Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies

13 ‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’: wordlists, songs, and knowledge production on the colonial Australian frontier Anna Johnston Colonial linguistic studies are complex and intriguing textual sources that reveal much about everyday life and knowledge production under frontier conditions. Halfway through her Kamilaroi vocabulary, the Irish-Australian poet Eliza Hamilton Dunlop recorded the phrase: ‘Yalla murrethoo gwalda[.] moorguia binna / Speak in your own language[.] I want to learn as I am stupid.’1 Dunlop’s self-positioning is clearly designed to put her Indigenous teachers at ease, setting the terms for her instruction. Yet as the phrase suggests, for Europeans in the Australian colonies, learning Indigenous languages could be an unsettling experience. Curious settlers placed themselves in awkward, dependent relationships with Indigenous people, whose motivations to engage with and teach settlers were various, but whose patience and precision were noted by those attempting to learn. So too their frustration and amusement: the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld described how Indigenous men such as his long-term collaborator Biraban ‘shew the greatest readiness in pronouncing again and again not without laughing at my stupidity in not understanding quickly’ when he attempted to learn the Awabakal language from Newcastle.2 As David A. Roberts notes, this was ‘a humbling experience, laden with rich, self-effacing moments that unsettled his cultural assumptions. … At a time when much opinion was being aired about the supposed innate deficiency of the Aboriginal intellect, Threlkeld was moved to remark that his Aboriginal tutors thought him somewhat dim-witted in not being able to easily attain their native language’.3 This chapter uses the archival traces left by two colonial women to explore the relationship between language study and knowledge production, paying particular attention to linguistic texts that reveal traces of cross-cultural relationships and the Indigenous intermediaries who engaged in knowledge- making practices across the contact zone. In 1838, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop arrived from Ireland with her family: she was already a published poet with Anna Johnston - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:23:05AM via free access 274 Indigenous/Diasporic an acute ear for language and broad reading, having spent a privileged child- hood reading philosophical, historical, and classical texts in her father’s library. Her interest in and use of Irish in her poetry prepared her for interest in Indigenous languages and forms of knowledge, and she had an acute polit- ical sense that was outraged by violence against Indigenous people. Her long residence at Wollombi, New South Wales enabled her to learn languages and to use Indigenous knowledge for poetic inspiration. Harriott Barlow’s poli- tics were less clearly expressed than Dunlop’s; however, her residence on the Queensland frontier exposed her to a variety of Indigenous people and their cultures. Between 1868 and 1874, she brought up her four children at her husband’s sheep and cattle station, which failed to thrive in the harsh envi- ronment. Barlow was an intelligent, educated woman: when the family’s finances declined and the bank foreclosed on the station, she established a highly regarded private girls’ school in the nearby city of Toowoomba, which she ran for nearly twenty-five years. During her time on Warkon station, however, she worked with local people to make one of the first language studies of the region, and she sent it to London, where it was published in the leading anthropological journal. Gender made a difference to the kinds of language collected and the Indigenous knowledge to which settlers could become privy: women’s collections were comparatively marginal at the time, and they were often missed among the large knowledge-aggregating projects of well-connected imperial collectors such as Sir George Grey and Sir Joseph Banks.4 Gender also influenced the conditions of learning and exchange. These intimate forms of exchange on colonial frontiers reveal the imbrica- tion of language collection, knowledge production, Indigenous engagement, and settler advocacy, and determined in what forms these issues emerged from the colonial south to influence imperial print culture. Linguistics and colonialism on the Australian frontier Language studies, like other forms of knowledge collection and dissemina- tion, were inevitably bound up with the process of imperial expansion and colonial governmentality.5 Colonised populations were marked, measured, and managed by their languages, even though many settler states sought to stamp out traditional languages and replace them with English, the lingua franca of commerce, education, labour, and the law across the British Empire. In Australia, James Cook’s Endeavour journals provide the first hundred or so Indigenous words collected, in the Guugu Yimidhirr language of Cape York Peninsula. Early attempts to learn Australian Indigenous languages tended to be undertaken by individuals marked by a personal curiosity and, often, close relationships with particular Indigenous individuals or groups. Anna Johnston - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:23:05AM via free access ‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’ 275 Yet because of the vast array and complexity of Indigenous Australian languages – estimated to be over 300 in the precolonial period – the task was difficult; the work was local and inchoate, and the effort made by some First Fleet officers to obtain the Sydney language beyond a purely functional exchange was soon abandoned, or else relegated to a personal interest pursued outside of official duties. On the colonial frontier, however, Indigenous people sought to communicate and sometimes to connect deeply with individual settlers, and some Europeans with a curiosity to learn recorded their findings. The reciprocal relationship between the colonial officer and astronomer William Dawes and the Eora woman Patyegarang is perhaps the best known early example of linguistic knowledge production.6 Arriving in 1788 with the First Fleet, Dawes was trained in scientific observation, and his employ- ment at the Sydney Observatory joined together his independence of mind and interest in the natural world: a set of skills that made him open to a short but deep study of what the Indigenous linguist Jakelin Troy has defined as the ‘Sydney language’. Although the late 1780s marked a ‘brief “golden age” for language study’, by the 1790s cultural contact between Indigenous and first settlers ensured that a nascent pidgin language was mostly used.7 A range of Indigenous people are named in Dawes’ account, including noted figures such as Bennelong. Dawes’ language studies – two notebooks, con- taining around a thousand lexemes, approximately fifty sentences, and four- teen dialogues – are the fullest provided by any of the early colonial officials.8 Troy notes that Dawes’ informants were among the first Indigenous Austra- lians to become familiar with the daily life of the English colonists, and that they were learning from Dawes reciprocally. Patyegarang’s engagements with Dawes are particularly notable for their interpersonal richness. As Ross Gibson suggests, accounts of Patyegarang’s motivations for her connection with Dawes often bear the traces of authorial desires and speculations rather than definitive empirical evidence, but across the scholarship the young Eora woman is easily recognisable as an intelligent and energetic interlocutor, who provided Dawes not only with words and phrases but with close, physical, interpersonal opportunities to learn language and negotiate its meaning in context. Dawes’ records reveal that Patyegarang was not averse to correcting his errors, and that pragmatic concerns such as access to food and resources were central to her purposes, as they were for other Indigenous people in Sydney.9 Dawes’ language learning was brief and intense: its scale was notable given his three short years of colonial residence. Given the rapid changes and displacement (both linguistic and social) wrought by colonialism, few field studies of the Sydney language were pro- duced until the late nineteenth century.10 Gibson reads Dawes’ language notebooks – only found in a London archive in 1972 – as prismatic and ever-expanding sources of insight into the momentous changes brought Anna Johnston - 9781526152893 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 07:23:05AM via free access 276 Indigenous/Diasporic about by close and regular contact between English and Indigenous worlds in the early colonies. Like Troy, Smith, and Gibson, I argue that linguistic sources provide rich information that reveals much about intimate exchanges and attempts at communication under colonial conditions, even as aspects of the sources remain puzzling and resistant to elucidation, on both sides of the encounter. Dawes’ studies reveal how his scientific training in observation affected his capacity to observe and learn from Patyegarang and other Eora people. Other colonists brought different motivations, but were no less reli- ant upon Indigenous knowledge and trusted guides. Indigenous motivations are harder to trace definitively, but we can make some conclusions drawing from textual evidence as well as from the gaps in the linguistic records. For Lancelot Threlkeld at Lake Macquarie in the 1820s, language learning was central to his evangelical message

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