Aboriginal search for Respect

Aboriginal Search for Respect

Before extensive European settlement, there were over 250 Aboriginal languages. of which fewer than twenty are still in daily use by all age groups. About 110 others are spoken exclusively by older people. At the time of the 2006 census, 52,000 indigenous Australians, representing 12% of the indigenous population, reported that they spoke an indigenous language at home.

The Wiradjuri people are a group of Aboriginal Australian people from central New South Wales, united by common descent through kinship and shared traditions. The Wiradjuri Nation is geographically the largest indigenous nation within New South Wales and it's probably the largest in terms of population. Its capital is Sydney. Inland are the rugged Blue Mountains, rainforests and outback towns where opals are mined. Along the coastline are long surfing beaches. The Hunter Valley region, in the north, has dozens of wineries.

Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri elder of Australia's second-largest Aboriginal community. Grant is one of only a handful of people who still speak the tribal language, also called Wiradjuri. The language nearly died out in the 20th century, when Aboriginals could and would be jailed for speaking their native tongue in public. Stan Grant is a famous Wiradjuri elder of Australia's second-largest Aboriginal community As a child, he scorned his grandfather’s ways. He was embarrassed to be black. By the time he was 17, in 1957, his grandfather had died, and he had already dropped out of school, left home and found a job on the railways. Soon, he moved from a small town to Sydney, where he says he drank a lot, got a tattoo of a roughly drawn dagger and eventually found himself in jail. It was his wife, Betty, now 73, who turned his life around. After marrying in August 1962, they spent several weeks living out of a shell of a car on the Aboriginal Three Ways Mission on the fringe of Griffith, in central New South Wales.

Mr. Grant soon found a job at a sawmill, and although an accident mangled two fingers of his left hand, it was steady work. He and his wife started a family. Around that time, Aboriginal activists began agitating for civil rights. In 1965, Charles Perkins, the first Aboriginal to attend the University of Sydney, led 35 student protesters on a Freedom Ride bus tour around outback country towns. They were pelted with gravel and harassed as they went from small town to small town, where they called for an end to segregated seating on buses and in theaters. They demanded equal service in shops and hotels, and they wanted Aboriginal children admitted to municipal swimming pools with white children. Six years later, Neville Bonner, a leader from an Aboriginal rights organization, became the first Aboriginal to gain a seat in Australia’s Parliament, filling a Senate vacancy left by a Queenslander who had resigned.

With the help of these small civic changes, Mr. Grant, whose formal education ended at age 15, managed to navigate a way forward for himself and his family. He first found work in Canberra helping Aboriginal children who had skipped school. Around the same time, there was a push to document Aboriginal culture and language, which was rarely written down. As one of the few who knew Wiradjuri language, he was approached about writing it down. That eventually led him to teaching his language and writing “A New Wiradjuri Dictionary,” published in 2005.

“I was told when you revive a lost language, you give it back to all mankind,” he said, sitting in his kitchen, not far from where the kingfishers darted across the Murrumbidgee.

“We were a nothing people for a long time. And it is a big movement now, learning Wiradjuri. I’ve done all that work. I’ve done all I can.” A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2016, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: I still speak the tribal language called Wiradjuri. The language nearly died out in the 20th century, when Aboriginals could be jailed for speaking their native tongue in public. Lloyd Dolan, a Wiradjuri lecturer who has worked with Mr. Grant, said elders took risks teaching Wiradjuri to their children. Mr. Dolan also learned Wiradjuri from his grandfather. His mother forbade him to speak it at home. “There was a real fear that the children would be taken away if authorities heard kids speaking the language,” Mr. Dolan, 49, said from his office at Charles Sturt University. “The drive to assimilate Aboriginals into white society was systemic.” Aboriginal people had no right to vote in elections before 1962, and they were counted as wildlife until a change to Australia’s Constitution in 1967. The Wiradjuri language was effectively extinct, but attempts were made to revive it, with a reconstructed grammar, based on earlier ethnographic materials and wordlists and the memories of Wiradjuri families, which is now used to teach the language in schools. This reclamation work was originally propelled by elder Stan Grant and John Rudder who had previously studied Australian Aboriginal languages in Arnhem Land.

The Wiradjuri language is taught in primary schools, secondary schools and at TAFE in the towns of Parkes and Forbes & Condobolin. Northern Wiradjuri schools such as Peak Hill, Dubbo (several schools), Narromine, Wellington, Gilgandra, Trangie, Geurie are taught Wiradjuri by AECG Language & Culture Educators. All lessons include both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. As of 2017 the language is also being taught in Young where it has been observed as having a positive impact on the number of pupils who self-identify themselves as Aboriginals. The Forbes Wiradjuri Dreaming Centre (WDC) is an iconic project initiated by the Forbes Wiradjuri Community to promote Wiradjuri culture and stories.The Centre is a

unique hub for educating the community and regularly hosts cultural events, meetings and workshops conducted largely by enthusiastic and dedicated local volunteers. Around the Centre you will find several totem poles telling the cultural stories from this remarkable community and a yarning circle and sand dance ring as well as interpretative signage featuring aspects of Wiradjuri culture. On the shoreline of adjacent Lake Forbes near the WDC is a bronze statue by artist Brett ‘Mon’ Garling entitled “Family Matters”. This breathtaking piece features two local women with child returning from gathering food and is an iconic component of the work undertaken between the Forbes Arts Society and the Wiradjuri Dreaming Centre committee.

Two Wiradjuri women with child coming back from gathering fishshells. A progressive revival is underway, because the Wiradjuri language is taught in primary schools, secondary schools and at TAFE in the towns of Parkes and Forbes & Condobolin. Northern Wiradjuri schools such as Peak Hill, Dubbo (several schools), Narromine, Wellington, Gilgandra, Trangie, Geurie are taught Wiradjuri by AECG Language & Culture Educators. All lessons are given to both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. As of 2017 the language is also being taught in Young where it has been observed as having a positive impact on the number of pupils self identifying as Aboriginal.

The process of reclaiming the language was greatly assisted by the publication in 2005 of A First Wiradjuri Dictionary by elder Stan Grant Senior and consultant Dr John Rudder. John Rudder described the dictionary: "The Wiradjuri Dictionary has

three main sections in just over 400 B5 pages. The first two sections, English to Wiradjuri, and Wiradjuri to English, have about 5,000 entries each. The third sections lists Names of Things grouped in categories such as animals, birds, plants, climate, body parts, colours. In addition to those main sections the dictionary contains an introduction to accurate pronunciation, a basic grammar of the language and a sample range of sentence types.