The Narinyiri language area is in the south-east corner of South Australia, shown orange on the accompanying map. It gained notoriety in 1994 when, at its western end, a proposed bridge from the mainland to Hindmarsh Island in the mouth of the River Murray was objected to by the local Aboriginal people because one of the abutments would have been built on special land connected with ‘secret women’s business’. After government investigation the bridge was built anyway.   Two E

At the end of March 2025 Your Amateur Researcher travelled with Aurora Coach Tours on a trip lasting about ten days to South Australia's Flinders Ranges, joining the coach in Adelaide. While the main destination was the Flinders Ranges, there were places and things of interest to see on the way. First urban, then outback, Australia rolled by as the coach gradually worked its way northwards past buildings, farmland, fields, transmission lines and occasional power stations, exp

What are the Bayala databases? The Bayala databases  are a set of relational databases containing words and sentences in Aboriginal languages from across the country. In the databases, words appear in full and also as broken up into their stem and one or several suffixes (and sometimes prefixes). The databases began simply as lists of Aboriginal words and their corresponding English meanings. Since then they have become increasingly complex, and now provide much more. To give

Who was Mathews? One of the principal figures in the recording of Aboriginal languages, particularly in the Sydney region, was Robert Hamilton Mathews (1841-1918), originally from near Goulburn in New South Wales. He became a surveyor, a post that took him to different parts of the country, and, having an interest in the indigenous people, he had the opportunity to make contact with people over a wide area. He recorded his findings in notebooks. From these he wrote academic p

Dieri is an Aboriginal language once spoken to the east of Lake Eyre in Cooper Creek country  in the Sturt Stony Desert in north-west South Australia. In 1874 a 51-page text, “The Dieyerie tribe of Australian Aborigines”, by local resident Samuel Gason, was published.  Information from < https://www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/gason.htm > reveals that Gason, in 1864 in his early twenties, accepted a position in the South Australian police force and was posted to Lake Hope,