga, 98

Gal, Susan, 133

galah, 76


140

141

ganma, 122

Gaykakangu, N., 135

Gee, James Paul, 127, 136

Gegeo, David Welchman, 124

genres, 66, 90, 127, 137

Gerritsen, R., 74, 103

gibber plain, 76

Gibbs, Genevieve, 66, 101

gidgee (spear), 76

gilgie, 76

Ginibi, Ruby Langford, 126, 136

go (verb), 113, 114

Gondarra, G., 135

Goodman, Kenneth, 131, 132, 136

goona (Nyungar), 98

grannies, 114

Green, Neville, 75, 76

Gribble, J. B., 79, 103

Haebich, Anna, 80, 81, 103

half, 114

Hall, G., 129, 135

Hamilton, Annette, 99, 103

Hampton, E. N., 101, 103

Harkins, Jean, 98, 103, 129, 132, 136

Harris, John W., 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 103

Harris, Stephen, 99, 103, 128, 129, 131, 134, 136, 137

Harris-Wright, Kelli, 130, 136

Hatch, Evelyn, 109, 112, 124

Haugen, Einar, 108, 124

Hayes, Glenys, 126, 137

Heath, Shirley Brice, 132, 136

Heller, D.A., 134, 136

Henderson, John, 64, 66

Hercus, Louise, 79, 105

Hobbes, Thomas, 72

hold, 123

holistic learning strategies, 134

Holm, J., 63, 66

Horton, D. R., 73, 79, 103

Hudson, Joyce, 130, 136

humpy, 76

identity, 62, 81, 88, 90, 101, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133

imagery, 109, 111

initial-h, 94

interference, linguistic, 134

Jandamarra (Bunaba hero), 78, 104

jarnkurna, 98

jarrah tree, 76

Jones, Trina, 94

jump up, 112

Kaldor, Susan, 107, 124, 133, 135, 136

kangaroo, 93, 99, 114, 118, 121

karri, 76

kat wara, 114

kepa, 98

kickit, 123

Kimberley, 94

kinship, 73, 74, 86, 116, 128

Knight, A., 76, 104

Königsberg, Patricia, 90, 101, 137

koonac, 76

Koscielecki, Marek M., 74, 76, 90, 104, 112, 124

kulunkga, 98

Lakoff, George, 108, 111, 124

Lambert, W.E., 129, 135

language, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 106, 108, 109, 111

Aboriginal languages, 61, 62, 63, 64, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79,82, 83, 84, 90, 94, 98, 105

Awabakal, 76

connection to land, 73

Dharuk, 74, 76

ethnic, 64

iceberg analogy, 90

Kriol, 63, 79, 96, 105, 106

language death, 79, 82, 132

lexifier language (of a pidgin), 90

Roper River Creole, 79

sign language, 74

Torres Strait Creole, 63, 79, 105

language contact, 63

language of power, 133

language suppression, 82

Leap, W.L., 130, 136

liddle mummy, 86

liddle pop/nan, 86

lie, liar, 98, 107

linear (discourse structure), 97, 128

linear (time framework), 97, 125


lingua franca, 79, 90, 133

listener, role of, 99

little fellas, 97, 98

Locke, John, 72

longa (Kriol preposition), 96

Lyon, R. M., 76

Macassans (traders), 73, 74

Macknight, C.C., 73, 104

maintenance, culture, 64

maintenance, language, 64, 82

making up, 85

Malcolm, Ian G., 66, 74, 76, 77, 87, 90, 93, 98, 99, 101,104, 107, 112, 117, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,131, 133, 134, 135, 137

Malik, K., 73, 104

mallet tree, 76

manatj (monach), 114

mapping, cognitive, 108, 112

Marawili, M., 135

Markus, A., 73, 104

Marrayurra, V., 135

marri, 76

marron, 76

Mazrui, Alamin, 107, 124

Mazrui, Ali, 107, 124

McCarty, T.L., 130, 137

McConvell, Patrick, 128, 129, 133, 136, 137

McKay, Graham, 79, 103, 104

McPhee, Jack, 84

McTaggart, Robin, 127, 128, 129, 137

Mead, Anne, 99

metaphor, 111, 122, 123

metonymy, 111, 123

mia-mia, 76

Michaels, Eric, 99, 104

mimi, 98

missionaries, 75, 76, 82

Mltjarrandi, E., 135

mob, 85, 95, 96, 114, 122

Moffatt, Tracey, 88

monach (manatj), 114

moorditj (muditj) (Nyungar), 98, 114

Moore River Native Settlement, 80

Moore, George Fletcher, 76

Morgan, Sally, 88

morphology, 90, 94, 96

Morphy, Howard, 73, 88, 104

muddy, 98

Muecke, Stephen, 66

Mühlhäusler, Peter, 79, 104, 122, 124

mulga, 76

Mulvaney, D. J., 74, 104

mum mum, 114

munda-maranga, 84

Munns, G., 86, 104

Munro, Morndi, 84, 104

Muspratt, Sandy, 126, 137

Myers, F.R., 73, 104

Nakata, Martin, 126, 132, 137

Nannup, Alice, 84, 104

Narogin, Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson), 66

narratives, oral, 65, 117

Nash, David, 64, 66

negation, multiple, 98

Nero, Shondel, 107

networks, associative, 110

networks, radial, 110, 114

Neville, A. O. (Chief Protector, W.A.), 81

Nguluwidi, J., 135

ngun (brother, Nyungar), 94

Nhanta, 76

niggers, 114

numbat, 76

Nungalurr, H., 135

nyorn (Nyungar), 98

Nyungar, Nyungars, 75, 76, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87,89, 92, 93, 94, 98, 114

Nyurrmiyarri, Pincher, 128

Ogbu, J., 130

ole girl, 98, 114

on top of (preposition), 113

one-way learning, 125

onna, 107

Oombulgurri text, 94

open, 98, 114

oral history, 125

ownlation, 114

Palmer, Gary, 108, 110, 111, 124


142

143

Peel, Thomas, 77, 78

Phillip, Governor Arthur, 75, 76

phonology, 90, 94, 97, 122

pidgin, 63, 77, 79, 84, 104

defined, 76

NSW Pidgin, 77, 90, 105

Pinjarra massacre, 78

Pires de Oliveira, R., 108, 111, 124

place, 87, 96, 97, 113

Politeness, 86

polysemy, 110, 123

possession, 93

pragmatics, 90, 93, 98, 99, 104

pregnant for, 114

prosodics, 90, 97

Protection (Acts), 80, 82

Protection (policy), 75, 80

prototypes, 109, 114

quandong, 76

questions (speech acts), 96, 100

quick-way (adv), 94, 116

quokka, 76

race, 73, 80, 81, 104

Rajkowski, P., 84, 104

Rankin, E., 130, 137

reckon, 122

register, 65

restructuring (of pidgin), 90

revival, language, 64

Reynolds, Henry, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 84, 104

Richards, D., 130, 137

Rickford, John, 133, 137

Rijavec, Frank, 79, 81, 84, 86, 105

roast, 114

Rochecouste, Judith, 104, 107, 124, 126, 137

Rose, David B., 73, 105

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 72

Rraminba, B., 135

Rrumaliny, N., 135

Rumsey, Alan, 73

Sahanna, Eva, 86

Salvado, Bishop, 75

Sansbury, Bonnie, 100

Sansom, Basil, 73, 88, 105

scenario, 111

schemas, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116-122

event schemas, 110, 117

Family schema, 120

Hunting schema, 119

Observing schema, 117, 121

proposition schemas, 110, 116

Scary Things schema, 117

story schemas, 111, 117

Travel schema, 120

Schmidt, Annette, 73, 79, 82, 90, 105

segregation (racial), 80-81

semantics, 90, 93, 96

shame, 85, 86, 98

Sharpe, Margaret, 79, 105, 107, 124

Shaull, R., 126, 138

Shnukal, Anna, 79, 105

Shoemaker, Adam, 66

side, 95, 96

Singh, M. G., 126, 138

singing, 113, 115

sit down, 112

‘skimming’, 97

skunned, 92, 94

smash, 107, 115, 117

Snowdon, Warren E., 88, 102, 128, 135

solid, 98, 107

sound lengthening, 97

speaker, role of, 99

Spindler, G., 125, 136, 138

Spindler, L., 125, 136, 138

Stanner, W. E. H., 73, 105

stiffened out, 122

Stirling, Captain/Governor James, 74, 75, 78

Stolen Generations, 81

stop, 83, 85, 115

straight-way (adv), 94

supper, 114

surveying, 121

Sutton, Peter, 73, 79, 84, 102, 105

swearing, 114

Sweetser, Eve, 108, 110, 111, 124

syntax, 90, 93, 96

take over, 114


taken away, 81, 84, 85

Taylor, John, 109, 124

Thieberger, Nick, 76, 105

Threlkeld, Lancelot, 76

time, 87, 97, 109, 111, 112, 113, 125

ting or sing (pro-form), 87, 94, 95, 96

Tonkinson, Robert, 73, 105

too many (adjective), 95, 96

too much (adjective), 114

tormenting, 97

towsan, 112

Troy, Jakelin, 75, 76, 77, 105

Trudgen, Richard, 73, 84, 105

Trudgill, Peter, 133, 134, 138

Tucker, Tanya (Dorizzi), 100

tumble down, 112

Turner, Mark, 124

two-way (education), 62, 128, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137

defined, 128

unc, uncle, 86, 98

under (preposition), 113

unna (question tag), 93

up (particle), 92, 93, 116

up to (preposition), 113

Urry, J., 73, 105

us mob (plural pronoun), 90, 95, 97

values (cultural), 74, 82, 86, 91, 126, 128, 131

Verspoor, Marjolijn, 110, 124

waddy (club), 76

wadjela, 83, 85

Waller, W., 125, 138

Walsh, Michael, 73, 74, 99, 102, 105

waratah, 76

Ward, Glenyse, 84, 105

Wardhaugh, Ronald, 133, 138

warru (kangaroo, Nyungar), 93

-watha (Yindjibarndi suffix), 98

Watson-Gegeo, Karen Ann, 110, 124

weelo bird, 76, 87

white bread, 112

Whorfianism, 108

wicked, 62, 98, 114

Wilcox, K., 125, 138

Willis, P., 125, 138

willy-willy, 76

Wilson, Sir Ronald, 82, 105

winyarn (Nyungar), 98

wobbly-way (adv.), 94, 116

Wolfram, Walt, 130, 134, 138

Woorunmurra, B., 78, 104

worldview, 73, 77, 78, 82, 86, 89, 90, 91, 98, 109, 112, 125, 133

writing, 66

yabby, 76

yakka, 76

Yamatji, Yamatjis, 86, 97, 98, 124

yandy, 76

yarn, 117

Yarwood, A.T., 72, 105

Yindjibarndi, 76

Yirra Yarkin (theatre), 88

yongka (kangaroo, Nyungar), 93, 98

yorgas, 98, 114

Yunupingu, Mandawuy, 128, 132, 138


144

ways of being, ways of talk

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