![]() ![]() ![]() We know that in the 50s at least, in and around Wreck Bay there many of the elder people still doing business (as we call it in those days) and so many of those were very strongly cultural and continue to maintain those. Only certain people had certain responsibilities for those kinds of teachings, so not everybody understands cultural issues to the extent that others might. In other words, cultural teachings and things like that. Certainly there are aspects of growing up that others may not have been privy to. There was none of this, 'Sit down, I must teach you this,' or whatever else. To me it didn't come across that way, it was just simply what you did, like any normal family growing up, you teach your kids whatever you think are the valued aspects of your own cultural background, and so it was with us. Vic Sharman: The way that you describe it suggests that it's almost a deliberate thing, and almost something that my parents and uncles and aunties would be doing because they recognise a loss or something. Jill Kitson: As a child were you taken through the country and shown-this is this, this is that, we do this this way-using that language from the past that many people would have thought had just fallen out of use? So there's lots of words like that, that even if we're having a discussion amongst ourselves and there are non-Aboriginal people around, they can't understand a damn thing we're saying, or at least they don't understand enough to understand the whole conversation that we're having. One of the most common words, because most of our.our people are coastal people, we talk about 'gungas' which is octopus, and 'gunga' means many arms. We use words to describe things that we either hunt or eat or whatever else. We still talk about 'gabaas' and 'waajin' which is a white man and a white woman. Examples of that might be either 'mirri' or 'mirrigan', which is a dog, and many people even today say, 'Look at the mirris,' or, 'Who owns this mirri?' And everybody understands what you mean. People there were still using many words to describe different things on a daily basis it wasn't something that was reserved for sitting around campfires or anything else, it was just what you said all the time to describe things. My parents had a mixed marriage, but essentially we ran with all of our Aboriginal people, the people on my mother's side. ![]() Vic Sharman: Most of my relatives on the south coast are all Aboriginal people. Talking to them together there, I asked Vic Sharman what he'd learned of his own Aboriginal language from his family as a child. He went to school in Nowra, 67 kilometres north of Ulladulla, and now, like Jakie Troy, works at ATSIC in Canberra. Vic Sharman is a descendant of the Aboriginal people from around Broulee, just south of Batemans Bay. Jackelin Troy writes about Coomee and Edward Milne in her book King Plates, but as she points out, contrary to Coomee and Milne's expectations another three generations later there's still a thriving community of south coast Aboriginal people whose speech is enriched with many words and expressions from the local Aboriginal languages. ![]() In 1909, believing Coomee to be the last of the local Murramurrang people, Milne presented her with an inscribed brass gorget or 'king plate', then a common way of honouring respected Aboriginal people. In those days, according to Milne, Coomee would recall her grandmother speaking of 'the first time the white birds came by', alluding to the sailing ships of Captain Cook or the First Fleet. Milne had known Coomee since the 1860s when he was still a school boy in Ulladulla on the NSW south coast. Jill Kitson: The words of Coomee Nulungar of the Murramurrang people, set down by Edward Milne in 1915. Kristina Nehm reads Milne's transcript of Coomee's words. After three generations, this is what it sounded like to Edward Milne, an amateur ethnographer who interviewed Coomee Nulungar of the Murramurrang people shortly before her death in 1915 when Coomee was in her 90s. The Pidgin of the colony combined English and Aboriginal words, and/or their approximations, and the so-called markers of, say, location or time characteristic of Aboriginal languages. On the program last week, linguistic anthropologist, Jakelin Troy, talked about the evolution of pidgin as the lingua franca that the colonists and the Aboriginal people used to converse with one another. Jill Kitson: This week, Lingua Franca takes up the story of the effects of the invasion of English speakers on the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Sydney and the south coast of NSW. ![]()
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