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 to set up the convict colony in Sydney on 26 January 1788 it numbered about 1350 people. There is little agreement on the precise figure. Governor Arthur Phillip said at the end of the second year that 1030 were landed. He also, not long after first arrival, estimated the local Aboriginal population around the harbour and in the neighbouring areas to be about 1500. The Aboriginals were overwhelmed and virtually outnumbered from Day 1.
The 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 ‘artificers’; there were 40 wives of soldiers and their children, as well as members of the Royal Navy to man the two permanent ships of the colony. These were the fleet flagship, the East Indiaman Sirius, and the smaller brig acting as a tender, Supply. Both remained when the nine merchant vessels, the transports that carried the people and provisions, had one by one all left to resume their normal shipping activities.
​
The Aboriginals first greeted the newcomers with wary cordiality as might be normally extended to unknown visitors. When trees began to be cut down and the intention of the arrivals to stay was made plain, relations deteriorated. The First Fleeters with their numbers and their guns and fishing nets soon made game and food hard to find. The way of life of the ages was permanently altered for the native people.
​
Within a year-and-a-half smallpox had devastated the local population—leaving almost untouched the Europeans with immunity conferred upon them by prior exposure.. In some communities a fatality rate of over ninety per cent was reported. In April 1789, dead black bodies were commonly to be found on the beaches and points of the coves of the harbour foreshores. 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.
Learning the language
It was essential that the new authorities be able to communicate with the indigenous population. In their attempts to do so they made some big discoveries. The first was that there was not a single language for the whole country.
Governor Phillip made attempts to acquire the language, first in December 1788 by capturing a local man, Arabanoo being the unfortunate detainee, who was supposed to learn English and then to teach the whites his own language. He proved not a great linguist. Still in captivity after six months, he too died of smallpox, on 18 May 1789.
​
While all of the marines and naval personnel would have picked up a smattering of words, 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 Lieutenant William Dawes, aged twenty-six.
William Dawes (1762-1836)
Dawes the Marine was an artillery man, and as such set up a defensive fortification consisting of several guns on what is now Dawes Point. This became known as Dawes Battery.
​
Dawes was also an educated man, a scientist or more particularly an astronomer, and had been asked 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 the necessary materials and he set up this facility on the same general location as his fortifications, and named it Maskelyne Point after the Astronomer Royal, his mentor. But it was his own name that was to stick to the landmark site, today dominated by the southern abutment of the Harbour Bridge.
​
When the authorities went on exploring expeditions on foot, it was 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.
​
Watkin Tench wrote in A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson [1979 edn, 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.
​
Dawes listened to the people around him; he associated with them; he learnt; he checked and amended; and he practised speaking the language himself. He recorded his findings in two small notebooks.
LEGACY UNFULFILLED
In mid December 1790, some clashes between the whites and the blacks culminated in the fatal spearing, by Pemulwuy of the Bidyigal clan, of the Governor’s gamekeeper, John McIntyre. Believing this attack to be unprovoked, Phillip ordered a punitive expedition to be 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. The scope of the mission was later reduced to capturing six natives, two for hanging and the rest for sending to Norfolk Island.
​
Dawes, after first refusing in writing to participate, reluctantly complied with the order. Afterwards, he 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 the turning point for him. When his fellow marines—including Tench—were relieved, leaving in the Gorgon on 18 December 1791, Dawes also departed for England, never to return. Phillip himself left a year later in the Atlantic, departing on 10 December 1792.
​
Dawes’ two notebooks ended up in the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London. To these notebooks have been attached another, possibly compiled largely by Phillip. If Dawes used the time on the slow ocean voyage back to England to prepare a more definitive grammar, the work has not so far been discovered. As a consequence we are left with his notebooks—so rich in detail yet so with so 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 fully conjugate one 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 [JRAHS 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 the Dawes notebooks.
Sydney Aboriginal Language
Some facts about the Sydney Aboriginal language are nevertheless apparent.
—Verbs had a stem to which endings were attached to indicate, as in Latin, tense and number.
—Tense: There was a past tense; particles conveyed aspects covered by the verb ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ in European languages. Past indicator: The letter or sound ‘dy’ in verb endings indicated the past tense.
Future indicator: Likewise the letter ‘b’ indicated the future.
—Nouns, too, had a stem and endings, to indicate up to a dozen ‘cases’. Gender, and plurals, were differentiated only if needed. Number: Unlike Latin (and English), the Sydney Aboriginal language distinguished between 2 and more than 2, though how it did so Dawes did not formally explain.
A variety of particles, and the manner of expressing oneself, conveyed nuances in meaning that in European languages are covered by articles (a, an or the), conjunctions (and, but), and prepositions (in, at, under, down etc.)
—Pronouns existed in free and ‘bound’ form as the table below illustrates.
​
Unlike in English (‘man bites dog’), words could be in any order because endings carried necessary information, but generally word order followed a pattern based on significance to the statement. Adjectives followed nouns.
​
The Sydney language, as with its speakers, was probably the first of the some 250 languages in the continent to be overwhelmed by the Europeans, and so to lose full fluent social validity. Nevertheless a limited usage persists, and, because of its being the first medium of contact with the Europeans, more of its words entered the English vocabulary than from any other Australian indigenous source. Some of these are:
dingo dog
dyin woman
waddy stick/club
waratah the flower
woomera throwing stick
​
Some place names (all present-day suburbs of Sydney) had particular meanings:
Berowra fish-hook, shell
Wahroonga when
Yagoona today or now
Yennora walking
​
TRIBAL ORGANISATION
The Dharuk 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 at least two and possibly three dialects were spoken:
—the coastal dialect, sometimes referred to as ‘eora’ (yura),
—and the inland dialect.
​
The common language means that the Aboriginal people in this area belonged to the Dharuk tribe.
​
[Map and text based on map by Jim Kohen.]
