First visit to SOAS Twenty years ago, on Monday 3 April 1995, your Sydney-based amateur researcher into Australian languages called on ‘the School of Oriental and African Studies [SOAS: part of the University of London] in London in a vain quest to look up information on the Sydney Aboriginal language gathered by First Fleeter William Dawes’. It was known that they held the notebooks compiled by Dawes. A diary entry further records that: ‘however, one needed a letter of intro