When Christian missionary Lancelot Threlkeld first arrived in the colony of New South Wales he observed that many whites insisted that the Blacks had no actual language but simply made noises. He remarked that:
This was a convenient assumption, for if it could be proved that the Aborigines of New South Wales were only a species of wild beasts, there could be no guilt attributed to those who shot them off or poisoned them as cumberers of the earth.
While he was at Newcastle Threlkeld borrowed a tent in which, every day at first, he met Aboriginal people to talk about their language and their lives. When this crowded and smoky meeting tent (the men all smoked pipes around a charcoal fire) became too claustrophobic for the missionary’s taste he soon preferred going out hunting or fishing with some of the people, taking down words and meanings in an alphabetically paged notebook as he went.
The Aborigines soon ascertained my wish to be able to converse with them in their own tongue, and it afforded them much amusement to correct my blunders, point out my errors, not unfrequently ending with the unclassical reprimand of – “What for you so stupid, you very stupid fellow”. The women and children were the most patient in hearing and answering questions, the females especially in persevering to make me understand the meaning of a phrase.
In later years Threlkeld was to write sorrowfully of “the almost sovereign contempt with which the Aboriginal language of New South Wales has been treated in this colony” and of “the indifference shown towards the attempts to gain knowledge on the subject”. Famously, Threlkeld’s most famous linguistic assistant was the noted Biraban, usually known by the whites as “M’Gill”.
Even with the greatest care and best intentions, setting down words from unfamiliar languages can be very hard, and mistakes, easily made, can become embedded, leading to permanent errors of understanding. Threlkeld came up against many of these problems and often wrote about them. Once he asked a man to tell him the name of a location he could point to. He was told a word and wrote it down. Only later, when he himself used the word with other people, did he learn it actually merely meant “over there”. Another time he heard a man being asked the native name of some peaches he was holding. He gave the word “tarahkul”, but Threlkeld queried this, since peaches were a recently introduced fruit. The real meaning of the word was “to set the teeth on edge”. Whites at the Hawkesbury insisted that “cobbra” was the name for “head”, but when Threlkeld inquired deeply into the subject he found the word meant skull. Once a visitor to the mission asked Biraban the name of the native cat and Biraban replied “minnaring”. The visitor was about to write this down when Threlkeld pointed out that Biraban was simply asking the visitor to clarify the question.
Threlkeld noted too, that many things had multiple names, depending on different aspects. There were, for example, at least five words meaning water, even more for fire and four for the moon, depending on its phase. As for the kangaroo (a name that actually really only meant “large animal”), the people had “distinct names for either sex, or according to size or different places of haunt”. The word “kangaroo” is an example of what Threlkeld called a “barbarism”. These were words “which have crept into use, introduced by sailors, stockmen and others, who have paid no attention to the aboriginal tongue, in the use of which both blacks and whites labour under the mistaken idea that each one is conversing in the other’s language”. It might surprise modern readers to know that, as well as “kangaroo”, other barbarisms listed by Threlkeld include “‘boomerang”, “gunyah”, “piccaninny”, “waddy” and “woomera”.
Another observation of Threlkeld’s was that people from places hundreds of kilometres away often used fundamentally the same language as the people in the district where he had his mission, even though their speech sounded different to his ear. Sometimes, when widely separated groups first met, he noticed that it took some time before they were able to converse readily, yet they did. Again, when he had to visit Aboriginal prisoners in jail in Sydney he sometimes found he couldn’t understand them but his companion McGill was able to, and the prisoner could understand Threlkeld’s attempts at the language he had learned.
In 1838, in evidence to a Government committee “on the Aborigines Question”, Threlkeld remarked that:
The native languages throughout New South Wales, are , I feel persuaded, based up on the same origin, but I have found the dialects of various tribes differ from that of those which occupy the country around Lake Macquarie; that is to say, of those tribes occupying the limits bounded by the North Head of Port Jackson, on the south, and Hunter’s River on the north, and extending inland about sixty miles, all of which speak the same dialect. The natives of Port Stephens use a dialect a little different, but not so much so as to prevent our understanding each other; but at Patrick’s Plains [Singleton] the difference is so great, that we cannot communicate with each other; there are blacks who speak both dialects. The dialect of Sydney and Botany Bay natives varies in a slight degree, and in that of those further distant, the difference is such that no communication can be held between them and the blacks inhabiting the district in which I reside.
In 1857 Threlkeld, then living in Sydney, wrote that: “The native Blacks are so rapidly becoming extinct that the languages must of necessity, unless preserved by the functions of the press, become utterly lost to posterity.”
Thankfully, Threlkeld’s publications avoided a total loss. In 1827 he published his first pamphlet: Specimens of the the Language of the Aborigines of New South Wales. Next, The Australian Grammar was published in 1834 and his A Key to the Structure of the Aboriginal Language appeared in 1850. His Gospel of St Luke and accompanying lexicon written in the Aboriginal tongue, was his final publication and the culmination of years of work.
This translation of the Gospel of Luke into the language of the aborigines was made by me with the assistance of the intelligent aboriginal M’Gill . . . Thrice I wrote it, and he and I went through it sentence by sentence, and word for word, while I explained to him carefully the meaning as we proceeded. M’Gill spoken the English language fluently. I then proceeded with the Gospel of Mark, a selection of prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, with which to commence worship with the few surviving blacks; I prepared a spelling book; I had also commenced a Gospel of Matthew, when the mission was brought to its final close.
Under such circumstances, the translation of the Gospel by St. Luke can only be now a work of curiosity, – a record of the language of a tribe that once existed, and would have, otherwise, been numbered with those nations and their forgotten languages and peoples with their unknown tongues who have passed away from this globe and are buried in oblivion.
His Gospel, he wrote: can only be regarded by posterity as a specimen of the language of the aborigines of New Holland, or, as a simple monumental tablet, on which might be truthfully inscribed, as regards the unprofitable servant who attempted to ameliorate the pitiable condition of the aborigines and attain a knowledge of their language: – “He has done what he could”.
It will be noted that Threlkeld never used the name “Awabakal” to denote either the people of Lake Macquarie or their language.
In the 1890s, when Threlkeld’s pamphlets were long out of print and perhaps largely forgotten, Maitland schoolmaster John Fraser republished them – with many of his own elaborations, comments and alterations – in a book that also included other attempts at codifying Aboriginal languages from different parts of NSW. One of Fraser’s inventions was the name “Awabakal”, which he created from words recorded in Threlkeld’s lexicon and which was intended to mean “people of the flat surface” – referring to Lake Macquarie. The people among whom Threlkeld worked never referred to themselves by this name. Indeed, as he wrote:
There is no proper name for a tribe, all the persons returned are related to him by birth or marriage and therefore congregate together as one family for defence, assistance &c.” This group’s “usual place of resort” was defined as “Newcastle and Lake Macquarie. The land bounded by S. Reid’s Mistake the entrance to Lake Macquarie. N by Newcastle and Hunter’s River, W by the Five Islands on the head of Lake Macquarie 10 miles W of our station. This boundary, about 14 miles N and S, by 13 E and W, is considered as their own land.
Much of the information in this blog post comes from the two volume Australian Reminiscences & Papers of Lancelot Threlkeld, edited by Niel Gunson (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1974).
Thank you for writing about Threlkeld and his attempts to record the local language. I have both volumes of Threlkeld diary and find it fascinating reading
. I am sometimes irritated by modern attempts to replicate and translate the language. For example, the name Wangi Wangi is spelt with a G, but Lake Macquarie Council calls our library Wanji Wanji Library. Why? I ask.
Wangi residents can all recite the supposed meanings of the name Wangi Wangi: place of much water, place of many owls, place of many trees. Carolyn Rose, who read widely about local history wondered if it was named for the Wonde Wonde Pigeon, now usually called the Wonga Pigeon. She found records of the use of the name ‘Wangi Pigeon’.
As for the name of the local language as ‘Awabakal’ I suppose it was gifted by a white man, but now the local Aboriginal people use it too.
Do you know what happened to the play that was being written based on the interactions between Biraban and Threlkeld? We went to a presentation of it in its early form at Awaba House about 2010.