A Tourist's Guide to the Sydney Aboriginal Language
Here follows an introduction to the Sydney Aboriginal language as translated by William Dawes, including word lists, interesting facts on the language, and insights into the history of the early white settlers and how these translations came about. This presentation of the Sydney Aboriginal language is indebted to the work of William Dawes and contemporary compilers of word lists, as well as to later professional scholars including Jakelin Troy, The Sydney Language (1992) and R.M.W. Dixon, The Languages of Australia (1980).
For more detailed information and analysis of William Dawes' recording of the Sydney Aboriginal language as translated by him see William Dawes notebooks and Jeremy Steele's thesis, The Aboriginal Language of Sydney.
Meeting the Sydney people: yura (eora)
When the First Fleet of eleven ships arrived from England to set up the convict colony in Sydney on 26 January 1788 it numbered somewhere between 1000 and 1350 people. Although there is little agreement on the precise figure, it is known that the First Fleet included some 778 convicts, of whom 192 were women. There was a guard consisting of four companies of marines (168 men) to provide order. There were, too, five surgeons, and various skilled craftsmen; there were 40 wives of soldiers and their children, as well as members of the Royal Navy to crew the two permanent ships of the colony. These were the fleet flagship, the East Indiaman the Sirius, and a smaller brig acting as a tender, the Supply. Both remained when the nine merchant vessels that had transported the people and provisions left one by one to resume their normal shipping activities.
Governor Arthur Phillip, not long after first arrival, estimated the local Aboriginal population around the harbour and in neighbouring areas to be about 1500, made up of a number of different tribal groups or clans.
Fig. 1 Four principal clans of about thirty around Sydney in 1788
Although the local people were virtually outnumbered and overwhelmed from Day 1, they first greeted the newcomers with wary cordiality as might normally be extended to unknown visitors. When trees began to be cut down and the intention of the arrivals to stay was made plain, however, relations deteriorated, for the First Fleeters with their numbers, guns and fishing nets had soon made game and food hard to find. The way of life of the ages was permanently altered for the Aboriginal people.
Learning the language
It was essential that the new authorities be able to communicate with the indigenous population and Governor Phillip made attempts to acquire the language in December 1788 by capturing a local man. The unfortunate detainee, Arabanoo, was supposed to learn English and then teach his captors his own language, but he proved not to be a great linguist. The newcomers nevertheless made major discoveries, realising that, in contrast to the small densely populated land from which they had come, there was not a single language for the whole country—even groups within a few days’ ride of the settlement did not fully understand one another.
Disease outbreak
Suddenly, within a year-and-a-half, smallpox had broken out, devastating the local population while leaving almost untouched the Europeans with immunity conferred upon them by centuries of prior exposure. In some communities a fatality rate of over ninety per cent was reported. In April 1789, dead bodies were commonly to be found on the beaches and points of the coves of the harbour foreshores. Naval first lieutenant William Bradley wrote in early May:
From the great number of dead Natives found in every part of the Harbour, it appears that the smallpox had made a dreadful havoc among them.
Still in captivity after six months, Arabanoo too was to die of smallpox, on 18 May 1789. Phillip needed another informant and ordered Lieut. William Bradley to seize someone. This he managed to do, on 25 November 1789 capturing Bennelong (aged about 25) and Coleby (aged about 35) in Manly Cove, and writing afterwards ‘it was by far the most unpleasant service I ever was ordered to execute’. Coleby escaped three weeks later, and Bennelong on 3 May 1970, going on to become Australia’s most famous historical Aboriginal figure, remembered in Bennelong Point, site of the Sydney Opera House.
Language groups around Sydney
The local language was spoken from the coast at Sydney west into the Blue Mountains, and from the Hawkesbury River to Appin in the south. Within this area, though, at least two and possibly three dialects were spoken: the coastal dialect, sometimes referred to as ‘eora’ (yura), and the inland dialect. This local language belonged to a group or ‘nation’, one of hundreds in the country. Today it is referred to as Dharug; no name was identified for it at the time.
Fig. 2 Tribes and languages around the wider Sydney region (map by Jim Kohen)
While all of the marines and naval personnel would have picked up a few words of the local language, and while some may have become moderately proficient, only one made a systematic attempt to record elements of the grammar as well as compiling a word list. That was 2nd Lieutenant William Dawes, aged 26.
William Dawes (1762-1836)
Dawes the marine had been directed to act as officer of artillery, and as such he set up a defensive fortification consisting of several canons on a harbourside point some distance from the settlement, which became known as Dawes’ Battery. Dawes had received a sound education, and was interested in science and more particularly in astronomy. Prior to his leaving England he had been asked, upon his arrival in Botany Bay, to establish an observatory from which to study and record a comet last seen in 1661, expected in the southern skies in 1789.
He had been provided with equipment to do so and he set up this facility in the same area as his fortifications. He named it Maskelyne Point after the Astronomer Royal, his mentor, but it was his own name, Dawes, that was to stick to the site, today dominated by the southern abutment of the Harbour Bridge. This is where he lived, rather than with the others in Sydney Cove.
When the authorities went on exploring expeditions on foot, it was the meticulous Dawes who recorded distance by counting the paces, all day long. And it was Dawes the humanitarian who took the keenest interest in the Aboriginal population and their language. He listened to the people around him when they came to his little house. He learnt; he checked and amended; and he practised speaking the language himself. He recorded his findings in two small notebooks. The most notable of the numerous informants who were to visit him was a teenage girl named Patyegorang.
Fig. 3 Dawes’ notebook ‘a’ featured model verbs; notebook ’b’ contained vocabulary: nouns, verbs and sentences. All pages of the Dawes’ notebooks, and a third Anon notebook, can be viewed at the School of Oriental and African Studies website
Captain Watkin Tench of the marines wrote about the language in A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson [Library of Australian History, 1979, p. 291]:
Of the language of New South Wales I hoped to have subjoined to this work such an exposition . . . but the abrupt departure of Mr Dawes . . . precludes me from executing this part of my original intention, in which he had promised to cooperate with me; and in which he had advanced his researches beyond the reach of competition.
AN UNFULFILLED LEGACY
In mid December 1790 some clashes between the newcomers and the local people culminated in the fatal spearing, by resistance leader Pemulwuy of the Bidyigal clan, of the Governor’s gamekeeper, John McIntyre, who had come to be dreaded and hated by Bennelong and his contemporaries. Presuming this attack to be unprovoked, Phillip ordered a punitive expedition to be undertaken, led by Captain Watkin Tench. This originally had the gruesome aim not only of capturing two of the Aboriginals but of returning with the heads of ten others in bags to serve as a lesson to them. The scope of the mission was later reduced, on Tench’s suggestion, to capturing six Aboriginals, two for hanging and the rest for sending to Norfolk Island.
Dawes, after first refusing in writing to participate, reluctantly complied with the order. He later expressed his regret to Phillip at having done so, and made it clear that he would not take part in any such future expedition. This repudiation of authority was grounds for a court martial, to which he would have been subjected had he not been an officer of the marine forces. It was to prove a turning point for the worse for him.
When Dawes’ fellow marines were relieved, departing for England in the Gorgon on 18 December 1791, Dawes too left the colony, never to return. A year later, on 10 December 1792, Phillip too departed, in the Atlantic.
Dawes’ two notebooks ended up in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, where they were rediscovered—and their significance realised—nearly two centuries later, in 1972. To these notebooks had been attached another, known as the Anon notebook, possibly compiled largely by David Collins, judge advocate and secretary of the colony.
If Dawes used the time on the slow ocean voyage back to England to prepare a more definitive grammar, this work has not so far been discovered. We are left with his notebooks— rich in detail yet with many tantalising holes. How could he have developed a system for recording sounds and progressively refined it without returning to the start to apply it consistently? How could he have not adjusted earlier spellings as he developed his transcription criteria? How could he have made provision for conjugating a few verbs in the present, past and future tenses, but not have provided in the notebooks a single fully conjugated example, in the present and past (although three are provided in the future)? How could he have failed to decline a single noun fully in its several cases?
Prof. G.Arnold Wood wrote [Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society Vol. 10, 1924]:
There is no man among the founders who ought to have given us so much information about himself and his views as Lieutenant Dawes, and there is no man among them who has given so little. He was the scholar of the expedition, man of letters and man of science, explorer, map maker, student of language, of anthropology, of astronomy, of botany, of surveying, and of engineering, teacher and philanthropist. The duty to posterity of such a man, in such singular circumstances was that he should be always writing, and in fact he wrote nothing at all that can now be read.
Wood did not then know about Dawes’ notebooks.
The Sydney language
There is no recognised name for the language spoken in Sydney at the time of the First Fleet’s arrival although the writer has called it Biyal Biyal from at least one record identifying it as such, following the practice of Australian Aboriginal language names being based on the duplicated word for ‘no’ (biyal in Sydney).
In spite of the shortcomings in Dawes’ notebooks alluded to above, from them some basic facts about the language spoken in Sydney in 1789 can be determined.
Verbs had a stem to which endings were attached to indicate, as in Latin (and English), tense.
Past indicator: The letter or sound ‘dy’ in verb endings indicated the past tense.
Future indicator:‘b’ indicated the future.
Other endings conveyed aspects of the verb (continuing, i.e. ‘-ing’; completed or habitual) and more. There was no direct equivalent of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ of European languages.
Nouns also had a stem together with endings for up to a dozen ‘cases’, some being featured in the tables following. There was some particle duplication among these cases. Gender, and plurals, were differentiated only if needed.
Pronouns existed in ‘free’ (standalone) and ‘bound’ (attached as a suffix) forms as the tables following illustrate.
Unlike Latin (and English), the Sydney language distinguished ‘number’ between two and more than two (we-two/we-all, you-two/you-all, they-two/they-all), though Dawes did not formally explain how.
Various particles or endings conveyed nuances in meaning, which English and other European languages do by means of prepositions (in, at, under, down etc.), articles (a, an or the), conjunctions (and, but) and word order.
Words in Biyal Biyal, in fact, could be in any order (unlike in English, where ‘dog bites man’ and ‘man bites dog’ mean different things), because endings carried the necessary information, but generally word order followed a pattern based on significance to the statement.
Although Biyal Biyal was the first of the continent’s many languages to be overwhelmed and so to lose full fluent social validity as its speakers were decimated, nevertheless a limited usage persists. Owing to its being the first medium of contact with the Europeans, more of its words have entered the English vocabulary than from any other Australian indigenous source.
Some of these words are:
dingo dog wallaby animal
dyin woman wombat animal
geebung plant waratah plant
waddy club, stick woomera throwing stick
As is the case across Australia, in today’s Sydney many suburb and street names are words from the local Aboriginal language. Some Sydney suburb names had particular meanings:
Berowra shell, fishhook Wahroonga when
Chullora ash Yagoona today, now
Mulgoa swan Yennora walking