Learners and teachers in Aboriginal communities.

Letter from Jabiru (Northern Territory, Australia)
by Judith Bishop

On my latest field trip to the Northern Territory, I've had a few revelations about language and the ethics of communication. They happened partly in response to a book by Richard Trudgen, Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, which was lent to me the day I arrived. I spent that first sultry afternoon reading and preparing to work the next day. My project here is to gather and produce a set of bilingual texts by texts by Aboriginal women who speak the Kunwinjku language. For the past four years, I have carried out research on this language, which is spoken in Arnhem Land and elsewhere in the Northern Territory of Australia. On previous field trips, I have noticed that it is women who are the pivots of language learning in Aboriginal communities: not only the primary carers for children, but also the ones who most often seek out tertiary training in translation and interpreting, acting on their desire to facilitate communication between the white community and their own. It makes sense to ask them to speak about language learning and language maintenance issues from their unique perspectives and positions.

Before leaving Melbourne, I had the usual troubles compiling equipment for recording and playing back the texts I record to my Kunwinjku language consultants (so they can help me decipher the words and expressions which are unfamiliar to me). I held up a single portable speaker to our university department's technology officer: could I use this to replay the recordings? Well, no, he said – "the impedance is too great – it would drain the Walkman." I nodded, and put it aside. But later in the car, I wondered what exactly he'd meant. I understood the context: the problem is amplification. If the speaker doesn’t have its own power source, it won't be sufficiently loud for my purpose. But the words "impedance" and "drain" were just ciphers, empty signifiers. I couldn't put an image to "impedance" beyond its connection to power and amplification, nor could I determine the actual mechanism of "drainage" behind the metaphor. Here was a process I had the ability to understand, but there was a gap in my information. I needed someone to fill this gap for me, in plain language, if I was to understand the processes involved, and more importantly, be able to act thereon.

I recognized the importance of this experience in retrospect, on reading Trudgen’s impassioned manifesto for change in communication practices in Aboriginal health and education. It has set me thinking about what it would be like if I didn't realize that this information gap was the real source of my difficulty in understanding what our officer said. If I didn't have the training I have, which enables me to visualize why I didn’t grasp what was meant – that some of the words I think I "know" are only barely anchored in their context of use, and remain empty of meaning, of mental imagery. According to Trudgen, this kind of experience is the norm for Aboriginal second-language speakers of English in relation to the language of health and medicine (not to mention law), and as such, it has enormous consequences. Words such as tumour, antibiotic, bacteria, pneumonia, and abstract, conceptual words which crop up in medical settings, such as conclusively and percent (“two percent of your kidneys are working”), may remain mere ciphers, to disastrous effect. One part of the problem is that dictionaries which translate such complex English terms adequately into the Aboriginal person’s own language(s) are vanishingly rare. From a few forays on the Internet, I gather that the situation is no different in the United States. But what this means is that it is exceedingly difficult for Aboriginal language speakers, even those who are literate in their language(s) – and there are many – to gain a deeper understanding of scientific and abstract English words. Without an analysis in the speaker’s own language, these terms often remain inscrutable.

To return to my work here, I have spoken with six women so far, each presently or previously involved in translation and interpreting courses. Their warmth and insight have overwhelmed me. D. is a friendly young woman, an Aged Care and health worker, but so much sought after for her language abilities as a translator and interpreter, she has trouble prioritizing the myriad demands on her time. But she has agreed to speak with me, and we spend an hour, late one afternoon, chatting by the lake in Jabiru. I am careful in explaining the nature of my project and the grant, and I ask her to decide if it is something she would like to be involved with. When the time comes to record the initial interview, I have some questions prepared in rough and ready Kunwinjku, and others – where my ability in that language falls short – in English. D. listens quietly before clarifying my use of particular words, or, after a moment’s reflection, beginning to respond in Kunwinjku. She describes her work in the hospital with aged members of her community, some of whom do not speak English well, so that she must convey to them the nature of their illness, and whether it is serious or not. She says that her community would like to work together with the region’s health workers (“kabirridjare kadjarrkdurrkmirri bininj dja balanda”) so that there is more reciprocity in the work of translation. The word “kabirridjarrkwokdi”, meaning “speak together,” recurs many times in what she says.

As this young woman speaks, and as all the women speak, I am struck by the urgency of their feeling. I ask them what it means to them that their children should grow up speaking their mother tongue; what Kunwinjku as a language and a culture can say, which English does not or cannot; what they feel when Balanda – white people, such as myself – seek to learn their language. E., the Deputy Principal of the school in a neighbouring community, is visionary in her responses. She speaks with passionate conviction about the heritage of beauty, spirituality and moral practice of which Kunwinjku – with its richness embodied by the speech of the old people – is properly the vehicle. She advocates “two-way learning” for Aboriginal children in communities, whereby it is made explicit to the children that their learning will require them, throughout their lives, to negotiate two systems of values, moral and cultural, embodied in two languages: and that this is a strength and a skill. To Balanda people who want to learn more about the Kunwinjku language and way of life, she advises in English: “Some things that you have to learn are uncomfortable – and those uncomfortable things will teach you a lot. To have patience, and more perseverance, and tolerance, to appreciate all the things that are around you, and the difference between Bininj [Aboriginal] and Balanda worlds.”

A number of the women I meet, on learning that I speak a little Kunwinjku and understand a little more, speak to me predominantly in Kunwinjku. On one occasion, men and women emerging from a training course crowd about me excitedly, questioning me in Kunwinjku about my adoptive relationship to Kunwinjku speakers in another community. They use the name given me by a family in that community – Belinj – to determine my relationship to themselves, in the abstract familial system known as ‘kinship.’ Within a half-hour, I am surrounded by people who are classified as my uncles, mothers, sisters and grandmothers. But most moving in this experience is the delight they express at discovering they can speak to me in Kunwinjku, and I am able to respond. What a relief, I think, that must be for these people – to be able to communicate with a white woman in their first language: the language of their thought, their knowledge, and their dreams. It is, of course, a struggle for me – a discomfort that I value, for it is deeply instructive. It is the same feeling as the initial, almost-drowning strokes one takes in the water of any foreign language, but with one ethical difference: the weight of racial history hanging between us: which leavens, ever so slightly, as we talk.

Judith Bishop recently completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. As the recipient of the 2002-3 Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship in Poetry, she is currently studying for an MFA in poetry at Washington University in St Louis.