Winter 2004

Talking History

Word games for historians

Why did it take nearly two centuries for quoll, a word recorded by Joseph Banks in 1770, to be accepted into mainstream Australian English? BRUCE MOORE discusses the correlation between the adoption of Australian words of Aboriginal origin and the development of Australian culture.

Histories come in many forms. At the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University, we are interested in the histories of Australian words. By means of quotations from books, diaries, newspapers, magazines and so on, we provide evidence for the historical development of Australian words and meanings. In turn, these words provide insights into Australia’s historical and cultural development.

In the early days of European settlement (1788–1850), Australian English borrowed some 400 words from more than 80 Aboriginal languages. This may seem a large number, but the semantic range of the words is very narrow. They are primarily nouns, and most refer to the physical world—words for new fauna (dingo, wallaby, wombat) and new flora (kurrajong, mulga, waratah), for features of the environment (bombora, gibber, gilgai) and for implements (boomerang, nulla nulla, woomera). The borrowed words do not suggest a close engagement with the cultures of the Indigenous peoples. They are the typical ‘borrowings’ of a politically and culturally dominant invader. They are not so much ‘borrowed’ as ‘taken’.

There are a few further ‘takings’ in the second half of the nineteenth century, reflecting the fact that the frontier was late in moving to some areas. Thus alcheringa (Dreamtime) is not recorded until 1897, but this merely reflects the lateness of the work of anthropologists among the Arrernte people of central Australia.

In addition to the borrowings from Aboriginal languages, many English words were created to describe Aboriginal life. Most of these appeared in the nineteenth century: bark canoe (1830), country (1843), bullroarer (1848), point the bone (1884), bush tucker (1895) and bark painting (1897). In the first 60 years of the twentieth century there were very few such terms created; the smattering includes fringe-dweller (1959), sacred site (1933) and x-ray art (1943). This points to the prevailing hegemonic view in the first half of the twentieth century—it was assumed that Australia would be a monolingual and monocultural society, and that Aborigines would be ‘assimilated’; Aboriginal languages would die, and Aboriginal culture would be remembered through the grainy black-and-white films of anthropologists.

At the end of the twentieth century, the report card, however, as reflected in the lexicon, was showing a different story. From the late 1960s there was a new influx of words into Australian English from Aboriginal languages and culture. Our records at the Centre reveal that 1970 to 2000 has been the most productive area for the creation of new words in Australian English.

Some of the new words are ‘language’ words. In Western Australia, for example, there has been a strong move to use Indigenous names for flora and fauna. The grass-tree or xanthorrhoea is now often referred to as the balga (from the Nyungar language of south-west Western Australia), and the recently identified rock wallaby Petrogale burbidgei of the Kimberley is called the monjon (from the Wunambul language of the north Kimberley). The increasing interest in bush tucker has meant that the Alyawarr word akudjura for ‘bush tomato’ has found its way into the menus of big-smoke restaurants. The name Uluru has now completely replaced Ayer’s Rock, and Kata Tuta has now almost completely replaced the Olgas. As terms for ‘Aboriginal person’, Koori (New South Wales and Victoria) and Murri (south and central Queensland) entered mainstream Australian English during the 1980s. In the following two decades many similar regional names came to be used: Nyoongah in the Perth area, Wongi in the Kalgoorlie area, Bama in north Queensland, Nunga in southern South Australia. And there are many others.

These new words undoubtedly reflect significant changes that were taking place in Australian society. The word quoll (from the Guugu Yimidhirr language) was recorded by Joseph Banks in 1770 when the Endeavour was beached for repairs near Cooktown, but for most of their white history the various members of the genus Dasyurus were known as native cats. It was only in the 1970s that Australian English began the process of discarding the absurd appellation native cat and adopting the indigenous quoll. This suggests that while the influx of new words parallels the development of Aboriginal political and cultural activism, it also goes hand in hand with an increasing interest in Aboriginal languages and culture on the part of non-indigenous Australians. The first wave of borrowing from Aboriginal languages was linguistic appropriation. This new wave of borrowings from Aboriginal culture reflects a very different relationship.

Many of the new words are English, but English as processed through Indigenous culture and politics. In 1964 the term ‘land rights’ is first heard in Australian English. In the late 1960s the outstation movement began. This occurred in northern and central Australia with groups of Aborigines moving away from large centres back to their traditional countries, although maintaining links with the large centre for supplies and services. The community itself was called an outstation, by analogy with the grazing property term, where there was often a subordinate station some distance from the main establishment. By the mid 1970s outstation and outstation movement had been largely replaced by the more accurate homeland and homeland movement. Other terms include: Aboriginal tent embassy, Aboriginal flag, land council, traditional owner, Invasion Day, Aboriginality, Aboriginalisation, Aboriginalise, Mabo, native title, stolen generation, Wik, and Sorry Day. Here, then, is a series of culturally and politically significant terms, many of them attributable to Aboriginal activism.

At the same time there was a resurgence of interest in Aboriginal culture. Typical of this resurgence is, for example, the creation of the Shepparton Aboriginal Keeping Place in Victoria. A keeping place is an Aboriginal cultural centre which has the primary purpose of ‘keeping’ the culture preserved (as distinct from the European term ‘museum’ which typically enshrines the past). Such keeping places also act as community centres. They are sometimes called living cultural centres. Dreamtime and dreaming, translations from the Arrernte word altyerre, were well established in Australian English by the 1960s, but as understanding of Aboriginal culture increased, terms such as dreaming track (or path) to describe the path followed by a dreamtime being through the landscape, entered the language. This dreaming track may also be called a song line. The dreamtime beings may be called ancestor spirits. In central Australia the Pitjantjatjara word tjukurpa meaning ‘Dreaming, Law’ is gradually replacing the English term. Smoking ceremonies, in which smoke is used for ritual purposes, especially after death, are mentioned in the early literature, but in the 1990s the term moved into mainstream Australian English. The terms saltwater people and freshwater people are now commonly heard to describe an Aboriginal people who live by the sea or along inland watercourses.

As the frontier is pushed back, as the past is recovered, as the present is filled out with living cultures and as the physical and linguistic maps are rewritten, Australian English is registering a profound change of attitude towards its Indigenous peoples, just as those Indigenous peoples are asserting their place in the lexicon of Australian English. The study of the words and meanings that have been generated within Australian English is one of Australia’s most significant histories. This brief survey of some of the words generated by Indigenous peoples gives an indication of how such histories might be pursued.

Bruce Moore is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at the Australian National University.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au