The hidden universe of Australia’s own languages

I’ve travelled around much of Australia, by foot, by plane, by train and by bus, but mostly by car. As I travelled across all those kilometres and many decades, I never realised that, without ever knowing, I would be silently crossing from one country into another, while underneath the surface of the landscape flashing past, languages were changing like the colour and shape of the grasses or the trees. The parallel universe of Indigenous languages is unfortunately an unexpected world little-known to most Australians.

For almost seven years I worked with hundreds of Indigenous community language activists, some professionally trained in languages, most not, who were working day and night to bring their languages back into everyday use. If they stumbled across a single missing word – in some library archive or vanished book ­ – the excitement was palpable.

'If the language activists taught me one thing it was that underneath the surface language was everywhere and in everything'

It was like finding a long-lost relative. Words for sister, brother, mother, father, long thought lost, suddenly leapt out at them. Ironically, often it was the missionaries, most interested in streaming a message about their religion from English who codified and recorded the local languages and, as a result, laid an unwitting basis for this later work.

Big Talk One Fire Festival, Cairns 2013 - 'there were 250 languages in Queensland alone'

The process these languages activists are trying to reverse – the decrease in the use of the Australia’s own languages over many generations – did not happen spontaneously. As Australia was progressively settled it was common practice to discourage or actively suppress people’s use of their ancestral languages.

If the language activists taught me one thing it was that underneath the surface language was everywhere and in everything.