• Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and names of Indigenous Australians who have died
The photograph on the wall of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre in Launceston was taken 167 years ago. It shows a group of people including the most famous Palawa woman, Trukanini, at a barracks at Putalina/Oyster Cove. They are survivors of Wybalenna, the barren Flinders Island internment camp where 300 Aboriginal Tasmanians captured by government-sponsored roving parties were exiled in the 1830s. All but 47 died.
Under their resolute gaze, Daisy Allan is speaking in a language that was painstakingly retrieved after the genocide of her people, her hands moving to emphasise the words’ meaning.
The spring winds are fierce and have set off Allan’s allergies. “Munathiya nimina,” she says to two women who come to the door. “Grass sickness, hay fever.”
Allan frequently speaks in the Tasmanian Aboriginal language, palawa kani, to other TAC staff. It’s part of her job as a language worker and, after 20 years of studying it, she is confident and fluent.
The biggest hurdle when she began learning the language was finding other speakers. Now they’re plentiful. There are language modules for every stage of life, starting with songs to sing a baby in utero. Schoolchildren attend weekly lessons. Resources are available to all Palawa people.
Unlike Allan’s generation and those of her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, Palawa children today are born knowing the sounds of their language. They are the first to do so for 150 years.
“It just goes to show the resilience and the resistance of Tasmanian Aboriginal people,” Allan says. “That we can stand strong against all odds, take pride in ourselves, refuse that push that we don’t exist, that we don’t have a language.”
Words passed down
As a child, June Sculthorpe would visit the Tasmanian Museum to hear her great-great-grandmother speak. Fanny Smith, who was born at Wybalenna in 1834, was recorded speaking and singing in the language of the north-eastern people towards the end of her life in 1899, and again in 1903. The wax cylinders have been damaged and the sound crackles but her voice carries through.
“You’d press the button and there she would be,” Sculthorpe says.
Ninety years after those recordings, Sculthorpe was appointed to lead a program to retrieve lost Tasmanian languages. It was a daunting task: the Aboriginal population was reduced from between 5,000 and 10,000 at the point of first settlement in 1803 to fewer than 100 by the late 1830s. When Trukanini died in 1876 it was widely and falsely reported that she was the last remaining Aboriginal Tasmanian.
“It’s written somewhere that with the death of Trukanini the government gave a sigh of relief,” Sculthorpe says. “It was sort of like, ‘Oh phew, we want to forget everything.’ All the wars and the deceit – it was never ever taught in schools.”
A valuable resource
Tasmanian Aboriginal words were recorded in the journals of more than 70 European settlers and explorers but the most extensive repository is in the journals of George Augustus Robinson.
Robinson was appointed in 1829 to manage a settlement on Bruny Island, where people from the south-eastern tribes had been interned. When 10 of the 19 people in that camp died, he proposed travelling around Tasmania to make contact with and later round up all other remaining tribes, eventually sending 300 to Wybalenna on Flinders Island. By 1938 just 82 people remained alive and in 1847 the 47 people who survived were moved to Putalina/Oyster Cove.
Throughout his travels Robinson recorded vocabulary, the names of Aboriginal people and tribes, and placenames, often attributed to a particular Aboriginal speaker. This makes his journals a valuable resource for reconstructing Tasmanian languages – even as they document what has been described as “perhaps the most horrifying example of genocide from anywhere in the world”.
Sculthorpe didn’t know any words in her language. Aside from vocabularies pulled from colonial diaries and single words that had entered the broader lexicon, she didn’t know that any remained.
But some family lines remembered. In the 1970s the linguist Prof Terry Crowley made recordings and captured a full sentence passed down among some of Fanny’s descendants: Tapilti ningina mumara prupari patrula/Go get a bit of wood and put it on the fire.
Crowley went on to assist the TAC in training language workers, shared his research and its conclusion: that though there had once been at least eight distinct language groups, there wasn’t enough left of any one of them to bring it back.
“So the community had decided to amalgamate, to get accurate and authentic words,” Sculthorpe says, adding: “We say it’s just like when our people were forced off mainland Tasmania and incarcerated at Wybalenna, with all different tribal groups together, and they all started sharing language and talking … it’s the way language can develop over time.”
The result, palawa kani, is a reconstructed language – a term Sculthorpe says is often misconstrued to mean it has been made up. Rather, she says, it’s the work of more than 30 years of dedicated historical and linguistic research by more than 30 people.
First, they analysed recordings of Fanny and others to isolate the sounds, then they developed a sound and spelling system complete with a reduced alphabet to remove duplicate sounds (using “k” not “g”, and “t” not “d”). Then they went back over the colonial recorders of Tasmanian languages to figure out what sounds they may not have been able to hear, and finally developed a method of documenting word histories to justify which words have been revived.
“We weren’t really thinking that we would ever revive a language,” she says. “I think we amaze ourselves sometimes. There we were – not only were we as a people on the brink of extinction – but here we are now, a thriving people with our own language.”
‘My life’s work’
Theresa Sainty joined the language program in 1997. She has left the TAC now – as has Sculthorpe – but they still split the word retrieval work. Having worked their way through lists of plants, stars and directions, they are now considering a mountain of words for different times of day.
Sainty’s family is descended from the Luna Rrala, women who were stolen as children and forced to partner Bass Strait sealers. Among them was her ancestor Pularilpana.
Her home, in the southern seaside town of Primrose Sands, is filled with heavily annotated, spiral-bound copies of 19th-century diaries and vocabularies. On the kitchen bench in front of us is the word history for Titima/Trefoil Island, which Sainty began working on in 2002.
Placenames are among the TAC’s most important work. Sixteen palawa kani names have been gazetted under the Tasmanian government’s dual naming policy. But the TAC has not submitted any new names since the Liberal government changed its policy in 2019 to allow words other than palawa kani submitted from other groups. Instead it has produced an online placename map for Lutruwita/Tasmania, which outlines the word history for each location.
Titima’s word history is just one page but some can run to half a dozen and are “just fantastic reads”, Sainty says.
“Even I’m blown away sometimes when I think ‘Fuck, that’s good work.’ We don’t come up with those words, we don’t come up with those placenames … it’s backed with solid research.”
Her favourite word, wanapakalali, means work. It’s an adaptation of pakala, meaning bullock – a sign of how rapidly language evolved after first contact.
Sainty is a “prolific writer” in palawa kani and English and is working on a PhD about language sovereignty and her experience working in the language program. “Writing songs, writing poetry, speaking at events, it’s activism,” she says. “And language is such a powerful and empowering tool to use in your activism.”
Palawa kani is “one huge research project that’s informed by a number of smaller research projects”, says Sainty – and every person who has contributed to it has played an equal role. “This is my life’s work,” she says.
Now to learn and speak
Copies of that work and historical journals line the walls of the TAC office belonging to the palawa kani language program coordinator, Annie Reynolds. She joined the program in 1993 when Sculthorpe left to take up a position at the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and as a non-Indigenous woman turned her efforts towards not the cultural business of word retrieval but on acquiring the primary sources needed to do the work.
“Now you can sit in your lounge room and it’s all digitised, you can sit there in your pyjamas and access them,” she says. “But we had to buy them … we needed the copies of the originals to see the spelling … We contacted all these places by fax.”
The vocabulary work is almost complete. Just a handful of words remain – excluding placenames, which require research ensuring that the word from the area’s language group has been correctly identified.
The focus has turned to work done by Allan and others to encourage the Palawa community to learn and speak the language – and to encourage non-Indigenous people to use palawa kani placenames.
Allan’s favourite is Lumaranatana, for the country around Cape Portland on the north-east coast. It was recorded by George Augustus Robinson in October 1830 as told to him by two women, Rramanaluna and Tanalipunya.
“That’s the country of the women who survived who make up today’s Aboriginal community,” she says.
